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      Targeting ‘Woke Capital’

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      West Virginia’s banning of five big Wall Street banks for doing business with the state is yet another step toward a politicized world of red brands and blue brands. Florida’s DeSantis: Make profits great again.Phelan M. Ebenhack/Associated PressStates take action against ‘woke C.E.O.s’ Five big Wall Street firms woke up to a headache yesterday, and the ailment seems to be spreading fast. Riley Moore, the outspoken treasurer of West Virginia, announced that Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, BlackRock, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo were banned from doing business with the state because they had stopped supporting the coal industry, reports The Times’s David Gelles.The banks have sharply reduced financing for new coal projects, while BlackRock has been reducing its actively managed holdings in coal companies since 2020. Coal, the most polluting fossil fuel, has become less profitable in recent years.Some of the firms do business with West Virginia in various ways. JPMorgan, for example, handles some banking services for West Virginia’s public university. But the dollar figures are relatively small, and the law does not affect the holdings of the state’s pension fund.The development is yet another step toward a politicized world of red brands and blue brands. In these hyperpartisan times, companies are increasingly being caught between conservatives and progressives, and some brands are being typecast as Republican or Democratic. The timing of the announcement was striking, coming just hours after Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who had been the chief Democratic holdout on climate legislation, relented and agreed to sign on.Meanwhile in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis unloaded on the supposedly “woke” ideology of some financial services firms, criticizing E.S.G. investing and announcing plans for legislation that would “prohibit big banks, credit card companies and money transmitters from discriminating against customers for their religious, political or social beliefs.” At a news conference this week, he also said he wanted to prohibit the state’s pension fund managers from considering environmental factors when making investment decisions. Instead, he said, they need to be focusing only on “maximizing the return on investment.”Businesses now “marginalize” people because of political disagreements, DeSantis said. “That is not the way you can run an economy effectively.” He singled out PayPal, which has cut off accounts associated with far-right groups that participated in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, and GoFundMe, which blocked donations to a group supporting truckers who occupied Ottawa this year.HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING Amazon’s shares soar as the company says consumer demand remains strong. The positive comments from C.E.O. Andrew Jassy and other top executives caused investors to shrug off the fact that the giant internet retailer reported its slowest quarterly sales growth in two decades, and has cut nearly 100,000 workers. Apple’s quarterly results were also better than expected, as Big Tech’s profits have been resilient even as the economy has slowed.The eurozone economy grew faster than expected, but so did inflation. Positive G.D.P. growth for the region, a day after the U.S. reported that economic growth slumped for the second quarter in a row, relieved some worries about growing stagflation. Still, inflation in the eurozone hit 8.9 percent in July compared with a year ago, a fresh record.The Biden administration plans to offer updated booster shots in September. With reformulated shots from Pfizer and Moderna on the horizon, the F.D.A. has decided that Americans under 50 should wait to receive second boosters.Read More About Oil and Gas PricesPrices Drop: U.S. gas prices have been on the decline, offering some relief to drivers. But weather, war and demand will influence how long it lasts.Stock Market: As financial markets around the world fell this spring amid worries about inflation and rising interest rates, energy was the only sector gaining ground. Summer Driving Season: The spike in gas prices is being driven in part by vacationers hitting the road. Here’s what our reporter saw on a recent trip.Gas Tax Holiday: President Biden called on Congress to temporarily suspend the federal gas tax, but experts remain skeptical the move would benefit consumers much, because tax is such a small percentage of the price you pay at the pump..A new book reignites a debate about how L.A. Times editors handled a 2017 exposé. Paul Pringle, a veteran reporter at the L.A. Times, writes in his book “Bad City” that top editors tried to slow-walk the paper’s initial groundbreaking article, which detailed how the dean of the University of Southern California’s medical school used drugs with young people.Trader Joe’s workers at a Massachusetts store form a union. It is the only one of the supermarket chain’s more than 500 stores with a formal union, but similar moves are afoot elsewhere, just as the union campaign has spread at Starbucks. Trader Joe’s will face at least one more union vote soon, at a Minneapolis store next month, and workers at a store in Colorado filed an election petition this week.Big oil’s big profitsOil companies are reporting surging profits, even as consumers and world leaders are dealing with the hardships caused by higher energy prices.Buoyed by high oil and gas prices, the energy sector is expected to have swelled earnings by more than 250 percent in the second quarter. Exxon Mobil and Chevron, the U.S.’s two largest oil companies, reported record profits this morning, with Exxon’s profit more than tripling from a year ago. Europe’s biggest oil companies, Shell and TotalEnergies, yesterday reported a combined $21 billion in profits.The fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has led to significant financial benefits for energy companies and their investors. The pain of rising energy prices and shortages, though, has been felt particularly strongly by consumers and businesses in Europe, which received roughly half of Russia’s oil exports before the invasion. In Asia and Africa, higher energy prices could push millions of people back into energy poverty, the International Energy Agency warned last month.It’s also led to claims of profiteering. President Biden said last month that oil companies were benefiting from their own underinvestment in refining capacity. In Britain, Boris Johnson, the outgoing prime minister, imposed a windfall tax on major oil and gas companies. But a top contender to replace him, Liz Truss, said that she opposed the tax because it would send “the wrong signal to the world,” and that Shell should be encouraged to invest in Britain.Oil companies have pointed the finger back at politicians. Ben van Beurden, Shell’s chief executive, said yesterday that energy prices were high in part because of government policies that discouraged investment in oil and natural gas in recent years.Gas prices in the U.S. have fallen over the last month, and there are some indications that more relief could be ahead. Citigroup said in a research note today that it expected growth in the supply of oil to outpace weaker demand. Still, geopolitical factors and the weather could change the trajectory of prices, particularly if the U.S. has an active hurricane season that disrupts refining capacity. “Just a few of these risks materializing could work up a continued perfect storm of high volatility,” Citigroup said.“There is a principle at stake. What can you buy if you have unlimited cash? Can you bend every rule? Can you take apart monuments?”— Stefan Lewis, a former member of Rotterdam’s City Council, explaining the outrage over the city’s decision, which has since been reversed, to temporarily dismantle a bridge to accommodate Jeff Bezos and his superyacht.The dark secrets of corporate subsidy deals Every year, state and local officials negotiate about $95 billion in economic development deals, competing with one another to recruit companies to their communities with lucrative subsidies in exchange for their business.But some corporations are becoming increasingly aggressive about forcing officials to sign nondisclosure agreements that could end up hurting the communities that the businesses were supposed to help, according to a new report by the American Economic Liberties Project, a progressive antitrust advocacy group. The N.D.A.s sometimes prohibit officials from disclosing basic information about a corporation, like its name and the type of business it’s building, Pat Garofalo, an author of the report, told DealBook.These N.D.A.s prevent community members, like workers and local businesses, from sharing their input on the deal until after it is completed. One recent example is the $4 billion battery factory that Panasonic will build in Kansas, which will get nearly $1 billion in subsidies. Before the deal was completed, Panasonic was also negotiating with Oklahoma, and the states were in a bidding war over the electronics giant’s business. But lawmakers could not talk about the corporation on the other side of the bargaining table in public — and sometimes didn’t even know its name. In April, Oklahoma officials complained that they had two hours to contemplate a complex incentive package worth $700 million, or about 8 percent of the state budget. “How am I supposed to go back to my constituents and say, ‘I gave away three-quarters of a billion dollars to a company that I don’t even know their name?’ Is that responsible?” State Representative Collin Walke said during an appropriations meeting.Some states have introduced bills to ban these N.D.A.s, which the report calls “an extremely common tactic” in development deals. This year, such legislation was introduced in New York, Michigan, Illinois, and Florida. New York’s State Senate voted unanimously to approve a ban. Garofalo thinks the New York lawmakers were galvanized by the Amazon HQ2 bid that fell apart in 2019. But he notes that communities don’t have to wait for politicians to fix the problem. Engaged citizens have used public meeting and records laws to solve subsidy mysteries, and sometimes a little transparency is all it takes, Garofalo said. “When the public does get a say,” he told DealBook, “the deals are better, or bad deals are knocked off right away.”THE SPEED READ Deals“Private equity giant Carlyle’s latest big play: Small Brooklyn buildings” (The Real Deal)Ernst & Young’s plan to split is reportedly being held up by debt issues. (WSJ)Newsmax renewed a deal to be carried by Verizon’s Fios, days before its rival One America News is to be dropped. Both are known for their loyalty to former President Trump. (NYT)PolicyThe private equity industry is objecting to a proposed U.S. tax increase on carried-interest income. (NYT)“Dry Fountains, Cold Pools, Less Beer? Germans Tip-Toe Up the Path to Energy Savings” (NYT)The big question is not whether the U.S. is in a recession. It’s whether the economy’s problems will worsen. (NYT’s The Morning)Best of the restArchitects have a reimagined vision for the former Deutsche Bank atrium at 60 Wall Street, with plans to make it look less like a Mediterranean spa and more like a Singapore airport. (NYT)Instagram is rolling back some product changes after celebrities like Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashian criticized them. (NYT)TV showrunners are demanding that studios create protocols to protect employees in states where abortion has been outlawed. (Variety)Richard Rosenthal, the top defense lawyer for dangerous dogs, has even frustrated animal rights groups. (NYT)We’d like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to dealbook@nytimes.com. More

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      Big Tech and the Fed

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      Some tech companies’ earnings are flagging, in what could be a positive sign for the Federal Reserve.Still big.Noah Berger/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhat tech earnings say about the economy The long-booming bottom lines of major tech companies are all of a sudden smaller than expected. That might be a good thing. Big Tech sailed through the pandemic with its profits mostly intact. The fact that some firms’ results are now flagging could be a positive sign for the Federal Reserve, which is trying to engineer a slowdown as it fights the nation’s worst bout of inflation in four decades.The big question for investors, and perhaps the Fed, is whether the profits of Apple, Alphabet, Amazon and the other tech giants, along with corporate America in general, have fallen enough.Microsoft and Alphabet, Google’s parent company, kicked off what appears to be a disappointing round of quarterly reports for the U.S.’s largest tech companies yesterday. Meta will release its results this afternoon, with Apple and Amazon rounding out Big Tech’s earnings announcements tomorrow.Microsoft’s profits, while below expectations, were still up. Sales of its signature software products, like Office, rose 13 percent. Its cloud services were up 40 percent. And LinkedIn, the professional social network Microsoft bought in 2016, grew 26 percent from a year ago, continuing to benefit from the tightest job market in decades.Alphabet’s sales rose 13 percent. In another good sign for the economy, the jump was driven by better-than-expected sales in its core Google search engine business, while results were mixed elsewhere. A jump in expenses and an exit from its Russian-related businesses caused profits to slump 14 percent.The results were positive enough for investors. Alphabet’s shares rose nearly 5 percent on the earnings news to $110. Microsoft’s shares jumped $10, or nearly 4 percent, to $262. Executives at both companies said they saw evidence of a weaker economy. “We are not immune to what is happening in the macro broadly,” Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, said on a call with analysts. Alphabet’s chief financial officer, Ruth Porat, told analysts that a pullback in spending by some advertisers reflected “uncertainty about a number of factors.”Few are betting that the earnings reports will change the Fed’s approach. Its policymakers are meeting this week, and they are widely expected to continue raising benchmark interest rates. While central bankers “will likely acknowledge a recent weakening in economic momentum, the Fed will likely feel the need to appear resolute in battling inflation until there are clear signs that it is abating,” wrote David Kelly, the chief global strategist of J.P. Morgan Asset Management, in a note to clients earlier this week.HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING Kraken, the crypto exchange, is under investigation for possible sanctions violations. The Treasury Department is looking into whether Kraken illegally allowed users in Iran and elsewhere to buy and sell digital tokens. Shares of Coinbase, a larger crypto exchange, plunged yesterday after reports that the S.E.C. was investigating whether it allowed trading in unregistered securities. Cathie Wood’s Ark funds reportedly dumped Coinbase shares yesterday for the first time this year.Antitrust legislation aimed at Big Tech may be off the table for now. Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, told donors at a Capitol Hill fund-raiser yesterday that the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, which he had promised to bring to a vote this summer, lacks the support needed to get it to the Senate floor, Bloomberg reported. The bill’s bipartisan backers have been pressuring Schumer to act fast, before midterm elections that could change the balance of power in Congress.One America News, once a dependable Trump promoter, is struggling to survive. The network is being dropped by major carriers and faces a wave of defamation lawsuits for its outlandish stories about the 2020 election. OAN’s most recent blow is from Verizon, which will stop carrying the network on its Fios television service this week. It is now available to only a few thousand people who subscribe to regional cable providers.Teva Pharmaceuticals reaches a tentative $4.25 billion settlement over opioids. The proposed settlement, which is with some 2,500 local governments, states and tribes, would end thousands of lawsuits against one of the largest producers of the painkillers during the height of the opioid epidemic.Florida’s largest utility secretly funded a website that attacked its critics. Florida Power & Light bankrolled and controlled The Capitolist, a news site aimed at Florida lawmakers, through intermediaries from an Alabama consulting firm, an investigation by The Miami Herald found. The site claimed to be independent, but it advocated rate hikes and legislative favors in efforts that were directed by top executives at the utility.BlackRock downshifts on E.S.G. BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, slashed its support for shareholder proposals on environmental and social issues this year, backing only 24 percent of such resolutions in the proxy season that ended in June, down from 43 percent in the previous period. The firm, which has long led the conscious investing movement, said this year’s proposals were “less supportable” and cited new regulatory guidance that opened the door to a broader range of policy-related proposals.The firm has criticized overly “prescriptive” resolutions. In a May memo, BlackRock signaled that Russia’s war in Ukraine was straining global energy supplies and shifting its calculations. “Many climate-related shareholder proposals sought to dictate the pace of companies’ energy transition plans despite continued consumer demand,” wrote the firm’s global head of investment stewardship, Sandy Boss. She noted that shareholders generally supported fewer environmental and social proposals this year as well, voting for 27 percent of resolutions, down from 36 percent in the previous proxy period.Opposition to E.S.G. is mounting. The environmental, social and governance investment push has been labeled “woke capitalism” by critics and is under fire from executives like Tesla’s Elon Musk, major investors like Bill Ackman and Republican politicians. In a speech yesterday, former Vice President Mike Pence, a possible 2024 hopeful, said that big government and big business were together advancing a “pernicious woke agenda.”E.S.G. supporters say critics may have a point. Andrew Behar, C.E.O. of the shareholder advocacy group As You Sow, agrees that many supposed E.S.G. investments don’t reflect true sustainability — with ever more capital directed toward the idea and many funds failing to live up to their promises. Behar argued that more corporate disclosures — which anti-E.S.G. groups oppose — would help to ensure that green investing actually works. He argues that critics also ignore a key financial incentive driving investor interest: knowing and lowering the costs of environmental issues throughout company operations, including risks from changing weather and the transition to more sustainable models. “We don’t have an E.S.G. problem,” Behar told DealBook. “We have a naming problem.”“I quit Starbucks. I had to. I just didn’t feel like that was justifiable. It’s like a small car payment.” — Fontaine Weyman, a 43-year-old songwriter from Charleston, S.C., on changing her coffee habits. Many Americans are dealing with the fastest inflation of their adult lives across a broad range of goods and services.Instagram tries to explain itself Instagram responded yesterday to criticism from some of its most popular users, including Kylie Jenner, about new features that made it more like its top rival, TikTok, the fast-growing video app owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.Adam Mosseri, Instagram’s head, said that it was experimenting with several changes, and that he knew users were unhappy. “It’s not yet good,” he said of some of the tweaks in a video post. He stressed Instagram’s commitment to photos, the app’s original focus, but said, “I’m going to be honest, I do believe that more and more of Instagram is going to become video over time.”Reels, a short-video product, is one of the six main investment priorities at Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, according to an internal memo last month from Chris Cox, the company’s chief product officer. Cox said that users had doubled the amount of time they spent on Reels year over year, and that Meta would prioritize boosting ads in Reels “as quickly as possible.” Last week, Instagram announced that almost all videos in the app would be posted as Reels.The changes come as Meta heads into a new phase. Mark Zuckerberg, its founder and chief executive, has cut costs, reshuffled his leadership team and made clear that low-performing employees will be let go, writes The Times’s Mike Isaac. “Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here,” Zuckerberg said on a call late last month. In recent months, profit at Meta has fallen and revenue has slowed as the company has spent lavishly on augmented and virtual reality projects, and as the economic slowdown has hurt its advertising business.The high-profile complaints about Instagram’s revamp started in recent days, when Kylie Jenner, the beauty mogul with 361 million Instagram followers, shared an image on the site that read: “Make Instagram Instagram again. (stop trying to be tiktok i just want to see cute photos of my friends.) Sincerely, everyone.”“PRETTY PLEASE,” Kim Kardashian, Jenner’s half sister and the seventh-most-followed Instagram user, echoed in a later post. Yesterday, Chrissy Teigen, a model and author with 39 million followers, responded to Mosseri in a tweet, saying, “we don’t wanna make videos Adam lol.”Companies have reason to listen when social media stars speak up, writes The Times’s Kalley Huang. In 2018, after Snapchat overhauled its interface, Jenner tweeted: “sooo does anyone else not open Snapchat anymore? Or is it just me….” Within a week, Snap, the app’s parent company, had lost $1.3 billion in market value.THE SPEED READ DealsThe activist investor Elliott Management reportedly has a stake in Paypal and is pushing it to cut costs faster. (WSJ, Bloomberg)Twitter shareholders will be asked to vote on Elon Musk’s potential acquisition in September. (Bloomberg)PolicyThe Senate advanced an industrial policy bill that includes more than $52 billion in subsidies for chip makers building U.S. plants. (NYT)The short seller Carson Block is being sued over a $14 million award from the S.E.C. that raised questions about the agency’s whistle-blower program. (Bloomberg)After Apple launched a “buy now, pay later” service, the top U.S. consumer finance regulator warned Big Tech about undermining competition in the sector. (FT)A federal judge ruled that Uber doesn’t have to offer wheelchair-accessible cars in every city. (The Verge)Best of the restCredit Suisse, which reported larger second-quarter losses than expected, replaced its C.E.O. (FT)Customers are paying billions of dollars in fees for “free” checking. (Bloomberg)The default settings in Apple, Google, Amazon and Microsoft products that you should turn off right away. (NYT)This man sells mud to Major League Baseball. (NYT)“The Case of the $5,000 Springsteen Tickets” (NYT)R.I.P., Choco Taco. (NYT)We’d like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to dealbook@nytimes.com. More

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      Who Is Financing Trump’s ‘Big Lie’ Caucus? Corporations You Know.

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      Immediately after the Jan. 6 attack, hundreds of corporations announced freezes on donating money to Republican lawmakers who had voted against certifying Joe Biden’s victory. “Given recent events and the horrific attack on the U.S. Capitol, we are assessing our future PAC criteria,” a spokesperson for Toyota said a week after the attack.For many corporations, that pause was short-lived.“By April 1, 2021, Toyota had donated $62,000 to 39 Republican objectors,” the journalist Judd Legum wrote in his newsletter, Popular Information. That included a donation of $1,000 that Toyota gave to Representative Andy Biggs, a Republican from Arizona who is a close ally of Donald Trump and a fervent devotee of the “big lie.”In July 2021, Toyota reversed course and announced another hiatus from donating to lawmakers who voted to overturn the election results. Six months later, the money started to flow again. The company, in a statement to The Times, said it donates equally to both parties and “will not support those who, by their words and actions, create an atmosphere that incites violence.” (Corporations aren’t allowed to give directly to campaigns but instead form political action committees that donate in the name of the company.)Giving equally to both parties sounds good. But what if a growing faction of one political party isn’t committed to the rule of law and the peaceful transfer of power?In the year and a half since the attack, rivers of cash from once skittish donors have resumed flowing to election deniers. Sometimes tens of thousands of dollars. Sometimes just a thousand. But it adds up. In the month of April alone, the last month for which data is available, Fortune 500 companies and trade organizations gave more than $1.4 million to members of Congress who voted not to certify the election results, according to an analysis by the transparency group Accountable.US. AT&T led the pack, giving $95,000 to election objectors.Of all the revelations so far from the hearings on the Jan. 6 attack, the most important is that the effort to undermine democratic elections in the United States is continuing. More than a dozen men and women who participated in the Jan. 6 insurrection or the rallies leading up to it have run for elected office this year. Supporters of Mr. Trump have also run for public offices that oversee elections. And according to an investigation by The Times, at least 357 Republican legislators in nine states have used the power of their offices to attack the results of the 2020 election.This isn’t a hypothetical threat. On Tuesday, New Mexico’s secretary of state was forced to ask the State Supreme Court to compel a Republican-led county election commission to certify primary election results. The commission had refused to do so, citing its distrust of its own voting machines.There is also an active effort underway to frustrate the Jan. 6 committee’s work, including refusing to comply with subpoenas. Mr. Biggs, for instance, has refused to comply with a congressional subpoena to testify, as have other Republican members of Congress, including Jim Jordan, Kevin McCarthy, Mo Brooks and Scott Perry. (Mr. Perry, among other congressmen, asked for a presidential pardon for efforts to challenge and overturn the 2020 election, according to Representative Liz Cheney, the vice chair of the committee. He has denied that charge.) Representatives Barry Loudermilk and Ronny Jackson have yet to agree to interview requests from the committee. Six of these congressmen alone have brought in more than $826,000 from corporate donors since Jan. 6, according to Accountable.US. (Mr. Brooks didn’t receive any money from the Fortune 500 companies and trade groups tracked in the report.)We tend to think of the past and future threat to elections as coming from voters for Donald Trump and those whom they’d elect to office. But the success of these politicians also depends on money. And a lot of money from corporations like Boeing, Koch Industries, Home Depot, FedEx, UPS and General Dynamics has gone to politicians who reject the 2020 election results based on lies told by the former president, according to a tally kept by the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, known as CREW.All told, as of this week, corporations and industry groups gave almost $32 million to the House and Senate members who voted to overturn the election and to the G.O.P. committees focused on the party’s congressional campaigns. The top 10 companies that gave money to those members, according to CREW’s analysis of campaign finance disclosures, are Koch Industries, Boeing, Home Depot, Valero Energy, Lockheed Martin, UPS, Raytheon, Marathon Petroleum, General Motors and FedEx. All of those companies, with the exception of Koch Industries and FedEx, once said they’d refrain from donating to politicians who voted to reject the election results.Of the 249 companies that promised not to fund the 147 senators and representatives who voted against any of the results, fewer than half have stuck to their promise, according to CREW.Kudos aplenty to the 85 corporations that stuck to their guns and still refuse to fund the seditious, including Nike, PepsiCo, Lyft, Cisco, Prudential, Marriott, Target and Zillow. That’s what responsible corporate citizenship looks like. It’s also patriotic.We’re going to need more patriotic companies for what’s coming. Not only are Republican lawmakers who refused to certify the election results still in office; their party is poised to make gains during the midterm elections. Their electoral fortunes represent not only an endorsement from voters who support their efforts to undermine our democracy; they also represent the explicit financial support of hundreds of corporations that pour money into their campaign coffers.Money in politics is the way of the world, especially in this country. But as the Jan. 6 committee’s investigation has made clear, Mr. Trump’s attempted coup was orders of magnitude different from the normal rough-and-tumble of politics. Returning to the status quo where corporate money flowed to nearly every politician elected to office isn’t just unseemly; it is helping to fund a continuing attack on our democracy.Many Americans say they’ve moved on from the attack on Jan. 6. For those who haven’t, a good place to focus their attention is on the continuing threat to the Republic posed by politicians who are actively undermining it, and the money that helps them do so.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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      Meta Will Give Researchers More Information on Political Ad Targeting

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      Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, said that it planned to give outside researchers more detailed information on how political ads are targeted across its platform, providing insight into the ways that politicians, campaign operatives and political strategists buy and use ads ahead of the midterm elections.Starting on Monday, academics and researchers who are registered with an initiative called the Facebook Open Research and Transparency project will be allowed to see data on how each political or social ad was used to target people. The information includes which interest categories — such as “people who like dogs” or “people who enjoy the outdoors” — were chosen to aim an ad at someone.In addition, Meta said it planned to include summaries of targeting information for some of its ads in its publicly viewable Ad Library starting in July. The company created the Ad Library in 2019 so that journalists, academics and others could obtain information and help safeguard elections against the misuse of digital advertising.While Meta has given outsiders some access into how its political ads were used in the past, it has restricted the amount of information that could be seen, citing privacy reasons. Critics have claimed that the company’s system has been flawed and sometimes buggy, and have frequently asked for more data.That has led to conflicts. Meta previously clashed with a group of New York University academics who tried ingesting large amounts of self-reported data on Facebook users to learn more about the platform. The company cut off access to the group last year, citing violations of its platform rules.The new data that is being added to the Facebook Open Research Transparency project and the Ad Library is a way to share information on political ad targeting while trying to keep data on its users private, the company said.“By making advertiser targeting criteria available for analysis and reporting on ads run about social issues, elections and politics, we hope to help people better understand the practices used to reach potential voters on our technologies,” the company said in a statement.With the new data, for example, researchers browsing the Ad Library could see that over the course of a month, a Facebook page ran 2,000 political ads and that 40 percent of the ad budget was targeted to “people who live in Pennsylvania” or “people who are interested in politics.”Meta said it had been bound by privacy rules and regulations on what types of data it could share with outsiders. In an interview, Jeff King, a vice president in Meta’s business integrity unit, said the company had hired thousands of workers over the past few years to review those privacy issues.“Every single thing we release goes through a privacy review now,” he said. “We want to make sure we give people the right amount of data, but still remain privacy conscious while we do it.”The new data on political ads will cover the period from August 2020, three months before the last U.S. presidential election, to the present day. More

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      I Worked at Facebook. It’s Not Ready for This Year’s Election Wave.

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      The world is not ready for the coming electoral tsunami. Neither is Facebook. With so many elections on the horizon — France, Kenya, Australia, Brazil, the Philippines and the United States will hold elections this year — the conversation now should focus on how Facebook is preparing.I know what it’s like to prepare for an election at Facebook. I worked there for 10 years, and from 2014 through the end of 2019, I led the company’s work across elections globally. It has poured more than $13 billion into building up its safety and security efforts in the United States since the 2016 elections, when the platform was too slow to recognize how its products could be weaponized to spread misinformation.Responsible election plans cannot be spun up in days or weeks. It takes time not only to organize internally but also to make meaningful and necessary connections with the communities around the world working to secure elections. Facebook must begin serious, concerted, well-funded efforts today.For some of the elections happening in the first half of this year, Facebook is cutting it close. But there’s still time for Facebook to commit to a publicly available road map that outlines how it plans to build up its resources to fight misinformation and hate speech around the world. Algorithms that find hate speech and election-related content; labels that give people more context, like those in the United States applied to content that questioned the election results; and efforts to get people accurate information about where, when and how to vote should all be a part of the baseline protections Facebook deploys across the globe. On top of these technical protections, it needs people with country-specific language and culture expertise to make tough decisions about speech or behavior that might violate the platform’s rules.I’m proud of the progress the company made in bringing more transparency to political and issue ads, developing civil society partnerships and taking down influence operations. None of that progress happened spontaneously. To combat the Internet Research Agency, a Russian troll farm that exposed 126 million Americans to its content before and after the 2016 elections, for example, Facebook needed new policies, new expertise and a revamped team at the platform dedicated to these issues. Because of those innovations, the company was able to take down 52 influence networks in 2021.Facebook couldn’t do this work alone. Partnerships with organizations such as the Atlantic Council, the National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute and many others were crucial.But even then, providing the technical infrastructure to combat misinformation is only half the battle. Facebook faced scrutiny again in 2020 and 2021 for how it handled everything from President Donald Trump’s Facebook account to false election fraud claims and Jan. 6. Many of the conversations I had at the time revolved around balancing the right to free speech with the harm that speech could cause someone.This is one of the central dilemmas companies like Facebook grapple with. What is the right call for company administrators when a sitting president of the United States violates their platform’s community standards, even as they believe that people should be able to hear what he has to say? When are people exercising their right to organize and protest against their government, as opposed to preparing for a violent insurrection?Similar issues come up in other countries. Last year the Russian government pressured Apple and Google to remove an app created by allies of Aleksei Navalny, an opponent of President Vladimir Putin’s. Refusing the government would have put their employees in Russia at risk. Complying would go against free-expression standards. The companies chose to protect their employees.These are the kinds of difficult questions that crop up in every country, but Facebook also needs country-specific monitoring. Human expertise is the only way to truly understand how heated discussions are shifting in real time and to be sensitive to linguistic and cultural nuances. The word “dill” in Russian translates to “ukrop,” for example, which has been used as a slur against Ukrainians. Some Ukrainians, however, reclaimed the word and even named a political party after it. A global framework that fails to account for these kinds of situations or that is overly reliant on technology to address them is not prepared to confront the reality of our complex world.Facebook has invested billions in this kind of work. But a majority of its investment for classifying misinformation, for example, has focused on the United States, even though daily active users in other countries make up the vast majority of the user base. And it’s not clear which efforts Facebook will extend from U.S. elections to those in other countries. It’s unlikely that within the next two years, much less the next few months, Facebook can build up protections in every country. But it must start planning now for how it will exponentially scale up people, products and partnerships to handle so many elections at once in 2022 and 2024.It should be transparent about how it will determine what to build in each country. In 2019, Facebook had more than 500 full-time employees and 30,000 people working on safety and security overall. Even with that amount of human talent, it could cover the national elections in only three major countries at once. At least that many people were needed for the United States in 2020. In two years, people in the United States, India, Indonesia, Ukraine, Taiwan, Mexico and Britain are to go to the polls in national elections. Facebook will need to consider hiring at least 1,000 more full-time employees to be ready for the next big election cycle. If the company is cutting it close for 2022, it has just enough time to be really ready for 2024.These problems are not ones that Facebook can fix on its own. Its parent, Meta, is a private company but one with tremendous influence on society and democratic discourse. Facebook needs to continue to recognize the responsibility it has to protect elections around the world and invest accordingly. Governments, civil society and the public should hold it accountable for doing so.Katie Harbath is the chief executive of Anchor Change, a company focused on issues at the intersection of tech and democracy. She formerly worked at Facebook, where she helped lead its work on elections.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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      What Happened When Facebook Employees Warned About Election Misinformation

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      Company documents show that the social network’s employees repeatedly raised red flags about the spread of misinformation and conspiracies before and after the contested November vote.Sixteen months before last November’s presidential election, a researcher at Facebook described an alarming development. She was getting content about the conspiracy theory QAnon within a week of opening an experimental account, she wrote in an internal report.On Nov. 5, two days after the election, another Facebook employee posted a message alerting colleagues that comments with “combustible election misinformation” were visible below many posts.Four days after that, a company data scientist wrote in a note to his co-workers that 10 percent of all U.S. views of political material — a startlingly high figure — were of posts that alleged the vote was fraudulent.In each case, Facebook’s employees sounded an alarm about misinformation and inflammatory content on the platform and urged action — but the company failed or struggled to address the issues. The internal dispatches were among a set of Facebook documents obtained by The New York Times that give new insight into what happened inside the social network before and after the November election, when the company was caught flat-footed as users weaponized its platform to spread lies about the vote. More

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      Trump Ban From Facebook Upheld by Oversight Board

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      A company-appointed panel ruled that the ban was justified at the time but added that the company should reassess its action and make a final decision in six months.SAN FRANCISCO — A Facebook-appointed panel of journalists, activists and lawyers on Wednesday upheld the social network’s ban of former President Donald J. Trump, ending any immediate return by Mr. Trump to mainstream social media and renewing a debate about tech power over online speech.Facebook’s Oversight Board, which acts as a quasi-court over the company’s content decisions, said the social network was right to bar Mr. Trump after he used the site to foment an insurrection in Washington in January. The panel said the ongoing risk of violence “justified” the move.But the board also said that an indefinite suspension was “not appropriate,” and that the company should apply a “defined penalty.” The board gave Facebook six months to make its final decision on Mr. Trump’s account status.“Our sole job is to hold this extremely powerful organization, Facebook, to be held accountable,” Michael McConnell, co-chair of the Oversight Board, said on a call with reporters. The ban on Mr. Trump “did not meet these standards,” he said.The decision adds difficulties to Mr. Trump rejoining mainstream social media, which he had used during his White House years to cajole, set policy, criticize opponents and rile up his tens of millions of followers. Twitter and YouTube had also cut off Mr. Trump in January after the insurrection at the Capitol building, saying the risk of harm and the potential for violence that he created were too great.But while Mr. Trump’s Facebook account remains suspended for now, he may be able to return to the social network once the company reviews its action. Mr. Trump still holds tremendous sway over Republicans, with his false claims of a stolen election continuing to reverberate. On Wednesday, House Republican leaders moved to expel Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming from her leadership post for criticizing Mr. Trump and his election lies.Representatives for Mr. Trump did not immediately return requests for comment. On Tuesday, he unveiled a new site, “From the desk of Donald J. Trump,” with a Twitter-like feed, to communicate with his supporters.Mr. Trump’s continued Facebook suspension gave Republicans, who have long accused social media companies of suppressing conservative voices, new fuel against the platforms. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, has testified in Congress several times in recent years about whether the social network has shown bias against conservative political views. He has denied it.Senator Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, said the Facebook board’s decision was “extremely disappointing” and that it was “clear that Mark Zuckerberg views himself as the arbiter of free speech.” And Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, said Facebook, which faces antitrust scrutiny, should be broken up.Democrats were also unhappy. Frank Pallone, the chairman of the House energy and commerce committee, tweeted, “Donald Trump has played a big role in helping Facebook spread disinformation, but whether he’s on the platform or not, Facebook and other social media platforms with the same business model will find ways to highlight divisive content to drive advertising revenues.”The decision underlined the power of tech companies in determining who gets to say what online. While Mr. Zuckerberg has said that he does not wish his company to be “the arbiter of truth” in social discourse, Facebook has become increasingly active about the kinds of content it allows. To prevent the spread of misinformation, the company has cracked down on QAnon conspiracy theory groups, election falsehoods and anti-vaccination content in recent months, before culminating in the blocking of Mr. Trump in January.“This case has dramatic implications for the future of speech online because the public and other platforms are looking at how the oversight board will handle what is a difficult controversy that will arise again around the world,” said Nate Persily, a professor at Stanford University’s law school.He added, “President Trump has pushed the envelope about what is permissible speech on these platforms and he has set the outer limits such that if you are unwilling to go after him, you are allowing a large amount of incitement and hate speech and disinformation online that others are going to propagate.”In a statement, Facebook said it was “pleased” that the board recognized that its barring of Mr. Trump in January was justified. The company added that it would consider the ruling and “determine an action that is clear and proportionate.”Mr. Trump’s case is the most prominent that the Facebook Oversight Board, which was conceived in 2018, has handled. The board, which is made up of 20 journalists, activists and former politicians, reviews and adjudicates the company’s most contested content moderation decisions. Mr. Zuckerberg has repeatedly referred to it as the “Facebook Supreme Court.”But while the panel is positioned as independent, it was founded and funded by Facebook and has no legal or enforcement authority. Critics have been skeptical of the board’s autonomy and have said it gives Facebook the ability to punt on difficult decisions.Each of its cases is decided by a five-person panel selected from among the board’s 20 members, one of whom must be from the country in which the case originated. The panel reviews the comments on the case and makes recommendations to the full board, which decides through a majority vote. After a ruling, Facebook has seven days to act on the board’s decision.Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook chief executive, testified before during the Senate judiciary committee last year. He has denied that the platform showed political bias.Pool photo by Hannah Mckay/EPA, via ShutterstockSince the board began issuing rulings in January, it has overturned Facebook’s decisions in four out of the five cases it has reviewed. In one case, the board asked Facebook to restore a post that used Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief, to make a point about the Trump presidency. Facebook had earlier removed the post because it “promoted dangerous individuals,” but complied with the board’s decision.In another case, the board ruled that Facebook had overreached by taking down a French user’s post that erroneously suggested the drug hydroxychloroquine could be used to cure Covid-19. Facebook restored the post but also said it would keep removing the false information following guidance by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization.In Mr. Trump’s case, Facebook also asked the board to make recommendations on how to handle the accounts of political leaders. On Wednesday, the board suggested the company should publicly explain when it was applying special rules to influential figures, though it should impose definite time limits when doing so. The board also said Facebook should more clearly explain its strikes and penalties process, and develop and publish a policy that governs responses to crises or novel situations where its regular processes would not prevent imminent harm.“Facebook has been clearly abused by influential users,” said Helle Thorning-Schmidt, a co-chair of the Oversight Board.Facebook does not have to adopt these recommendations but said it “will carefully review” them.For Mr. Trump, Facebook was long a place to rally his digital base and support other Republicans. More than 32 million people followed him on Facebook, though that was far fewer than the more than 88 million followers he had on Twitter.Over the years, Mr. Trump and Mr. Zuckerberg also shared a testy relationship. Mr. Trump regularly assailed Silicon Valley executives for what he perceived to be their suppression of conservative speech. He also threatened to revoke Section 230, a legal shield that protects companies like Facebook from liability for what users post.Mr. Zuckerberg occasionally criticized some of Mr. Trump’s policies, including the handling of the pandemic and immigration. But as calls from lawmakers, civil rights leaders and even Facebook’s own employees grew to rein in Mr. Trump on social media, Mr. Zuckerberg declined to act. He said speech by political leaders — even if they spread lies — was newsworthy and in the public interest.The two men also appeared cordial during occasional meetings in Washington. Mr. Zuckerberg visited the White House more than once, dining privately with Mr. Trump.The politeness ended on Jan. 6. Hours before his supporters stormed the Capitol, Mr. Trump used Facebook and other social media to try to cast doubt on the results of the presidential election, which he had lost to Joseph R. Biden Jr. Mr. Trump wrote on Facebook, “Our Country has had enough, they won’t take it anymore!”Less than 24 hours later, Mr. Trump was barred from the platform indefinitely. While his Facebook page has remained up, it has been dormant. His last Facebook post, on Jan. 6, read, “I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence!”Cecilia Kang More

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      The Marriage Between Republicans and Big Business Is on the Rocks

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      But the internal contradictions of “woke capitalism” are a mixed blessing for the Democratic Party.“Woke capitalism” has been a steadily growing phenomenon over the past decade. The muscle of the movement was evident as early as 2015 in Indiana and 2016 in North Carolina, when corporate opposition forced Republicans to back off anti-gay and anti-transgender legislation.Much to the dismay of the right — a recent Fox News headline read “Corporations fear woke left minority more than silent majority” — the movement has been gaining momentum, obscuring classic partisan allegiances in corporate America.This drive has a fast-growing list of backers from the ranks of the Fortune 500, prepared to challenge Republican legislators across the nation.Right now, the focus of chief executives who are attempting to burnish their progressive credentials is on blocking legislation in 24 states that curtails access to the ballot box for racial and ethnic minorities — legislation that, among other things, reduces the number of days for advance voting, that requires photo ID to accompany absentee ballots and that limits or eliminates ballot drop boxes.Perhaps most threatening to Republicans, key corporate strategists attempting to woo liberal consumers have come to believe that their support for progressive initiatives will generate sufficient revenue to counter retaliation by hostile white voters and the Republican politicians who represent them.The corporate embrace of these strategies has generally received favorable press, but there are some doubters.Adam Serwer, a staff writer at The Atlantic, argued in “‘Woke Capital’ Doesn’t Exist” on April 6 that capital “pursues its financial interests in whatever political or social context it finds itself.”As Serwer puts it,For big firms, talk is very cheap. Similarly, the actions of Major League Baseball, Coca-Cola, and Delta reflect the political landscape in Georgia and its interaction with their bottom line, not the result of a deep ideological commitment to racial equality.Similarly, Matthew Walther argued in an August 2017 article in The Week, thatWe should not be looking to corporate America for moral instruction or making exemplars of its leaders or heaping approbation upon their bland, cynical consultant-designed utterances.Apple’s Tim Cook, Walther continued, “tells us that he is against racism. I believe it. Good on him.” As commendable as Cook may be for his antiracism, Walther writes, heis the C.E.O. of a corporation that has made profits on a scale hitherto unimaginable in human history by exploiting cheap labor in a poor country ruled by tyrants whose authority is perpetuated in no small part thanks to Apple’s own compliance in its silencing of dissent and hiring the smartest lawyers in the world to make their tax burden negligible.Companies leading the charge against laws promoted by Republican state legislators include Delta Air Lines, Coca-Cola, Merck & Co., Dell Technologies, Mars Inc., Nestlé USA, Unilever PLC and American Airlines.And just two days ago, 30 chief executives of Michigan’s largest companies, including Ford, General Motors and Quicken Loans, declared their opposition to similar changes in voting rules pending before the legislature.The headline on an April 10 Wall Street Journal story sums up the situation: “With Georgia Voting Law, the Business of Business Becomes Politics.” The law was described by USA Today on April 10 as one “that includes restrictions some activists say haven’t been seen since the Jim Crow era.”Last week, executives from over 100 companies held a video conference call to explore ways to voice their opposition to pending and enacted election legislation.For many Republicans, the future of their party’s dominance in such states as Texas, Florida, North Carolina and Georgia rides on their ability to hold back the rising tide of minority voters.While Republicans are convinced of the effectiveness their legislative strategies, poll data from the 2020 election suggests they may be mistaken. Republicans made inroads last year among Black and Hispanic voters, the constituencies they would now suppress, while losing ground among white voters, their traditional base of support.Growing numbers of Republicans are refusing to buckle under pressure from the corporate establishment.For Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, who rejected Donald Trump’s pleas to overturn the state’s presidential election results, the controversy offers the opportunity to claim populist credentials and perhaps to win back the support of Trump loyalists.“I will not be backing down from this fight,” Kemp declared at an April 3 news conference:This is a call to everyone, not only in Georgia but all across the country to wake up and get in the fight and help us in that fight. Because they are coming for you next.In Texas, where American Airlines, Dell Technologies, Microsoft and Southwest Airlines have opposed laws under consideration by Republican state legislators, Republicans have been quick to go on the attack.“Texans are fed up with corporations that don’t share our values trying to dictate public policy,” Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, a Republican, declared in a news release attacking liberalized voting protocols. “The majority of Texans support maintaining the integrity of our elections, which is why I made it a priority this legislative session.”Other Republicans are explicitly warning business that it will pay a price if it goes too far. “Corporations will invite serious consequences if they become a vehicle for far-left mobs to hijack our country from outside the constitutional order,” Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority Leader, declared at an April 5 news conference. “Our private sector must stop taking cues from the Outrage-Industrial Complex.”In the past, the corporate community has been one of McConnell’s most steadfast allies and its current adversarial stance is a major loss.Alma Cohen, a professor at Harvard Law School, and three colleagues, analyzed campaign contributions made by 3,800 individuals who served as chief executive of large companies from 2000 to 2017 in their 2019 paper, “The Politics of C.E.O.s.” They found a decisive Republican tilt: “More than 57 percent of C.E.O.s are Republicans, 19 percent are Democrats and the rest are neutral.”I asked W. Bradford Wilcox, a conservative professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, for his assessment of the conflict between big business and Republicans. His reply suggested that Kemp’s defiant stance will resonate among Republican voters:The decades-long marriage between the G.O.P. and big business is clearly on the rocks. This is especially true because the G.O.P. is increasingly drawn to a pugnacious and populist cultural style that has more appeal to the working class, and Big Business is increasingly inclined to support the progressive cultural agenda popular among the highly educated.Taking on corporate America meshes with the goal of rebranding the Republican Party — from the party of Wall Street to the party of the working class.The response of the white working-class to the leftward shift on social issues by American businesses remains unpredictable.Democracy Corps, a liberal group, conducted focus groups of white Republicans in March and reached the conclusion that conservative voters are cross-pressured:The Trump loyalists and Trump-aligned were angry, but also despondent, feeling powerless and uncertain they will become more involved in politics.While anger is a powerful motivator of political engagement, despondency and the feeling of powerlessness often depress turnout and foster the belief that political participation is futile.Opinion on the motives of corporate leaders diverges widely among those who study the political evolution of American business.Scholars and strategists differ among themselves over how much the growth of activism is driven by market forces, by public opinion, by conviction and by the growing strength of Black and Hispanic Americans as consumers, employees and increasingly as corporate executives.James Davison Hunter, professor of religion, culture and social theory at the University of Virginia, is interested in the psychology of those in the executive suite:At least on the surface, corporate America has accommodated progressive interests on these issues and others, including the larger agenda of Critical Race Theory, the Me-too movement, the gay and transgender rights, etc. There has been a shift leftward.The question he poses is why. His answer is complex:The idea, once held, that what was good for business was good for America is now a distant memory. A reputation, long in the making, for avoiding taxes and opposing unions all in pursuit of profit has done much to undermine the credibility of business as a force for the common good. Embracing the progressive agenda is a way to position itself as a “good” corporate citizen. Corporations gain legitimacy.The fluid ideological commitments of business should be seen in the larger context of American politics and culture, Hunter argues:Over the long haul, conservatives have fought the culture war politically. For them, it was the White House, the Senate and, above all, the Supreme Court that mattered. Political power was pre-eminent.Progressives have struggled in political combat, while in the nation’s cultural disputes, in Hunter’s view, the left has dominated:Even while progressives were losing elections, gay and transgender rights, feminism, Black Lives Matter and critical race perspectives were all gaining credibility — in important cultural institutions including journalism, academia, entertainment, advertising, public education, philanthropy, and elsewhere. Sooner or later, it was bound to influence corporate life, the military, and other so-called conservative institutions not least because there was no credible conservative alternative to these questions; only a defensive rejection.How will this play out?We will continue to see ugly political battles long into the future, but the culture wars are tilting definitively toward a progressive win and not least because they have a new patron in important corporations.Malia Lazu, a lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, argued in an email that the public’s slow but steady shift to the left on racial and social issues is driving corporate decision-making: “Corporations understand consumers want to see their commitment to environmental and social issues.”Lazu cited studies by Cone, a business consulting firm, “showing that 86 percent of Americans would support a brand aligned with their values and 75 percent would refuse to buy a product they saw as contrary to their beliefs.”Lazu contends that “there is a generational shift in America toward increasing justice and collective responsibility” and that as a result, “institutions, including corporations, will make incremental change.”John A. Haigh, co-director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard’s Kennedy School, does not agree with those who see business motivated solely by potential profits, arguing instead that idealism has become a major force.“Corporations have an obligation to deliver high performance for their shareholders and other stakeholders — customers, employees, and suppliers,” Haigh wrote in an email. But, he continued, “corporations also have an obligation to do so with high integrity.”In the case of challenges to restrictive voting laws, Haigh believes thatthere is also a possibility that they are behaving with some sense of their moral obligation to society — with integrity. The right to vote could be seen as a pillar of our democratic system, and blatant attempts to suppress votes are offensive to our core values.Haigh says that he does not wantto sound Pollyannish — these are difficult trade-offs within corporations, and it is much more complicated than simply “doing good.” But there are thresholds for moral behavior, and companies do have an obligation to speak up. There is a long history in the U.S. around issues of civil rights and their suppression, and mixed engagement by companies in addressing these issues.Neal Hartman, a senior lecturer who is also at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, argued that in attacking voting rights, Republicans violated a tenet of American democracy important to voters of all stripes.Not only have the restrictive proposals in Georgia and other states awakened “strong levels of activism among many moderate-to-liberal voters,” Hartman wrote by email, butmany people in the United States — including a number of more conservative individuals — believe voting should be as simple and widespread as possible. It is a fundamental principle of our democracy.Corporations, Hartman continued,are responding to calls from the public, their shareholders, and their employees to respond to bills and laws deemed as being unfair.Hartman argues that “voting rights is front and center today,” butnot far behind will be efforts to thwart LGBTQI rights — bills targeting the transgender community are already being introduced and passed — as well as continuing battles regarding abortion and the rights of women to choose.There is some overlap between the thinking of Robert Livingston, a lecturer in public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School, and Haigh and Hartman:What we are seeing in Georgia is an affront to people’s basic sense of morality and decency. And people will sometimes subordinate their self-interest to cherished values and beliefs. Many of these companies have credos and core values that are internalized by their leadership and employees, and we see leaders becoming increasingly willing to express their disapproval of the reckless temerity of politically savvy but socially irresponsible politicians.Livingston acknowledges that many companies aremotivated by their own interests as well. Major League Baseball is an organization that depends on people of color. Nike tends to cater to an increasingly youthful and diverse customer base. So, there is something in it for them too.But, he continued, “I’ve worked with a lot of top leaders and can tell you that for many of them, it’s more a question of principle than politics.”Joseph Aldy, a professor of public policy at the Kennedy School, noted in an email that willingness to engage in controversial political issues is most evident in the case of climate change:The climate denial/climate skeptic attitude that characterizes many Republican elected officials is increasingly out of step with the majority of the American public and the American business community.Instead, Alby wrote,the continued focus on cultural issues among Republicans reflects a growing estrangement between the business community and the Republican Party.There are several possible scenarios of how these preoccupations and conflicts will evolve.Insofar as the split between American business and the Republican Party widens and companies begin to cut campaign contributions, the likely loser is Mitch McConnell, the leader of the party’s corporate wing. Any limit on McConnell’s ability to channel business money to campaigns would be a setback.Such a development would further empower the more extreme members of the Republican Party’s Trump wing and would embolden Republican officials to escalate their conflict with corporate America.For example, David Ralston, the speaker of the Georgia House — which has just passed a retaliatory bill penalizing Delta by eliminating a tax break on jet fuel — told reporters: “You don’t feed a dog that bites your hand.”Finally, for Democrats, the leftward shift of business is a mixed blessing.On the plus side, Democrats gain an ally in pressing a liberal agenda on social and racial issues.On the downside, the perception of the party as allied with corporate interests may take root and Democratic officials are very likely to face pressure to make concessions to their new allies on fundamental economic policies — bad for the party, in my view, and bad for the country.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