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      The big idea: are we really so polarised? | Dominic Packer and Jay Van Bavel

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      The big idea: are we really so polarised? In many democracies the political chasm seems wider than ever. But emotion, not policies, may be what actually divides us In 2020, the match-making website OkCupid asked 5 million hopeful daters around the world: “Could you date someone who has strong political opinions that are the opposite of yours?” Sixty per cent said no, up from 53% a year before.Scholars used to worry that societies might not be polarised enough. Without clear differences between political parties, they thought, citizens lack choices, and important issues don’t get deeply debated. Now this notion seems rather quaint as countries have fractured along political lines, reflected in everything from dating preferences to where people choose to live.Sign up to our Inside Saturday newsletter for an exclusive behind the scenes look at the making of the magazine’s biggest features, as well as a curated list of our weekly highlights.Just how stark has political polarisation become? Well, it depends on where you live and how you look at it. When social psychologists study relations between groups, they often find that whereas people like their own groups a great deal, they have fairly neutral feelings towards out-groups: “They’re fine, but we’re great!” This pattern used to describe relations between Democrats and Republicans in the US. In 1980, partisans reported feeling warm towards members of their own party and neutral towards people on the other side. However, while levels of in-party warmth have remained stable since then, feelings towards the out-party have plummeted.The dynamics are similar in the UK, where the Brexit vote was deeply divisive. A 2019 study revealed that while UK citizens were not particularly identified with political parties, they held strong identities as remainers or leavers. Their perceptions were sharply partisan, with each side regarding its supporters as intelligent and honest, while viewing the other as selfish and close-minded. The consequences of hating political out-groups are many and varied. It can lead people to support corrupt politicians, because losing to the other side seems unbearable. It can make compromise impossible even when you have common political ground. In a pandemic, it can even lead people to disregard advice from health experts if they are embraced by opposing partisans.The negativity that people feel towards political opponents is known to scientists as affective polarisation. It is emotional and identity-driven – “us” versus “them”. Importantly, this is distinct from another form of division known as ideological polarisation, which refers to differences in policy preferences. So do we disagree about the actual issues as much as our feelings about each other suggest?Despite large differences in opinion between politicians and activists from different parties, there is often less polarisation among regular voters on matters of policy. When pushed for their thoughts about specific ideas or initiatives, citizens with different political affiliations often turn out to agree more than they disagree (or at least the differences are not as stark as they imagine).More in Common, a research consortiumthat explores the drivers of social fracturing and polarisation, reports on areas of agreement between groups in societies. In the UK, for example, they have found that majorities of people across the political spectrum view hate speech as a problem, are proud of the NHS, and are concerned about climate change and inequality.As psychologist Anne Wilson and her colleagues put it in a recent paper: “Partisans often oppose one another vehemently even when there is little actual daylight between their policy preferences, which are often tenuously held and contextually malleable.”This relative lack of divergence would, of course, come as a surprise to partisans themselves. This is the phenomenon of false polarisation, whereby there is widespread misperception of how much people on the left and the right are divided, not only on issues but also in their respective ways of life. When asked to estimate how many Republicans earn more than $250,000 a year, for example, Democrats guessed 38%. In reality it is 2%. Conversely, while about 6% of Democrats self-identify as members of the LGBT community, Republicans believed it was 32%. New research from Victoria Parker and her colleagues finds that partisans are especially likely to overestimate how many of their political opponents hold extreme opinions. Those overestimates, in turn, are associated with a disinclination to talk or socially engage with out-party members, avoidance that is likely to prevent people from forming more accurate impressions of the other side.What drives these misperceptions? And why do citizens so dislike one another if they aren’t necessarily deeply divided on policy matters? Politicians certainly have incentives to sharpen differences in order to motivate and mobilise voters, rallying support by portraying themselves as bulwarks against the barbarians on the other side. Divisiveness also plays well on social media, where extreme voices are amplified. Moral outrage is particularly likely to go viral.In a recent project led by Steve Rathje and Sander van der Linden at Cambridge University, we examined more than 2.5m posts on Twitter and Facebook. We found that posts were significantly more likely to be shared or retweeted if they referenced political opponents. Every word about the out-group increased the odds of a post being shared by 67% – and these posts were, in turn, met with anger and mockery.In this increasingly toxic environment, reducing false polarisation and affective polarisation are major challenges. It is often suggested, for example, that if people were only to expose themselves to perspectives from the other side, it would breed greater understanding and cooperation. Yet this intuition turns out to be flawed.The big idea: Is the era of the skyscraper over?Read moreSociologist Christopher Bail and his colleagues offered sets of Democrats and Republicans money to follow a bot that would retweet messages from politicians, media companies and pundits every day for a month. Importantly, the messages always came from the other side of the political spectrum. Far from promoting harmony, it backfired. After a month of being exposed to conservative talking points, Democrats’ attitudes had become, if anything, marginally more liberal. And Republicans became more conservative following their diet of liberal views. When what you see from the other side strikes you as biased or obnoxious, it doesn’t endear you to their perspectives.In this regard, the behaviour of elites matters. Political scientist Rasmus Skytte showed people messages from politicians that were either civil or rude. Interestingly, aggressive and unkind messages didn’t reduce trust in politicians or increase affective polarisation. It seems that incivility is what people have come to expect. But when they saw polite and respectful messages, they subsequently felt more trust towards politicians and became less affectively polarised.These results suggest that we should expect better from our leaders and those with large platforms. Don’t reward divisive rhetoric with “likes”. Instead, follow politicians and pundits who embody norms of respect and civility, even when they disagree on policy matters. In fact, many of us might be better off if we took a break from social media altogether. When economists found that whenpeople who were encouraged people to disconnect from Facebook for a month spent less time online and were less politically polarised. They also experienced improved psychological wellbeing.No one these days is worried that our societies are insufficiently polarised. But because so much of the polarisation is about emotions and identities rather than issues, it is still not clear that citizens are presented with good choices or that important issues are being deeply debated. Here again, we must expect better. Demand that politicians and pundits get into policy specifics. Let’s focus more on actual ideas for solving actual problems, where we, as citizens, may well turn out to agree on more than we realise. Dominic Packer and Jay Van Bavel are psychologists and the authors of The Power of Us. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.Further readingUncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity by Lilliana Mason (Chicago, £19)Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing by Chris Bail (Princeton, £20)The Wealth Paradox: Economic Prosperity and the Hardening of Attitudes by Frank Mols and Jolanda Jetten (Cambridge, £19.99)TopicsBooksThe big ideaSociety booksSocial trendsSocial mediaDigital mediaPsychologyUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Jon Ronson and Adam Curtis on the culture wars: ‘How has this happened? Where is the escape hatch?’

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      As Ronson’s BBC podcast Things Fell Apart begins, the documentary-makers and old friends discuss conspiracy theories, the problem of ‘activist journalists’ and what happened to Ceaușescu’s socksby Fiona SturgesJon Ronson and Adam Curtis became friends in the late 1990s, having bonded over their shared interests in power, society and the stories we tell about ourselves. Curtis, 66, is a Bafta-winning documentary film-maker whose credits include The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear and HyperNormalisation. His most recent six-part series, Can’t Get You Out of My Head, draws on the history of psychology and politics to show how we got to where we are today. Ronson, 54, is a US-based Welsh writer and journalist whose books include 2015’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, about social media brutality and the history of public shaming. In recent years, Ronson has turned to podcasting, investigating the porn industry in The Butterfly Effect and its follow-up The Last Days of August.Sign up to our Inside Saturday newsletter for an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the making of the magazine’s biggest features, as well as a curated list of our weekly highlights.His forthcoming BBC podcast, Things Fell Apart, is about the roots of the culture wars and the ways the present is echoed in the past. Over eight episodes, he talks to individuals caught up in ideological conflicts, conspiracy theories and moral panics. These include Alice Moore, the wife of a fundamentalist minister and unexpected culture war instigator who campaigned to remove textbooks containing liberal material from schools, and Kelly Michaels, a daycare worker and victim of the “satanic panic” who was wrongfully imprisoned in 1988 by a New Jersey court for child abuse (the verdict was overturned in 1993).We are on: Curtis is talking from his office in London while Ronson is at home in New York. By way of preparation before their chat, Curtis has binged on Ronson’s new series. No sooner are cameras switched on than the reminiscences begin.Jon Ronson Do you remember that time we went to an auction of [the late Romanian dictator Nicolae] Ceaușescu’s belongings?Adam Curtis Yes, now that was exciting.JR It was. We went on a minibreak to Romania together.AC I bought Ceaușescu’s cap, and a pair of socks.JR I also got a pair of socks. There was some very heavy bidding from a mysterious gentleman who got all the ornaments. The prices were getting pretty high so I stuck with the socks. I don’t even know where they are now. I bet you know where your stuff is.AC I do, actually.JR We have had many conversations over the years and generally I find I’m asking you questions because I’m trying to get ideas. I always think of you as a fantastic source of insights into the future. In the early days of social media, you were the very first person to say to me: “Don’t think of this as a utopia. There are some problems here.” There are two or three people in my life where, when they talk, I really want to listen to what they have to say, and you are one of those.AC That is completely not true. What actually happens is that I bollock on about theories which you completely ignore and then you go off on your stories. Anyway, I’m trying to remember when we actually met.JR I think the first time I met you was when I made the [1997] documentary Tottenham Ayatollah and you came to the screening.AC And your wife Elaine invited me to meet you in a cafe off Tottenham Court Road. She said: “Can you come and talk to him? Then you could take some of the pressure off me by talking about his film.”JR She probably said: “I can’t take it any more. He won’t stop agonising.”AC But when we met you didn’t agonise at all. I think what we recognised in each other – and it’s been the professional bond between us – is that we’re both interested in what happens outside those normal areas that most political journalists examine that involve politics and power. We want to look at things like psychology and how a conspiracy theory plays out and how feelings work through society.JR I’m really surprised at how frequently the things that we tell stories about overlap. But the way we go about it is so different. I think your brain works better thinking about theories and my brain works better thinking about stories.AC I think you and I are creatures of our time. I got interested in this idea that power now works not through traditional forms but through the idea of individualism; it says you should be allowed to do what you want to do, but we will serve you to get that. You and I both know what it’s like to be an obsessive individualist, but we’ve become intrigued by how that plays out in a society in which you’ve got lots of people wanting to be individuals. I’ve always had this theory that self-expression is the conformity of our age. The most radical thing you can do is something extraordinary like walking naked around the world, and not tell anyone that you’ve done it. You can’t post anything online. When you say that to people, they can’t conceive of it.JR I really like that idea.AC The other thing that we both do when we’re interviewing people is not follow a list of questions. You go into a situation where you have questions in your head but suddenly they’ll say something which is either funny or unexpected and you just learn to go with it. It’s like suddenly a little piglet swerves off from the herd, and you go with it up and over the hill.JR One positive thing that has been said about what I do is that there’s a sincerity to it. I never go into something with an idea of how it will turn out.AC We’re talking about sincerity? Don’t go there, Jon! You’ll be writing poems next.JR [Laughs] Well it’s really to do with trying to figure out what I think from my research without being told what to think by other people. I think people appreciate the fact that I’ve worked hard to come to the thoughts I’ve come to.AC Yes, I agree with that.JR I guess what we have in common is we’re not ideologues. We don’t go into a situation with a set of agendas. We’re more willing to be a twig in the river of the story and just go where it takes us. By doing that we’re forced to keep an open mind. I don’t even have a list of questions in my head when I’m interviewing somebody. I’m literally a tightrope walker with no safety net, and I have, on many occasions, plummeted to my death like in Squid Game.AC I think that open-mindedness is clear in your podcast. And it’s absolutely the right time to examine the roots of what we’re calling the culture wars, which is such a difficult and sensitive area. So much journalism, when it goes back into the past to see why something happened, always interviews the people who are defined as the actors, the people who consciously set out to [create conflict]. What I’m increasingly intrigued by is the people who were acted upon by that thing or idea. Because the way ideas or concepts play out in society are never the way that the people who started them think. What you’ve done in these programmes is follow individuals who are acted upon by these forces, because it shows you the real dimensions of what these things called culture wars are.JR Well, I realised that I would watch people become overconsumed by these cultural conflicts, to the extent that it was impacting their mental health and tearing families apart. But every show that’s about the culture ends up a part of the culture wars, and I didn’t want to do that. So I thought the way to do it was by focusing on a moment and a human story and tell that story in as unexpected a way as possible. In the end we found eight stories about the complexity of human life and they all happen to be origin stories. These are the pebbles being thrown in the pond and creating these ripples.AC Yes, these people have got caught up in the great tides of history that have come sweeping over them. It feels real. If you follow people who are acted upon, you start to understand, in a much more sympathetic way, why people do things that you might not like or approve of. You see how someone is led to something, with no idea of the consequences. In the first two episodes, you talk about how the evangelical movement up until the early 1970s had been completely detached from any involvement in the moral, political or social questions of American society. And what you trace is how two people got sucked into a particular issue, which then acted like a fuse to reawaken the evangelical movement.JR For decades the Christian right were silent: they consumed their own media, they went to their own churches and they listened to their own radio shows, and they were totally unengaged with what was happening. But then a few things happened that finally galvanised them into becoming soldiers in a culture war, and one was a new diversity of thought in school textbooks. In the series I talk to Alice Moore, who is in her 80s now and was one of the earliest cultural warriors for the evangelical right. She was a church minister’s wife in West Virginia who discovered there was going to be a new sex education lesson taught in schools, and she wasn’t having that. So she got on to the school board, and then the new curriculum arrived in 1974 that was full of all these multicultural voices, and things got so heated over just one semester that school buses were shot at – in fact, shots were fired from both sides – and a school was bombed. And I discovered while talking to Alice that one of the reasons for the intensity of the anger was a misinterpretation of a poem [that appeared in one of the new school textbooks].AC By Roger McGough!JR Yes. It was a poem [1967’s At Lunchtime: A Story of Love] that featured a spontaneous orgy that takes place on a bus, because the passengers thought the world was about to end at lunchtime in a nuclear war. So Alice was reading out this poem to me and I was thinking: “I don’t think this is in favour of spontaneous orgies on buses. I think this poet is agreeing with you, to an extent.” So then I went off to talk to Roger about it.AC And then you went back to Alice, and she was quite grumpy about it, which was funny. But I think this is a beautiful example of what we were talking about. As I was listening to that episode I was thinking: “Hang on, this isn’t quite as bad as she thinks it is.” And then, Jon’s brain is thinking the same thing, but without judgment.JR I like to steer clear of conflict as much as I can.AC Which is good and also rare. Most people would pursue her with their agenda. Right now, everyone is judged as either being good or bad. It’s good versus evil – that’s where journalism has got to now. But yours doesn’t do that.JR I’m interested in everybody as a human being and I’m quite startled by the myriad examples of the media being a part of the culture wars. It seems to happen everywhere, this mistelling of a story so it fits into a particular ideology a little more clearly. It happens on all sides. I get very disheartened when CNN lies to me or is biased or omits certain aspects of the truth to tell a certain version of the story. During the Trump years I really felt that with CNN. I felt like I was in QAnon and my Q was Anderson Cooper.AC I would read the New York Times all about the close friendship between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. And I know enough Russian journalists who I trust to know that it’s just complete rubbish. So hysteria happened on both sides. I mean if you go back over reports even from my own organisation, the BBC, about how Trump was actually an agent of Putin, it’s extraordinary. It’s a conspiracy theory. That’s as much of a panic as anything else you get on the right.JR I also think a lot of journalists are, like: “Oh my God. All this time I’ve just been a liberal but look at these things that are happening: Trump’s election, George Floyd.” So they think it’s not enough to be a liberal journalist, they have to be an activist journalist. And I think it’s completely understandable and, in some cases, it’s a great thing. But then in other cases, it’s really troublesome because journalism now has pre-existing ideologies.AC And then journalism lifts off from Planet Real and goes off into the realms of histrionic personality disorder. I actually think histrionic personality disorder describes most of the progressive classes in western societies, in that they’ve given up on their progressivism and retreated into a histrionic attitude to the world.JR I do think these stories tell us an awful lot about the way we live our lives today. In the satanic panic episode, which is about moral panics in the 1980s, you think it’s going to be about the parallels today with QAnon. But it becomes clear that there are also parallels with the panics on the left today, and that we all have these cognitive biases. I tell this story in which daycare workers are being accused of satanic activity, which clearly never happened, and where people actually went to jail. Suddenly it wasn’t just the Christian right worried about satanic cults at the end of your street, but mainstream America. When the flame is burning hot, we can all act in irrational, brutal or inhuman ways, and you see it across the spectrum.AC The series did make me think: how has this happened? Not just the culture wars but their ferocity. And where is the escape hatch? Because I think all sides now feel that there’s something not quite right. If you examine the years since Trump and Brexit, there has been this enormous hysteria in newspapers and on television about it. But actually the politicians have done nothing to change society. It’s almost been like a frozen world. So, I think the real answer to why this is happening is because politics has failed. It’s become this dead area, this desert surrounded by thinktanks, and someone’s got to get in there and regenerate it. The new politics is waiting to come. And I think it will happen.Jon Ronson’s Things Fell Apart continues Tuesday, 9am Radio 4 and BBC Sounds. It will be available in the US and Canada exclusively on BBC Podcasts Premium on Apple Podcasts. Adam Curtis’s Can’t Get You Out of My Head is on BBC iPlayer.TopicsJon RonsonAdam CurtisPodcastsPodcastingUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Prince Harry says he warned Twitter boss a day before Capitol riot

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      Prince HarryPrince Harry says he warned Twitter boss a day before Capitol riot‘I warned him his platform was allowing a coup to be staged. I haven’t heard from him since,’ Harry says01:18Sarah Marsh@sloumarshWed 10 Nov 2021 06.24 ESTLast modified on Wed 10 Nov 2021 08.55 ESTPrince Harry has said he warned Twitter’s boss Jack Dorsey about his platform allowing political unrest a day before the Capitol riot that led to five deaths.The Duke of Sussex made the comments at the RE:WIRED tech forum in the US. He said: “I warned him his platform was allowing a coup to be staged. That email was sent the day before. And then it happened and I haven’t heard from him since.”On the day of the 6 January riots, Donald Trump tweeted allegations of vote fraud before a rally in Washington DC. Members of the Proud Boy movement, a rightwing militia, stormed the Capitol to disrupt the official certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the White House race, as part of an attempt to overturn the election result.Harry was speaking via video chat at a session discussing whether social media was contributing to misinformation and online hatred. Dorsey, who is Twitter’s chief executive, has so far not commented.A study released in October by the social media analytics service Bot Sentinel identified 83 accounts on Twitter that it said were responsible for 70% of hateful content and misinformation aimed at Harry and his wife, Meghan.Harry said that “perhaps the most disturbing part of this [study] was the number of British journalists who were interacting with them and amplifying the lies. But they regurgitate these lies as truth.”He said social media companies were not doing enough to stop the spread of misinformation, and the internet was “being defined by hate, division and lies”.He also argued that the word “Megxit”, used by the British press to describe the couple’s decision to quit their royal duties, was misogynistic.Harry said the word was an example of online and media hatred. “Maybe people know this and maybe they don’t, but the term ‘Megxit’ was or is a misogynistic term, and it was created by a troll, amplified by royal correspondents, and it grew and grew and grew into mainstream media. But it began with a troll,” he said. He did not elaborate.Harry and Meghan moved to California last year to lead a more independent life. He has said that part of the reason for their departure was the racist treatment of Meghan, whose mother is black and whose father is white, by the British tabloid media.TopicsPrince HarryTwitterJack DorseyUS Capitol attacknewsReuse this content More

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      Liz Cheney condemns ‘false flag’ Capitol attack claim seen in Tucker Carlson film

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      US Capitol attackLiz Cheney condemns ‘false flag’ Capitol attack claim seen in Tucker Carlson film
      6 January panel member: ‘It’s un-American to spread those lies’
      In Trumpland, election was stolen and racism was long ago
      Martin Pengelly in New York@MartinPengellySun 7 Nov 2021 13.43 ESTLast modified on Sun 7 Nov 2021 13.46 ESTIn an apparent swipe at the Fox News host Tucker Carlson, the anti-Trump Republican Liz Cheney said on Sunday it was “dangerous” and “un-American” to suggest the deadly assault on the US Capitol on 6 January was a “false flag” attack.Virginia victory gives some Republicans glimpse of future without TrumpRead moreConspiracy theorists say “false flag” attacks are staged by the government to achieve its own ends. A documentary produced by Carlson for the Fox Nation streaming service, Patriot Purge, contains such a suggestion about the Capitol attack.Five people died around the events of 6 January, when Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in an attempt to overturn his election defeat by Joe Biden.Trump was impeached for inciting the attack but escaped conviction when sufficient Republican senators stayed loyal.Cheney, who has condemned Carlson’s series before, spoke to Fox News Sunday. The host, Chris Wallace, asked if there was “any truth” to claims 6 January was “a false flag operation, a case of liberals in the deep state setting up conservatives and Trump supporters”.Cheney replied: “None at all. It’s the same thing that you hear people saying 9/11 is an inside job. It’s un-American to be spreading those kinds of lies, and they are lies.”Cheney, who voted to impeach Trump, is one of two Republican members of the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack. The other, Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, will retire from the House next year.But the Wyoming congresswoman, a stringent conservative whose father is the former vice-president Dick Cheney, has shown no sign of yielding despite losing her leadership position in Washington and attracting a primary challenger back home.Cheney appeared on Sunday with the South Carolina congressman Jim Clyburn, the Democratic chief whip, with whom (and Wallace) she was this weekend honoured for being willing to work across the aisle.“We have an obligation that goes beyond partisanship,” Cheney said, “Democrats and Republicans together, to make sure that we understand every single piece of the facts about what happened [on 6 January] and to make sure that people who did it are held accountable.“And to call it a false flag operation to spread those kinds of lies is really dangerous.”TopicsUS Capitol attackUS politicsRepublicansFox NewsUS televisionDonald TrumpnewsReuse this content More

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      Tucker Carlson condemned over ‘false flag’ claim about deadly Capitol attack

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      Fox NewsTucker Carlson condemned over ‘false flag’ claim about deadly Capitol attackCongresswoman Liz Cheney and Anti-Defamation League president denounce Fox News host’s ‘lies’ as he plugs new series

      ‘Roadmap for a coup’: inside Trump plot to steal the presidency
      Martin Pengelly in New York@MartinPengellySat 30 Oct 2021 01.00 EDTLast modified on Sat 30 Oct 2021 10.55 EDTThe conservative Republican Liz Cheney and the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League led condemnation of Fox News and Tucker Carlson, after the primetime host announced a series about the supposed “true story” of the deadly attack on the US Capitol on 6 January. Trump seeking to block call logs and notes from Capitol attack panelRead moreThey denounced Carlson for spreading dangerous conspiracy theories in the latest scandal to engulf a man whose popularity belies his record of racist and untrue statements on issues from immigration to racial justice.“Fox News is giving Tucker Carlson a platform to spread the same type of lies that provoked violence on 6 January,” tweeted Cheney, a Wyoming representative on the dwindling anti-Trump wing of the Republican party.Jonathan Greenblatt, of the ADL, wrote to Lachlan Murdoch, chief executive of Fox Corporation, to demand the series be shelved.“Clearly Carlson has the right to make outrageous claims,” Greenblatt wrote. “But freedom of speech is not freedom of reach. You have no obligation to validate his views with airtime on your platform and, I would argue, a moral responsibility not to do so.”Greenblatt has previously called for Carlson to be fired over his advocacy of the racist replacement theory, which says Democrats encourage immigration to keep Republicans out of power. Lachlan Murdoch rejected that request.In the trailer for Carlson’s series, Patriot Purge, a pundit says: “False flags have happened in this country, one of which may have been 6 January.”Among conspiracy theorists, “false flag” events are said to be staged by the government to pursue nefarious ends. Some claim the 9/11 terrorist attacks were false flags. The InfoWars host Alex Jones, a Trump ally and supporter, has landed in legal and financial jeopardy after claiming the Sandy Hook school shooting of 2012, in which 20 young children and six adults were killed, was a false flag attack.Carlson has called the 6 January riot “a political protest that got out of hand”. He has also claimed it was organised by the FBI.Cheney said: “As Fox News knows, the election wasn’t stolen and 6 January was not a ‘false flag’ operation.”Five people including a Trump supporter shot by law enforcement and a police officer died around the Capitol attack. The riot followed a “Stop the Steal” rally near the White House at which Trump told supporters to march on Congress and “fight like hell” to overturn the election.Trump was impeached for inciting an insurrection. Cheney was one of 10 House Republicans who voted to send him to the Senate for trial but only seven Republican senators joined Democrats in finding Trump guilty and he was not convicted. He is free to run for office again, fundraising strongly and dominating polls regarding possible candidates for 2024.Trump has stuck to his lie that the election was stolen, a claim rejected by his own attorney general, Republican officials in key states and a succession of judges. The Republican party has swung behind Trump, also seeking to play down the events of 6 January, a day which has led to more than 600 arrests.Another outlet owned by Rupert Murdoch, the Wall Street Journal, was condemned this week for printing a letter in which Trump repeated his election lies.In another tweet, Cheney asked Carlson: “Are you still falsely contending the voting machines were corrupted and the election was stolen?” She included the Twitter handles of Rupert Murdoch, Fox News’s chief executive, Suzanne Scott, its president and executive editor, Jay Wallace, and the former House speaker Paul Ryan, now a member of the Fox board. None commented.Fox News did not respond to a request for comment.On Thursday another Fox News personality, Geraldo Rivera, told the New York Times Carlson was “wonderful” and “provocative” but said things that were “inflammatory and outrageous and uncorroborated”. On Twitter, Rivera called the “false flag” claim in Carlson’s trailer “bullshit”.Carlson’s series will premiere on the Fox Nation streaming service on Monday. Scored to martial drums, its trailer says it will tell the “the true story behind 1/6 … the war on terror 2.0 and the plot against the people”.“The domestic war on terror is here and it’s coming after half of the country,” a pundit says, over shots of helicopters near the Capitol and the title, Patriot Purge.Fox News host Tucker Carlson tells interviewer: ‘I lie’Read moreCarlson says: “The helicopters have left Afghanistan and now they’ve landed here at home.”On Thursday, Carlson claimed: “What we found … bore no resemblance whatsoever to the story that you have heard repeatedly from Liz Cheney and Nancy Pelosi, as well as their many obedient mouthpieces in the media. They were lying.”In his trailer, another pundit says: “The left is hunting the right, sticking them in Guantánamo Bay for American citizens, leaving them to rot.”The trailer also splices footage of Trump speaking with a shot of Osama bin Laden, while scenes outside the Capitol on 6 January are scored to the Battle Hymn of the Republic. The trailer culminates with the refrain of that civil war song: “The truth is marching on.”In his letter to Rupert Murdoch, Greenblatt of the ADL wrote: “Let’s call this what it is: an abject, indisputable lie and a blatant attempt to rewrite history.”TopicsFox NewsUS Capitol attackRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

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      Wall Street Journal criticized for Trump letter pushing election lie

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      Wall Street JournalWall Street Journal criticized for Trump letter pushing election lieFormer president’s letter, written in response to an editorial on Pennsylvania voting laws, contains a list of disproved claims Adam Gabbatt@adamgabbattThu 28 Oct 2021 11.35 EDTLast modified on Thu 28 Oct 2021 11.37 EDTThe Wall Street Journal has been criticized after it published a letter by Donald Trump in which the former president continued to push his false claim that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged”.The former president’s letter, written in response to a WSJ editorial about voting law in Pennsylvania, claims, wrongly, that “the election was rigged, which you, unfortunately, still haven’t figured out”.How a secretive conservative group influenced ‘populist’ Trump’s tax cutsRead moreThe 600-word letter contains a bullet-point list of disproved claims – many of which have been debunked by WSJ reporters – which Trump claims show there was voter fraud. There was no widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, as several independent and partisan reviews have confirmed.Several WSJ reporters were unhappy with the publication of the letter, CNN reported, which comes after what had been a successful few weeks for the WSJ, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. The newspaper’s Facebook Files investigation revealed, through internal documents, how high-profile users were not subject to the same standards as regular users, and that Facebook was aware that Instagram, which it owns, is toxic for teenage girls.The decision to publish Trump’s spurious letter threatens to undermine that journalism, despite a newspaper’s editorial board typically being separate from the newsroom.Trump remains banned from Twitter and Facebook, and has been reduced to sending daily emails to supporters to make his voice heard. The WSJ’s publication of the letter was swiftly criticized in the media world.“I think it’s very disappointing that our opinion section continues to publish misinformation that our news side works so hard to debunk,” an unnamed WSJ reporter told CNN. “They should hold themselves to the same standards we do!”Bill Grueskin, a Columbia University School of Journalism professor who served as deputy managing editor of the Journal, told the Washington Post that letters to the editor are often used as a place for readers to express dissatisfaction with a newspaper’s coverage.“That’s generally fine, but if someone is going to spout a bunch of falsehoods, the editor usually feels an obligation to trim those out, or to publish a contemporaneous response. The Wall Street Journal editorial page chose not to do that in this case,” Grueskin said.Other journalists weighed in on Twitter.“Most newspapers don’t allow op-ed writers to just make up nonsense lies. Apparently the Wall Street Journal is not among them,” SV Dáte, a HuffPost White House correspondent, wrote.Matt Fuller, who covers politics for the Daily Beast, posted: “Newspapers don’t exist so that powerful people can publish whatever lies they want. In fact, that may be one of the very opposite reasons newspapers exist.”The WSJ did not immediately respond to a request for comment.TopicsWall Street JournalDonald TrumpUS elections 2020US press and publishingNewspapers & magazinesNewspapersnewsReuse this content More

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      Facebook revelations: what is in cache of internal documents?

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      FacebookFacebook revelations: what is in cache of internal documents?Roundup of what we have learned after release of papers and whistleblower’s testimony to MPs Dan Milmo Global technology editorMon 25 Oct 2021 14.42 EDTLast modified on Mon 25 Oct 2021 16.04 EDTFacebook has been at the centre of a wave of damaging revelations after a whistleblower released tens of thousands of internal documents and testified about the company’s inner workings to US senators.Frances Haugen left Facebook in May with a cache of memos and research that have exposed the inner workings of the company and the impact its platforms have on users. The first stories based on those documents were published by the Wall Street Journal in September.Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen calls for urgent external regulationRead moreHaugen gave further evidence about Facebook’s failure to act on harmful content in testimony to US senators on 5 October, in which she accused the company of putting “astronomical profits before people”. She also testified to MPs and peers in the UK on Monday, as a fresh wave of stories based on the documents was published by a consortium of news organisations.Facebook’s products – the eponymous platform, the Instagram photo-sharing app, Facebook Messenger and the WhatsApp messaging service – are used by 2.8 billion people a day and the company generated a net income – a US measure of profit – of $29bn (£21bn) last year.Here is what we have learned from the documents, and Haugen, since the revelations first broke last month.Teenage mental healthThe most damaging revelations focused on Instagram’s impact on the mental health and wellbeing of teenage girls. One piece of internal research showed that for teenage girls already having “hard moments”, one in three found Instagram made body issues worse. A further slide shows that one in three people who were finding social media use problematic found Instagram made it worse, with one in four saying it made issues with social comparison worse.Facebook described reports on the research, by the WSJ in September, as a “mischaracterisation” of its internal work. Nonetheless, the Instagram research has galvanised politicians on both sides of the Atlantic seeking to rein in Facebook.Violence in developing countriesHaugen has warned that Facebook is fanning ethnic violence in countries including Ethiopia and is not doing enough to stop it. She said that 87% of the spending on combating misinformation at Facebook is spent on English content when only 9% of users are English speakers. According to the news site Politico on Monday, just 6% of Arabic-language hate content was detected on Instagram before it made its way on to the platform.Haugen told Congress on 5 October that Facebook’s use of engagement-based ranking – where the platform ranks a piece of content, and whether to put it in front of users, on the amount of interactions it gets off people – was endangering lives. “Facebook … knows, they have admitted in public, that engagement-based ranking is dangerous without integrity and security systems, but then not rolled out those integrity and security systems to most of the languages in the world. And that’s what is causing things like ethnic violence in Ethiopia,” she said.Divisive algorithm changesIn 2018 Facebook changed the way it tailored content for users of its news feed feature, a key part of people’s experience of the platform. The emphasis on boosting “meaningful social interactions” between friends and family meant that the feed leant towards reshared material, which was often misinformed and toxic. “Misinformation, toxicity and violent content are inordinately prevalent among reshares,” said internal research. Facebook said it had an integrity team that was tackling the problematic content “as efficiently as possible”.Tackling falsehoods about the US presidential electionThe New York Times reported that internal research showed how, at one point after the US presidential election last year, 10% of all US views of political material on Facebook – a very high proportion for the platform – were of posts alleging that Joe Biden’s victory was fraudulent. One internal review criticised attempts to tackle “Stop the Steal” groups spreading claims that the election was rigged. “Enforcement was piecemeal,” said the research. The revelations have reignited concerns about Facebook’s role in the 6 January riots.Facebook said: “The responsibility for the violence that occurred … lies with those who attacked our Capitol and those who encouraged them.” However, the WSJ has also reported that Facebook’s automated systems were taking down posts generating only an estimated 3-5% of total views of hate speech.Disgruntled Facebook staffWithin the files disclosed by Haugen are testimonies from dozens of Facebook employees frustrated by the company’s failure to either acknowledge the harms it generates, or to properly support efforts to mitigate or prevent those harms. “We are FB, not some naive startup. With the unprecedented resources we have, we should do better,” wrote one employee quoted by Politico in the wake of the 6 January attack on the US capitol.“Never forget the day Trump rode down the escalator in 2015, called for a ban on Muslims entering the US, we determined that it violated our policies, and yet we explicitly overrode the policy and didn’t take the video down,” wrote another. “There is a straight line that can be drawn from that day to today, one of the darkest days in the history of democracy … History will not judge us kindly.”Facebook is struggling to recruit young usersA section of a complaint filed by Haugen’s lawyers with the US financial watchdog refers to young users in “more developed economies” using Facebook less. This is a problem for a company that relies on advertising for its income because young users, with unformed spending habits, can be lucrative to marketers. The complaint quotes an internal document stating that Facebook’s daily teenage and young adult (18-24) users have “been in decline since 2012-13” and “only users 25 and above are increasing their use of Facebook”. Further research reveals “engagement is declining for teens in most western, and several non-western, countries”.Haugen said engagement was a key metric for Facebook, because it meant users spent longer on the platform, which in turn appealed to advertisers who targeted users with adverts that accounted for $84bn (£62bn) of the company’s $86bn annual revenue. On Monday, Bloomberg said “time spent” for US teenagers on Facebook was down 16% year-on-year, and that young adults in the US were also spending 5% less time on the platform.Facebook is built for divisive contentOn Monday the NYT reported an internal memo warning that Facebook’s “core product mechanics”, or its basic workings, had let hate speech and misinformation grow on the platform. The memo added that the basic functions of Facebook were “not neutral”. “We also have compelling evidence that our core product mechanics, such as vitality, recommendations and optimising for engagement, are a significant part of why these types of speech flourish on the platform,” said the 2019 memo.A Facebook spokesperson said: “At the heart of these stories is a premise which is false. Yes, we are a business and we make profit, but the idea that we do so at the expense of people’s safety or wellbeing misunderstands where our own commercial interests lie. The truth is we have invested $13bn and have over 40,000 people to do one job: keep people safe on Facebook.”Facebook avoids confrontations with US politicians and rightwing news organisationsA document seen by the Financial Times showed a Facebook employee claiming Facebook’s public policy team blocked decisions to take down posts “when they see that they could harm powerful political actors”. The document said: “In multiple cases the final judgment about whether a prominent post violates a certain written policy are made by senior executives, sometimes Mark Zuckerberg.” The memo said moves to take down content by repeat offenders against Facebook’s guidelines, such as rightwing publishers, were often reversed because the publishers might retaliate. The wave of stories on Monday were based on disclosures made to the Securities and Exchange Commission – the US financial watchdog – and provided to Congress in redacted form by Haugen’s legal counsel. The redacted versions were obtained by a consortium of news organisations including the NYT, Politico and Bloomberg.TopicsFacebookSocial mediaSocial networkingUS Capitol attackUS politicsDigital mediaanalysisReuse this content More

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      Facebook boss ‘not willing to protect public from harm’

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      The ObserverFacebookFacebook boss ‘not willing to protect public from harm’ Frances Haugen says chief executive has not shown any desire to shield users from the consequences of harmful content Dan MilmoSat 23 Oct 2021 21.02 EDTLast modified on Sun 24 Oct 2021 04.23 EDTThe Facebook whistleblower whose revelations have tipped the social media giant into crisis has launched a stinging new criticism of Mark Zuckerberg, saying he has not shown any readiness to protect the public from the harm his company is causing.Frances Haugen told the Observer that Facebook’s founder and chief executive had not displayed a desire to run the company in a way that shields the public from the consequences of harmful content.Her intervention came as pressure mounted on the near-$1tn (£730bn) business following a fresh wave of revelations based on documents leaked by Haugen, a former Facebook employee. The New York Times reported that workers had repeatedly warned that Facebook was being flooded with false claims about the 2020 presidential election result being fraudulent and believed the company should have done more to tackle it.Frances Haugen: ‘I never wanted to be a whistleblower. But lives were in danger’Read moreHaugen, who appears before MPs and peers in Westminster on Monday, said Zuckerberg, who controls the business via a majority of its voting shares, has not shown any willingness to protect the public.“Right now, Mark is unaccountable. He has all the control. He has no oversight, and he has not demonstrated that he is willing to govern the company at the level that is necessary for public safety.”She added that giving all shareholders an equal say in the running of the company would result in changes at the top. “I believe in shareholder rights and the shareholders, or shareholders minus Mark, have been asking for years for one share one vote. And the reason for that is, I am pretty sure the shareholders would choose other leadership if they had an option.”Haugen, who quit as a Facebook product manager in May, said she had leaked tens of thousand of documents to the Wall Street Journal and to Congress because she had realised that the company would not change otherwise.She said: “There are great companies that have done major cultural changes. Apple did a major cultural change; Microsoft did a major cultural change. Facebook can change too. They just have to get the will.”This weekend, a consortium of US news organisations released a fresh wave of stories based on the Haugen documents. The New York Times reported that internal research showed how, at one point after the US presidential election last year, 10% of all US views of political material on Facebook – a very high proportion for Facebook – were of posts falsely alleging that Joe Biden’s victory was fraudulent. One internal review criticised attempts to tackle Stop the Steal groups spreading claims on the platform that the election was rigged. “Enforcement was piecemeal,” said the research.The revelations have reignited concerns about Facebook’s role in the 6 January riots, in which a mob seeking to overturn the election result stormed the Capitol in Washington. The New York Times added that some of the reporting for the story was based on documents not released by Haugen.A Facebook spokesperson said: “At the heart of these stories is a premise which is false. Yes, we’re a business and we make profit, but the idea that we do so at the expense of people’s safety or wellbeing misunderstands where our commercial interests lie. The truth is we’ve invested $13bn and have over 40,000 people to do one job: keep people safe on Facebook.”Facebook’s vice-president of integrity, Guy Rosen, said the company had put in place multiple measures to protect the public during and after the election and that “responsibility for the [6 January] insurrection lies with those who broke the law during the attack and those who incited them”.It was also reported on Friday that a new Facebook whistleblower had come forward and, like Haugen, had filed a complaint to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the US financial regulator, alleging that the company declined to enforce safety rules for fear of angering Donald Trump or impacting Facebook’s growth.Haugen will testify in person on Monday to the joint committee scrutinising the draft online safety bill, which would impose a duty of care on social media companies to protect users from harmful content, and allow the communications regulator, Ofcom, to fine those who breach this. The maximum fine is 10% of global turnover, so in the case of Facebook, this could run into billions of pounds. Facebook, whose services also include Instagram and WhatsApp, has 2.8 billion daily users and generated an income last year of $86bn.As well as issuing detailed rebuttals of Haugen’s revelations, Facebook is reportedly planning a major change that would attempt to put some distance between the company and its main platform. Zuckerberg could announce a rebranding of Facebook’s corporate identity on Thursday, according to a report that said the company is keen to emphasise its future as a player in the “metaverse”, a digital world in which people interact and lead their social and professional lives virtually.Haugen said Facebook must be compelled by all regulators to be more transparent with the information at its disposal internally, as detailed in her document leaks. She said one key reform would be to set up a formal structure whereby regulators could demand reports from Facebook on any problem that they identify.“Let’s imagine there was a brand of car that was having five times as many car accidents as other cars. We wouldn’t accept that car company saying, ‘this is really hard, we are trying our best, we are sorry, we are trying to do better in the future’. We would never accept that as an answer and we are hearing that from Facebook all the time. There needs to be an avenue where we can escalate a concern and they actually have to give us a response.”TopicsFacebookThe ObserverSocial networkingMark ZuckerbergUS elections 2020US CongressUS politicsReuse this content More