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      Teamsters Vote for Sean O'Brien, a Hoffa Critic, as President

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      Sean O’Brien scored a decisive victory among union members after criticizing the current leadership as too timid in UPS talks and Amazon organizing.Sean O’Brien was a rising star in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in 2017 when the union’s longtime president, James P. Hoffa, effectively cast him aside.But that move appears to have set Mr. O’Brien, a fourth-generation Teamster and head of a Boston local, on a course to succeed Mr. Hoffa as the union’s president and one of the most powerful labor leaders in the country.A Teamsters vice president who urged a more assertive stand toward employers like the United Parcel Service — as well as an aggressive drive to organize workers at Amazon — Mr. O’Brien has declared victory in his bid to lead the nearly 1.4 million-member union.According to a tally reported late Thursday on an election supervisor’s website, he won about two-thirds of the votes cast in a race against the Hoffa-endorsed candidate, Steve Vairma, another vice president. He will assume the presidency in March.The result appears to reflect frustration over the most recent UPS contract and growing dissatisfaction with Mr. Hoffa, who has headed the union for more than two decades and whose father did from 1957 to 1971. The younger Mr. Hoffa did not seek another five-year term.In an interview, Mr. O’Brien said success in organizing Amazon workers — a stated goal of the Teamsters — would require the union to show the fruits of its efforts elsewhere.“We’ve got to negotiate the strongest contracts possible so that we can take it to workers at Amazon and point to it and say this is the benefit you get of being in a union,” he said.David Witwer, an expert on the Teamsters at Pennsylvania State University at Harrisburg, said it was very rare for the Teamsters to elect a president who was not an incumbent or backed by the incumbent and who was sharply critical of his predecessor, as Mr. O’Brien was of Mr. Hoffa.Since the union’s official founding in 1903, Dr. Witwer said in an email, “there have been only two national union elections that have seen an outside reformer candidate win election as president.”During the campaign, Mr. O’Brien, 49, railed against the contract that the union negotiated with UPS for allowing the company to create a category of employees who work on weekends and top out at a lower wage, among other perceived flaws.“If we’re negotiating concessionary contracts and we’re negotiating substandard agreements, why would any member, why would any person want to join the Teamsters union?” Mr. O’Brien said at a candidate forum in September in which he frequently tied his opponent to Mr. Hoffa.Mr. O’Brien has also criticized his predecessor’s approach to Amazon, which many in the labor movement regard as an existential threat. Although the union approved a resolution at its recent convention pledging to “supply all resources necessary” to unionize Amazon workers and eventually create a division overseeing that organizing, Mr. O’Brien said the efforts were too late in coming.“That plan should have been in place under our warehouse director 10 years ago,” he said in the interview, alluding to the position of warehouse division director that his opponent, Mr. Vairma, has held since 2012.The outcome appears to reflect frustration over the union’s growing dissatisfaction with the tenure of James P. Hoffa.Calla Kessler/The New York TimesIn an interview, Mr. Hoffa said that the union was broke and divided when he took over and that he was leaving it “financially strong and strong in every which way.”He said he was proud of the recent UPS contract, calling it “the richest contract ever negotiated” and pointing out that it allows many full-time drivers to make nearly $40 an hour.He said Mr. O’Brien’s critique of the union’s efforts on Amazon was unfair. “No one was doing it a decade ago,” Mr. Hoffa said. “It’s more complex than just going out and organizing 20 people at a grocery store. He sounds like it’s so simple.”Mr. O’Brien did not elaborate on his own plans for organizing Amazon, saying he wanted to solicit more input from Teamsters locals, but suggested that they would include bringing political and economic pressure to bear on the company in cities and towns around the country. The union has taken part in efforts to deny Amazon a tax abatement in Indiana and to reject a delivery station in Colorado.Mr. O’Brien, who once worked as a rigger, transporting heavy equipment to construction sites, was elected president of a large Boston local in 2006. Within a few years, he appeared to be ensconced in the union’s establishment wing.In a 2013 incident that led to a 14-day unpaid suspension, Mr. O’Brien threatened members of Teamsters for a Democratic Union, a reform group, who were taking on an ally of his in Rhode Island. “They’ll never be our friends,” he said of the challengers. “They need to be punished.”Mr. O’Brien has apologized for the comments and points out that the reform advocate who led the challenge in Rhode Island, Matt Taibi, is now a supporter who ran on his slate in the recent election.The break with Mr. Hoffa came in 2017. Early that year, the longtime Teamsters president appointed Mr. O’Brien to a position whose responsibilities included overseeing the union’s contract negotiation with UPS, where more than 300,000 Teamsters now work.Understand Amazon’s Employment SystemCard 1 of 6A look inside Amazon. More

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      Sean O'Brien, a Hoffa Critic, Claims Victory in Teamster Vote

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      The head of a Boston local who urged a more assertive stand toward employers like the United Parcel Service — and an aggressive drive to organize workers at Amazon — declared victory Thursday in his bid to lead the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.If the result is confirmed, the victory by Sean O’Brien, an international vice president of the Teamsters, would put a new imprint on the nearly 1.4 million-member union after more than two decades of leadership by James P. Hoffa, who did not seek another five-year term.The outcome appears to reflect frustration over the union’s most recent contract with UPS and a growing dissatisfaction with the tenure of Mr. Hoffa, whose father ran the union from 1957 to 1971.With about 90 percent of the ballots tallied, Mr. O’Brien had more than two-thirds of the vote in his race against Steve Vairma, a fellow international vice president who had been endorsed by Mr. Hoffa. The election was conducted by mail-in ballots that were due Monday.Mr. O’Brien, 49, railed against the contract that the union negotiated with UPS — where more than 300,000 Teamsters work — for allowing the company to create a category of employees who work on weekends and top out at a lower wage, among other perceived flaws.“If we’re negotiating concessionary contracts and we’re negotiating substandard agreements, why would any member, why would any person want to join the Teamsters union?” Mr. O’Brien said at a candidate forum in September in which he frequently tied his opponent to Mr. Hoffa.Mr. O’Brien has also criticized Mr. Hoffa’s approach to Amazon, which many in the labor movement regard as an existential threat. Although the union approved a resolution at its recent convention pledging to “supply all resources necessary” to unionize Amazon workers and eventually create a division overseeing that organizing, Mr. O’Brien said the efforts were too late. More

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      Amazon Union Vote at Alabama Warehouse Should Be Redone, Official Says

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      A hearing officer for the National Labor Relations Board found that Amazon illegally discouraged organizing at an Alabama warehouse. The company can appeal to block a new election.A hearing officer of the National Labor Relations Board has recommended that the board throw out a union election at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Ala., where results announced in early April showed workers rejecting a union by a more than two-to-one ratio.The union announced the recommendation on Monday, and Amazon quickly said it would take steps to ensure that the original election result prevailed.The hearing officer’s recommendation, which includes holding a new election, will be reviewed by the acting regional director of the agency, who will issue a ruling on the case in the coming weeks. If the regional director rules against Amazon, the company can appeal to the labor board in Washington.The union campaign at the warehouse, which had more than 5,000 eligible workers, was the highest-profile domestic organizing effort so far at Amazon, which has a history of aggressively deterring worker activism.The challenge by the union, the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, accused Amazon of engaging in unfair labor practices to keep workers from unionizing.“Throughout the N.L.R.B. hearing, we heard compelling evidence how Amazon tried to illegally interfere with and intimidate workers as they sought to exercise their right to form a union,” said Stuart Appelbaum, the union’s president, in a statement. “We support the hearing officer’s recommendation that the N.L.R.B. set aside the election results and direct a new election.”The union first filed paperwork for the election in November, and the voting took place by mail between early February and late March.The union complained frequently during the campaign that the company was intimidating and threatening workers.Amazon disputed the accusations and continues to do so. “Our employees had a chance to be heard during a noisy time when all types of voices were weighing into the national debate, and at the end of the day, they voted overwhelmingly in favor of a direct connection with their managers,” an Amazon spokeswoman said in a statement on Monday. “Their voice should be heard above all else, and we plan to appeal to ensure that happens.”Wilma B. Liebman, who was chairwoman of the labor board under President Barack Obama, said regional directors typically followed the recommendations of hearing officers in such cases.About one week after the labor board announced the results in April, the union filed a formal objection to the conduct of the election and asked the board to overturn it. An officer for the board held hearings over three weeks in which both sides called and questioned witnesses.The union objection contended that Amazon consultants and employee relations managers had created an atmosphere of fear by identifying and removing workers from mandatory anti-union meetings if they questioned company officials, and by telling employees they risked losing pay, benefits or even their jobs if a union was established.The union also contended that Amazon consultants and managers had illegally asked workers how they intended to vote, and that Amazon fired a union supporter for distributing union cards. It said the company took several measures — such as increasing pay and giving away merchandise — to defuse pressure for a union. It is illegal to begin to take such steps once a union campaign is underway.The union objection focused heavily on an on-site collection box that Amazon had repeatedly pushed the U.S. Postal Service to install shortly before the voting began. The union said the box was not authorized by the labor relations board. Amazon has said that it pushed for the box to make it easier for employees to vote and that it did not have access to ballots that workers placed inside.The union argued that the presence of the collection box gave workers the impression that Amazon was monitoring who voted, and possibly even how they voted. It is not clear whether the union would improve its showing if the election were rerun. Labor law allows companies to hold frequent mandatory anti-union meetings, and Mr. Appelbaum, the retail workers’ president, has said that high turnover at the warehouse was a significant obstacle to the union campaign. More

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      Trump Organization, Voting Rights, Cloud Gaming: Your Thursday Evening Briefing

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      Here’s what you need to know at the end of the day.(Want to get this newsletter in your inbox? Here’s the sign-up.) Good evening. Here’s the latest at the end of Thursday.Allen Weisselberg, center, at the Manhattan district attorney’s office. Jefferson Siegel for The New York Times1. The Trump Organization and its C.F.O. were charged with fraud and tax crimes.The real estate business that catapulted Donald Trump to tabloid fame, television riches and ultimately the White House was charged with criminal tax fraud, falsifying business records and running a conspiracy to help executives evade taxes. Here’s what we know so far. More

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      The Mike Pence Saga Tells Us More Than We Want to Know

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      Bret Stephens: Hi, Gail. I was hoping to pick up where we left off last week, with the New York City mayoral primary and our new ranked-choice voting system. Assuming Eric Adams holds on to his lead, what do you think his win says about the state of the city — and of the Democratic Party?Gail Collins: Bret, this is why I love conversing with you. I’ve been hearing Republicans howl about the negotiations with Joe Biden on spending, and I was dreading a discussion on that subject.Bret: Biden gets out a little over his skis with a dumb remark, publicly admits he screwed up, pledges to keep his word on a bipartisan bill. Imagine that.Gail: Well, the city election is definitely a more interesting topic and I can see why Eric Adams intrigues you. He’s a Black former police officer who ran on his crime-fighting skills. Politically he’s a moderate — by New York standards, anyway. And talking with his supporters after the vote, I did get the impression that some were most concerned with blocking off Maya Wiley, the only real leftie with a chance of winning.Of course while the left was getting bad news in New York City, regular Buffalo Democrats were discovering their longtime mayor had lost the primary to a Black female socialist. Hoping to hear a lot more discussion about India Walton as we slowly make our way through this political year.Nothing is for sure yet in the city — thanks to our new preferential voting system New Yorkers may not get the final word on who won the primary for ages. But if it’s Adams, it could send a cheerful message to people like Chuck Schumer, who’s up for re-election next year. There’s been speculation about whether Schumer might be challenged by a progressive.Bret: New system or not, I still don’t understand why it should take forever to know the results of a municipal election. But I’ll be happy if Adams holds on to his lead, for lots of reasons.One good reason to cheer an Adams victory is that it would demonstrate yet again that the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez left doesn’t represent the Democratic base. “Defund the police” is not a working-class interest.Gail: Yeah, but having unarmed, trained mediators who could respond to complaints like family fighting might get a good response.Bret: I used to think that was a good idea. Then several of our readers explained to me that family altercations are often violent and require more than a social worker.Getting back to working-class interests: Blocking Amazon and the thousands of jobs it would have brought to Queens was not pro-worker. Nor does it help the working class to deny parents who can’t afford to send their kids to Dalton the school choice they need, when it comes to getting a better education for their children.Gail: The public school issue is so important and so complicated. You want to make sure it’s always open to reform and improvement. Still, you don’t want to create a system that allows canny parents to get terrific options for their own kids while reducing public pressure for all-around quality education.But go on.Bret: My bottom line is that “democratic socialism” might be cool with pampered N.Y.U. undergrads, but it isn’t going to help people who aren’t partying in Washington Square Park. So hooray for Adams and all middle-of-the-road Democrats. In the meantime, our mutual friend Donald Trump is on the rally circuit again.Gail: Wow, I watched his speech over the weekend. I guess it was a sort of return to national politics — Trump’s been off the trail since January when his attempt to convince the world he didn’t lose the election led to a bloody riot.No violence this time. In fact, the whole thing was one big snooze.Hard to imagine him really making a comeback. But also hard to imagine who’d be coming next. Can’t really picture a President Pence.Bret: You know, I probably spend more time thinking about Mike Pence than I ought to, given my high blood pressure. He reminds me of Mr. Collins, the unctuous clergyman in “Pride and Prejudice,” who’s always bowing and scraping to the overbearing, tasteless, talentless Lady Catherine de Bourgh, while he also lords it over the Bennet family because he stands to inherit their estate. Alternatively, Pence could be a character out of Dickens, with some ridiculous name like Wackford Squeers or Mr. Pumblechook.Gail: Wow, great analogies. Plus, it is indeed possible you spend more time thinking about Mike Pence than you ought to.Bret: Here’s a guy who makes his career on the Moral Majority wing of the Republican Party, until he hitches his wagon to the most immoral man ever to win a big-ticket presidential nomination. Phyllis Schlafly deciding to elope with Larry Flynt would have made more sense. Then Pence spends four years as the most servile, toadying, obsequious, fawning, head-nodding, yes-siring, anything-you-say-boss vice president in history. He’ll do anything for Trump’s love — but not, as the singer Meat Loaf might have said, attempt to steal the presidential election in broad daylight.For this, Trump rewards Pence by throwing him to a mob, who tried to hunt him down and hang him. But even now Pence can’t get crosswise with his dark lord, so the idea of him ever taking the party in an anti-Trump direction seems like a fantasy.Gail: You have convinced me that Pence is too much of a wimp to rebel. But you can never tell — look what happened to Mitt Romney.Bret: Unlike Pence, Romney is a true Christian, with actual principles. As for Nikki Haley, I just don’t see her winning the Republican nomination. She’s just not Trumpy enough. My bet is on the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, with Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina as his vice-presidential nominee. Crazy?Gail: Oh God. What a combo. l hear there’s a “Ron Be Gone” movement in Florida. Maybe they can combine it with a “Tim, Don’t Get In.” Or just: “Not Scott.”Bret: DeSantis is a very shrewd guy. He’s made a point of staying close to Trump, personally, and he’s also been very good at baiting the media. His handling of the pandemic was better than most liberals will ever give him credit for, because, unlike Andrew “I’m-still-standing” Cuomo, he made a point of protecting nursing homes. With Scott on the ticket he could also peel off some of the Black vote, or at least make white suburban voters feel comfortable about voting for a G.O.P. ticket that progressives will inevitably attack as racist.Of course none of that will stop Trump from turning on DeSantis if he decides to run again in 2024, and I have to assume there are skeletons in the governor’s closet. In the words of the immortal Beatles song, “Everybody’s got something to hide except me and my monkey.”Gail: Right now the only thing we’re thinking about in DeSantis’s state is the terrible condo collapse near Miami. There are going to be lots of questions about how that disaster came to be, and the government’s role in ensuring public safety.Bret: It’s so heartbreaking. I have my own memories of what it’s like, from having lived through the Mexico City earthquake in 1985, which killed thousands of people and flattened a lot of buildings in the vicinity of my dad’s office. It’s hard to think of a more awful way to go.But I’d hate to see the issue politicized. Buildings collapse in cities and states run by Democrats, too, like the Hard Rock Hotel in New Orleans a couple of years ago.Gail: Good point. But you will remember DeSantis is also the guy who’s been fighting against vaccine requirements on cruise ships.Bret: Sounds like an unreasonable government restriction on private enterprise trying to make the rules for what’s allowed on their premises.By the way, I’m increasingly of the view that Medicare and health insurance companies should refuse to underwrite treatment for any non-vaccinated people who wind up getting sick. People who take unreasonable private risks shouldn’t be allowed to socialize the cost of the consequences. What do you think?Gail: When said unvaccinated people get sick they’re going to need medical care. Which, if they’re uninsured and of low income, is going to have to be taken care of by the taxpayer unless the hospitals are directed to refuse to admit the unvaccinated critically ill.Bret: True, though my scheme would only apply to anti-vaxxers who refused to get a vaccine, not those who just didn’t have access to it. It’s never going to happen, for the same reason that we’re probably not going to deny coverage for lung cancer patients because they happen to be ex-smokers. But I just wish we lived in a country where being willfully dumb was a little more costly.Gail: Make being willfully dumb a little more costly — I think you’ve got a campaign slogan, Bret. Don’t let Mike Pence get his hands on it.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Why Is Big Tech Policing Free Speech? Because the Government Isn’t

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Capitol Riot FalloutVisual TimelineInside the SiegeNotable ArrestsThe Global Far RightCredit…Illustration by Hudson ChristieFeatureWhy Is Big Tech Policing Free Speech? Because the Government Isn’tDeplatforming President Trump showed that the First Amendment is broken — but not in the way his supporters think.Credit…Illustration by Hudson ChristieSupported byContinue reading the main storyJan. 26, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETIn the months leading up to the November election, the social media platform Parler attracted millions of new users by promising something competitors, increasingly, did not: unfettered free speech. “If you can say it on the streets of New York,” promised the company’s chief executive, John Matze, in a June CNBC interview, “you can say it on Parler.”The giants of social media — Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram — had more stringent rules. And while they still amplified huge amounts of far-right content, they had started using warning labels and deletions to clamp down on misinformation about Covid-19 and false claims of electoral fraud, including in posts by President Trump. Conservative figures, including Senator Ted Cruz, Eric Trump and Sean Hannity, grew increasingly critical of the sites and beckoned followers to join them on Parler, whose investors include the right-wing activist and heiress Rebekah Mercer. The format was like Twitter’s, but with only two clear rules: no criminal activity and no spam or bots. On Parler, you could say what you wanted without being, as conservatives complained, “silenced.”After the election, as Trump sought to overturn his defeat with a barrage of false claims, Matze made a classic First Amendment argument for letting the disinformation stand: More speech is better. Let the marketplace of ideas run without interference. “If you don’t censor, if you don’t — you just let him do what he wants, then the public can judge for themselves,” Matze said of Trump’s Twitter account on the New York Times podcast “Sway.” “Just sit there and say: ‘Hey, that’s what he said. What do you guys think?’”Matze was speaking to the host of “Sway,” Kara Swisher, on Jan. 7 — the day after Trump told supporters to march on the U.S. Capitol and fight congressional certification of the Electoral College vote. In the chaos that followed Trump’s speech, the American marketplace of ideas clearly failed. Protecting democracy, for Trump loyalists, had become a cry to subvert and even destroy it. And while Americans’ freedoms of speech and the press were vital to exposing this assault, they were also among its causes. Right-wing media helped seed destabilizing lies; elected officials helped them grow; and the democratizing power of social media spread them, steadily, from one node to the next.Social media sites effectively function as the public square where people debate the issues of the day. But the platforms are actually more like privately owned malls: They make and enforce rules to keep their spaces tolerable, and unlike the government, they’re not obligated to provide all the freedom of speech offered by the First Amendment. Like the bouncers at a bar, they are free to boot anyone or anything they consider disruptive. In the days after Jan. 6, they swiftly cracked down on whole channels and accounts associated with the violence. Reddit removed the r/DonaldTrump subreddit. YouTube tightened its policy on posting videos that called the outcome of the election into doubt. TikTok took down posts with hashtags like #stormthecapitol. Facebook indefinitely suspended Trump’s account, and Twitter — which, like Facebook, had spent years making some exceptions to its rules for the president — took his account away permanently.Parler, true to its stated principles, did none of this. But it had a weak point: It was dependent on other private companies to operate. In the days after the Capitol assault, Apple and Google removed Parler from their app stores. Then Amazon Web Services stopped hosting Parler, effectively cutting off its plumbing. Parler sued, but it had agreed, in its contract, not to host content that “may be harmful to others”; having promised the streets of New York, it was actually bound by the rules of a kindergarten playground. In a court filing, Amazon provided samples of about 100 posts it had notified Parler were in violation of its contract in the weeks before the Capitol assault. “Fry ’em up,” one said, with a list of targets that included Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. “We are coming for you and you will know it.” On Jan. 21, a judge denied Parler’s demand to reinstate Amazon’s services.It’s unlikely the volume of incendiary content on Parler could rival that of Twitter or Facebook, where groups had openly planned for Jan. 6. But Parler is the one that went dark. A platform built to challenge the oligopoly of its giant rivals was deplatformed by other giants, in a demonstration of how easily they, too, could block speech at will.Over all, the deplatforming after Jan. 6 had the feeling of an emergency response to a wave of lies nearly drowning our democracy. For years, many tech companies had invoked the American ethos of free speech while letting disinformation and incitement spread abroad, even when it led to terrible violence. Now they leapt to action as if, with America in trouble, American ideals no longer applied. Parler eventually turned to overseas web-hosting services to get back online.“We couldn’t beat you in the war of ideas and discourse, so we’re pulling your mic” — that’s how Archon Fung, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, put it, in expressing ambivalence about the moves. It seemed curiously easier to take on Trump and his allies in the wake of Democrats’ victories in the Senate runoffs in Georgia, giving them control of both chambers of Congress along with the White House. (Press officers for Twitter and Facebook said no election outcome influenced the companies’ decision.) And in setting an example that might be applied to the speech of the other groups — foreign dissidents, sex-worker activists, Black Lives Matter organizers — the deplatforming takes on an ominous cast.Fadi Quran, a campaign director for the global human rights group Avaaz, told me he, too, found the precedent worrying. “Although the steps may have been necessary to protect American lives against violence,” he said, “they are a reminder of the power big tech has over our information infrastructure. This infrastructure should be governed by deliberative democratic processes.”But what would those democratic processes be? Americans have a deep and abiding suspicion of letting the state regulate speech. At the moment, tech companies are filling the vacuum created by that fear. But do we really want to trust a handful of chief executives with policing spaces that have become essential parts of democratic discourse? We are uncomfortable with government doing it; we are uncomfortable with Silicon Valley doing it. But we are also uncomfortable with nobody doing it at all. This is a hard place to be — or, perhaps, two rocks and a hard place.When Twitter banned Trump, he found a seemingly unlikely defender: Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who criticized the decision as a “problematic” breach of the right to free speech. This wasn’t necessarily because Merkel considered the content of Trump’s speech defensible. The deplatforming troubled her because it came from a private company; instead, she said through a spokesman, the United States should have a law restricting online incitement, like the one Germany passed in 2017 to prevent the dissemination of hate speech and fake news stories.Among democracies, the United States stands out for its faith that free speech is the right from which all other freedoms flow. European countries are more apt to fight destabilizing lies by balancing free speech with other rights. It’s an approach informed by the history of fascism and the memory of how propaganda, lies and the scapegoating of minorities can sweep authoritarian leaders to power. Many nations shield themselves from such anti-pluralistic ideas. In Canada, it’s a criminal offense to publicly incite hatred “against any identifiable group.” South Africa prosecutes people for uttering certain racial slurs. A number of countries in Europe treat Nazism as a unique evil, making it a crime to deny the Holocaust.In the United States, laws like these surely wouldn’t survive Supreme Court review, given the current understanding of the First Amendment — an understanding that comes out of our country’s history and our own brushes with suppressing dissent. The First Amendment did not prevent the administration of John Adams from prosecuting more than a dozen newspaper editors for seditious libel or the Socialist and labor leader Eugene V. Debs from being convicted of sedition over a speech, before a peaceful crowd, opposing involvement in World War I. In 1951, the Supreme Court upheld the convictions of Communist Party leaders for “conspiring” to advocate the overthrow of the government, though the evidence showed only that they had met to discuss their ideological beliefs.It wasn’t until the 1960s that the Supreme Court enduringly embraced the vision of the First Amendment expressed, decades earlier, in a dissent by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.: “The ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas.” In Brandenburg v. Ohio, that meant protecting the speech of a Ku Klux Klan leader at a 1964 rally, setting a high bar for punishing inflammatory words. Brandenburg “wildly overprotects free speech from any logical standpoint,” the University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey R. Stone points out. “But the court learned from experience to guard against a worse evil: the government using its power to silence its enemies.”This era’s concept of free speech still differed from today’s in one crucial way: The court was willing to press private entities to ensure they allowed different voices to be heard. As another University of Chicago law professor, Genevieve Lakier, wrote in a law-review article last year, a hallmark of the 1960s was the court’s “sensitivity to the threat that economic, social and political inequality posed” to public debate. As a result, the court sometimes required private property owners, like TV broadcasters, to grant access to speakers they wanted to keep out.But the court shifted again, Lakier says, toward interpreting the First Amendment “as a grant of almost total freedom” for private owners to decide who could speak through their outlets. In 1974, it struck down a Florida law requiring newspapers that criticized the character of political candidates to offer them space to reply. Chief Justice Warren Burger, in his opinion for the majority, recognized that barriers to entry in the newspaper market meant this placed the power to shape public opinion “in few hands.” But in his view, there was little the government could do about it..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-c7gg1r{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:0.875rem;line-height:0.875rem;margin-bottom:15px;color:#121212 !important;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-c7gg1r{font-size:0.9375rem;line-height:0.9375rem;}}.css-rqynmc{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.9375rem;line-height:1.25rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-rqynmc{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-rqynmc strong{font-weight:600;}.css-rqynmc em{font-style:italic;}.css-yoay6m{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-yoay6m{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1dg6kl4{margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:15px;}.css-16ed7iq{width:100%;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;-webkit-box-pack:center;-webkit-justify-content:center;-ms-flex-pack:center;justify-content:center;padding:10px 0;background-color:white;}.css-pmm6ed{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}.css-pmm6ed > :not(:first-child){margin-left:5px;}.css-5gimkt{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.8125rem;font-weight:700;-webkit-letter-spacing:0.03em;-moz-letter-spacing:0.03em;-ms-letter-spacing:0.03em;letter-spacing:0.03em;text-transform:uppercase;color:#333;}.css-5gimkt:after{content:’Collapse’;}.css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;-webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);-ms-transform:rotate(180deg);transform:rotate(180deg);}.css-eb027h{max-height:5000px;-webkit-transition:max-height 0.5s ease;transition:max-height 0.5s ease;}.css-6mllg9{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;position:relative;opacity:0;}.css-6mllg9:before{content:”;background-image:linear-gradient(180deg,transparent,#ffffff);background-image:-webkit-linear-gradient(270deg,rgba(255,255,255,0),#ffffff);height:80px;width:100%;position:absolute;bottom:0px;pointer-events:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}.css-1amoy78{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1amoy78{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-1amoy78:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}.css-1amoy78[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-1amoy78[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-1amoy78[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-1amoy78[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-k9atqk{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-k9atqk strong{font-weight:700;}.css-k9atqk em{font-style:italic;}.css-k9atqk a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;border-bottom:1px solid #ccd9e3;}.css-k9atqk a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd;}.css-k9atqk a:hover{border-bottom:none;}Capitol Riot FalloutFrom Riot to ImpeachmentThe riot inside the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, Jan. 6, followed a rally at which President Trump made an inflammatory speech to his supporters, questioning the results of the election. Here’s a look at what happened and the ongoing fallout:As this video shows, poor planning and a restive crowd encouraged by President Trump set the stage for the riot.A two hour period was crucial to turning the rally into the riot.Several Trump administration officials, including cabinet members Betsy DeVos and Elaine Chao, announced that they were stepping down as a result of the riot.Federal prosecutors have charged more than 70 people, including some who appeared in viral photos and videos of the riot. Officials expect to eventually charge hundreds of others.The House voted to impeach the president on charges of “inciting an insurrection” that led to the rampage by his supporters.Traditionally, conservatives have favored that libertarian approach: Let owners decide how their property is used. That’s changing now that they find their speech running afoul of tech-company rules. “Listen to me, America, we were wiped out,” the right-wing podcaster Dan Bongino, an investor in Parler, said in a Fox News interview after Amazon pulled its services. “And to all the geniuses out there, too, saying this is a private company, it’s not a First Amendment fight — really, it’s not?” The law that prevents the government from censoring speech should still apply, he said, because “these companies are more powerful than a de facto government.” You needn’t sympathize with him to see the hit Parler took as the modern equivalent of, in Burger’s terms, disliking one newspaper and taking the trouble to start your own, only to find no one will sell you ink to print it.One problem with private companies’ holding the ability to deplatform any speaker is that they’re in no way insulated from politics — from accusations of bias to advertiser boycotts to employee walkouts. Facebook is a business, driven by profit and with no legal obligation to explain its decisions the way a court or regulatory body would. Why, for example, hasn’t Facebook suspended the accounts of other leaders who have used the platform to spread lies and bolster their power, like the president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte? A spokesman said suspending Trump was “a response to a specific situation based on risk” — but so is every decision, and the risks can be just as high overseas.“It’s really media and public pressure that is the difference between Trump coming down and Duterte staying up,” says Evelyn Douek, a lecturer at Harvard Law School. “But the winds of public opinion are a terrible basis for free-speech decisions! Maybe it seems like it’s working right now. But in the longer run, how do you think unpopular dissidents and minorities will fare?”Deplatforming works, at least in the short term. There are indications that in the weeks after the platforms cleaned house — with Twitter suspending not just Trump but some 70,000 accounts, including many QAnon influencers — conversations about election fraud decreased significantly across several sites. After Facebook reintroduced a scoring system to promote news sources based on its judgment of their quality, the list of top performers, usually filled by hyperpartisan sources, featured CNN, NPR and local news outlets.But there’s no reason to think the healthier information climate will last. The very features that make social media so potent work both to the benefit and the detriment of democracy. YouTube, for instance, changed its recommendation algorithm in 2019, after researchers and reporters (including Kevin Roose at The New York Times) showed how it pushed some users toward radicalizing content. It’s also telling that, since the election, Facebook has stopped recommending civic groups for people to join. After Jan. 6, the researcher Aric Toler at Bellingcat surfaced a cheery video, automatically created by Facebook to promote its groups, which imposed the tagline “community means a lot” over images of a militia brandishing weapons and a photo of Robert Gieswein, who has since been charged in the assault on the Capitol. “I’m afraid that the technology has upended the possibility of a well-functioning, responsible speech environment,” the Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith says. “It used to be we had masses of speech in a reasonable range, and some extreme speech we could tolerate. Now we have a lot more extreme speech coming from lots of outlets and mouthpieces, and it’s more injurious and harder to regulate.”For decades, tech companies mostly responded to such criticism with proud free-speech absolutism. But external pressures, and the absence of any other force to contain users, gradually dragged them into the expensive and burdensome role of policing their domains. Facebook, for one, now has legions of low-paid workers reviewing posts flagged as harmful, a task gruesome enough that the company has agreed to pay $52 million in mental-health compensation to settle a lawsuit by more than 10,000 moderators.Perhaps because it’s so easy to question their motives, some executives have taken to begging for mercy. “We are facing something that feels impossible,” said Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive, while being grilled by Congress last year. And Facebook’s founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, has agreed with lawmakers that the company has too much power over speech. Two weeks after suspending Trump, Facebook said its new oversight board, an independent group of 20 international experts, would review the decision, with the power to make a binding ruling.Zuckerberg and Dorsey have also suggested openness to government regulation that would hold platforms to external standards. That might include, for example, requiring rules for slowing the spread of disinformation from known offenders. European lawmakers, with their more skeptical free-speech tradition (and lack of allegiance to American tech companies), have proposed requiring platforms to show how their recommendations work and giving users more control over them, as has been done in the realm of privacy. Steps like these seem better suited to combating misinformation than eliminating, as is often suggested, the immunity platforms currently enjoy from lawsuits, which directly affects only a narrow range of cases, mostly involving defamation.There is no consensus on a path forward, but there is precedent for some intervention. When radio and television radically altered the information landscape, Congress passed laws to foster competition, local control and public broadcasting. From the 1930s until the 1980s, anyone with a broadcast license had to operate in the “public interest” — and starting in 1949, that explicitly included exposing audiences to multiple points of view in policy debates. The court let the elected branches balance the rights of private ownership with the collective good of pluralism.This model coincided with relatively high levels of trust in media and low levels of political polarization. That arrangement has been rare in American history. It’s hard to imagine a return to it. But it’s worth remembering that radio and TV also induced fear and concern, and our democracy adapted and thrived. The First Amendment of the era aided us. The guarantee of free speech is for democracy; it is worth little, in the end, apart from it.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      How Parler, a Chosen App of Trump Fans, Became a Test of Free Speech

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Presidential TransitionLatest UpdatesHouse Moves to Remove TrumpHow Impeachment Might WorkBiden Focuses on CrisesCabinet PicksAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyHow Parler, a Chosen App of Trump Fans, Became a Test of Free SpeechThe app has renewed a debate about who holds power over online speech after the tech giants yanked their support for it and left it fighting for survival. Parler was set to go dark on Monday.John Matze, chief executive of the alternative social networking app Parler, has said the app welcomes free speech. Credit…Fox News, via YouTubeJack Nicas and Jan. 10, 2021Updated 10:15 p.m. ETFrom the start, John Matze had positioned Parler as a “free speech” social network where people could mostly say whatever they wanted. It was a bet that had recently paid off big as millions of President Trump’s supporters, fed up with what they deemed censorship on Facebook and Twitter, flocked to Parler instead.On the app, which had become a top download on Apple’s App Store, discussions over politics had ramped up. But so had conspiracy theories that falsely said the election had been stolen from Mr. Trump, with users urging aggressive demonstrations last week when Congress met to certify the election of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.Those calls for violence soon came back to haunt Mr. Matze, 27, a software engineer from Las Vegas and Parler’s chief executive. By Saturday night, Apple and Google had removed Parler from their app stores and Amazon said it would no longer host the site on its computing services, saying it had not sufficiently policed posts that incited violence and crime. As a result, Parler was set to disappear from the web on Monday.That set off a furious effort to keep Parler online. Mr. Matze said on Sunday that he was racing to save the data of Parler’s roughly 15 million users from Amazon’s computers. He was also calling company after company to find one willing to support Parler with hundreds of computer servers.“I believe Amazon, Google, Apple worked together to try and ensure they don’t have competition,” Mr. Matze said on Parler late Saturday. “They will NOT win! We are the worlds last hope for free speech and free information.” He said the app would probably shut down “for up to a week as we rebuild from scratch.”Credit…ScreenshotParler’s plight immediately drew condemnation from those on the right, who compared the big tech companies to authoritarian overlords. Representative Devin Nunes, a California Republican, told Fox News on Sunday that “Republicans have no way to communicate” and asked his followers to text him to stay in touch. Lou Dobbs, the right-wing commentator, wrote on Parler that the app had a strong antitrust case against the tech companies amid such “perilous times.”Parler has now become a test case in a renewed national debate over free speech on the internet and whether tech giants such as Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon have too much power. That debate has intensified since Mr. Trump was barred from posting on Twitter and Facebook last week after a violent mob, urged on by the president and his social media posts, stormed the Capitol.For years, Facebook and Twitter had defended people’s ability to speak freely on their sites, while Amazon, Apple, Google and others had stayed mostly hands-off with apps like Parler. That allowed misinformation and falsehoods to flow across online networks.A screenshot of Mr. Matze’s Parler profile.Users can choose whom to follow on Parler.Credit…ScreenshotThe tech companies’ actions last week to limit such toxic content with Mr. Trump and Parler have been applauded by liberals and others. But the moves also focused attention on the power of these private enterprises to decide who stays online and who doesn’t. And the timing struck some as politically convenient, with Mr. Biden set to take office on Jan. 20 and Democrats gaining control of Congress.The tech companies’ newly proactive approach also provides grist for Mr. Trump in the waning days of his administration. Even as he faces another potential impeachment, Mr. Trump is expected to try stoking anger at Twitter, Facebook and others this week, potentially as a launchpad for competing with Silicon Valley head on when he leaves the White House. After he was barred from Twitter, Mr. Trump said in a statement that he would “look at the possibilities of building out our own platform in the near future.”Ben Wizner, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, said it was understandable that no company wanted to be associated with the “repellent speech” that encouraged the breaching of the Capitol. But he said Parler’s situation was troubling.That was because Apple’s and Google’s removal of Parler from their app stores and Amazon’s halting its web hosting went beyond what Twitter or Facebook do when they curtail a user’s account or their posts, he said. “I think we should recognize the importance of neutrality when we’re talking about the infrastructure of the internet,” he said.In earlier statements, Apple, Amazon and Google said that they had warned Parler about the violent posts on its site and that it had not done enough to consistently remove them. The companies said they required sites like Parler to systematically enforce their rules. They declined to comment further on Sunday.Tech companies pulling support for certain websites is not new. In 2018, Gab, another alternative to Facebook and Twitter that is popular among the far right, was forced offline after it lost support from other companies, including PayPal and GoDaddy, because it had hosted anti-Semitic posts by a man who shot and killed 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue. Gab later came back online with the help of a Seattle company, Epik, which hosts other far-right websites.Even if Parler goes dark, right-wing personalities like Mr. Nunes who have built followings on the app do not lack other communication channels. Many still have ample followings on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, which welcome any user who doesn’t violate their rules, which prohibit threatening violence or posting hate speech.Parler was founded in 2018 by Mr. Matze and a fellow programmer, one of several social-media upstarts that aimed to capitalize on the growing anger of Mr. Trump’s supporters with Silicon Valley. But Parler had a significant advantage: money. Rebekah Mercer, one of Mr. Trump’s largest donors, helped bankroll the site. Other investors include Dan Bongino, a former Secret Service agent and Fox News pundit. It plans to eventually make money by selling ads.The app is essentially a Twitter clone. It enables people to broadcast messages — known as “parleys,” not “tweets” — to followers. Users can also comment on and “echo” — not “retweet” — other users’ posts. When signing up for a new account, people are asked to select their favorite color and are urged to choose from a list of conservative voices to follow, including Mr. Nunes, the Fox News host Sean Hannity and the actress Kirstie Alley.These “influencers” dominate the experience on the site. On Sunday, the Parler newsfeed was a stream of their angry “parleys,” railing at Big Tech and pleading with their followers to follow them elsewhere.“Please sign up for my daily newsletter today, before the tech totalitarians ban everything,” wrote Mr. Bongino, who also controls one of Facebook’s most popular pages.Messages on Parler from Mr. Matze.Parler’s list of top personalities.Parler grew slowly until early 2020, when Twitter began labeling Mr. Trump’s tweets as inaccurate and some of his supporters joined Parler in protest. After November’s election, Parler grew even more quickly as Facebook and Twitter clamped down on false claims that the vote had been rigged. So many users signed up that, at times, they overloaded the company’s systems and forced it to pause new registrations.In total, people downloaded Parler’s app more than 10 million times last year, with 80 percent in the United States, according to Sensor Tower, the app data firm.Last Wednesday, Mr. Trump encouraged his supporters to march to the Capitol to pressure lawmakers to overturn his election loss, leading to a rampage that left five people dead. The rally was planned on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere. On Parler, people posted advice on which streets to take to avoid the police; some posted about carrying guns inside the Capitol.In an interview with The New York Times hours after the mob stormed the Capitol, Mr. Matze said, “I don’t feel responsible for any of this and neither should the platform, considering we’re a neutral town square that just adheres to the law.”But on Friday, Apple and Google told Parler that it needed to more consistently remove posts that encouraged violence. By Saturday, Apple and Google had removed Parler from their app stores, limiting its ability to reach new users on virtually all of the world’s smartphones.“There is no place on our platform for threats of violence and illegal activity,” Apple said in a statement. Google said, “We do require that apps implement robust moderation for egregious content.”Late Saturday, Amazon told Parler that it would need to find a new place to host its site. Amazon said it had sent Parler 98 examples of posts on its site that encouraged violence, but many remained online.“We cannot provide services to a customer that is unable to effectively identify and remove content that encourages or incites violence against others,” Amazon said.Amazon was scheduled to pull its support for Parler just before midnight Sunday on the West Coast. Amazon said it would preserve Parler’s data so it could move it to other computer servers.“It’s devastating,” Mr. Matze told Fox News on Sunday. “And it’s not just these three companies. Every vendor, from text message services to email providers to our lawyers, all ditched us, too, on the same day.” He said he was struggling to find another company to host Parler’s website.But Jeffrey Wernick, Parler’s chief operating officer, said in an interview that the app had heard from several companies that wanted to help. He declined to name them.“What Parler will look like a month from now, I can’t tell you,” he said. “But Parler will not be gone.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More