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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

      The Guardian view on Trump’s tax take: only for the little people | Editorial

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      The emperor’s new clothes is a cautionary tale that politicians know well. A vain ruler who cannot resist buying new garments is sold an imaginary new suit. Out on a stroll in this “magical” attire, he is revealed to be naked by a little boy. Hans Christian Andersen’s exercise in groupthink has the emperor, despite the obvious, continuing to claim that he is garbed in finery. It is a subversive message; that power can bend the truth. Donald Trump thinks himself such a ruler.According to the New York Times, President Trump paid minuscule amounts of federal income tax – $750 in 2016 and 2017, and nothing in 10 of the previous 15 years. That’s because he had a reverse Midas touch with business. Rather than the self-made-billionaire image honed by The Apprentice, Mr Trump excelled at losing, not making, money. Mr Trump’s golf courses have lost $315m since 2000. This time it was the Old Grey Lady, not a child, who showed how Mr Trump was, figuratively, naked.The president’s reaction was to call the story “totally fake news”. He hopes this language resonates with his base and causes them to identify with him rather than listen to the facts. Mr Trump built a coalition by appealing more to conspiracy theory than to partisanship; and his strategy has been to supply his supporters with conspiracy theories to fight what they see as a conspiracy against them. He lies outrageously and often. His supporters may even appreciate his deceits. Many think all politicians are liars and consider those outraged by Mr Trump’s falsehoods to be hypocrites.But the New York Times story carries a sting in its long tail. Should Mr Trump win, he is liable for $300m in loans that will come due within four years. “His lenders could be placed,” the paper notes dryly, “in the unprecedented position of weighing whether to foreclose on a sitting president.” Being in hock to foreign entities would surely pose a major security risk. As the story is unfolding, its impact on the most important election in modern US history cannot be easily judged. The news arrived on the eve of the first presidential debate between the Democrats’ Joe Biden and Mr Trump. Mr Biden’s campaign was quick to cast the president as a leader who thought taxes were just for the little people, pointing out that teachers, nurses and firefighters all paid a lot more to the government than Mr Trump does.America seems broken by Covid-19 after four years of Mr Trump. Almost 30 million are claiming unemployment insurance. Hunger is growing. Two-thirds of households hit by coronavirus face financial hardship. Decades of worshipping greed has destabilised society. The lack of political pressure to compel Congress to extend the $600 per week additional jobless benefit when it expired in July was shocking – especially considering the Republican rush to push through Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s supreme court confirmation hearings. Inequality is a US national emergency. It ought to be addressed by increased taxes on the wealthy. Mr Trump won in 2016 by making promises to voters he was not going to keep. He cheated his working-class supporters, suggesting that many of their fears cannot be of concern. Mr Trump probably believed his own story. One hopes for the US’s sake that come November fewer people will trust him again. 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