US Politics

After a set of leaks last month that represented the most damaging insight into Facebook’s inner workings in the company’s history, the former employee behind them has come forward. Now Frances Haugen has given evidence to the US Congress – and been praised by senators as a ‘21st century American hero’. Will her testimony accelerate efforts to bring the social media giant to heel?

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On Monday, Facebook and its subsidiaries Instagram and WhatsApp went dark after a router failure. There were thousands of negative headlines, millions of complaints, and more than 3 billion users were forced offline. On Tuesday, the company’s week got significantly worse. Frances Haugen, a former product manager with Facebook, testified before US senators about what she had seen in her two years there – and set out why she had decided to leak a trove of internal documents to the Wall Street Journal. Haugen had revealed herself as the source of the leak a few days earlier. And while the content of the leak – from internal warnings of the harm being done to teenagers by Instagram to the deal Facebook gives celebrities to leave their content unmoderated – had already led to debate about whether the company needed to reform, Haugen’s decision to come forward escalated the pressure on Mark Zuckerberg. In this episode, Nosheeen Iqbal talks to the Guardian’s global technology editor, Dan Milmo, about what we learned from Haugen’s testimony, and how damaging a week this could be for Facebook. Milmo sets out the challenges facing the company as it seeks to argue that the whistleblower is poorly informed or that her criticism is mistaken. And he reflects on what options politicians and regulators around the world will consider as they look for ways to curb Facebook’s power, and how likely such moves are to succeed. After Haugen spoke, Zuckerberg said her claims that the company puts profit over people’s safety were “just not true”. In a blog post, he added: “The argument that we deliberately push content that makes people angry for profit is deeply illogical. We make money from ads, and advertisers consistently tell us they don’t want their ads next to harmful or angry content.” You can read more of Zuckerberg’s defence here. And you can read an analysis of how Haugen’s testimony is likely to affect Congress’s next move here. Archive: BBC; YouTube; TikTok; CSPAN; NBC; CBS;CNBC; Vice; CNN More

US Capitol attackHouse Capitol attack panel subpoenas key planners of ‘Stop the Steal’ rallyInvestigators seek documents and testimony from Trump allies and organization that backed rally Hugo LowellThu 7 Oct 2021 16.24 EDTFirst published on Thu 7 Oct 2021 16.15 EDTThe House select committee investigating the Capitol attack on Thursday issued new subpoenas to allies of Donald Trump as well as the organization affiliated with the “Stop the Steal” rally that deteriorated into the 6 January insurrection.The third tranche of subpoenas reflects the select committee’s overarching focus on the extent of Trump White House involvement in planning the Capitol attack, as they target entities connected to top executive branch officials and members of Congress.House select committee investigators issued subpoenas compelling documents and testimony to Ali Alexander, a far-right activist who emerged as the chief architect of the “Stop the Steal” rally, and Nathan Martin, who was connected to permit applications for the rally.Top Trump aides set to defy subpoenas in Capitol attack investigationRead moreThe subpoena letters noted Alexander made repeated references to the use of violence on 6 January, and claimed to have communicated with the White House and members of Congress about plans to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s election win.“Accordingly, the select committee seeks documents and a deposition regarding these and other matters that are within the scope of the select committee’s inquiry,” the panel’s chairman, Bennie Thompson, said in the letters.The select committee also authorized a subpoena for Stop the Steal LLC, the corporation behind the rally. The subpoena letter demanded that the registered custodian of records for the group produce documents and appear for a closed-door deposition later this month.The new subpoenas come a day after the Guardian first reported that Trump’s former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino, strategist Steve Bannon and defense department aide Kash Patel would resist the orders under instruction from Trump.House investigators had issued the subpoenas to the Trump aides with the threat of criminal prosecution for non-compliance, warning that the penalty for resisting the orders would be far graver under the Biden administration than during the Trump presidency.The argument for Trump pushing the aides to not cooperate with the inquiry is being mounted on claims of executive privilege, arguing that what the former president knew in advance about the Capitol attack should be secret, according to a source familiar with the matter.Alexander was a key figure behind the “Stop the Steal” movement to subvert the 2020 election and said in a since-deleted video that he worked with the Republican congressmen Paul Gosar, Mo Brooks and Andy Biggs to interfere with the certification in order to reinstall Trump as president.“We four schemed up to put maximum pressure on Congress while they were voting,” Alexander said in the video.It was not immediately clear whether Alexander, Martin and George Coleman, the registered agent for Stop the Steal LLC, would comply with the orders. Martin and Alexander have until 21 October to produce documents, and until 28 and 29 October respectively for testimony.TopicsUS Capitol attackHouse of RepresentativesUS politicsUS CongressDonald TrumpnewsReuse this content More

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Fight to voteUS newsRepublicans’ 2020 recount farce steams ahead despite lack of evidenceEfforts in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Texas to review last year’s results are ‘delegitimizing democracy’, critics say The fight to vote is supported byAbout this contentSam Levine in New YorkThu 7 Oct 2021 10.00 EDTLast modified on Thu 7 Oct 2021 11.51 EDTRepublicans in several states are advancing partisan reviews of the 2020 election results, underscoring how deeply the GOP has embraced the myth of a stolen election since 2020.The investigations in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Texas are advancing even after an extensive similar effort in Arizona, championed by Donald Trump and allies, failed to produce evidence of fraud. All three inquiries come as Trump has called out top Republicans in each state and pressured them to review the 2020 race. He is also backing several candidates who have embraced the myth in their races for statewide offices in which they would oversee elections.Republicans leading the efforts in all three states have said little about the scope and details of their unusual post-election investigations. But experts worry they signal a dangerous new normal in American politics in which the losers of elections refuse to accept the outcome and continue to undermine the results of electoral contests months after they have been decided.“They have slight differences tactically, but they all share the same strategic goals, which are primarily to continue to sow doubt about the integrity of American elections overall,” said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, and an election administration expert who has denounced the reviews. “I don’t know that there’s a word to describe how concerning it is.”In Wisconsin, a state where Joe Biden narrowly defeated Trump by 20,000 votes, there are three different efforts to review the election results. In February, Republicans in the state legislature authorized the non-partisan legislative audit bureau to review the election. Representative Janel Brandtjen, a Republican who chairs the elections committee in the state assembly and travelled to Phoenix to observe the Arizona investigation, unsuccessfully sought to subpoena voting equipment and ballots earlier this summer.Wisconsin Republicans also hired Michael Gabelman, a retired state supreme court justice to serve as a special counsel to investigate the election, which will be funded by $680,000 in taxpayer money. Gabelman took his most significant step on Friday when he issued subpoenas to at least five cities in the state and the administrator of the statewide body that oversees elections. The subpoenas request a large range of documents related to the 2020 election. Gabelman requested that the election officials appear at a 15 October hearing that will focus in part on “potential irregularities and/or illegalities related to the Election”, according a subpoena seen by the Guardian.Republicans are about to lose Texas – so they’re changing the rules | The fight to voteRead moreThere is no evidence of fraud or any other kind of wrongdoing in Wisconsin. Even though Trump’s campaign had an opportunity to request a recount of the entire state, it did so only in Milwaukee and Dane counties last year, two of the state’s most populous and liberal counties. Both recounts affirmed Biden’s win.Gabelman has said little publicly about the details of his effort, but released a video last month pledging it would be fair and that it was not designed to overturn the 2020 vote. “This is not an election contest. We are not challenging the results of the 2020 election; rather we are holding government officials accountable to the public for their actions surrounding the elections,” he said in the video.But Gabelman has already expressed support for the idea that the election was stolen, telling a pro-Trump crowd last November: “Our elected leaders – your elected leaders – have allowed unelected bureaucrats at the Wisconsin Elections Commission to steal our vote.” Gabelman has since defended those comments, saying in a July interview: “I didn’t say it was a stolen election. I cannot – and I defy you to – think of anything more unjust than a corrupt or unlawful election in a democracy. Whether that occurred here is very much a question to be examined.”On Tuesday, Gabelman said he was not an expert in elections. “Most people, myself included, do not have a comprehensive understanding or even any understanding of how elections work,” he told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. In August, he traveled to a forum on election irregularities hosted by Mike Lindell, a Trump ally and MyPillow CEO, who has voiced some of the most baseless conspiracy theories about the election. Gabelman also reportedly consulted with Shiva Ayyadurai, a failed US Senate candidate who has spread false information about the 2020 election and the Covid-19 vaccine, including a wildly misleading and inaccurate report about ballots in Maricopa county.Gabelman’s effort has already been hobbled by a series of errors. One subpoena on Friday was sent to the city clerk in Milwaukee, who does not oversee elections, according to the Washington Post. A cover letter for a subpoena sent to Claire Woodall-Vogg, the executive director of the Milwaukee election commission, requested documents about Green Bay. Gabelman’s review also sent out an email to local election officials from a Gmail account under the name “John Delta”. The message landed in the spam folders of several county clerks. And it included a document asking the local clerks to preserve records related to the 2020 election that was written by Andrew Kloster, a former Trump administration official. Kloster published a blogpost in April that said “the 2020 presidential election was stolen, fair and square,” according to the Associated Press.Kathy Bernier, a Republican who chairs the elections committee in the Wisconsin state senate, has resisted efforts to spread election misinformation, even holding a training last month to educate lawmakers on how elections work. But in an interview, she said she was supportive of the review in her state, and said the idea it would undermine confidence in the election was “pish-posh”.She said Democrats were to blame for uncertainty around the election because some refused to accept Trump’s electoral victory in 2016, claiming Russian interference. (Trump was seated in 2016 without serious objections in Congress, and there were no similar partisan post-election reviews.)“If there are things called into question, and there is not full confidence in the electoral process, providing audits and research and evidence that in fact these processes and procedures and the election results you can have confidence in, only supports that position where you can have confidence and here is why,” she said.Bernier added that she was concerned that undermining elections could hurt Republicans in the future.“At some point we have to accept the election results and move on,” she said. “If the middle thinks the left is bonkers and the right is bonkers, they will stay home. I’m concerned about the middle.”The details of the review in Pennsylvania, where Biden defeated Trump by more than 80,000 votes, are still murky. Last month, senate Republicans voted to subpoena information on every registered voter in the state, including sensitive details such as the last four digits of their social security number. Cris Dush, the Republican senator overseeing the effort, said last month the legislative committee overseeing the investigation said “there have been questions regarding the validity of people … who have voted, whether or not they exist,” according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. He added the committee was seeking to determine whether the allegations were factual. Dush also traveled to Arizona to observe the Maricopa review. (A spokesman for senate Republicans said Dush was unavailable for an interview.)Democrats in the Pennsylvania state senate as well as the attorney general, Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, are suing to block the subpoenas. Senate Democrats argue the request amounts to an effort to contest the election and Shapiro has said it would violate voters’ rights.Perhaps the most perplexing post-election review is happening in Texas. Hours after Trump requested an audit of the 2020 election results, state officials announced they had already begun one in Dallas, Harris, Tarrant and Collin counties, respectively the two largest Democratic-leaning and Republican-leaning counties.When the secretary of state’s office released details of the review days after the announcement, its first phase included several measures counties were already required to perform after the election, the Texas Tribune reported. The second phase of the review, set for spring 2022, includes an examination of several election records, including voter registration lists, chain of custody logs and rejected provisional ballots.Texas Republicans are also advancing a separate piece of legislation that would allow partisan county officials to request an audit of the 2020 election in their county as well as of future election results.Becker, the elections administration expert, said those who backed the audit were making an “outrageous insinuation” that elections don’t matter.“It is delegitimizing democracy as a form of government,” he said. “The election was not close by any historical measure. And these grifters are continuing to sell the story to Trump supporters that you cannot trust elections, that you cannot trust democracy.”TopicsUS newsFight to voteUS voting rightsUS elections 2020RepublicansUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

SeattleRecall fever: Seattle socialist is one of hundreds targeted amid Covid rowsGavin Newsom’s survival as California’s governor was just one of hundreds of recall attempts on the west coast this year Hallie Golden in SeattleThu 7 Oct 2021 07.00 EDTLast modified on Thu 7 Oct 2021 11.38 EDTRecall attempts across the US in recent months have hit a fever pitch in response to Covid-19 and racial justice disputes, and a socialist city council member in Seattle has become the latest prominent seat to be targeted.Occupy Wall Street swept the world and achieved a lot, even if it may not feel like it | Akin OllaRead moreOpponents of Kshama Sawant have spent months collecting thousands of signatures in an attempt to unseat the council member, who became the first socialist on the Seattle council in nearly a century after she beat a Democrat in 2013. Last week, the recall effort officially qualified for an election in December.The attempt to oust Sawant during her third term was based on claims that she opened city hall to demonstrators during a protest, disregarding Covid-19 restrictions, used city resources for a “Tax Amazon” effort and led a march to Seattle mayor Jenny Durkan’s home despite the address being protected under state confidentiality laws.Across the US, there have been at least 500 recall attempts this year, with the majority in the west, according to Joshua Spivak, a senior fellow at the Hugh L Carey Institute at Wagner College, and the author of Recall Elections: From Alexander Hamilton to Gavin Newsom. Although many have not qualified for the ballot, he said the number of attempts is already one of the highest in more than a decade.“It appears that the restrictions around the pandemic have fueled a boost in recall attempts,” he said. “To a significantly lower degree issues surrounding the Black Lives Matter protests and other social justice related matters, such as the teaching of critical race theory, have led to recalls that we normally don’t see – more of a national level issue as opposed to a strictly local level policy debate.”Just last month, California governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, defeated a recall bid that was spurred in part by safety measures in response to Covid, to remain in office. In Washington state, Durkan also faced a recall effort, after she was accused of mishandling protests, but last fall the state supreme court nixed the effort.Spivak said: “They see the Gavin Newsom recall, and they also maybe remember the Scott Walker recall, and feel this is a good weapon. Part of the problem, of course, is that the Scott Walker and Gavin Newsom recall … neither of them worked in the end. And arguably both of the governors were strengthened by the recall effort.”According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 19 states and Washington DC allow the recall of state officials, while at least 30 states allow the practice in local jurisdictions.The push to oust Sawant was launched last summer by a Seattle resident, less than a year after she beat out an opponent with unprecedented financial support from Amazon, which is headquartered in Seattle.In April, Washington’s supreme court allowed the effort to move forward, stating that three of the recall petition’s charges against Sawant “are factually and legally sufficient to support recall”.King county elections announced it had accepted more than 11,000 signatures collected through the recall process, and it would be on the ballot during an election on 7 December. The effort needed about 10,700 signatures to move forward.Sawant’s supporters have framed this as her latest fight against big business, the right wing and the political establishment as a whole. They have also argued that the timing of the election is akin to voter suppression, saying her opponents coordinated their effort so it would be during an election that they anticipate will have a lower turnout rate.In response to the charges, Bryan Koulouris, the Kshama Solidarity Campaign spokesperson, said that the crowd was masked in the after-hours visit to city hall, Sawant didn’t lead the protest to the mayor’s house and doesn’t know her address. He also said that the “Tax Amazon” claim is misleading and that Sawant “was doing exactly what she was elected to do, which was use her council office to build the type of movements that are necessary for working people”.Sawant told the Guardian she is not surprised her seat on the city council is being threatened.“I think the fact that it is happening now obviously has a lot to do with our Marxist approach and the way we have used our position so effectively, absolutely refusing to be marginalized and at the same time absolutely refusing to sell out … In that context we should expect attacks like this,” she said.Henry Bridger II, campaign manager and chairman of Recall Sawant, said that he is not a billionaire and is in fact a Democrat. He also said the timing of the election came down to how long it took to collect the signatures and validate them.Bridger said he was happy to see that the recall was moving forward, as it already shows just how many people in her district are not supportive of the council member.“She thinks she’s above the law, and she is not,” he said. “This is something that we’re really excited that the citizens – she gets to face her constituents now. And they get to decide if she broke the law or not. And with all of these signatures, it shows that there’s a huge support to remove her from office and hold her accountable.”The Seattle Times reported this may be the first time a push to recall a member of the city council has reached voters.The recall proponents have raised over $637,000, while the Kshama Solidarity Campaign has raised over $687,000, according to the Seattle ethics and elections commission.The yes or no recall question is expected to be the only one on the ballot in December, according to King county elections. If Sawant is ousted, voters will not choose a replacement candidate, the seat will instead be filled through an appointment process.During Sawant’s time in office she has helped lead the push to boost Seattle’s minimum wage to $15 an hour – a first for a major US city – and helped to secure more rights for renters. TopicsSeattleUS politicsCoronavirusnewsReuse this content More

OpinionUS politicsOccupy Wall Street swept the world and achieved a lot, even if it may not feel like itAkin OllaA decade ago Occupy reframed US political debate, trained a generation of activists, and served as a dress rehearsal for movements that followed Wed 6 Oct 2021 06.18 EDTLast modified on Wed 6 Oct 2021 07.56 EDTIt has been 10 years since Occupy Wall Street shook the United States and spread like fire across the planet, part of a new era of political consciousness that included movements like the Arab Spring and the Spanish Indignados. Originally launched on 17 September 2011 by members of the Canadian political magazine Adbusters, and famous for temporarily occupying Zuccotti Park in Manhattan’s Financial District, Occupy spread to more than 900 cities in countries across the world within a month. By its end, hundreds of thousands of people had engaged in a broad political struggle against the prevailing political order of economic inequality and the unaccountable capitalists who had driven the world into recession only a few years prior.David Graeber pushed us to imagine greater human possibilities | Rebecca SolnitRead moreOccupy was dismissed for years as ineffective, but time has disproven the cynics. If anything, the Occupy movement showed what is possible when a ragtag group of organizers turn private suffering into public action. Occupy not only helped redefine the political conversation in the United States, it served as a dress rehearsal for many organizations and movements that followed. Through policies proposed and passed in its wake, to the individuals it set up to lead a new generation of social movements and political institutions, Occupy Wall Street has left a powerful legacy.Political uprisings are usually categorized as successful or not based on what policies they achieve at their peak. But this is not the only means of measuring a movement, as noted by theorists Paul and Mark Engler. The Englers, authors of the 2016 book This Is an Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt is Shaping the Twenty-First Century, argued that movements can also be measured by their ability to shape public opinion and articulate new solutions, many of which need more longstanding organizations to carry them through.The Fight for $15 movement, for example, began in New York soon after Occupy Wall Street, with fast-food workers demanding a fair wage from the one-percenter bosses who controlled the industry. The movement also borrowed from Occupy’s political strategy, initially focusing more on dramatic protest than the slower organizing methods of labor unions and community organizations. Despite this break from traditional labor strategy, Fight for $15 was heavily supported by one of the country’s biggest service worker unions, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which also provided support for Occupy Wall Street. Since Occupy, 33 cities have increased their minimum wage to $15 or more.Occupy’s largest and most obvious impact was shifting the rhetoric of the Democratic party. While the party remains tied to capitalists, as made clear by its prioritizing the healthcare industry during the pandemic, how the Democrats talk about economics has certainly shifted. During the 2020 Democratic primary, even the most moderate Democrats on stage were spouting policies that borrowed more from the democratic socialist Bernie Sanders than from Barack Obama. While Obama’s 2008 rhetoric focused on increasing access to private medical insurance, the more recent Biden and Buttigieg platforms emphasized expanding coverage through Medicare. And while Obama had no initial plan to forgive student debt, Buttigieg argued that four-year colleges should be free for most students and called for an automatic enrollment in income-based repayment plans with loan cancellation after 20 years. The centrist Rahm Emanuel, a former mayor of Chicago and Obama’s chief of staff, spoke to this shift when he conceded in a 2020 op-ed that “today’s landscape is much friendlier for progressive ideas than it was when either Mr Clinton or Mr Obama was running for office.”This shift can of course be seen as an outcome of Bernie Sanders’ impressive showing in the 2016 election season and his status as the country’s most popular senator. But Sanders himself relied on the rhetoric and the alumni of the Occupy movement. His digital team was packed with Occupy alums like Brett Banditelli of Occupy Harrisburg and Charles Lenchner, who once helped run websites for the 2011 movement. For Sanders’ 2016 campaign, Occupy activists even returned to the birthplace of the movement, Zuccotti Park, to make phone calls for his primary fight. At the end of the primary, Sanders declared that his campaign was “about creating an economy that works for all of us, not just the 1%”, much like in 2020 when he tweeted: “[T]he top 1% may have enormous wealth and power, but they are just the 1%. When the 99% stand together, we can transform society.”The electoral success of Occupy didn’t end with Sanders, either. Occupy alumni like Max Berger would go on to develop organizations such as the Justice Democrats, which helped elect progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Cori Bush. Other Occupy alumni like Mimi Hitzemann and Guido Girgenti helped build Momentum, an American social movement training center (not to be confused with the British organization with the same name) focused on applying lessons from Occupy to more traditional forms of social change, in the way that the civil rights movement combined public spectacle with grounded grassroots organizing. Leaders from Momentum went on to create organizations like the Sunrise Movement, which has championed the Green New Deal, and Black Visions, which popularized the “Defund the Police” demand that swept the country amid the George Floyd uprising. And while these organizations may appear more distantly connected to Occupy, there are a handful of fruits closer to the root.Almost immediately after the initial wave of the movement and its call for an uprising by the 99%, new organizations were forming around its broad mission. Strike Debt was one of the first; the collective was formed in 2012 with the aim of supporting debtors in resisting their own personal debt and the system of debt as a whole. They released a Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual which aimed to “provide specific tactics for understanding and fighting against the debt system so that we can all reclaim our lives and our communities”. The collective’s most well-known project was the Rolling Jubilee, a project in which they purchased $15m of medical debt and erased it. The group lives on today in chapters across the country and as a new consumer union called the Debt Collective.Other organizations like Occupy Sandy and Occupy Homes also took up the mantle of fighting for people who need help. Of Occupy Sandy, which provided relief to victims of Hurricane Sandy in 2012, the New York Times said: “Where FEMA Fell Short, Occupy Sandy Was There.” Similarly, Occupy Homes fought to prevent foreclosures after the 2008 housing crash. Remnants of Occupy Homes’ work can be seen in organizations such as Occupy Philadelphia Housing Authority, which last year forced the city of Philadelphia to agree to establish a community land trust and permanent low-income housing.There was never, say, a big “Occupy Wall Street” bill from Congress that immediately addressed the concerns of the movement. But Occupy’s greatest legacy may be showing the world that movements are more than just the legislation they pass or the regimes they topple. They are training grounds for what comes next, practice for new generations finding their footing on political terrain. Movements can redefine how political parties speak, and how future organizations wage struggle. By those measures, Occupy was a success. And due to the organizations and individuals inspired by its work, the next Occupy may deliver all that the first could not.
Akin Olla is a contributing opinion writer at the Guardian
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