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      in US Politics

      Kamala Harris and why politicians can’t resist Vogue (though it always ends in tears)

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      When Theresa May appeared in US Vogue in 2017, even her deliberately anodyne choice of a posh-end-of-the-high-street dress by British label LK Bennett did not prevent this newspaper calling the Annie Leibovitz shoot a “defining moment” which, “like Margaret Thatcher in the tank turret looking like a cross between Boudicca and Lawrence of Arabia … might easily become a signifier of all that is flawed in her prime ministerial style”. Michelle Obama’s bare upper arms appeared no fewer than three times on the cover of Vogue during her White House years, causing pearl-clutching uproar at the sight of her toned triceps.A political Vogue appearance is such a white-hot issue that it causes controversy even when it doesn’t happen. Donald Trump recently weighed in to complain about “elitist” Vogue having snubbed Melania, notable by her absence from the magazine over the past four years. Vice-president-elect Kamala Harris’s Vogue debut, in the February issue of the magazine’s US edition, is the latest in a long line of political covers to have caused a media storm. Sunday’s release on social media of the rather different newsstand and digital covers quickly fuelled a wave of criticism. Had Harris’s skin tone been “washed-out” by thoughtless or even culturally insensitive lighting? Was it disrespectful, on the newsstand cover, to present Harris wearing her battered Converse trainers, rather than giving her a stately makeover? Was Harris’s team led to believe that the more formal portrait in Michael Kors tailoring, apparently destined for digital editions, would appear on newsstands, too?Vogue has sprung to the defence of images that show Harris at “her casual best” in “styling choices that were her own”. Tyler Mitchell, who in 2018 became the first African American photographer to shoot a US Vogue cover, explains in an accompanying online article that a much-maligned pink-and-green backdrop was chosen to honour Harris’s sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, of which Mitchell’s aunt was also a member. Mitchell, who “grew up from a young age deeply understanding the rich history of these sororities and their significance … wanted the set design to pay homage to that history, to [Harris’] status as an AKA, and Black sororities and sisterhoods worldwide.”A Vogue appearance is rarely anything but controversial for women in politics, but the invitation remains apparently irresistible, nonetheless. To be a cover star – and especially for Vogue – is to be the avatar of a cultural moment. To have your image publicly displayed beneath that Vogue font is perhaps the closest any public figure will ever get to having their profile on a stamp or, while still living, their face on a banknote. And in an increasingly atomised media landscape, a Vogue cover is one of the few platforms with the cut-through to reach disparate audiences. It is shared on Instagram, discussed in newspapers, and on display at the supermarket checkout.When Hillary Clinton appeared on the cover of Vogue in 1998 it was in a floor-length velvet gown and pearl drop earrings, smiling beatifically from a stateroom banquette beside an urn spilling red roses. The letters of Vogue were spelt out – in gold – directly on top of the curlicued gilt frame of one of the wall’s oil paintings. The message was clear: a Vogue cover is as close to an official portrait as pop culture gets. Which is why the row around Vogue’s latest cover is not really about Mitchell’s lighting rig, or Harris’s shoes. Rather, these portraits are a lightning rod for a country grappling with a moment of cultural reckoning around gender, race and power.Harris’s stretchy black trousers are a little wrinkled around the knees, the kind of imperfection you might expect to have been smoothed out by a watchful assistantThe relaxed and smiling images were taken in the dizzy post-election relief of November, but landed online a few days after the storming of the Capitol had dialled the emotional tone of politics back up to febrile. This, perhaps, has left them out of step with the particular moment. In the more casual of the two portraits, Harris’s stretchy black trousers are a little wrinkled around the knees – just a tiny imperfection, but the kind that you might expect to have been smoothed out by a watchful assistant before the shutter clicked. Perhaps the informality was judged by the editorial team to chime better with the era of WFH dressing than slick tailoring. Perhaps it was intended to channel Harris’s now famous leggings-clad victory moment. (“We did it, Joe!”).Certainly, any likeness to the 2009 cover for Newsweek of Republican former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, posing in her gym gear, is unintentional. Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, who after a close relationship with the Obamas has been in self-imposed exile from the circles of political power during Trump’s presidency, will surely be looking to align herself as friend and ally of the incoming Democrat administration.The current British Vogue is more overtly political than ever before, and wears its activist heart on its cover – the magazine equivalent of its sleeve. Recent cover stars have included frontline workers and the Man United and England striker Marcus Rashford who, as one of the most high-profile public figures driving legislation for progressive social change, surely counts as a political figure – and the prime minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, who was featured among 15 Forces for Change on the August 2019 cover.British politicians, however, have been notable by their absence. And should a flattering invitation find its way to a Westminster in-tray, it should be approached with caution. A Vogue cover is always a moment, but not always a flattering one. More

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      in US Politics

      'I figured I'd give it a year': Arthur Sulzberger Jr on how the New York Times turned around

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      Where does the New York Times reside in the subconscious of news hounds across America? Paul Rudnick wrote this answer for a New York City mother played by Bette Middler in Coastal Elites on HBO this year:
      I love the Times. I feel like it’s my child, or my parent. Do you know what the Times means to a liberal Jewish woman like me? On the census, when it asks for religion, I don’t put Jewish. I put the New York Times. Which I have delivered. The real Times. The newsprint Times. I know I’m old-fashioned, but reading the Times online is like having sex with a robot. I mean, it’s cleaner and it’s faster but you can tell the difference. OK, I’ll just say it. The New York Times online is the New York Times for the gentiles.
      The former New Yorker editor Robert Gottlieb put it slightly differently to me, long ago: “The Times is in the same position as the Jews: it’s expected to behave better than everybody else.”For a hundred years, for better or worse, no institution has played a larger role in American culture and politics. And no corporation with comparable clout has been continuously controlled by a single family since 1896.This month, at 69, Arthur Sulzberger Jr will retire as company chairman, after decades of speculation that he would be the last Sulzberger to run the business.In 2005, a vicious profile in the New Yorker asked: “Can Arthur Sulzberger Jr save the Times – and himself?” A couple of years later, Vanity Fair declared that he had “steered his inheritance into a ditch”.As the New Yorker editor, David Remnick, put it to the Guardian this week: “As recently as five years ago, the biggest question was: “Is [Mike] Bloomberg going to own the Times or [Mexican billionaire] Carlos Slim?”And yet, 11 days from now, Sulzberger will defy almost every expectation except his own and hand over a healthy, thriving enterprise to his son AG Sulzberger, giving the fifth generation of the Ochs-Sulzbergers the rudder of the enterprise.“It’s a rare thing and a wonderful thing to see someone exit the stage on a note of real triumph,” Remnick observed.‘I realized change needed to happen’I’ve been a student of the Times ever since I wrote my first story as a 20-year-old student at Columbia, working as the paper’s college correspondent, a part-time post that launched the careers of many Times editors. I only wrote for the paper for eight years, five as a reporter on the metro staff. But the Times tends to enter the bones of everyone who works there, and a preoccupation with its peculiarities has been my hobby ever since.The first time I met Arthur Sulzberger Jr was at a party of budding journalists in Washington at the end of 1980. I can still see him striding into the room with a swagger, a huge smile and his infant son, AG, on his shoulders. Back then, the father was just a young reporter in the Times Washington bureau. But like almost everyone else, I assumed I was watching the next publisher – and the publisher after that.In a series of conversations this month, father and son offered plenty of evidence that a love for journalism can indeed be passed down through DNA. But they also insisted that what looks like old-fashioned primogeniture is actually a bit more complicated. Each told me he had never felt the slightest pressure to follow in his father’s footsteps – and neither decided he wanted to become the boss until he was a young adult.For Sulzberger Jr, the lightbulb came on when he went to work in the advertising department.“I figured I’d give it a year, I’d hate it, and I’d go back to the newsroom,” he said. But then he made his first big ad sale and “realized that I had just covered Johnny Apple’s liquor bill for a year!” (RW Apple Jr, a fabled political correspondent and London bureau chief, had the traditional journalist’s goal: to always submit the largest possible expense account.)“Suddenly it came to me that this was supporting the enterprise. This was the critical part. It was a real eye-opener for me.”“And your father was completely silent about whether he wanted you to succeed him?” I asked.“Oh yes, very much so. You don’t want to pressure somebody to do something they don’t want. Because in the end, if they get it and they don’t want it, that doesn’t help the institution or the individual. Right?”So Sulzberger Jr adopted the same strategy with his own son.“He did not ever push me to be his successor,” AG Sulzberger said. “He was always really consistent about me following my passions. But I made the mistake of having my first job out of college being a reporting gig.” It was at the Providence Journal, and he fell in love with it.“I would have been very happy to spend my career as a reporter or editor,” he continued. But when he was 33, Jill Abramson, then executive editor of the Times, asked him to write an innovation report about the newspaper’s future.“I realized how much change needed to happen at the Times and how essential that change was for the institution to continue to thrive,” he said. Suddenly, it felt like his “highest purpose was trying to make that change happen”.His father agreed: “I think that was his sort of eye-opening moment.”One secret to the Sulzbergers’ success is that each time power has been given to a new generation, predecessors have not become second-guessers. This is what has made it possible for the paper to change with the times.In the case of Arthur Sulzberger Jr, the first and biggest beneficiaries of that tradition were the Times’ lesbian and gay employees. During the regime of his father, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Abe Rosenthal, the top editor from the late 60s to the mid-80s, made it clear that the career of any gay employee would end as soon as they came out of the closet.When Arthur Sulzberger Jr became an assistant metropolitan editor, in the early 80s, he figured out who every gay employee was. Then he took each of them out to lunch, told them he knew they were gay, and promised this would have no effect on their career once Rosenthal had departed.“Until you said so,” David W Dunlap, then a metropolitan reporter, wrote years later, “I couldn’t have imagined how to reconcile my soul with my professional calling. Now suddenly there was a Sulzberger … cheerfully reassuring me I had nothing to worry about.”Indeed, as soon as Rosenthal was succeeded by Max Frankel as executive editor, the Times was transformed from the most homophobic to the most gay-friendly major institution in America.Articles of faithA big reason there was so much skepticism that the latest Sulzberger handoff would ever take place was the fate of almost every other major American publishing family of the last 40 years. The Binghams got rid of the Louisville Courier-Journal in 1986. The Taylors unloaded the Boston Globe in 1993 – to the Sulzbergers. The Chandlers of the Los Angeles Times sold their presses in 2000. The Grahams of the Washington Post hung on longer, but even they took $250m from Jeff Bezos in 2013.Sulzberger Jr insists he “just refused to to consider that kind of stuff”. Instead, as the internet ate away at the print advertising that had fuelled the business for so long, he unloaded hundreds of millions of dollars in assets.In 2007, nine TV stations went for $575m. In 2011, it was $143m for 16 regional newspapers – there had once been 35. The WQXR radio station went in two stages, AM and FM. In between came the toughest decision of all for the family, which drew much of its income from shares. In 2009, the Times suspended all dividend payments to shareholders.The Sulzbergers never flinched. But even all of that wasn’t enough. In 2009, Sulzberger Jr had to borrow $250m from Slim – at 14% interest.Four years before that, the paper had made its first effort to make subscription money off of its online edition, by putting some of its columnists behind a paywall in a program called Times Select. But after two years the company decided the loss of online revenue was more important than the gain in subscriptions, and the paywall was abandoned.That made the decision to resume a paywall in 2011 all the more difficult – and it only happened after a fierce internal debate. In the end, Sulzberger Jr sided with the then chief executive, Janet Robinson. It turned out to be his most prescient announcement.“A few years ago it was almost an article of faith that people would not pay for the content they accessed via the web,” he said. But he predicted the paywall would allow the company “to develop new sources of revenue to support the continuation of our journalistic mission and digital innovation … This system is our latest, and best, demonstration of where we believe the future of valued content – be it news, music, games or more – is going.”He turned out to be right.Last month, the company said it had 6 million paying online readers, and for the first time more revenue from digital than print subscribers. The Times had $800m on hand, with $250m available through a revolving credit line. It no longer has any debt, and last year it paid off a loan that allowed it to buy back its Manhattan headquarters. ‘It got really tough’Sulzberger Jr’s close friend Steven Rattner, a former Times reporter turned investment banker, explained his success this way: “If you want just one quality, it would have to be determination. No matter how tough it got – and it got really tough – Arthur never gave up. He was among the first (if not the first) traditional newspaper guy to grasp the importance of the internet, focus on it and never get distracted from it.”Paul Goldberger, a longtime Times architecture critic and one of the paper’s wisest observers, said the most relevant description of Sulzberger Jr’s philosophy could be found in an Italian novel, The Leopard: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”I repeated that to the departing Times chairman.“Yes,” he said. “Adapt or die.” More

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      in Elections

      'Putin could only dream of it': how Trump became the biggest source of disinformation in 2020

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      [embedded content]
      It seemed like the nightmare of 2016 all over again.
      On 21 October, less than two weeks before election day, US intelligence and law enforcement officials convened a last-minute press conference to warn that foreign adversaries were once again interfering in American democracy. Iran was spreading false tales about “allegedly fraudulent ballots” and sending spoofed emails purporting to contain threats from the Proud Boys, “designed to intimidate voters, incite social unrest and damage President Trump”, said John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence. Meanwhile, both Russia and Iran had obtained access to voter information that could be used to “cause confusion, sow chaos and undermine your confidence in American democracy”, he warned.
      It was everything that Democrats and disinformation experts have been warning about for the last four years, except, well, not quite.
      The email operation had been relatively small and immediately debunked, while voter roll information is either public or easy to obtain. Senior intelligence officials quickly raised doubts about Ratcliffe’s emphasis on the threat from Iran over Russia and questioned whether his motives for the public announcement were political, the New York Times reported.
      “It was very difficult to see those men in suits talking about interference in the election when the White House is the one interfering with the election,” said Claire Wardle, the executive director of First Draft, a group that researches and combats disinformation.
      After all, when it comes to intimidating voters or inciting social unrest, nothing has had more impact than the constant drumbeat of lies and disinformation from Donald Trump. Years of preparation by the press, social media platforms, and civil society groups for a foreign interference campaign against the US electoral process have been upended by the bizarre reality that the biggest threat to American democracy right now is almost certainly the commander-in-chief, and that his primary mode of attack is a concerted disinformation campaign.
      Because how much impact can a few thousand faked emails telling voters in Florida and Alaska to “vote for Trump or else” have on voters compared with Trump directly ordering the Proud Boys, a neo-fascist street gang, to “stand back and stand by” before a television audience of 73 million people? And what kind of false tale of voter fraud could Iran possibly seed that could undermine Americans’ faith in the electoral process more than the disinformation about voter fraud and mail-in ballots coming straight from the White House and Trump’s campaign?
      “‘Don’t trust the electoral system, don’t trust the CDC, don’t trust your neighbor because they’re probably antifa, don’t trust the left,’” Wardle said of Trump’s re-election message. “It’s not about persuading people one way or the other, it’s about making them scared and causing confusion and chaos,” she added.
      “The media’s been obsessed with Russians under the bed, but to have the president of the United States telling people in the US that they can’t trust the results of the election – Putin could only dream of that kind of thing.”
      Social media tactics
      Russia’s disinformation campaign in the 2016 presidential election had two main vectors: a social media campaign to sow division and distrust among voters, and a “hack and leak” operation that resulted in the theft and publication of emails and documents stolen from Democrats and Hillary Clinton’s campaign. That hack and leak operation was incredibly successful, with caches of stolen material proving irresistible both for the mainstream press and for conservative activists and conspiracy theorists.
      The 2020 iteration of the hack and leak tactic – Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani pushing dubious emails and text messages supposedly obtained from a hard drive linked to Joe Biden’s son Hunter – has been something of a damp squib, however. “You don’t see the same kind of credulous, knee-jerk out-of-control amplification that you saw in 2016,” said Whitney Phillips, a professor at Syracuse University and author of The Oxygen of Amplification, a report examining how the press served the purposes of media manipulators, trolls and hate groups in 2016. The top newspapers have debunked and deflated Giuliani’s claims, and the idea of the pilfered hard drive has failed to capture the public’s interest in the same way that troves of stolen emails did.
      But while the Trump re-election campaign may have failed to recapture the magic of 2016 when it comes to hacked emails, the president has taken Russia’s 2016 social media playbook and supercharged it with the power of the White House.
      “I’m sure that there is some foreign influence stuff happening and we might know more about it later,” said Phillips. “But so much of the pollution is trickling down from the White House itself, and people have been absolutely overwhelmed with falsehoods and confusion over Covid and ballots … When people get overwhelmed, they either fight or flee. [Trump] is making it almost impossible for people not to get totally burned out and disgusted.” More

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      in US Politics

      Facebook leak reveals policies on restricting New York Post's Biden story

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      Facebook moderators had to manually intervene to suppress a controversial New York Post story about Hunter Biden, according to leaked moderation guidelines seen by the Guardian.The document, which lays out in detail Facebook’s policies for dealing with misinformation on Facebook and Instagram, sheds new light on the process that led to the company’s decision to reduce the distribution of the story.“This story is eligible to be factchecked by Facebook’s third-party factchecking partners,” Facebook’s policy communications director, Andy Stone, said at the time. “In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform. This is part of our standard process to reduce the spread of misinformation. We temporarily reduce distribution pending factchecker review.”In fact, the documents show, the New York Post – like most major websites – was given special treatment as part of Facebook’s standard process. Stories can be “enqueued” for Facebook’s third-party factcheckers in one of two ways: either by being flagged by an AI, or by being manually added by one of the factcheckers themselves.Facebook’s AI looks for signals “including feedback from the community and disbelief comments” to automatically predict which posts might contain misinformation. “Predicted content is temporarily (for seven days) soft demoted in feed (at 50% strength) and enqueued to fact check product for review by [third-party factcheckers],” the document says.But some posts are not automatically demoted. Sites in the “Alexa 5K” list, “which includes content in the top 5,000 most popular internet sites”, are supposed to keep their distribution high, “under the assumption these are unlikely to be spreading misinformation”.Those guidelines can be manually overridden, however. “In some cases, we manually enqueue content … either with or without temporary demotion. We can do this on escalation and based on whether the content is eligible for fact-checking, related to an issue of importance, and has an external signal of falsity.” The US election is such an “issue of importance”.In a statement, a Facebook spokesperson said: “As our CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified to Congress earlier this week, we have been on heightened alert because of FBI intelligence about the potential for hack and leak operations meant to spread misinformation. Based on that risk, and in line with our existing policies and procedures, we made the decision to temporarily limit the content’s distribution while our factcheckers had a chance to review it. When that didn’t happen, we lifted the demotion.”The guidelines also reveal Facebook had prepared a “break-glass measure” for the US election, allowing its moderators to apply a set of policies for “repeatedly factchecked hoaxes” (RFH) to political content. “For a claim to be included as RFH, it must meet eligibility criteria (including falsity, virality and severity) and have content policy leadership approval.”The policy, which to the Guardian’s knowledge has not yet been applied, would lead to Facebook blocking viral falsehoods about the election without waiting for them to be debunked each time a new version appeared. A similar policy about Covid-19 hoaxes is enforced by “hard demoting the content, applying a custom inform treatment, and rejecting ads”.Facebook acts only on a few types of misinformation without involving third-party factcheckers, the documents reveal. Misinformation aimed at voter or census interference is removed outright “because of the severity of the harm to democratic systems”. Manipulated media, or “deepfakes”, are removed “because of the difficulty of ‘unseeing’ content so sophisticatedly edited”. And misinformation that “contributes to imminent violence or physical harm” is removed because of the security of imminent physical harm.The latter policy is not normally applied by ground-level moderation staff, but a special exception has been made for misinformation about Covid-19, the document says. Similar exceptions have been made to misinformation about polio in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to misinformation about Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.Facebook also has a unique policy around vaccine hoaxes. “Where groups and pages spread these widely debunked hoaxes about vaccinations two or more times within 90 days, those groups and pages will be demoted in search results, all of their content will be demoted in news feed, they will be pulled from recommendation systems and type-ahead in search, and pages may have their access to fundraising tools revoked,” the document reads.“This policy is enforced by Facebook and not third-party factcheckers. Thus, our policy of not subjecting politician speech to factchecking does NOT apply here. If a politician shares hoaxes about vaccines we will enforce on that content.” More

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      in US Politics

      Glenn Greenwald resigns from the Intercept over 'editorial freedom'

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      The investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald has resigned abruptly from the Intercept, the news website he co-founded, and accused the organization of seeking to censor him over a planned article critical of the Democratic nominee, Joe Biden.
      [embedded content]
      Greenwald, who was a vital part of the Guardian US team that broke the Edward Snowden whistleblower story in 2013, released a statement online that blasted the editors of the Intercept as being in hock to Biden and the Democratic party.
      “The Intercept’s editors, in violation of my contractual right of editorial freedom, censored an article I wrote this week, refusing to publish it unless I remove all sections critical of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, the candidate vehemently supported by all New-York-based Intercept editors involved in this effort at suppression,” he wrote in a lengthy resignation post.
      Greenwald is a vocal critic of the US media and American politics, with an abrasive style that has won him many admirers as well as a legion of critics. Recently, he has been especially critical of media coverage of the Russian attempt to interfere with the 2016 US election and has been criticized by some leftwing commentators for appearing on rightwing Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s show.
      He co-founded the Intercept in 2014 with investment from the tech billionaire Pierre Omidyar. The website rapidly established itself as a scrappy online news organization that could punch above its weight on some issues, especially cybersecurity, politics and tech and corruption in Brazil, where Greenwald lives.
      Greenwald said the site no longer carried out the mission that he had intended when it was founded, which was to amplify voices rarely heard in American journalism. In his resignation statement Greenwald said: “The current iteration of The Intercept is completely unrecognizable when compared to that original vision.”
      He also said he would post the article on Biden that he said had been censored online.
      In a sharply worded statement, the Intercept’s editor-in-chief, Betsy Reed, said that the charge that the Intercept was censoring its staff was “preposterous” and that Greenwald’s main problem had been a desire to have his work published unedited.
      “The narrative he presents about his departure is teeming with distortions and inaccuracies – all of them designed to make him look like a victim, not a grown person throwing a tantrum,” she added. More

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      in US Politics

      Fears of crackdown on US journalism as Trump ally removes editorial 'firewall'

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      The US diplomats’ union has denounced an attempt by a Trump appointee to remove the “firewall” protecting the editorial independence of the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and other US overseas broadcasters, warning that it marked an attempt to turn them into vehicles for “government propaganda”.
      The CEO of the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), Michael Pack, announced overnight on Monday that he would be rescinding the “firewall rule” insulating journalists from editorial direction from politically appointed management.
      The rule, Pack argued, was “in tension with the law and harmful to the agency and the US national interest”.
      “The rule threatened constitutional values because the constitution gives the president broad latitude in directing the foreign policy of the United States,” Pack wrote in a message to his staff.
      The move follows several steps already taken by Pack, an ally of the rightwing ideologue Steve Bannon, to exercise greater political control USAGM broadcasters that include Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Middle East Broadcasting Networks, Radio Free Asia and the Office of Cuba Broadcasting. Since taking up the job in June, he has conducted a purge on senior journalists and refused to renew the visas of foreign reporters.
      The American Foreign Service Association (AFSA) said it stood in solidarity with USAGM staff in opposition to the move
      “This action runs counter to the tradition of independence and non-partisanship of US public broadcasting … and tarnishes America’s tradition of a free press that goes back to the founders,” AFSA said in a statement. “Government propaganda has no place in official US news reporting. Truth is the best antidote to foreign disinformation.”
      Eliot Engel, the chair of the House foreign affairs committee, said Pack had no legal authority to rescind the “firewall rule”.
      “Congress created that firewall by law and although Mr Pack can huff and puff, he can’t blow that wall down. The rule he rescinded yesterday clarified the legal protections. The firewall remains,” Engel said in a statement.
      In another potential threat to independent journalism, the Department of Homeland Security has proposed reducing the length of journalist visas from five years to 240 days with the possibility of just one extension, which would be contingent on a DHS review of “the content that the foreign information media representative is covering in the United States”.
      “The proposed changes by the DHS would restrict the ability of independent foreign news organizations from reporting news within the US and could lead to reprisals affecting US journalists in other countries,” the president of the Society of Professional Journalists, Matthew Hall, said.
      “Both outcomes are unacceptable.” More

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      in US Politics

      Facebook and Twitter restrict controversial New York Post story on Joe Biden

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      Facebook and Twitter took steps on Wednesday to limit the spread of a controversial New York Post article critical of Joe Biden, sparking outrage among conservatives and stoking debate over how social media platforms should tackle misinformation ahead of the US election.In an unprecedented step against a major news publication, Twitter blocked users from posting links to the Post story or photos from the unconfirmed report. Users attempting to share the story were shown a notice saying: “We can’t complete this request because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful.” Users clicking or retweeting a link already posted to Twitter are shown a warning the “link may be unsafe”.Twitter said it was limiting the article’s spread due to questions about “the origins of the materials” included in the article, which contained material supposedly pulled from a computer that had been left by Hunter Biden at a Delaware computer repair shop in April 2019. Twitter policies prohibit “directly distribut[ing] content obtained through hacking that contains private information”.The company further explained the decision in a series of tweets on Wednesday, saying some of the images in the article contained personal and private information. Twitter’s policy against posting hacked material was established in 2018. Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, said the company’s communication about the decision to limit the article’s spread was “not great”, saying the team should have shared more context publicly.Our communication around our actions on the @nypost article was not great. And blocking URL sharing via tweet or DM with zero context as to why we’re blocking: unacceptable. https://t.co/v55vDVVlgt— jack (@jack) October 14, 2020
      Facebook, meanwhile, placed restrictions on linking to the article, saying there were questions about its validity. “This is part of our standard process to reduce the spread of misinformation,” said a Facebook spokesperson, Andy Stone.The move marks the first time Twitter has directly limited the spread of information from a news website, as it continues to implement stricter rules around misinformation ahead of the 2020 elections. On Wednesday evening Twitter also reportedly locked the personal account of the White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany for sharing the article.In recent weeks Twitter announced it would warn users who attempt to retweet a link without first clicking on it for more context. It has also started to take action against misinformation and calls to violence posted by Donald Trump and other public figures.Wednesday’s actions around the New York Post article drew swift backlash from figures on the political right, who accused Facebook and Twitter of protecting Biden, who is leading Trump in national polls. The New York Post blasted the companies, saying they were trying to help Biden’s election campaign and falsely claiming no one had disputed the story’s veracity. “Facebook and Twitter are not media platforms. They’re propaganda machines,” it wrote in an editorial.Meanwhile, the Republican senator Ted Cruz wrote a letter to Dorsey, saying: “Twitter’s censorship of this story is quite hypocritical, given its willingness to allow users to share less-well-sourced reporting critical of other candidates.”Trump’s campaign director, Jake Schneider, called the blocking of McEnany “absolutely unacceptable” and McEnany herself tweeted: “Censorship should be condemned.”Trump tweeted that it was “terrible” that the social media companies “took down” the article – in fact, it was restricted, not removed – and renewed his calls to “repeal section 230”, a measure that keeps website hosts from being held responsible for content posted. Ironically, repealing section 230 would require Twitter to take down more content, including many of Trump’s tweets.Even non-conservatives criticized the choice to limit the spread of the article as one that will play into the rightwing narrative that big tech firms censor conservative views. The decision was indeed quickly politicized – with House Republicans publishing the text of the story on their website in order to share the link without censorship.The article implicates the former vice-president in connection with his son Hunter’s Ukraine business and was headlined: “Smoking-gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad.”The unnamed owner of the computer repair shop told the newspaper he passed a copy of the hard drive on the seemingly abandoned computer to Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer.The story focused on one email from April 2015, in which a Burisma board adviser thanked Hunter for inviting him to a Washington meeting with his father. But there was no indication of when the meeting was scheduled or whether it ever happened.“Investigations by the press, during impeachment, and even by two Republican-led Senate committees whose work was decried as ‘not legitimate’ and political by a GOP colleague, have all reached the same conclusion: that Joe Biden carried out official US policy toward Ukraine and engaged in no wrongdoing,” said Andrew Bates, a spokesman for the Biden campaign. “Trump administration officials have attested to these facts under oath.”The campaign said it was not told by Facebook or Twitter that any action would be taken regarding the article.“We have reviewed Joe Biden’s official schedules from the time and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place,” the Biden campaign added.Others cast also doubt on the report, citing Giuliani’s record of producing disinformation and making bogus claims about both Bidens and Ukraine.AFP contributed reporting More

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      in US Politics

      Trump says he will not cut funding to Stars and Stripes newspaper

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      Donald Trump tweeted on Friday that he “will not be cutting funding to Stars and Stripes”, a newspaper that has served US armed forces since 1861, despite a Pentagon memo obtained by USA Today saying the title would close by the end of the month.“The United States of America will NOT be cutting funding to Stars and Stripes magazine under my watch,” Trump wrote. “It will continue to be a wonderful source of information to our Great Military!”News that the venerable paper was in peril had landed as the White House reeled from a report in the Atlantic which said the president disparaged US marines killed in France in the first world war and made disrespectful remarks about both John McCain, a late political rival and Vietnam veteran, and wounded soldiers in general.Trump rubbished that report, insisting: “I never called our great fallen soldiers anything other than HEROES”.In the case of McCain, observers pointed to a tweet from 2015 in which Trump called the senator and presidential nominee, who died in 2018, a “loser”.Trump also said the Atlantic, which was founded in 1857, was “dying, like most magazines”, and said its report had been refuted.Stars and Stripes traces its origins to Bloomfield, Missouri, in November 1861, when troops under the future president Ulysses S Grant took over the printing press of a Confederate sympathiser.It has traditionally provided news free of government censorship, often critical of military and civilian commanders, and is delivered daily to troops around the world, even on frontlines.According to USA Today, the Department of Defense ordered the publisher of Stars and Stripes to provide a plan to “dissolve” it by 15 September, including a “specific timeline for vacating government owned/leased space worldwide”.“The last newspaper publication (in all forms) will be 30 September 2020,” the author of the memo, Col Paul Haverstick Jr, was quoted as writing.Haverstick is director of Defense Media Activity (DMA), based at Fort Meade, Maryland. According to the Pentagon website, DMA is “a mass media and education organisation that creates and distributes Department of Defense content across a variety of platforms to audiences around the world”.Moves to close Stars and Stripes began in February, when the Pentagon announced plans to reallocate funding to projects including the Space Force, a much-maligned and satirised Trump pet project.On Wednesday, Military.com reported that a bipartisan group of senators led by the California Democrat Dianne Feinstein had written to the defense secretary, Mark Esper.“Stars and Stripes is an essential part of our nation’s freedom of the press that serves the very population charged with defending that freedom,” the 15 senators wrote. “Therefore, we respectfully request that you rescind your decision to discontinue support for Stars and Stripes and that you reinstate the funding necessary for it to continue operations.”Tammy Duckworth, an Illinois Democrat who lost both legs when her helicopter was shot down in Iraq, signed the Feinstein letter. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a close Trump ally who was a lawyer in the US air force, wrote a letter of his own.Stars and Stripes did not immediately comment on Wednesday, but it did share a tweet from one of its writers, Steve Beynon.“I read Stars and Stripes on a mountain in Afghanistan when I was a 19-year-old aspiring journalist,” he wrote. “Now I work there. This doesn’t stop the journalism. I’m juggling three future news stories today.”Beynon shared recent stories including a report on women commanding combat units and employees alleging “ingrained racism” at the Department of Veterans Affairs.Kathy Kiely of the Missouri School of Journalism, who published news of the memo in USA Today, wrote: “Even for those of us who are all too wearily familiar with President Donald Trump’s disdain for journalists, his administration’s latest attack on the free press is a bit of a jaw-dropper.”Stars and Stripes later retweeted Trump’s promise not to close it.Before the presidential fiat by tweet, as news of the Pentagon memo echoed through the US media, one former cavalry officer who twice deployed to Iraq spoke to the Guardian on condition of anonymity.“Having an independent media outlet focused totally on the military and its communities,” he said, “should be a priority for the Department of Defense, to keep these communities informed and together – even while physically separated.”The same veteran expressed sadness about Trump’s reported remarks about soldiers killed in action, wounded or taken prisoner.“Anyone who is shocked or surprised at any of this simply hasn’t been paying attention,” he said. “Look at his comments about prisoners of war when talking about McCain.” More