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      Mark Zuckerberg Ends Election Grants

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      Mark Zuckerberg, who donated nearly half a billion dollars to election offices across the nation in 2020 and drew criticism from conservatives suspicious of his influence on the presidential election, won’t be making additional grants this year, a spokesman for the Facebook founder confirmed on Tuesday.The spokesman, Ben LaBolt, said the donations by Mr. Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, and his wife, Priscilla Chan, were never intended to be a stream of funding for the administration of elections.The couple gave $419 million to two nonprofit organizations that disbursed grants in 2020 to more than 2,500 election departments, which were grappling with a shortfall of government funding as they adopted new procedures during the coronavirus pandemic.The infusion of private donations helped to pay for new ballot-counting equipment, efforts to expand mail-in voting, personal protective equipment and the training of poll workers.It also sowed seeds of mistrust among supporters of former President Donald J. Trump. Critics referred to the grants as “Zuckerbucks” and some frequently claimed, without evidence, that the money was used to help secure Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory. Several states controlled by Republicans banned private donations to election offices in response.“As Mark and Priscilla made clear previously, their election infrastructure donation to help ensure that Americans could vote during the height of the pandemic was a one-time donation given the unprecedented nature of the crisis,” Mr. LaBolt said in an email on Tuesday. “They have no plans to repeat that donation.”The Center for Tech and Civic Life, a nonprofit group with liberal ties that became a vessel for $350 million of the contributions from Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan in 2020, announced on Monday that it was shifting to a different model for supporting the work of local election administrators.During an appearance on Monday at the TED2022 conference in Vancouver, Tiana Epps-Johnson, the center’s executive director, said that the organization would begin a five-year, $80 million program to help meet the needs of election departments across the country.Called the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence, the program will draw funding through the Audacious Project, a philanthropic collective housed at the TED organization, the center said. Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan are not involved in the new initiative, Mr. LaBolt said.At the event on Monday, Ms. Epps-Johnson said the grants distributed by the center in 2020 helped fill a substantial void of resources for those overseeing elections in the United States. One town in New England, she said without specifying, was able to replace voting equipment from the early 1900s that was held together with duct tape.“The United States election infrastructure is crumbling,” Ms. Epps-Johnson said.In addition to the Center for Technology and Civic Life, Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan gave $69.6 million to the Center for Election Innovation & Research in 2020. At the time, that nonprofit group said that the top election officials in 23 states had applied for grants.Republicans have been unrelenting in their criticism of the social media mogul and his donations.While campaigning for the U.S. Senate on Tuesday in Perrysburg, Ohio, J.D. Vance, the “Hillbilly Elegy” author who has undergone a conversion to Trumpism, continued to accuse Mr. Zuckerberg of tipping the election in 2020 to Mr. Biden.Mr. Vance, a venture capitalist, hasn’t exactly sworn off help from big tech. He counts Peter Thiel, a departing board member of Mr. Zuckerberg’s company, Meta, and a major donor to Mr. Trump, as a top fund-raiser. Mr. Thiel has also supported Blake Masters, a Republican Senate candidate in Arizona.In an opinion piece for The New York Post last October, Mr. Vance and Mr. Masters called for Facebook’s influence to be curbed, writing that Mr. Zuckerberg had spent half a billion dollars to “buy the presidency for Joe Biden.”In Colorado, Tina Peters, the top vote-getter for secretary of state at the state Republican Party’s assembly last weekend, has been a fierce critic of Mr. Zuckerberg, even after her arrest this year on charges stemming from an election security breach. Ms. Peters, the Mesa County clerk, is facing several felonies amid accusations that she allowed an unauthorized person to copy voting machine hard drive information. More

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      ‘La French Tech’ Arrives Under Macron, but Proves No Panacea

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      The president has brought innovation, jobs and growth. Still, resentments fester on the eve of the presidential election.PARIS — In full Steve Jobs mode, President Emmanuel Macron of France donned a black turtleneck in January and took to Twitter to celebrate the creation in France of 25 “unicorn” start-ups — companies with a market value of over 1 billion euros, or almost $1.1 billion.He declared that France’s start-up economy was “changing the lives of French people” and “strengthening our sovereignty.” It was also helping to create jobs: Unemployment has fallen to 7.4 percent, the lowest level in a decade.The start-up boom was a milestone for a young president elected five years ago as a restless disrupter, promising to pry open the economy and make it competitive in the 21st century.To some extent, Mr. Macron has succeeded, luring billions of euros in foreign investments and creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs, many in tech start-ups, in a country whose resistance to change is stubborn. But disruption is just that, and the president has at the same time left many French feeling unsettled and unhappy, left behind or ignored.As Mr. Macron seeks re-election starting on Sunday, it is two countries that will vote — a mainly urban France that sees the need for change to meet the era’s sweeping technological and economic challenges, and a France of the “periphery,” wary of innovation, struggling to get by, alarmed by immigration and resentful of a leader seen as embodying the arrogance of the privileged.Which France shows up at voting booths in greater numbers will determine the outcome.Campaign posters on display this month in the northeastern French town of Stiring-Wendel.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesIn many Western societies, the simultaneous spread of technology and inequality has posed acute problems, stirring social tensions, and France has proved no exception. If the disenchanted France prevails, Marine Le Pen, the perennial candidate of the nationalist right, will most likely prevail, too.Worried that he may have lost the left by favoring start-up entrepreneurship and market reforms, Mr. Macron has in the past week been multiplying appeals to the left, resorting to phrases like “our lives are worth more than their profits” to suggest his perceived rightward lurch was not the whole story.He told France Inter radio that “fraternity” was the most important word in the French national motto, and said during a visit to Brittany that “solidarity” and “equality of opportunity” would be the central themes of an eventual second term.Learn More About France’s Presidential ElectionThe run-up to the first round of the election has been dominated by issues such as security, immigration and national identity.On the Scene: A Times reporter attended a rally held by Marine Le Pen, the far-right French presidential candidate. Here is what he saw.Challenges to Re-election: A troubled factory in President Emmanuel Macron’s hometown shows his struggle in winning the confidence of French workers.A Late Surge: After recently rising in voter surveys, Jean-Luc Mélenchon could become the first left-wing candidate since 2012 to reach the second round of the election.A Political Bellwether: Auxerre has backed the winner in the presidential race for 40 years. This time, many residents see little to vote for.The pledges looked like signs of growing anxiety about the election’s outcome. After several months in which Mr. Macron’s re-election had appeared virtually assured, the gap between him and Ms. Le Pen has closed. The leading two candidates in Sunday’s vote will go through to a runoff on April 24.The election will be largely decided by perceptions of the economy. In Mr. Macron’s favor, the country has bounced back faster than expected from coronavirus lockdowns, with economic growth reaching 7 percent after a devastating pandemic-induced recession.Marine Le Pen speaking this month in Stiring-Wendel.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesThe most significant cultural transformation has come in the area of tech, where Mr. Macron’s determination to create a start-up culture centered around new technology has brought changes the government considers essential to the future of France.Cédric O, the secretary of state for the digital sector, wearing jeans and a white dress shirt, no tie, admits to being obsessed. Day after long day, he plots the future of “la French tech” from his spacious office at the Finance Ministry.Five years ago, that may have seemed quixotic, but something has stirred. “It’s vital to be obsessed because the risk France and Europe are facing is to be kicked out of history,” Mr. O, 39, said, borrowing a line often used by Mr. Macron. “We have to get back into the international technological race.”Toward that end, Mr. Macron opened Station F, a mammoth incubator project in Paris representing France’s start-up ambitions, and earmarked nearly €10 billion in tax credits and other inducements to lure research activity and artificial intelligence business. A new bank was created to help finance start-ups.The president wined and dined multinational chief executives, creating an annual gathering at Versailles called “Choose France.”Since 2019, France has become the leading destination for foreign investment in Europe, and more than 70 investment projects worth €12 billion have been pledged by foreign multinationals at the Versailles gatherings, said Franck Riester, France’s foreign trade minister.In the past four years, IBM, SAP of Germany and DeepMind, the London-based machine learning company owned by Google’s parent, Alphabet, have increased investment in France and created thousands of jobs.Station F, a mammoth project in Paris that represents France’s start-up ambitions.Roberto Frankenberg for The New York TimesFacebook and Google have also bolstered their French presence and their artificial intelligence teams in Paris. Salesforce, the American cloud computing company, is moving ahead with over €2 billion in pledged investments.“Macron brought a culture shift where France was suddenly open to the world of funders,” said Thomas Clozel, a doctor by training and the founder in 2016 of Owkin, a start-up that uses Artificial Intelligence to personalize and improve medical treatment. “He made everything easy for start-up entrepreneurs and so changed the view of France as an anticapitalist society.”François Hollande, Mr. Macron’s Socialist Party predecessor, had famously declared in 2012: “My enemy is the world of finance.” As a result, Mr. Clozel said, securing funds as a French start-up was so problematic that he chose to incorporate in the United States.No longer.“Today, I am thinking of reincorporating in France,” he said. “The ease of dealing with the government, the consortium of start-ups helping one another, and the new French tech pride are compelling.”Among the start-ups that have had a significant effect on French life are Doctolib, a website that allows patients to arrange for medical appointments and tests online, and Backmarket, an online market for reconditioned tech gadgets that just became France’s most valuable start-up, at $5.7 billion.They began life before Mr. Macron took office, but have grown exponentially in the past five years.“I have made 56 investments in the last two years, and 53 of them are in France,” said Jonathan Benhamou, a French entrepreneur who founded PeopleDoc, a company that simplifies access to information for human resources departments.Now funding new ventures and focusing on a new start-up called Resilience in the field of personalized cancer care, Mr. Benhamou credits Mr. Macron with “giving investors confidence in stability and creating a virtuous cycle.”Talented engineers no longer go elsewhere because there is an “ecosystem” for them in France, Mr. O said.Yellow Vest protesters blocking a road in Caen, in France’s Normandy region, in November 2018.Charly Triballeau/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMr. Macron has insisted that opening the economy is consistent with maintaining protections for French workers and that the arrival of la French tech does not mean the embrace of the no-holds-barred capitalism behind the churn of American creativity.Despite the president’s overhauls, France remains one of the most expensive countries for payroll taxes, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, with hourly labor costs of nearly €38, close to levels seen in Sweden, Norway and other northern European countries.“We know that we have to go further,” Mr. Riester, the foreign trade minister, said in a recent interview. “We still have some brakes that could be taken off the economy, and we have to cut some red tape in the future.”Who Is Running for President of France?Card 1 of 6The campaign begins. 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      ‘I’ll Stand on the Side of Russia’: Pro-Putin Sentiment Spreads Online

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      After marinating in conspiracy theories and Donald J. Trump’s Russia stance, some online discourse about Vladimir Putin has grown more complimentary.The day before Russia invaded Ukraine, former President Donald J. Trump called the wartime strategy of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia “pretty smart.” His remarks were posted on YouTube, Twitter and the messaging app Telegram, where they were viewed more than 1.3 million times.Right-wing commentators including Candace Owens, Stew Peters and Joe Oltmann also jumped into the fray online with posts that were favorable to Mr. Putin and that rationalized his actions against Ukraine. “I’ll stand on the side of Russia right now,” Mr. Oltmann, a conservative podcaster, said on his show this week.And in Telegram groups like The Patriot Voice and Facebook groups including Texas for Donald Trump 2020, members criticized President Biden’s handling of the conflict and expressed support for Russia, with some saying they trusted Mr. Putin more than Mr. Biden.The online conversations reflect how pro-Russia sentiment has increasingly penetrated Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, right-wing podcasts, messaging apps like Telegram and some conservative media. As Russia attacked Ukraine this week, those views spread, infusing the online discourse over the war with sympathy — and even approval — for the aggressor.The positive Russia comments are an extension of the culture wars and grievance politics that have animated the right in the United States in the past few years. In some of these circles, Mr. Putin carries a strongman appeal, viewed as someone who gets his way and does not let political correctness stop him.“Putin embodies the strength that Trump pretended to have,” said Emerson T. Brooking, a resident senior fellow for the Atlantic Council who studies digital platforms. “For these individuals, Putin’s actions aren’t a tragedy — they’re a fantasy fulfilled.” Support for Mr. Putin and Russia is now being expressed online in a jumble of facts, observations and opinions, sometimes entwined with lies. In recent days, commenters have complimented Mr. Putin and falsely accused NATO of violating nonexistent territorial agreements with Russia, which they said justified the Russian president’s declaration of war on Ukraine, according to a review of posts by The New York Times.Others have spread convoluted conspiracy theories about the war that are tinged with a pro-Russia sheen. In one popular lie circulating online, Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump are working together on the war. Another falsehood involves the idea that the war is about taking down a cabal of global elites over sex trafficking.In all, pro-Russian narratives on English-language social media, cable TV, and print and online outlets soared 2,580 percent in the past week compared to the first week of February, according to an analysis by the media insights company Zignal Labs. Those mentions cropped up 5,740 times in the past week, up from 214 in the first week of February, Zignal said.The narratives have flourished in dozens of Telegram channels, Facebook groups and pages and thousands of tweets, according to The Times’s review. Some of the Telegram channels have more than 160,000 subscribers, while the Facebook groups and pages have up to 1.9 million followers.(It is difficult to be precise on the scope of pro-Russian narratives on social media and online forums because bots and organized campaigns make them difficult to track.)Maidan Nezalezhnosti, or Independence Square, in Kyiv this week. The square was the center of Ukraine’s 2014 revolution.Brendan Hoffman for The New York TimesThe pro-Russia sentiment is a stark departure from during the Cold War, when the Soviet Union was viewed by many Americans as a foe. In recent years, that attitude shifted, partly helped along by interference from Russia. Before the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Kremlin-backed groups used social networks like Facebook to inflame American voters, creating more divisions and resistance to political correctness.After Mr. Trump was elected, he often appeared favorable to — and even admiring of — Mr. Putin. That seeded a more positive view of Mr. Putin among Mr. Trump’s supporters, misinformation researchers said.“Putin has invested heavily in sowing discord” and found an ally in Mr. Trump, said Melissa Ryan, the chief executive of Card Strategies, a consulting firm that researches disinformation. “Anyone who studies disinformation or the far right has seen the influence of Putin’s investment take hold.”At the same time, conspiracy theories spread online that deeply polarized Americans. One was the QAnon movement, which falsely posits that Democrats are Satan-worshiping child traffickers who are part of an elite cabal trying to control the world.The Russia-Ukraine war is now being viewed by some Americans through the lens of conspiracy theories, misinformation researchers said. Roughly 41 million Americans believe in the QAnon conspiracy theory, according to a survey released on Thursday from the Public Religion Research Institute. This week, some QAnon followers said online that Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was simply the next phase in a global war against the sex traffickers.Lisa Kaplan, the founder of Alethea Group, a company that helps fight online misinformation, said the pro-Russia statements were potentially harmful because it could “further legitimize false or misleading claims” about the Ukraine conflict “in the eyes of the American people.”Not all online discourse is pro-Russia, and Mr. Putin’s actions have been condemned by conservative social media users, mainstream commentators and Republican politicians, even as some have criticized how Mr. Biden has handled the conflict.“Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is reckless and evil,” Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader, said in a statement on Twitter on Thursday.On Tuesday, Representative Adam Kinzinger, a Republican from Illinois who was censured recently by the Republican Party for participating in the committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection, criticized House Republicans for attacking Mr. Biden, tweeting that it “feeds into Putin’s narrative.”Understand Russia’s Attack on UkraineCard 1 of 7What is at the root of this invasion? 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      Peter Thiel to Exit Meta’s Board to Support Trump-Aligned Candidates

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      The tech billionaire, who has been on the board of the company formerly known as Facebook since 2005, is backing numerous politicians in the midterm elections.Peter Thiel, one of the longest-serving board members of Meta, the parent of Facebook, plans to step down, the company said on Monday.Mr. Thiel, 54, wants to focus on influencing November’s midterm elections, said a person with knowledge of Mr. Thiel’s thinking who declined to be identified. Mr. Thiel sees the midterms as crucial to changing the direction of the country, this person said, and he is backing candidates who support the agenda of former President Donald J. Trump.Over the last year, Mr. Thiel, who has a net worth estimated at $2.6 billion by Forbes, has become one of the Republican’s Party’s largest donors. He gave $10 million each last year to the campaigns of two protégés, Blake Masters, who is running for a Senate seat in Arizona, and J.D. Vance, who is running for Senate in Ohio.Mr. Thiel has been on Meta’s board since 2005, when Facebook was a tiny start-up and he was one of its first institutional investors. But scrutiny of Mr. Thiel’s position on the board has steadily increased as the company was embroiled in political controversies, including barring Mr. Trump from the platform, and as the venture capitalist has become more politically active.The departure means Meta loses its board’s most prominent conservative voice. The 10-member board has undergone significant changes in recent years, as many of its members have left and been replaced, often with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. Drew Houston, the chief executive of Dropbox, joined Facebook’s board in 2020, and Tony Xu, the founder of DoorDash, joined it last month. Meta didn’t address whether it intends to replace Mr. Thiel.The company, which recently marked its 18th birthday, is undertaking a shift toward the so-called metaverse, which its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, believes is the next generation of the internet. Last week, Meta reported spending more than $10 billion on the effort in 2021, along with mixed financial results. That wiped more than $230 billion off the company’s market value.“Peter has been a valuable member of our board and I’m deeply grateful for everything he’s done for our company,” Mr. Zuckerberg said in a statement. “Peter is truly an original thinker who you can bring your hardest problems and get unique suggestions.”A Look Ahead to the 2022 U.S. Midterm ElectionsIn the Senate: Democrats have a razor-thin margin that could be upended with a single loss. Here are 10 races to watch.In the House: Republicans and Democrats are seeking to gain an edge through redistricting and gerrymandering.Governors’ Races: Georgia’s contest will be at the center of the political universe, but there are several important races across the country.Campaign Financing: With both parties awash in political money, billionaires and big checks are shaping the midterm elections.Key Issues: Democrats and Republicans are preparing for abortion and voting rights to be defining topics.In a statement on Monday, Mr. Thiel said: “It has been a privilege to work with one of the great entrepreneurs of our time. Mark Zuckerberg’s intelligence, energy and conscientiousness are tremendous. His talents will serve Meta well as he leads the company into a new era.”Mr. Thiel first met Mr. Zuckerberg 18 years ago when he provided the entrepreneur with $500,000 in capital for Facebook, valuing the company at $4.9 million. That gave Mr. Thiel, who with his venture firm Founders Fund controlled a 10 percent stake in the social network, a seat on its board of directors.Since then, Mr. Thiel has become a confidant of Mr. Zuckerberg. He counseled the company through its early years of rapid user growth, and through its difficulties shifting its business to mobile phones around the time of its 2012 initial public offering.He has also been seen as the contrarian who has Mr. Zuckerberg’s ear, championing unfettered speech across digital platforms when it suited him. His conservative views also gave Facebook’s board what Mr. Zuckerberg saw as ideological diversity.In 2019 and 2020, as Facebook grappled with how to deal with political speech and claims made in political advertising, Mr. Thiel urged Mr. Zuckerberg to withstand the public pressure to take down those ads, even as other executives and board members thought the company should change its position. Mr. Zuckerberg sided with Mr. Thiel.But Mr. Thiel’s views on speech were at times contradictory. He funded a secret war against the media website Gawker, eventually resulting in the site’s bankruptcy.Mr. Thiel’s political influence and ties to key Republicans and conservatives have also offered a crucial gateway into Washington for Mr. Zuckerberg, especially during the Trump administration. In October 2019, Mr. Zuckerberg and Mr. Thiel had a private dinner with President Trump.Facebook and Mr. Zuckerberg have long taken heat for Mr. Thiel’s presence on the board. In 2016, Mr. Thiel was one of the few tech titans in largely liberal Silicon Valley to publicly support Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign.In 2020, when Mr. Trump’s incendiary Facebook posts were put under the microscope, critics cited Mr. Thiel’s board seat as a reason for Mr. Zuckerberg’s continued insistence that Mr. Trump’s posts be left standing.Facebook banned Mr. Trump’s account last year after the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol, saying his messages incited violence. The episode became a key rallying point for conservatives who say mainstream social platforms have censored them.Mr. Vance, who used to work at one of Mr. Thiel’s venture funds, and Mr. Masters, the chief operating officer of Mr. Thiel’s family office, have railed against Facebook. In October, the two Senate candidates argued in an opinion piece in The New York Post that Mr. Zuckerberg’s $400 million in donations to local election offices in 2020 amounted to “election meddling” that should be investigated.Recently, Mr. Thiel has publicly voiced his disagreement with content moderation decisions at Facebook and other major social media platforms. In October at a Miami event organized by a conservative technology association, he said he would “take QAnon and Pizzagate conspiracy theories any day over a Ministry of Truth.”Mr. Thiel’s investing has also clashed with his membership on Meta’s board. He invested in the company that became Clearview AI, a facial recognition start-up that scraped billions of photos from Facebook, Instagram and other social platforms in violation of their terms of service. Founders Fund also invested in Boldend, a cyberweapons company that claimed it had found a way to hack WhatsApp, the Meta-owned messaging platform.Meta declined to comment on Mr. Thiel’s investments.In the past year, Mr. Thiel, who also is chairman of the software company Palantir, has increased his political giving to Republican candidates. Ahead of the midterms, he is backing four Senate candidates and 12 House candidates. Among those House candidates are three people running primary challenges to Republicans who voted in favor of impeaching Mr. Trump for the events of Jan. 6. More

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      Meta’s Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Quarter

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      At some point, the jig is up for almost every highflying tech company (consider that Cisco was, for a time in 2000, the world’s most valuable company). That’s usually because executives put on blinders to one constant rule of innovation I’ve observed: The young devour the old.So, are the worrisome quarterly results posted Wednesday by the outfit formerly known as Facebook an early sign of that? That seemed to be Wall Street’s conclusion, which until now has showered the social networking giant with unquestioning love, but nonetheless shaved more than $250 billion off its market value, or 26 percent, the largest one-day dollar drop for a U.S. company in history.That’s quite the indictment, since the money crowd has stuck beside the company despite a roiling series of controversies in the 18 years since its founding. Privacy violations, foreign interference, harmful impacts on teenage girls, data breaches, voluminous disinformation and misinformation, and the hosting of citizens charged with seditious conspiracy have made the company into the singular villain of this digital age. It has even supplanted the ire that was once aimed at Microsoft (ironically, seen today as the “good” tech company).But until now, none of these myriad sins have seemed to matter to investors, who have cheered on Facebook’s digital advertising dominance that has yielded astonishing profits.It posted $10.3 billion in profits in the fourth quarter, an 8 percent dip, despite a 20 percent sales gain to $33.7 billion. But those profits were a disappointment, dragged down in part by $10 billion in 2021 spending on its Reality Labs unit, which makes its virtual reality glasses and similar products. That’s serious money to throw at something, but it looks to be just the tip of Meta’s spear in the battle to dominate the still vaporous metaverse. Mark Zuckerberg has clearly decided to go all in on what he views as the battleground for the future.There are other troubling signs, including the meteoric rise of TikTok and the impact of Apple’s ad tracking changes that have hurt Facebook’s ability to hoover up users’ personal data in service of targeted ads.While the Apple challenge and the metaverse spending are certainly troubling, what we might be seeing is the market’s tiring of co-founder Zuckerberg at the helm, even as more exciting and energetic rivals come into play. Even Microsoft seems more relevant and vibrant, including its recent and very deft plan to snap up Activision, a move Meta wouldn’t dare make due to regulatory scrutiny.So Facebook is forced to be creative on its own, not always its strongest suit given how it is known for ham-handedly shoplifting ideas from others.Indeed, Zuckerberg did not sound much like Caesar Augustus — the techie’s favored Roman emperor — in his earnings call with investors: “Although our direction is clear, it seems that our path ahead is not quite perfectly defined.” You’d imagine $10 billion would buy a better map.Thus, right on schedule, the company is trying to soften up Washington influencers for its next act, the metaverse. According to a report by Bloomberg, Meta is focused on think tanks and nonprofits, especially those that lean libertarian or free market, to presumably convince them that what happened back in web2 will not be an issue in web3, the supposed next phase of the internet.Narrator: It will be in issue.Meta gives funding to a lot of these organizations, of course, a kind of soft way to influence. It spent $20 million on lobbying alone last year — more than five times the amount in 2012 — which is more than triple Apple’s spending and roughly double Alphabet and Microsoft’s. Amazon was the only tech company to surpass Meta, with about $20.5 million in lobbying spending.Given the increasing bipartisan furor with the company, it makes sense. As Neil Chilson of Stand Together, a nonprofit associated with Charles Koch, put it: “There’s a lot of scrutiny on them, and they are trying to move into a new space and bring the temperature down at the same time.”Ya think? In a “Sway” interview I did recently, former Disney C.E.O. and Chairman Bob Iger noted the dangers of the metaverse: “There’s been enough said and criticized about toxic behavior in internet 2.0; Twitter, Facebook, you name it. Imagine what can happen when you have a much more compelling and immersive and, I’ll call it, collective of people or avatars of people in that environment, and what kind of toxic behavior could happen.”“Something Disney is going to have to consider as it talks about creating a metaverse for themselves is moderating and monitoring behavior,” he said.So it appears Zuckerberg is right about one thing about Meta’s direction: It’s going to be a bumpy ride.4 QuestionsI caught up with Chris Krebs, who served as director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency under President Donald Trump and now runs the Krebs Stamos Group. I’ve edited his answers.Are you surprised that the conspiracy theories around election fraud have gotten worse, despite all your efforts to debunk the information, which ultimately led to your being fired in a tweet?Sadly, no, not really. That’s unfortunately the game plan — they flood the zone with garbage to overwhelm evidence-based reality. Not to necessarily prove any particular plot or conspiracy theory, but to confuse the masses so they don’t know whom to trust, they just know that “something isn’t right here.” What really set the stage was the former president’s supporters had been primed to expect a rigged election. After all, Trump had been telling them that’s the only way he could lose. This agitation was made that much easier due to most voters only having a casual understanding of how elections work, exacerbated by some of the changes and confusion around voting during Covid. So, when you’ve been told to expect shenanigans, and you don’t know how anything works, the things you don’t understand look like conspiracy theories. Even though we were regularly debunking election-related conspiracy theories, the flood of lies pushed by elites and influencers amounted to a self-fulfilling prophecy that overwhelmed us.Then there’s the ecosystem of grifters that boost these conspiracy theories for their own benefit, because ultimately disinformation is about power, money and influence. Until we hold them accountable for the harm they’ve done to democracy, they’ll continue to do it. We have to place the blame squarely where it lies: The fact that the former president continues to push lies about the 2020 election, simply because he can’t take the loss. That his own party won’t stand up for the country is really one of the more shameful chapters in American political history.The recent New York Times story that as president, Trump tried to get Homeland Security to seize the voting machines feels ominous. Were you aware of this and what is your assessment of his aims?I wasn’t aware of the scheme before I was fired in mid-November 2020, but I heard about it from a few reporters and government officials soon afterward in December. That it was even floated for consideration in the Oval Office is completely insane. It also says a lot that Trump’s own cabinet officials and advisers rejected the concept out of hand as beyond their authorities and illegal. Based on who was reportedly pushing this garbage to the president — namely Mike Flynn, Sidney Powell, Mike Lindell and Phil Waldron) — maybe they thought they were going to actually find something despite all available evidence. The more likely outcome? There was nothing there to find and they would either misrepresent something or manufacture a story entirely. That’s exactly what happened in Antrim County in Michigan in mid-December, where a group issued a report that was riddled with errors and misinterpretations that was then thoroughly debunked by experts in the field. Even if the plot had survived the inevitable legal action by the targeted states, it would have been the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security or some other agency analyzing any seized machines, and not the president’s rogue group of advisers. There was no evidence then or now that suggests they’d find foreign manipulation of votes or vote counting — because it didn’t happen.What are your biggest worries about the next election and what is your confidence that it will be secure?I remain confident that the work we all did through the 2020 election led to a secure, free and fair election. I also have continued confidence in the vast majority of professional election officials across the country committed to secure and transparent elections. Congress has to continue investing in elections so that we can continue the march toward 100 percent voter-verifiable paper. In 2016, less than 80 percent of votes had a paper ballot associated with the vote, with the remainder of votes stored on digital media. That’s hard to audit. In 2020, that number jumped to around 95 percent, according to a study by the Center for Election Innovation and Research. Entire states like Georgia and Pennsylvania shifted from paperless systems to paper ballot-based systems, leaving Louisiana as the only remaining state that’s broadly paperless. To its credit, Louisiana has tried, but has run into various procurement snags. We also need to continue expanding postelection, precertification audits that are based on transparent standards and methodologies conducted by election audit professionals. One of my greatest concerns looking ahead to 2022 midterms and 2024 is not necessarily a foreign cyber threat; instead, it’s a domestic insider threat posed by partisan election officials. This isn’t just speculation. In Mesa County, Colo., the Republican county clerk is under grand jury investigation for allowing unauthorized access to voting systems. More concerning, there are “Stop the Steal” candidates running in secretary of state races in Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and Michigan and elsewhere that, if in office in 2024, would be in a position to affect how elections are run and even refuse to certify if their preferred candidate doesn’t win.That’s just not any American democracy that I recognize, and if you’re anything like me, you’re a single-issue voter: If you run on a stolen election platform, you’re unfit for public office.You formed your firm Krebs Stamos Group with Alex Stamos, former Facebook chief security officer, and one of your first clients was SolarWinds, the famously hacked network software company. What do you do for your clients and what’s the most important thing companies need to pay attention to?The set of companies in the sights of high-level cyber actors are no longer limited to the big banks, energy firms and defense contractors. Instead, the hundreds of technology firms that are critical supply chain partners for just about every aspect of our nation’s economic engine are now targeted by foreign cyber actors. Companies must recognize that if you’re shipping a product, you’re shipping a target; if you’re hosting a service, you are the target, and then adjust their approach to security accordingly.We work with clients to develop and implement risk management strategies informed by this dramatic shift in geopolitical and geo-economic concerns that shape our world today. What’s happening in Eastern Europe is a perfect example. While we might not know for certain if Russia is going to attack Ukraine, Russia has plenty of offensive options, and they’ve proven time and again that they aren’t afraid to use cyber capabilities that directly impact businesses across the globe. Then there’s the Chinese government. As Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Chris Wray said this week, “Whatever makes an industry tick, they target.” Using hacking, spying, covert acquisition and other techniques to steal intellectual property from advanced technology firms, they seek to gain a commercial advantage for Chinese firms. State actors exploiting our growing digital dependencies for intelligence, commercial, influence and military purposes is now the norm, rather than the exception, and every business needs a security strategy driven from the c-suite.Lovely & LoathsomeLovely: With TikTok full of some truly vile and dangerous challenges (the now-banned milk crate challenge, for one), perhaps we need to focus on the many inventive and fun ones. I am enamored of what’s known as the Drop Down Challenge, in which people, well, drop down into a squat, typically synchronized. There was a skit on it on “Saturday Night Live” this past week, but the real thing is oddly satisfying and, mostly, persistently creative. Check out this one called the “nurse edition.”Loathsome: Senator Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, continues his reign as Twitter’s most obtuse tweeter. Last month, after walking back his repeated statements acknowledging there was a “violent terrorist attack” on the Capitol last January, Cruz the next day accused President Biden of “trying to signal weakness and surrender” to Russia’s Vladimir Putin in Ukraine. Mockery ensued, obviously, but that digital dopiness was somehow topped this week with his tweet advising people in his state to get ready for cold conditions, noting it’s “better to be over prepared than underprepared for winter weather.” That comes just a year after he decamped to Cancún, Mexico, amid a serious home heating fuel crisis in Texas, a debacle thoroughly chronicled on Twitter.Conclusion: You cuncan’t make this stuff up! More

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      Who Are the Key Figures of Interest in the Jan. 6 Inquiry?

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      The list of names being scrutinized by the House committee for their role in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol keeps growing.A House select committee has been formed to scrutinize the causes of the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. The riot occurred as Congress met to formalize Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s election victory amid efforts by President Donald J. Trump and his allies to overturn the results.Here are some of the key people and groups included so far in the panel’s investigation:President Donald J. Trump spoke at a rally on Jan. 6, 2021, shortly before the riot at the Capitol.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesTrump, His Family and His Inner CircleDonald J. TrumpThe former president’s White House records related to the attack have been a focus of the inquiry. Mr. Trump unsuccessfully tried to keep these documents from the committee by claiming executive privilege. The panel is also scrutinizing Mr. Trump’s role in proposals to seize voting machines after the 2020 election.Ivanka TrumpThe daughter of the former president, who served as one of his senior advisers, has been asked to cooperate. The panel said that it had gathered evidence that she had implored her father to call off the violence that occurred when his supporters stormed the Capitol.Rudolph W. GiulianiMr. Trump’s personal lawyer and three members of his legal team — Jenna Ellis, Sidney Powell and Boris Epshteyn — pursued conspiracy-filled lawsuits that made claims of voter fraud and played central roles in the effort to use courts, state legislatures and Congress to overturn the results.Stephen K. BannonThe former Trump aide is under scrutiny by the committee for comments he made on his radio show on Jan. 5, 2021. The committee points to this as evidence that he had “some foreknowledge” of the attack. Mr. Bannon has been charged with contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with a subpoena; he claimed protection under executive privilege even though he was an outside adviser.Michael T. FlynnMr. Trump’s former national security adviser attended an Oval Office meeting on Dec. 18, 2020, in which participants discussed seizing voting machines and invoking certain national security emergency powers. Mr. Flynn has filed a lawsuit to block the panel’s subpoenas.Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, arrived in the East Room for an election night address by Mr. Trump.Mandel Ngan/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhite House OfficialsMark MeadowsMr. Trump’s chief of staff, who initially provided the panel with a trove of documents that showed the extent of his role in the efforts to overturn the election, is now refusing to cooperate. The House voted to recommend holding Mr. Meadows in criminal contempt of Congress for defying the panel’s subpoena.Mike PenceThe former vice president could be a key witness as the committee focuses on Mr. Trump’s responsibility for the riot and considers criminal referrals, but Mr. Pence has not decided whether to cooperate, according to people briefed on his discussions with the panel.Marc ShortMr. Pence’s chief of staff, who has firsthand knowledge of Mr. Trump’s pressure campaign on the vice president to throw out the election results, testified before the panel under subpoena. He is the most senior person on Mr. Pence’s staff who is known to have cooperated with the committee.Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader. He has refused to cooperate with the congressional inquiry into the Jan. 6 riot.Tom Brenner for The New York TimesMembers of CongressKevin McCarthyThe panel has requested an interview with Mr. McCarthy, the House Republican leader, about his contact with Mr. Trump during the riot. A California representative who could become speaker of the House after the midterms in November, Mr. McCarthy has refused to cooperate.Scott Perry and Jim JordanThe representatives from Pennsylvania and Ohio are among a group of Republican congressmen who were deeply involved in efforts to overturn the election. Both Mr. Perry and Mr. Jordan have refused to cooperate with the panel.Roger Stone in December 2021, after a meeting with the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack.Al Drago for The New York TimesOutside Advisers and GroupsRoger J. Stone Jr.The longtime political operative, who promoted his attendance at rallies on Jan. 5 and 6 and solicited support to pay for his security, has become a focus of the panel as it digs further into the planning and financing of rallies before the attack.Phil WaldronThe retired Army colonel has been under scrutiny since Mr. Meadows turned over a 38-page PowerPoint document that Mr. Waldron had circulated on Capitol Hill. The document contained plans that detailed how to overturn the election.Jeffrey ClarkThe Justice Department official repeatedly pushed his colleagues to help Mr. Trump undo his loss. The panel has recommended that Mr. Clark be held in criminal contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate with a subpoena.John EastmanThe little-known academic and conservative lawyer has become the subject of intense scrutiny since writing a memo that laid out how Mr. Trump could stay in power.Fake Trump electorsFourteen people falsely claimed to be electors for Mr. Trump in the 2020 election in states that Mr. Biden had won: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.Members of the Proud Boys burned a Black Lives Matter banner torn from a church in Washington, D.C., in December 2020.Victor J. Blue for The New York TimesFar-Right FiguresExtremist groupsThe panel is scrutinizing some white nationalist leaders and militia groups, including the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. It is intensifying its focus on the rallies that led up to the mob violence and how extremists worked with pro-Trump forces to undermine the election.Alex JonesThe conspiracy theorist helped organize the rally that occurred before the riot, and said that White House officials told him that he was to lead a march to the Capitol, where Mr. Trump would speak, according to the committee.Sean Hannity, the Fox News host.Frank Franklin II/Associated PressMedia EntitiesFox News anchorsSean Hannity sent text messages to Trump officials in the days surrounding the riot that illustrate his unusually elevated role as an outside adviser. Mr. Hannity, along with Laura Ingraham and Brian Kilmeade, also texted Mr. Meadows as the riot unfolded.Big Tech firmsThe committee has criticized Alphabet, Meta, Reddit and Twitter for allowing extremism to spread on their platforms. The panel has said that the four social media companies have failed to adequately cooperate with the inquiry.The Willard Hotel in Washington, where several Trump allies met on the day before the riot.Drew Angerer for The New York TimesAnd a Key EventWillard Hotel meetingSeveral Trump advisers and allies — including Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Bannon, Mr. Flynn, Mr. Stone, Mr. Jones and Mr. Eastman — gathered at the Willard Hotel near the White House the day before the riot. The events that unfolded there have become a prime focus of the committee. 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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      Jan. 6 Committee Subpoenas Twitter, Meta, Alphabet and Reddit

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      The panel investigating the attack on the Capitol is demanding information from Alphabet, Meta, Reddit and Twitter.WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol issued subpoenas on Thursday to four major social media companies — Alphabet, Meta, Reddit and Twitter — criticizing them for allowing extremism to spread on their platforms and saying they have failed to cooperate adequately with the inquiry.In letters accompanying the subpoenas, the panel named Facebook, a unit of Meta, and YouTube, which is owned by Alphabet’s Google subsidiary, as among the worst offenders that contributed to the spread of misinformation and violent extremism. The committee said it had been investigating how the companies “contributed to the violent attack on our democracy, and what steps — if any — social media companies took to prevent their platforms from being breeding grounds for radicalizing people to violence.”“It’s disappointing that after months of engagement, we still do not have the documents and information necessary to answer those basic questions,” said the panel’s chairman, Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi.The committee sent letters in August to 15 social media companies — including sites where misinformation about election fraud spread, such as the pro-Trump website TheDonald.win — seeking documents pertaining to efforts to overturn the election and any domestic violent extremists associated with the Jan. 6 rally and attack.After months of discussions with the companies, only the four large corporations were issued subpoenas on Thursday, because the committee said the firms were “unwilling to commit to voluntarily and expeditiously” cooperating with its work. A committee aide said investigators were in various stages of negotiations with the other companies.In the year since the events of Jan. 6, social media companies have been heavily scrutinized for whether their sites played an instrumental role in organizing the attack.In the months surrounding the 2020 election, employees inside Meta raised warning signs that Facebook posts and comments containing “combustible election misinformation” were spreading quickly across the social network, according to a cache of documents and photos reviewed by The New York Times. Many of those employees criticized Facebook leadership’s inaction when it came to the spread of the QAnon conspiracy group, which they said also contributed to the attack.Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee turned whistle-blower, said the company relaxed its safeguards too quickly after the election, which then led it to be used in the storming of the Capitol.Critics say that other platforms also played an instrumental role in the spread of misinformation while contributing to the events of Jan. 6.In the days after the attack, Reddit banned a discussion forum dedicated to former President Donald J. Trump, where tens of thousands of Mr. Trump’s supporters regularly convened to express solidarity with him.On Twitter, many of Mr. Trump’s followers used the site to amplify and spread false allegations of election fraud, while connecting with other Trump supporters and conspiracy theorists using the site. And on YouTube, some users broadcast the events of Jan. 6 using the platform’s video streaming technology.Representatives for the tech companies have been in discussions with the investigating committee, though how much in the way of evidence or user records the firms have handed over remains unclear.The committee said letters to the four firms accompanied the subpoenas.The panel said YouTube served as a platform for “significant communications by its users that were relevant to the planning and execution of Jan. 6 attack on the United States Capitol,” including livestreams of the attack as it was taking place.“To this day, YouTube is a platform on which user video spread misinformation about the election,” Mr. Thompson wrote.The panel said Facebook and other Metaplatforms were used to share messages of “hate, violence and incitement; to spread misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories around the election; and to coordinate or attempt to coordinate the Stop the Steal movement.”Public accounts about Facebook’s civic integrity team indicate that Facebook has documents that are critical to the select committee’s investigation, the panel said.“Meta has declined to commit to a deadline for producing or even identifying these materials,” Mr. Thompson wrote to Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive.Key Figures in the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 12The House investigation. More