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      Facebook is pretending it cares how its platform affects the world | Siva Vaidhyanathan

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      The world is a lot better off without Donald Trump as president of the United States. And Facebook is a lot more peaceful without Trump’s unhinged calls for vengeance against his political opponents and fabricated tales of voter fraud echoing across the platform. What’s more, the world is a lot better off now that Trump can’t use Facebook to execute his plans.The Facebook Oversight Board, a company-selected team of free speech experts, ruled on Wednesday that while, based on Trump’s statements, the company was justified in banning Trump for some period of time, doing so indefinitely meant the company was treating Trump differently than it does other users and other world leaders. The board kicked the decision back to Facebook, meaning that this saga is far from over.“In applying a vague, standardless penalty and then referring this case to the board to resolve, Facebook seeks to avoid its responsibilities,” the 20-member board ruled. “The board declines Facebook’s request and insists that Facebook apply and justify a defined penalty.” The board then demanded that Facebook come up with a clearer and more fair penalty within six months.The board deliberated for four months after Facebook itself appealed its own January ban of Trump. Trump had praised and encouraged the invasion of the US Capitol building on 6 January when five people died in the violence, in what was a clear assault not only on the process of legitimately selecting Trump’s successor but on American democracy itself.In doing so, the board not only came to the most obvious short-term decision, it exposed the limits of its utility. Instead of considering more important questions about the role Facebook plays in politics and political violence around the world, or about how Facebook amplifies some messages and stifles others, or – crucially, in the case of Trump – how a political figure or party exploits Facebook’s features to degrade democracy or exact violence, the board took on the narrowest of questions: the regulation of particular expressions.The decision to ban Trump and his pages in January was a significant reversal of company policy. For years Facebook had treated Trump gingerly, scared of blowback from Republican legislators and the Trump administration itself. Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s CEO, had also for years extolled the platform’s alleged neutrality when it came to controversial speech, going so far, at one point, as to defend the policy of letting Holocaust deniers promote their expressions on Facebook. Clearly Facebook executives considered not only the gravity of the assaults of 6 January, but the fact that Trump would only be president for three more weeks and that Republicans had lost control of the US Senate. It was a safe and almost obvious decision to quiet Trump.The oversight board content director, Eli Sugarman, stated on Twitter that the indefinite penalty, issued without standards by which Trump could correct his behavior and restore his status, was quite different from how Facebook handled misinformation about Covid-19 in March from the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro. Facebook froze Maduro’s page for 30 days and then left it up as “read-only,” limiting posting.“This penalty is novel and smacks of political expediency,” Sugarman wrote about the indefinite banning of Trump, compared to the limited penalty on Maduro.The problem is, Trump is almost novel – or at least he is among a select class of want-to-be tyrants capable of stoking massive violence and undermining democracy with years of corrosive messages. Maduro is no Trump. Comparing the reach and influence of Maduro to Trump makes no sense. And perhaps Facebook made a mistake by making Maduro’s penalty too short and light.Trump’s strategy of fully leveraging Facebook for propaganda, fundraising, organization, and stoking violence against opponents was mastered in 2015 by the leader of the Bharatiya Janata party in India, the current prime minister, Narendra Modi. It was repeated in early 2016 by Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines and Jair Bolsonaro used it in Brazil. Modi, Duterte and Bolsonaro are still active on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. The board has no power to insist that Facebook now treat those leaders like they did Trump. The board may only rule on accounts and content that Facebook decided to ban.Most significantly, the board did not consider the macro effect of Trump on Facebook, on the US, or on democracy. The board is not designed to. The board framed this question as one of expression, as if expression is the only consideration for a company like Facebook. The board was meant to ignore the ways Facebook actually works in the world and the ways some of its most influential users actually use Facebook.The reality is that Trump used Facebook most effectively as an organizing and fundraising tool. Trump’s entire political organization depended on Facebook from the start. Through Facebook, Trump built a fundraising base, recruited volunteers, filled his rallies with supporters and targeted advertisements to small slices of potential voters. Facebook is how Trump prevailed in 2016. Only the fact that Trump failed spectacularly as president to keep the US healthy and prosperous kept him from being re-elected in 2020.Even though he is no longer president and may not ever run for office again, Trump has the means and motivation to expand his political machine. Perhaps it would be to maintain his influence in the Republican party. Perhaps it would support some of his children or their spouses in their political campaigns to come.We should not expect consistency from Facebook going forward … Ultimately, Facebook is too big and too complicatedThe oversight board is committed to rule-based deliberation. It seeks consistency and predictability from Facebook. But Facebook is facing a series of unique challenges, very few of which are like the others. Rule-based deliberation forces the board to imagine that world leaders are somehow the same or even in the same situations. It also assumes that language works the same way in different contexts. Overall, it makes the board focus on the micro – the expression itself – not on the macro effects over time of a leader’s full activity on Facebook.Even comparing Modi, who has been pressuring Facebook to scrub criticisms of his government from the platform, to Trump, who has not and cannot, has its limitations. Facebook has so far failed to take Modi seriously as a threat to the lives and health of both people and democracy. But then again, India is Facebook’s largest market and Modi is close to both Zuckerberg and the chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg.We should not expect consistency from Facebook going forward. We should not even demand it. Ultimately, Facebook is too big and too complicated. And so is the real world. Any attempt to change Facebook for the better to bolster the fate of democracy must come with a full acknowledgment that whether one account is up or down or one post is deleted or not does not matter that much. The oversight board is a weak attempt by Facebook to look as if it takes seriously its effects on the world. We should not give it that much credit. More

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      in US Politics

      The inside story of how we reached the Facebook-Trump verdict | Alan Rusbridger

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      As so often is the case, Donald Trump gets to the heart of the problem. On 6 January, he was the president of the United States: probably the most powerful man in the world. He should be free to speak his mind, and voters should be free to listen. But he was also a habitual liar who, by the end of his term, had edged into repudiating the very democracy that had elevated him.And then came his inflammatory words on that day, uttered even as rioters were breaking their way into the heart of US democracy. His words had a veneer of restraint – “We have to have peace, so go home.” But his statements were laced with lies, along with praise for the mob who terrorised lawmakers as they sought to confirm Biden as Trump’s successor – “We love you, you’re very special … great patriots … remember this day for ever.”At 5.41pm and 6.15pm that day, Facebook removed two posts from Trump. The following day the company banned Trump from its platform indefinitely. Around the same day, Twitter also moved to ban the president – permanently.So there was the problem that Donald Trump embodied – in a country whose commitment to free speech is baked into its core. The president might be a bitterly polarising figure, but surely he has a right to be heard – and for voters to be free to make up their own minds?Facebook’s decision to the contrary would spark passionate debate within the United States. But it had a wider resonance. For how much longer would giant social media platforms act as an amplification system for any number of despots around the world. Would they, too, be banned?The classic defence of free expression is that good speech defeats bad speech. Political speech – in some views – should be the most protected speech. It is vital we know who our leaders are. We have a right – surely? – to know if they are crooks, liars or demagogues.On 7 January Facebook decided: no longer. And now the Facebook oversight board, of which I am a member, has published its own verdict on the decision: Facebook was both right and wrong. Right to remove his 6 January words and right, the following day, to ban the president from the platform. But wrong to ban him “indefinitely”.The key word is “indefinitely” – if only because Facebook’s own policies do not appear to permit it. The oversight board (OSB) judgment doesn’t mince its words: “In applying a vague, standardless penalty and then referring this case to the board to resolve, Facebook seeks to avoid its responsibilities. The board declines Facebook’s request and insists that Facebook apply and justify a defined penalty.” Ball squarely back in Facebook’s court.What Facebook has to do now – in our judgment, which the company is bound to implement – is to re-examine the arbitrary penalty it imposed on 7 January. It should take account of the gravity of the violation and the prospect of future harm.The case is the most prominent the OSB has decided since it was established as an independent entity and will inevitably focus more attention on its work. Why is such a body thought necessary?But this 38-page text is, I hope, a serious contribution to thinking about free speech in an age of chaosLet’s assume we might agree that it’s a bad thing for one person, Mark Zuckerberg, to be in charge of the rules of speech for 2 billion or more people. He is clearly a wonderfully talented engineer – but nothing in his background suggests he is equipped to think deeply about the complexities involved in free expression.Maybe most people who have studied the behaviour of governments towards publishers and newspapers over 300 years might also agree that politicians are not the best people to be trusted with individual decisions about who gets to say what.Into the void between those two polarities has stepped the OSB. At the moment we’re 19 individuals with backgrounds in journalism, law, academia and human rights: by the end of 2021 we hope to be nearer 40.Are we completely independent from Facebook? It certainly feels that way. It’s true that Facebook was involved in selecting the first 20 members, but once the board reaches its full complement, we decide who our future colleagues will be. Since a few early meetings to understand Facebook processes around moderation and similar matters we have had nothing to do with the company.We have our own board of distinguished trustees – again, free of any influence from Facebook. From what I’ve seen of my colleagues so far they’re an odd bunch to have picked if you were in search of a quiet life.The Trump decision was reached through the processes we’ve devised ourselves. A panel of five – with a good spread of regional backgrounds – did the initial heavy lifting, including sifting through more than 9,000 responses from the public.The wider board fed in its own views. We looked at Facebook’s own values – what they call voice, safety and dignity – as well as its content policies and community standards. But we also apply an international human rights lens in trying to balance freedom of expression with possible harms.In the Trump case we looked at the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs), which establish a voluntary framework for the human rights responsibilities of private businesses. We also considered the right to freedom of expression set out in articles 19 and 20 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) – as well as the qualifying articles to do with the rights to life, security of person, non-discrimination, participation in public affairs and so on.We also considered the 2013 Rabat Plan of Action, which attempts to identify and control hate speech online. We took into account a submission sent on behalf of Trump himself and sent Facebook 46 questions. They answered 37 fully, and two partially.And then we debated, and argued – virtually/verbally and in writing. A number of drafts were circulated, with most board members pitching in with tweaks, challenges, corrections and disagreements. Gradually, a consensus developed – resulting in a closely argued 38-page decision which openly reflects the majority and minority opinions.In addition to our ruling about the original and “indefinite” bans, we’ve sent Facebook a number of policy advisory statements. One of these concentrates on the question of how social media platforms should deal with “influential users” (a more useful conceit than “political leaders”).Speed is clearly of the essence where potentially harmful speech is involved. While it’s important to protect the rights of people to hear political speech, “if the head of state or high government official has repeatedly posted messages that pose a risk of harm under international human rights norms, Facebook should suspend the account for a determinate period sufficient to protect against imminent harm”.As in previous judgments, we are critical of a lack of clarity in some of Facebook’s own rules, together with insufficient transparency about how they’re enforced. We would like to see Facebook carry out a comprehensive review of its potential contribution to the narrative around electoral fraud and in the exacerbated tensions that culminated in the violence on 6 January.And then this: “This should be an open reflection on the design and policy choices that Facebook has made that may enable its platform to be abused.” Which many people will read as not-so-coded reference to what is shorthanded as The Algorithm.Social media is still in its infancy. Among the many thorny issues we periodically discuss as a board is, what is this thing we’re regulating? The existing language – “platform”, “publisher”, “public square” – doesn’t adequately describe these new entities.Most of the suggested forms of more interventionist regulation stub their toes on the sheer novelty of this infant space for the unprecedented mass exchange of views.The OSB is also taking its first steps. The Trump judgment cannot possibly satisfy everyone. But this 38-page text is, I hope, a serious contribution to thinking about how to handle free speech in an age of information chaos. More

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      in US Politics

      Facebook fudge potentially lets Trump live to lie another day

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      It was not so much “Release the Kraken!” as “please tell the Kraken to pace around the room a few more times while we think about it”.Facebook’s oversight board ruled that Donald Trump should remain banned from the platform for incendiary posts on the day of the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol. But it also told the company that its “vague, standardless penalty” should be reviewed within six months.The former president has made a career of portraying defeats as victories, bankruptcies as financial successes, the 2020 election as an epic win that was stolen. Facebook’s fudge will again allow him to have it both ways.In the short term, the continued ban will feed the rightwing narrative of “cancel culture” and the perception that both mainstream media and social media censor conservative voices. Trump is the master of the politics of grievance and victimhood, constantly telling his supporters that “they” are taking away “your voice”.Now he has more ammunition. It is surely no coincidence that on Wednesday, he launched a glorified blog in which his statements have convenient tabs for users to post to Facebook and Twitter. His tirades against Facebook might soon be appearing all over a Facebook page near you.The announcement will also empower his conservative allies to cast big tech companies as the enemy of free speech. Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, told Fox News: “It’s a sad day for Facebook because I can tell you a number of members of Congress are now looking at: do they break up Facebook? Do they make sure that they don’t have a monopoly?”The Republican senator Josh Hawley, an arch critic of Silicon Valley, tweeted that the decision is “a real life example of the tyranny of #BigTech”, adding: “That’s what monopolies do. Break them up.”But in the longer term, the quasi-independent board’s quasi-ruling leaves open the door for Trump to return to Facebook in plenty of time for the 2024 presidential election, whether as candidate or kingmaker.At first glance, this seems less significant than a return to Twitter, from which he is also barred. Twitter was always his favourite, the Ivanka to Facebook’s Eric, perhaps because its 280-character limit was better suited to his famously short attention span. His tweets, rather than his Facebook posts, generated headlines on cable TV and in newspapers.But Facebook was arguably a more important engine of his election campaigns. It was a tool to raise money, mobilise his supporters and spread disinformation about his opponents. According to the Axios website, Trump spent about $160m on Facebook ads in 2020, compared with Joe Biden’s $117m.The company’s ultimate decision on whether to allow him a comeback therefore carries high stakes. It is worth remembering what the ban was about in the first place. On 6 January, as rioters stormed the Capitol threatening to hang Vice-President Mike Pence, Trump wrote on Facebook: “We love you. You’re very special” and “great patriots” and “remember this day forever”.Just this week, Trump was still harping on the election, falsely asserting: “The Fraudulent Presidential Election of 2020 will be, from this day forth, known as THE BIG LIE!” This took the form of an emailed press release that journalists could mostly ignore. But what if he had posted it on Facebook, where it could spread like wildfire?Even without Trump’s presence, such conspiracy theories continue to thrive on the platform, helping to fuel Republican efforts across the country to pass laws that make voting harder. Trump’s ban from social media risks an out-of-sight, out-of-mind complacency, an assumption that now Biden is in the White House, America can let its guard down.Columnist Thomas Friedman told CNN this week: “There’s a sense out there that everything’s OK. Everything is not OK. Our democracy today is as threatened as at any time.”Trump’s national relevance has ebbed away with shocking speed since he left office on 20 January. The Facebook ruling, while prolonging that trend, will also help maintain the comforting illusion that America has achieved herd immunity against his Big Lie. Unfortunately, you cannot kill an idea, even an untrue one; you have to learn to live with it. More

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      Facebook ruling on Trump renews criticism of oversight board

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      Facebook’s oversight board on Wednesday ruled that Donald Trump’s Facebook account should not be reinstated. But it stopped short of making a final decision, saying Facebook itself must decide what to do with the former president’s account. The move has deepened questions over the oversight board’s effectiveness.Trump has been exiled from the platform since January over posts in which he appeared to encourage the rioters who stormed the US Capitol. Trump petitioned Facebook to reinstate his account, and the social media giant punted a decision on his fate to the oversight board, which has now punted the decision right back to Facebook.The ruling announced on Wednesday was watched closely by tech critics and advocates, marking one of the first times such a large tech platform has publicly made a crucial, public decision regarding who gets to use its platform to speak.Activists who had discouraged Facebook from allowing the return of the president say the announcement underscores failures of the oversight board, a regulatory group that was formed in 2020 to make decisions independent of Facebook’s corporate leadership. “Instead of addressing the core problems in its platform, [Facebook] exploited this fragile moment in our society in order to sell us the fiction of this oversight group,” said Angelo Carusone, president and CEO of Media Matters for America. “Don’t buy it. Now, they’re kicking the can down the road again.“Unless Facebook permanently bans Trump immediately, we will be having this same dramatic sideshow in six months from now,” he added.Activists have said Facebook has a responsibility to ban Trump, whose activity on the platform – from lies about the election to calls for violence against peaceful protesters – they say is dangerous to democracy. In addition to the Capitol riot posts that led to the ban, Trump made hundreds of false statements about Covid-19 and other issues, analyses show.In an analysis of Donald Trump’s posts between 1 January 2020, and 6 January 2021 when he was banned from the platform, the non-profit advocacy group Media Matters for America found that Trump pushed misinformation about Covid-19 and election fraud or violent rhetoric attacking his critics in more than 1,400 separate posts – more than a quarter of his total posts during that period.The scale of Trump’s coronavirus misinformation makes the decision to remove him particularly important at this moment in the pandemic, said Jessica J González, the co-chief executive officer of the non-profit anti-hate speech organization Free Press.“Given Trump’s history of spreading pandemic disinformation, it’s particularly crucial to deny him a megaphone at a time when we’re still struggling to contain the virus and increase vaccinations.”The oversight board includes high-profile members, such as the former Danish prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the Columbia law professor Jamal Greene and the former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger.The Real Oversight Board, a group of activists formed as a critique of Facebook’s oversight board, said members of Facebook’s board should step down from the group “for their own dignity”.“What is the point of the oversight board?” the activist group said. “This is a Facebook-funded, Facebook-appointed body that has no legitimacy to make real decisions. Facebook’s attempt to divert attention from its fundamental failure to take responsibility for what’s on its own platform has itself failed.”The oversight board before Wednesday’s decision had made a handful of smaller, less high-profile choices. Facebook has repeatedly said it allows posts from influential users like politicians to remain online even if they violate policy because of their newsworthiness. But the oversight board said Facebook should “publicly explain the rules that it uses when it imposes account-level sanctions against influential users”.“Heads of state and other high officials of government can have a greater power to cause harm than other people,” the board said in its explanation of the decision. “If a head of state or high government official has repeatedly posted messages that pose a risk of harm under international human rights norms, Facebook should suspend the account for a period sufficient to protect against imminent harm. Suspension periods should be long enough to deter misconduct and may, in appropriate cases, include account or page deletion.”Activists have pointed out other platforms, including Twitter and Snapchat, banned the former president outright without taking such pains to explain themselves. González said that the oversight board’s decision announced on Wednesday does not address many of the issues activists have brought up regarding hate speech and misinformation on Facebook.“Mark Zuckerberg designed the oversight board to deflect attention from the structural rot at the heart of Facebook’s hate-and-lie-for-profit business model,” she said. “Facebook’s content moderation efforts are dysfunctional by design. The tech giant earns revenues by engaging people in hate.”González added that what is truly needed to rein in Facebook’s issues with hate speech is action from legislators – a measure that seems inevitable as executives have faced a record number of hearings in Congress over the past year.“Until national and global institutions rein in Facebook, the company will continue to profit from spreading inflammatory political rhetoric and disinformation that target communities confronting oppression across the country and around the world,” González said. More

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      200 years of US coverage: how the Guardian found its feet stateside

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      When George W Bush launched an illegal invasion of Iraq in a vain search for weapons of mass destruction, there was no shortage of cheerleaders in the US media.The Guardian’s trenchant criticism of the war would have had little impact across the Atlantic were it not for the power of the internet to demolish national boundaries. As it was, Americans paid attention – in their millions.“A host of political bloggers have pointed to the British media’s more sceptical coverage of the run-up to the Iraq war and wondered why American reporters can’t be more impertinent,” noted the Columbia Journalism Review in 2007. “These bloggers regularly link to stories in the Guardian, the Independent, and the Times, driving waves of US traffic to their websites.”Suddenly, a third of the Guardian’s readers were in North America, seemingly attracted by its lack of deference to authority, its global outlook at a moment when many US newspapers were cutting costs and turning inward, and its informal tone and irreverent wit.The breakthrough hinted at a potential to become a force in the US in ways that would have been unimaginable to the paper’s founders in Manchester 200 years ago.It was not plain sailing. The Guardian lacked the financial muscle for an immediate and aggressive expansion into the US. An attempt to buy the website domain name guardian.com foundered when Guardian Industries, a company in Auburn Hills, Michigan, refused to sell.Still, the news organisation’s free, open-access model and liberal values built a loyal audience, and its focus on the national security state, racial injustice, voting rights and environmental protections struck a chord.Sidney Blumenthal, a former White House official who became familiar with the paper in the 1980s and continues to write for it, says: “The Guardian was within my conception of what journalism was and should be – and it was not like the New York Times. It was more stylish, it took more chances, it was more analytical.”By the end of 2020, the website had a record 116 million unique US browsers, with a daily average of 5.8 million. It has never built a paywall, but after years of boom-bust cycles, reader contributions have turned it into a profitable business in the US.But it has been a long and sometimes rocky road to get where it is today, and the paper has not always embodied the values that strike a chord with progressive Americans. For all the values it espouses today, the Guardian has sometimes found itself on the wrong side of history.Two centuries of transatlantic reportingThe Manchester Guardian was founded in 1821 by the journalist John Edward Taylor, the son of a cotton merchant, with financial backing from cotton and textile traders – some of whom would almost certainly have traded with cotton plantations that used enslaved labour.(Last year, as the Black Lives Matter movement forced a worldwide reckoning over historical injustices, the Scott Trust commissioned independent researchers to investigate any potential links between the Guardian and the transatlantic slave trade.)As such, in the early decades, the paper often aligned its views with those of “big cotton”, repeatedly siding with mills and manufacturers against workers refusing to handle cotton picked by enslaved people during the American civil war.The paper had always denounced slavery, but was unconvinced that victory for the north would end it. It ran hostile editorials about Abraham Lincoln, dismissing his time in office as “a series of acts abhorrent to every true notion of constitutional right and human liberty”.As it had long supported self-determination movements around the world, it also believed that the south had every right to establish independence.The Guardian of today took shape when Taylor’s nephew, CP Scott, took over in 1872 at the age of 25. Committed to social justice, his 57-year editorship transformed it into a standard-bearer for independent liberal journalism. Scott had a private meeting with Woodrow Wilson when the US president visited Manchester in 1918.But news from the US was still sporadic. Years passed with no regular correspondent there at all. For the first half of the 20th century, the paper relied on busy American journalists already working for US titles, who were discouraged from filing too often because of the cost of cables. It wasn’t until after the second world war that the Guardian really began to cover the US properly.Alistair Cooke’s reporting on the founding conference of the United Nations in San Francisco helped land him a job as a full-time correspondent in New York. But in the 1960s, Cooke’s relationship with his counterpart in Washington, the Canadian Max Freedman, was so strained that they never spoke, and editorial planning had be done through the Manchester office more than 3,000 miles away. Freedman, who worked from a room in the Washington Post office, quit the Guardian suddenly in 1963, leaving the biggest story of the decade to fall to Cooke.He had been invited to cover John F Kennedy’s trip to Dallas, Texas, by a member of White House staff, but having taken 82 flights in just over two months, turned down the offer. Although this denied him the historic dateline, it allowed him to file faster than reporters on the spot who, 13 cars behind Kennedy, were taken to a separate location with no idea of what happened.Cooke’s daughter, Susan Cooke Kittredge, who was 14 at the time, recalls: “We were all discharged from school early and my memory of New York City is that there was no sound – that’s probably because there was so much going on in my head. When I walked into the apartment, it was the opposite of that: we had two televisions, which was unusual at the time, and late into the night I monitored two stations and Daddy had one in his study.“I remember so clearly – the way one has important memories embedded in the brain – the phones ringing all the time. I have a vision of Daddy being in his bathrobe and it was maybe 10.30 at night and the phone rang and he stood there and screamed into the telephone: ‘We are doing the best we can!’” Nearly five years later, Cooke was in the room when Kennedy’s brother, Bobby, was shot and killed in Los Angeles while running for president and filed a report from the scene. “He was completely stunned by the experience,” his daughter says. “He hadn’t taken his typewriter even and had to file copy on a piece of scratch paper.”Hammering a typewriter in his 15th-floor apartment overlooking New York’s Central Park, Cooke would hold his position until 1972 on a salary of $19,000 a year, covering a vast range of topics while also making TV programmes and the BBC radio series Letter from America. But he was challenged by the then Guardian editor, Alastair Hetherington, over whether he was giving too little coverage to race relations in the south. In the early 1960s the paper sent William Weatherby to cover the civil rights movement, and according to a New York Times obituary, he developed lifelong friendships with James Baldwin, Bayard Rustin and other major figures.Guardian reporters covered the twists and turns of the Watergate scandal that brought down Richard Nixon in the 1970s. Michael White, Washington correspondent from 1984 to 1988, witnessed the re-election of Ronald Reagan and his second term at the White House.“He had this knack of lighting up a room and you couldn’t dislike him because even when he was shot he made a joke,” says White, 75. “The difference between Reagan and [Donald] Trump was that Reagan appealed in important respects to the sunny side of human nature, and that’s quite important. You could get very cross and very scornful towards Reagan, but he was a hard man to hate.”A day after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, the paper’s front page carried the headline “A declaration of war” above a near-full-page photo of the twin towers in flames. A leader column urged the US to “keep cool”.
      An even greater unilateralism, even a growing siege mentality, is to be avoided at all costs. It would be a victory for the terrorists. Likewise, American overreaction, especially of the military variety, must be guarded against. The temptation right now is to make someone pay. And pay … and pay … and pay. Take a deep breath, America. Keep cool. And keep control. Guardian leader, 12 September 2001
      But there were moments of overreach. In 2004 the Guardian launched a campaign encouraging concerned non-American readers to lobby undecided voters in Clark County, Ohio, a swing state in the election between Bush and John Kerry. There was uproar over what many saw as foreign interference in American democracy long before disinformation was a twinkle in Vladimir Putin’s eye.“Blimey,” wrote the then features editor, Ian Katz. “I think I have an idea as to how Dr Frankenstein felt. By the beginning of this week, a quixotic idea dreamed up last month in a north London pub had morphed into a global media phenomenon complete with transatlantic outrage, harrumphing over journalistic ethics, grave political predictions – and thousands of people from every corner of the planet writing personal, passionate letters to voters in a tiny American district few outside Ohio had heard of 10 days ago.”In the end, Bush won Clark County by a bigger margin than he had in 2000, prompting speculation about a “Guardian effect” that backfired spectacularly. “Did Guardian turn Ohio to Bush?” pondered a BBC headline.But by this time a paradigm shift was taking place: the internet changed everything.By 2007 the Guardian’s online presence was pulling in about 5 milllion unique browsers a month in the US, prompting the launch of a dedicated US-based website. It was branded Guardian America, its headquarters were two blocks from the White House, and its founding editor, Michael Tomasky, was American.“In 2007 the idea of a British newspaper trying to become an American media outlet was new and strange and something that people couldn’t quite wrap their heads around,” says Tomasky. “I would say that in two years, the world had changed enough that it was no longer strange to people, and the Guardian – in addition to the Independent and others – was an acknowledged and accepted part of the media landscape.” In 2011, the site relaunched as Guardian US, this time from New York even as a succession of big scoops helped put it on the map. In 2010 it was among five newspapers worldwide to make public US diplomatic cables provided by Chelsea Manning, a US army intelligence analyst, to the whistleblower website WikiLeaks.In 2013 it published documents leaked by Edward Snowden detailing mass surveillance by the National Security Agency, a story that dominated news cycles and boosted its profile immeasurably. The Guardian and Washington Post shared a Pulitzer prize for public service.It also broke new ground by compiling a national database of people killed by police and telling the stories of more than 3,600 healthcare workers who died after contracting the coronavirus on the frontline.Today the Guardian has offices in New York, Washington and Oakland, California, and further correspondents elsewhere: a team of more than a hundred editorial and commercial staff that dwarfs most other British newspaper operations in the US.Its ever evolving insider-outsider viewpoint continues to resonate with readers such Debbie Twyman from Independence, Missouri. When she and her husband, Craig Whitney, a fellow teacher, taught civics and government, they set up a homespun website that included the Guardian in its list of reliable news sources.Twyman says: “You guys have really stepped up your coverage of issues in the US and, in particular, you’ve followed politics so closely over the last few years. Sometimes you guys scoop US papers; sometimes you get there before they do.“But sometimes you cover things that they aren’t even covering at all, and one of the reasons we put the Guardian link on our webpage is we want kids to have an international perspective. The Guardian’s a reliable, responsible, well-sourced newspaper. You’re trustworthy.” More

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      in US Politics

      Falun Gong-aligned media push fake news about Democrats and Chinese communists

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      US news outlets aligned with Falun Gong, a religious movement locked in a decades-long conflict with the Chinese state, have been increasingly successful in promoting conspiracy narratives about Democrats, election fraud and communists to the pro-Trump right in America.Experts say that in a future post-pandemic landscape, the cable news channel NTD, and especially the multimedia enterprise the Epoch Times, may amplify the efforts of Republicans to link Joe Biden and Democrats to the Chinese Communist party (CCP), and to harden US public opinion against China.According to Angelo Carusone, president and CEO of the media watchdog Media Matters for America, these outlets, and especially the Epoch Times, were always critical of China, and somewhat right-leaning, but were not commonly counted as problematic during the 2016 election as spreading falsehoods across social media platforms like Facebook.But in a telephone conversation, Carusone said Epoch Times pivoted hard from 2017 towards material which stoked conspiracy narratives, and began spending freely in order to make sure that their message was prominent on platforms like YouTube.“After social media sites moved against the fake news outlets, it left a gap,” Carusone said. “What Epoch Times did so well was to step right into that gap.” And, he says, they secured their niche by handing money to big tech platforms.After Epoch Times spent about $11m on Facebook ads in 2019, the platform banned them from advertising on the grounds that they had violated rules around transparency in political advertising. But the outlet simply took its business elsewhere: according to data from Pathmatics that was analyzed by Media MattersIn the year to date, Epoch Times has spent an estimated $930,000 in digital advertising promoting videos and desktop display ads. Over 95% of their spending was on YouTube.Through 2020 and into the early life of the Biden administration, Epoch Times and NTD alike promoted conspiracy theories related to the QAnon movement, the supposedly compromising international ties of Hunter Biden, and even sold merchandise outlining half-forgotten conspiracy theories such as “Uranium One”, which held that Hillary Clinton, as US secretary of state, engineered the sale of uranium deposits to Russian interests in return for donations to the Clinton Foundation.While US rightwing outlets like One America News and Newsmax have profited by supplying the seemingly bottomless appetite among the rightwing grassroots for material that depicts American politics as a tangle of elite conspiracies, Carusone says it is a mistake to view the Falung Gong-aligned outlets as normal media companies.The principal goal of Epoch Times – now publishing in 36 countries under the supervision of a network of non-profits – is not to generate profit, he says, but to mount a long and broad “influence operation”. And the goal of that influence operation, in turn, is “to foment anti-CCP sentiment”.By leveraging the deep partisan polarization in US politics, and by tapping into a long tradition of anticommunism on the American right, according to Carusone, the outlets have sought to link Biden and the Democratic party to radical leftist movements like antifa, and then publish “anything that ties them to CCP influence”, however spurious.He envisages the possibility that Republicans will cooperate with these outlets – who have also spread significant amounts of disinformation about the Covid-19 pandemic – to ask “what is Joe Biden going to do about China causing coronavirus?”Although there is no evidence of direct cooperation, they have already shown a willingness to echo anti-China messaging with the likes of the former Trump aide Steve Bannon and billionaire Chinese exile Guo Wengui, also known as Miles Kwok, who has financed Bannon’s activities through consulting contracts and donations.From as early as January 2020, Bannon and Kwok were attempting to spread a narrative alleging that the pandemic was caused by a Chinese bioweapon, both on Bannon’s radio program and on their shared media venture, G News. The Epoch Times followed that April with a documentary that repeated the bioweapon claims, and have taken further opportunities to allege, without basis, that China’s government started the pandemic deliberately.According to Carusone, such opportunistic retreading of existing conspiracy narratives is characteristic of these outlets. “They’re not drivers, they’re not weaving new conspiracy theories, they’re amplifying what’s already out there,” he said.This effort appears to be increasingly well-resourced. Although the financial arrangements of the many Epoch Times non-profits vary, the original Epoch Times Association Inc, headquartered in New York City, saw revenues and donations increase sharply every year between 2016 and 2019 according to IRS 990 declarations inspected by the Guardian. While in 2016, the association took in $3.9m in revenue, in 2019 they brought in $15.4m, and cleared $1.86m after salaries and expenses.Neither outlet has ever explicitly confirmed its links to Falun Gong, a religious organization which emerged from the so-called “qijong” movement, which teaches adherents to practice breathing, movement and meditation exercises. But former employees reportedly say that they are run by movement adherents, and that Falun Gong founder and leader, Li Hongzhi, and others in the movement’s hierarchy exercise a powerful influence over the outlets’ anti-China messaging.Alongside the English language outlets, Chinese language outlets and a dance troupe spread the group’s messages.Though Falun Gong emerged in China in the 1990s, its founder now lives in the US.The Epoch Times, which began as a print newspaper in 2000, has been a steadfast opponent of the CCP, which has persecuted Falun Gong and other, related qijong movement groups since the late 1990s.The newspaper was founded in Georgia by a Chinese-American Falun Gong adherent, John Tang, and a group of like-minded businessmen. Over the next half-decade it expanded internationally.Carusone says that the intensification of conspiracy messaging in the output of NTD and the Epoch Times, along with their embrace of Trumpism could make them more influential as the far right regroups in the coming months and heads towards the 2022 midterm elections.“There’s an incredible demand for a version of the world centered on one big villain.” he said. “Epoch Times provides that very simple narrative.” More

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      Are we ready for social media influencers shaping politics? | Joshua Citarella

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      Gen Z is the most online generation in history. They also have increasingly radical political views that aren’t always reflected in traditional media. It’s no surprise that online influencers – who run highly popular social media channels – are dominating political discourse in Gen Z’s online spaces.Young people’s politics are being shaped by popular YouTubers, livestreamers, podcasters and other influencer personalities, who debate political positions and educate viewers on what political engagement looks like. As audiences grow and watch times increase, the question inevitably arises: will the influencers of the burgeoning alt-media sphere become a new type of political organizer?At first glance, this might seem comically absurd. But in the past year, most universities, institutions and political organizations have transformed into Zoom meetings. Today, the gap between a college education and a Twitch stream has significantly narrowed. If you don’t speak during an online chapter meeting of the Democratic Socialists of America, can you really be sure you’re not listening to a podcast?There have been a number of recent events which further blur these distinctions. In January of 2021, Riley Grace Roshong, a Baltimore-based law student and YouTuber, livestreamed her testimony before the Maryland congress in support of House Bill 231, which would eliminate the “panic defense” laws, a legal strategy that allows defendants who attack or murder LGBTQ people to claim that the gender identity or sexual orientation of their victim caused them to enter into a gay or trans “panic”. Roshong researched and drafted her testimony in collaboration with key contributors from her community of followers during a Twitch stream. Roshong’s testimony was one in a chorus of local activists and organizations including FreeState Justice and the ACLU.Another high-water mark for influencers flexing their political muscle was the Georgia Senate runoff – a key race which would determine the outcome of the 2020 election, in particular whether Democrats would enjoy a majority in both houses of Congress. In December and January, Destiny, a professional gamer turned political commentator on Twitch, led one of the larger door-knocking campaigns of the election. Using his enormous fanbase and platform, the gamer managed to mobilize his followers to knock on an estimated 17,500-20,000 doors in Columbus, Georgia, with approximately 140 volunteers. By comparison, local groups like the Mijente Pac had 200 paid canvassers and the New Georgia Project was seeking 200-300 volunteers.These recent events seem to indicate something larger on the horizon. In each of these instances, influencers took a tiny bit of time out of their usual entertainment programming to make a few political asks before switching back to their regular content (influencers are in the business of making videos, after all). However, as online media encroach further into real-world politics, there is a mounting competitive pressure for content producers to get more politically involved. If you’re going to talk the talk, you’ve got to walk the walk. It’s not enough to sit home and criticize.It’s worth mentioning that the Proud Boys were founded by the Vice co-founder, comedian and former YouTuber Gavin McInnes in 2016. The broadcasters Cenk Uygur, of The Young Turks, and Kyle Kulinski, of Secular Talk, are among the co-founders of Justice Democrats in 2017. Just a few years before, it was difficult to imagine that online personalities could help to shape offline organizations.Most troublingly, the terrain of social media seems to definitively advantage rightwing politics. While conspiracy and disinformation circulates across the whole of the political spectrum, the far right is uniquely able to manifest offline in the form of gangs or stochastic violence. On the extreme end of this trajectory we find Tim Gionet (AKA Baked Alaska) livestreaming and taking selfies from inside the Capitol riot on 6 January 6. The attention economy incentivizes new and dangerous levels of violent spectacle.It’s worth theorizing how these forces could be harnessed for something other than conspicuous political stunts. What we know for sure, is that large online audiences, numbered in the hundreds of thousands, do not translate to the ballot box. In 2016, the civil rights activist and Twitter influencer DeRay Mckesson finished a Baltimore mayoral run with only 2.6% of the vote. In 2019, the rightwing YouTubers Carl Benjamin (AKA Sarkon of Akkad) and Mark Meechan (AKA Count Dankula), both ran for MEP, winning just 3.2% in England’s south-west and 1.9% in Scotland, respectively. In 2020, the Gen Z trucker turned TikTok star Joshua Collins earned less than 1% of the vote in Washington’s 10th district. If election outcomes were purely a product of follower counts then political parties would just recruit Kendall Jenner.The key difference between mainstream celebrities and niche influencers, is the potential for social media to form hyper-specific and hyper-dedicated communities. Viewers feel a strong connection to the content creators they follow and to the communities they participate in. These audiences yield higher than average conversion rates when called upon to take action. Today there are no casual fans – everything is a cult following. In most cases, these political influencer channels are unearthed over the course of months (or years) of exploring. Social media are forming accidental “pipelines” to political education and it’s time to start thinking about what these pipelines lead to.Fandoms are beginning to resemble political affiliations. Crowdfunding approximates membership dues. At their core, organizations are a list of names and addresses. Swap out newsletters for episodic content but the actionable items remain largely the same: voting endorsements and invitations to canvas. On an annual basis, it costs more to support a podcast than to join the DSA.Social atomization and economic precarity are sending increasing numbers of people out on to the web in search of answersClearly, magazines did not replace political parties and social media channels won’t either. But it does create room for something like an Upton Sinclair of the digital age. In an era defined by elite corruption and institutional failure, listener-funded counter-hegemonic narrators are thriving. Young viewers trust alt-media figures like Contrapoints because she doesn’t seem to work for the elites. Critical voices can only be trusted when they aren’t attached to big donors. Bloomberg couldn’t buy a successful meme while Bernie supporters made thousands for free.Social atomization and economic precarity are sending increasing numbers of people out on to the web in search of answers. But in the post-political era, most organizations have withered or dissolved. Perhaps members of generation Z are flocking to online fandoms because of the lack of real-world organizations. Further compounding this, is the repellent quality of activist culture which is largely out of touch with the needs of most people. Meanwhile, online communities are fun and cool. Until organization becomes a normal aspect of everyday life, we should expect for online communities to grow at comparatively faster rates.So what might these new influencer communities be good for? One indication could be novelty fundraising. In November of 2020, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, along with a team of other players, including the Canadian politician Jagmeet Singh, political streamers the Serfs and video game streamers including xQcOw, DisguisedToast and others, raised a combined $200,000 for eviction defense and food pantries while playing the popular online multiplayer game Among Us. But this particular model seems reminiscent of celebrity fundraisers in the cable TV era and could easily be repeated by the political establishment.On the nationalist right, political influencers have taken to forming their own parallel events to compete with establishment parties. Inaugurated in 2020, and now in its second year, Afpac, America First Political Action Conference, is an annual event, intended as an off-site alternative to the Conservative Political Action Conference, a Republican stronghold. Throughout 2019, this same group of young American nationalists coordinated to heckle and undermine public events including those which featured Donald Trump Jr and congressman Dan Crenshaw. Small hyper-dedicated groups are ideally suited for specific and targeted interventions.Influencers are not organizers. But they might be soon. Perhaps they require their own distinct category. Online communities might become a new type of crowdfunded special interest group or thinktank with a built-in spokesperson (like People’s Policy Project, founded by Matt Breunig in 2017). At the least, these overlapping fields are becoming more structurally similar. The key difference seems to be what the community members are asked to do. Soon, content producers might ask for much more.If fierce online competition is driving these channels to become politically active, this can be harnessed as effective advertising and recruitment into organized political life. It’s worth thinking about these emergent pipelines now, so that in 2028, we find ourselves surrounded by a new rank and file rather than sensationalist livestreaming from the barricades. More

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      Puente: binational, bilingual project aims to cover the border with nuance

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      Editor Bob Moore sits at his desk in El Paso, Texas, and turns up the volume on his Zoom meeting English-language channel, where a simultaneous interpreter helps him understand his Spanish-speaking counterpart, Rocío Gallegos, who also sits at her desk, across the border in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.It’s Monday, time for another editorial meeting at the first binational, bilingual border journalism project in the US – or maybe anywhere.Called “Puente,” or “bridge”, the newsgathering collaboration consists of seven digital, TV and radio outlets from the area. “We have long talked about El Paso and Ciudad Juárez as being one region,” said Moore, one of the project’s directors. “But this has never been true with journalism.”That has had consequences. “National media covers the border badly, with a distorted view that comes from what it means in the context of current political views,” said Moore, who was an editor at the El Paso Times for 25 years before one too many corporate-driven budget cuts drove him out of newspapers in 2017 and toward non-profit, digital news.With most national and international coverage, Moore said: “We lose the richness and nuance of the border.”The Puente Media Collaborative hopes to change that, and the project, only several months old, may have come about at just the right time, as the subject of immigration has once again centered national and international attention on the region.The idea came about during the pandemic, said Gallegos, when she talked to Moore about Covid restrictions on crossing the border that were stopping her from sending reporters to El Paso. “You can’t cross the border; I can’t either,” she remembers telling him. They began discussing collaborating on reporting.Gallegos had also led Juárez’s main newspaper, El Diario de Juárez, until 2018. She then became director at La Verdad, or The Truth, a digital outlet – mirroring Moore, who launched the website, El Paso Matters, in 2019.Their ideas on joining forces got a boost in October when their project proposal received $300,000 in funding plus technical support from Microsoft, as part of an initiative focused on supporting local journalism that includes outlets in Mississippi’s Delta region, Yakima, Washington, and Fresno, California – and aimed at helping counteract the loss of 2,100 newspapers in the last 15 years.Puente’s journalists recently released their first stories on the impact of Covid on the region, a year into living with the pandemic – including how border restrictions have affected drug trafficking, and what it means to tighten border crossing in a region that normally sees 50,000 people go back and forth for work and other reasons. There was also a story on how the two countries squandered opportunities to face Covid together.Next, Moore said, “we will be looking at immigration – through a different lens than most of the national media”. The newsgathering itself has been different, since reporters have been collaborating on sources and ideas, and gathering information in both languages. While a final decision hasn’t been reached, Moore thinks the upcoming stories on immigration may be written in Spanish, and translated into English.The collaboration has also led to sharing perspectives on how to frame stories. Gallegos pointed to a recent editorial planning meeting on the upcoming immigration stories. Shoe-leather reporting had already been done in both cities. Discussion turned to sending cameras from Channel 26, the local Univision affiliate and Puente partner, to federal government shelters where children who had crossed the border are being kept.“We were sensitive to what they had been through,” Gallegos said, adding that many were indigenous people who spoke neither Spanish nor English. “We wanted to make sure we didn’t victimize or traumatize them once again” with a camera crew, she said. The Mexican journalists “had a better grasp of what their lives are like”, said Moore. The camera crew agreed to approach the assignment with care.Kathleen Staudt, former professor of political science at the University of Texas, El Paso, and author of nine books on the border, said that she hopes the Puente Media Collaborative provides a lens from the other side of the border, since “too often Mexico is portrayed as the ‘other’” in English-language media.”Brenda de Anda-Swann, news director and 22-year veteran at the El Paso ABC affiliate KVIA – and part of Puente – said “the people who are part of this collaborative have worked on the border for a long, long time … We trust each other. This doesn’t feel unfamiliar, while at the same time it is new.”She said that her news station’s participation in the project will give the outlet “some time to sit back, explore how things work, why they’re happening” – without turning attention away from the news of the day, such as a recent dust storm.Working in collaboration with La Verdad “reflects who we are as a community”, she added. “Having newsrooms on both sides of the border is a perfect reflection of the community, on a personal, business and political level.”She hopes to see the project “bridging the communities through storytelling and information”, and that it serves to “provide best practices for other parts of the world”. More