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      In Taiwan’s Elections, China Seems to Want a Vote

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      The first time I covered a Taiwan “election,” 38 years ago, the island was a dictatorship under martial law, with members of the opposition more likely to be tortured than to gain power.Government officials explained that modern democracy wasn’t fully compatible with Chinese culture, and one of my minders made a vague inquiry about paying me — apparently to see if a Times correspondent could be bribed.Taiwan lifted martial law the next year, 1987, and helped lead a democratic revolution in Asia, encompassing South Korea, Mongolia, Indonesia and others. Taiwan now ranks as more democratic than the United States, Japan or Canada, according to the most recent ratings by the Economist Intelligence Unit, and the island is now caught up in boisterous campaigning for presidential and legislative elections on Saturday.(The campaigning has mostly gone smoothly but not entirely so: As a gimmick, one Taiwanese party handed out 460,000 laundry detergent pods to win support. Some voters unfortunately mistook the pods for food.)The stakes here are enormous, for President Biden has repeatedly said that the United States would defend Taiwan from a military assault by China, and the policies of the new government may shape the risk of such a confrontation. The importance of the outcome to China is reflected in Beijing’s efforts to manipulate it — and perhaps we Americans can learn something here about resisting election interference.“What China has been trying to do is use Taiwan as a test ground,” Taiwan’s foreign minister, Joseph Wu, told me. “If they are able to make a difference in this election, I’m sure they are going to try and apply this to other democracies.”China resisted Asia’s democratic tide — yet it seems to want a vote in Taiwan’s election.Flags representing different political parties.An Rong Xu for The New York Times“Whenever Taiwan holds an election, China interferes — but this time it’s the most severe,” Vice President William Lai, who is leading in the presidential polls, told foreign reporters.The Chinese government has made no secret of its unhappiness with Lai’s candidacy, because he and his Democratic Progressive Party view Taiwan as effectively independent rather than as part of China. Beijing sees Lai as a secessionist, calling him a “destroyer of peace” and warning that he could be “the instigator of a potential dangerous war.”Paradoxically, China’s Communist Party appears to favor a victory by its historical enemy, the Kuomintang. That’s because the Kuomintang welcomes closer economic ties with China and opposes Taiwan’s becoming an independent country.In an effort to increase the chances of the Kuomintang presidential candidate, Hou Yu-ih, China appeared to pressure a billionaire businessman, Terry Gou, who operates factories in China making Apple products, to drop out of the race. Gou claimed to have backing from Mazu, a sea goddess, but the Communist Party must have prevailed over the goddess: Gou did indeed drop out.Meanwhile, networks on Facebook and TikTok are spreading Chinese propaganda in Taiwan as part of an election manipulation strategy, according to a research organization here. The networks mostly disparage Lai and other Democratic Progressives while raising suspicions about the United States.China has lately sent a series of intimidating large balloons — perhaps weather or surveillance balloons — over Taiwan. Some see the purpose as rattling the Taiwanese in the run-up to the election and warning them of the risks of electing Democratic Progressives.Then there are other accusations that are more difficult to assess. A Democratic Progressive candidate accused China of circulating a deepfake video of him engaged in a sex act. The cabinet called for an investigation.The best antidote to Chinese manipulation may be calling attention to it. In the past, Chinese election meddling in Taiwan has backfired, and Lai seems happier talking about Chinese manipulations than about the frustration voters feel about out-of-control Taiwan housing prices and government corruption.Presidential candidate William Lai, at a rally.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesOne reason for the global attention on Taiwan’s election is the backdrop of concern about the risk of conflict in the Taiwan Strait. Some in the Taiwan opposition warn that the danger will be greater if the next president is someone who flirts with Taiwan independence, like Lai. Partly because of accusations that he might poke China unnecessarily, Lai has gone out of his way to say that he will continue the policies of President Tsai Ing-wen — whom Beijing also can’t stand but who has been cautious about provoking China.The White House has called on “outside actors” — read: “China”— to avoid interfering in Taiwan’s elections, and I hope that Beijing will get the message that manipulations can backfire. Unfortunately, I suspect that the reality is nuanced: Blatant election bullying is counterproductive, but more subtle manipulations on TikTok or Facebook may succeed if they elude scrutiny. We in the press didn’t pay enough attention to foreign manipulation in the 2016 U.S. election; we must do better.One last thought: As I cover these Taiwan elections and think back to the first one I covered in Taiwan, I keep reflecting: When will change ever come to China?It wasn’t obvious in the 1980s which countries in Asia would democratize and which wouldn’t — and then rising education levels and a growing middle class led to a flowering in countries near China even as the Middle Kingdom itself became more repressive, especially in recent years under Xi Jinping.Beijing feels bleak today — but considering the transformation on an island once under prolonged martial law and a similarly autocratic regime, it may be that the place where it’s easiest to be optimistic about China is actually here in the thriving young democracy of Taiwan during election week.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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      Elections and Disinformation Are Colliding Like Never Before in 2024

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      A wave of elections coincides with state influence operations, a surge of extremism, A.I. advances and a pullback in social media protections.Billions of people will vote in major elections this year — around half of the global population, by some estimates — in one of the largest and most consequential democratic exercises in living memory. The results will affect how the world is run for decades to come.At the same time, false narratives and conspiracy theories have evolved into an increasingly global menace.Baseless claims of election fraud have battered trust in democracy. Foreign influence campaigns regularly target polarizing domestic challenges. Artificial intelligence has supercharged disinformation efforts and distorted perceptions of reality. All while major social media companies have scaled back their safeguards and downsized election teams.“Almost every democracy is under stress, independent of technology,” said Darrell M. West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution think tank. “When you add disinformation on top of that, it just creates many opportunities for mischief.”It is, he said, a “perfect storm of disinformation.” More

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      Fox News and Trump Go Live Wednesday for First Time in 2 Years

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      A town hall in Iowa on Wednesday is the network’s first live interview with the former president in nearly two years, the latest twist in a long-running drama.One of television’s longest-running soap operas is about to start a new chapter.Donald J. Trump has not appeared for a live interview on Fox News since April 2022, a nearly two-year stretch of chilliness between the former president and the channel whose airwaves he once relied on to cement his status atop the American right.In that period, all of Mr. Trump’s Fox News interviews were pretaped, a notable precaution for a network that paid $787.5 million to settle a defamation lawsuit fueled by the former president’s mendacious claims about the 2020 election. That changes on Wednesday, when Mr. Trump will appear live on the network for a town hall in Des Moines ahead of the Iowa caucuses.The relationship between Mr. Trump and the Rupert Murdoch-owned network has featured more drama than a season of “Real Housewives.” But Wednesday’s event is not only a turning point and a potential ratings winner for Fox News: It is also the former president’s first live interview on any major news network since he went on CNN last May, an event that drew harsh criticism for the volume and velocity of his unfiltered false claims.Mr. Trump has not exactly been silenced. He refused the invitations of several networks to participate in live Republican primary debates. And he has agreed to numerous pretaped interviews, including an appearance on NBC in September that also prompted complaints from viewers who berated the network for providing him a platform.His relationship with Fox News, however, is especially complicated. In fact, it wasn’t that long ago when parts of the network seemed to be moving on.Back in 2022, Fox News snubbed Mr. Trump’s rallies while offering admiring coverage to a rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. After Mr. Trump announced in November 2022 that he would again run for president, the network kept him off its airwaves for a full five months. When Mr. Trump did return, for a taped interview last March with Sean Hannity, he received a cool reception from other Fox hosts; one network contributor called his appearance “absolutely horrific.”The slights angered Mr. Trump, who has harbored resentment toward Fox over its early projection of Arizona for Joseph R. Biden Jr. on election night in 2020. Over the past year, the former president has lobbed crude insults at Mr. Murdoch and denounced Fox as “fake news” and “hostile” in posts on Truth Social, his preferred social media platform. He has also grumbled to allies that the network erred in settling the defamation suit brought by Dominion Voting Systems, saying it offered ammunition to other potential litigants.In an interview, Bret Baier, Fox News’s chief political anchor, who is moderating the Wednesday event alongside the anchor Martha MacCallum, did not shy away from acknowledging the volatility of the relationship.“We’re one Truth Social post away from some different feeling,” he said.Despite the wariness, both sides found reasons to agree to Wednesday’s town hall.Judging by his poll numbers, many conservatives remain enthralled by Mr. Trump, and keeping the potential Republican nominee at arm’s length would erode Fox News’s credibility with a core audience. While Mr. Trump has told confidants that he believes Fox News has lost some influence with Republican voters, it remains the highest-rated cable network and home to influential conservatives like Mr. Hannity and Jesse Watters.Furthermore, the town hall gives Mr. Trump a chance to dunk on both his presidential rivals and one of his media bêtes noires: CNN.CNN had previously announced that it would sponsor a Republican debate in Iowa on the same night, in the same city, at the same time (9 p.m. Eastern). Mr. DeSantis and Nikki Haley, Mr. Trump’s closest rivals in state polls, will be at that debate, but Mr. Trump boycotted. Fox’s town hall allows him to siphon away attention and potentially deliver a TV ratings victory over CNN — which would also please Fox News.Given the rough-and-tumble nature of a presidential campaign, Wednesday’s telecast is unlikely to represent a lasting détente. One person with direct knowledge of interactions between the Trump camp and Fox News, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the relationship remained chilly.The televisions on Mr. Trump’s plane once constantly aired Fox News, but that is no longer the case, the person said. The former president often requests to watch Mr. Hannity’s program, but sometimes prefers Newsmax, particularly its host Greg Kelly, an old acquaintance from New York political circles. Mr. Trump remains a fan of Mr. Hannity — and of Mr. Watters and Maria Bartiromo — but he has soured on the “Fox & Friends” host Steve Doocy, whom he recently described as “not nice like he should be.”Mr. Baier said he had studiously courted Mr. Trump in recent weeks, pitching him on the idea of a town hall over the phone and at least once in person at his Florida mansion, Mar-a-Lago.“It’s not easy,” he said of the efforts required to coax Mr. Trump into an interview. He said he had encouraged the former president to take “tough but fair” questions in a live setting.“This is getting to the playoffs,” Mr. Baier said. “This is a time when voters need to see him live, in person, when it happens.”So what happens if Mr. Trump repeats on live TV his baseless claim that the 2020 election was rigged?“We’re ready to deal with it,” Mr. Baier said, noting that he disputed Mr. Trump’s claims when the subject arose at their pretaped interview last June. “But if he’s spending all of his town hall time dealing with 2020, and not talking about what he wants to do as president, he’s got other issues.” (At the time, Mr. Trump was not thrilled about Mr. Baier’s real-time fact-checking, calling it “nasty.”)For Mr. Baier, the next person on his list for a live, unfiltered interview is President Biden. “We’ve had a request in every two weeks since South Carolina, when candidate Joe Biden won the primary,” he said. “We would love to do a town hall with the president. We would do that in a heartbeat.”Jonathan Swan More

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      Clashing Over Jan. 6, Trump and Biden Show Reality Is at Stake in 2024

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      In dueling sets of speeches, Donald Trump and President Biden are framing the election as a battle for the future of democracy — with Mr. Trump brazenly casting Mr. Biden as the true menace.Rarely in American politics has a leading presidential candidate made such grave accusations about a rival: warning that he is willing to violate the Constitution. Claiming that he is eager to persecute political rivals. Calling him a dire threat to democracy.Those arguments have come from President Biden’s speeches, including his forceful address on Friday, as he hammers away at his predecessor. But they are also now being brazenly wielded by Donald J. Trump, the only president to try to overthrow an American election.Three years after the former president’s supporters stormed the Capitol, Mr. Trump and his campaign are engaged in an audacious attempt to paint Mr. Biden as the true menace to the nation’s foundational underpinnings. Mr. Trump’s strategy aims to upend a world in which he has publicly called for suspending the Constitution, vowed to turn political opponents into legal targets and suggested that the nation’s top military general should be executed.The result has been a salvo of recriminations from the top candidates in each party, including competing events to mark Saturday’s third anniversary of the attack on the Capitol.The eagerness from each man to paint the other as an imminent threat signals that their potential rematch this year will be framed as nothing short of a cataclysmic battle for the future of democracy — even as Mr. Trump tries to twist the very idea to suit his own ends.“Donald Trump’s campaign is about him — not America, not you,” Mr. Biden said Friday, speaking near Valley Forge in Pennsylvania. “Donald Trump’s campaign is obsessed with the past, not the future. He’s willing to sacrifice our democracy, put himself in power.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      In Tense Election Year, Public Officials Face Climate of Intimidation

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      Colorado and Maine, which blocked former President Donald J. Trump from the ballot, have grappled with the harassment of officials.The caller had tipped off the authorities in Maine on Friday night: He told them that he had broken into the home of Shenna Bellows, the state’s top election official, a Democrat who one night earlier had disqualified former President Donald J. Trump from the primary ballot because of his actions during the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.No one was home when officers arrived, according to Maine State Police, who labeled the false report as a “swatting” attempt, one intended to draw a heavily armed law enforcement response.In the days since, more bogus calls and threats have rolled in across the country. On Wednesday, state capitol buildings in Connecticut, Georgia, Hawaii, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi and Montana were evacuated or placed on lockdown after the authorities said they had received bomb threats that they described as false and nonspecific. The F.B.I. said it had no information to suggest any threats were credible.The incidents intensified a climate of intimidation and the harassment of public officials, including those responsible for overseeing ballot access and voting. Since 2020, election officials have confronted rising threats and difficult working conditions, aggravated by rampant conspiracy theories about fraud. The episodes suggested 2024 would be another heated election year.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Conservative Group Wins Legal Victory Over 2020 Voting Challenges in Georgia

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      The group, True the Vote, had been accused by the liberal organization Fair Fight of violating the Voting Rights Act by intimidating voters. A judge rejected the claims.A federal judge ruled on Tuesday that a conservative group’s efforts to challenge the eligibility of hundreds of thousands of voters in the Senate runoff elections in Georgia in early 2021 did not violate the Voting Rights Act under a clause outlawing voter suppression.In a 145-page opinion, the judge, Steve C. Jones of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, wrote that the court “maintains its prior concerns” regarding how the group, True the Vote, sought to challenge voters’ eligibility. But he said that Fair Fight, the liberal voting rights group that brought the lawsuit against True the Vote, had failed to show that the efforts were illegal.The decision was relatively narrow, applying only to Judge Jones’s district in northern Georgia, and will do little to change the status quo: Right-wing election groups have already tried to help bring thousands of challenges to voter registrations in states across the country.But the opinion is likely to encourage conservative activists hunting for voter fraud during the 2024 presidential election. Election officials and voting rights groups have expressed worries about these efforts, warning that an expanded campaign to challenge voters en masse could intimidate people away from the ballot box. True the Vote and similar groups, taking a cue from former President Donald J. Trump, have often spread false theories about election fraud.“Any of these decisions that allows these kinds of mass challenges to go forward embolden that movement,” said Sophia Lin Lakin, the director of the Voting Rights Project at the A.C.L.U.In his opinion, Judge Jones wrote that evidence from Fair Fight and individual voters in the trial did not amount to intimidation under an important section of the Voting Rights Act known as Section 11(b), which outlaws any attempt to “intimidate, threaten, or coerce, or attempt to intimidate” any voter or act of voting.“While the court believes that actions increasing the difficulty to vote if paired with other conduct might give rise to a Section 11(b) violation in some circumstances, increased difficulty alone does not constitute voter intimidation,” Judge Jones wrote.Voting rights experts said the ruling could raise the bar of what constitutes voter intimidation under the Voting Rights Act, and said it was yet another court decision that chipped away at the protections in the landmark law.“He took a very narrow view of what constitutes intimidation,” Ms. Lakin said. “But raising the bar of what you need to show altogether will make demonstrating voter intimidation claims more difficult, at least in the Northern District of Georgia.”In a footnote in the decision, Judge Jones, who was appointed to his post by President Barack Obama, was careful not to give a blessing to tactics like True the Vote’s.“In making this conclusion, the court, in no way, is condoning TTV’s actions in facilitating a mass number of seemingly frivolous challenges,” he wrote. He added: “TTV’s list utterly lacked reliability. Indeed, it verges on recklessness.”Fair Fight sued True the Vote three years ago, after the conservative group organized challenges in December 2020 questioning the eligibility of more than 250,000 registered Georgia voters. To spur right-wing activists to help challenge voters, True the Vote created a $1 million reward fund and offered bounties for evidence of “election malfeasance.”Fair Fight argued in its lawsuit that finding actual fraud or ineligible voters was only a secondary concern for True the Vote, and that the real intention was to frighten Democratic-leaning voters from turning out in what were expected to be razor-thin runoff elections that would determine control of the United States Senate.Catherine Engelbrecht, the president of True the Vote, celebrated the ruling as “an answer to the prayers of faithful patriots across America.”“Today’s ruling sends a clear message to those who would attempt to control the course of our nation through lawfare and intimidation,” Ms. Engelbrecht wrote in a statement. “American citizens will not be silenced.”Fair Fight, in a lengthy statement, said that federal courts were not adequately protecting Americans from ramped-up attacks on voting rights.“While there is much to make of the court’s 145-page opinion, Fair Fight is disappointed that Georgians and voters nationwide must continue to wait for our federal courts to impose accountability in the face of widespread and mounting voter intimidation efforts,” Cianti Stewart-Reid, the executive director of Fair Fight, said in the statement.It was unclear whether the group planned to appeal the decision. More

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      Biden’s Christian ‘Persecution’? We Assess Trump’s Recent Claims.

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      Former President Donald J. Trump has repeatedly accused the Biden administration of criminalizing Christians, and Catholics in particular, for their faith. Here are the facts.Former President Donald J. Trump has repeatedly tried to appeal to Christian voters in recent weeks by accusing the Biden administration of criminalizing Americans for their faith.On multiple occasions this month, Mr. Trump has claimed that President Biden has “persecuted” Catholics in particular. Mr. Biden himself is Catholic.“I don’t know what it is with Catholics,” Mr. Trump said during a rally in Coralville, Iowa. “They are going violently and viciously after Catholics.”Mr. Trump repeated similar comments days later at another rally, in Waterloo, and in a video posted before Christmas he said that “Americans of faith are being persecuted like nothing this nation has ever seen before.”The message fits into a larger theme for Mr. Trump, who — facing criminal charges in relation to his bid to say in office after losing the 2020 election and criticism for praising strongmen — has tried to paint Mr. Biden and Democrats as being the real threat to democracy.Here’s a closer look at his claims.WHAT WAS SAID“Under Crooked Joe Biden, Christians and Americans of faith are being persecuted like nothing this nation has ever seen before. Catholics in particular are being targeted and evangelicals are surely on the watchlist as well.”— in a video on Truth Social this monthFalse. Experts say they are unaware of any data to support the idea that Catholics in the United States are being persecuted by the government for their faith — let alone at record levels.“In terms of the evidence, I find it to be pretty hard to kind of support the idea that there’s a concerted, marked increase in a particular kind of Christian targeting,” said Jason Bruner, a religious studies professor at Arizona State University and historian who studies Christian persecution.Instead, Mr. Bruner said, it’s most likely that Mr. Trump is extrapolating from cases — say, churches that faced penalties for congregating during the Covid pandemic or anti-abortion activists who have been charged with crimes — to suggest a systemic issue.“There’s a long history of discrimination against Catholics in the United States, from the framing way through the 1970s,” said Frank Ravitch, a professor of law and religion at Michigan State University. “And if anything, it’s probably better now in terms of nondiscrimination than it ever, probably, ever has been.”Mr. Trump’s claims, Mr. Ravitch said, show “such an incredible blindness to the history of anti-Catholicism in the U.S.”Advocates who track Christians fleeing persecution around the world note that the Biden administration has been gradually increasing the number of refugees admitted into the United States after the number dropped precipitously during the Trump era. At the end of fiscal year 2023, the country recorded about 31,000 Christian refugee arrivals — about half of all refugees and the highest number recorded since fiscal year 2016. (Not all were necessarily fleeing persecution on religious grounds.)“We’re encouraged by that trajectory,” said Matthew Soerens, vice president of advocacy and policy at World Relief, a Christian humanitarian organization that has pushed the Biden administration to establish policies welcoming those facing faith-based discrimination.The Trump campaign did not respond to requests for the sources behind his claims.WHAT WAS SAID“Over the past three years, the Biden administration has sent SWAT teams to arrest pro-life activists.”— in a video on Truth Social this monthThis is misleading. The Justice Department has initiated an increasing number of criminal prosecutions under a law that makes it a violation to interfere with reproductive health care by blocking entrances, using threats or damaging property. In at least one case, a defendant’s family claimed he was arrested by a “SWAT” team, but the Federal Bureau of Investigation said that was not the case.The law is called the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances, or FACE, Act and was enacted in 1994. Federal prosecutors have used it to initiate 24 criminal cases, involving 55 defendants, since January 2021, according to the Justice Department.While a majority of those cases have involved acts at facilities that provided abortion services, prosecutors have also used it to charge several individuals who supported abortion access and targeted Florida centers that offered pregnancy counseling and abortion alternatives.Moreover, Mr. Trump omits that such arrests are not for “pro-life” activism but for specific actions, including violence, that prosecutors argue were attempts at blocking access to or interfering with reproductive health care services.In one case, federal attorneys charged a man for allegedly using a slingshot to fire metal ball bearings at a Chicago-area Planned Parenthood clinic. In another, prosecutors said that a New York man used locks and glue to prevent the opening of a clinic’s gate. And three men were accused of firebombing a clinic in California; one recently pleaded guilty.Mr. Trump’s claims about the use of “SWAT teams” may be a reference to the 2022 arrest of a Catholic activist in Pennsylvania. The defendant, Mark Houck, was charged with shoving a volunteer at a Planned Parenthood center in Philadelphia in 2021. Mr. Houck’s defense maintained that he was responding to abusive comments made toward his 12-year-old son by the volunteer. He was acquitted earlier this year.Republican lawmakers have criticized Mr. Houck’s arrest by armed agents, but the F.B.I. has rejected the claim that it used a SWAT team and said its tactics were consistent with standard practices.“There are inaccurate claims being made regarding the arrest of Mark Houck,” the F.B.I. said in a statement. “No SWAT team or SWAT operators were involved. F.B.I. agents knocked on Mr. Houck’s front door, identified themselves as F.B.I. agents and asked him to exit the residence. He did so and was taken into custody without incident pursuant to an indictment.”Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, when asked about the circumstances of Mr. Houck’s arrest, has said such decisions are made at the local level, “by the career agents on the ground, who have the closest visibility to the circumstances.”WHAT WAS SAID“The F.B.I. has been caught profiling devout Catholics as possible domestic terrorists and planning to send undercover spies into Catholic churches, just like in the old days of the Soviet Union.”— in a video on Truth Social this monthThis needs context. Mr. Trump was likely referring to a leaked January memo prepared by the F.B.I.’s field office in Richmond, Va., that warned of the potential for extremism for adherents of a “radical-traditionalist Catholic” ideology. Republicans have criticized the memo for months.But the memo was withdrawn and the nation’s top law enforcement officials have repeatedly denounced it.The memo warned of potential threats ahead of the 2024 election and suggested gathering information and developing sources within churches to help identify suspicious activity. It also distinguished between those radicalized and not radicalized, saying “radical-traditionalist Catholics” were a small minority.Some researchers believe there is some merit to those concerns, even if the memo was flawed. Mr. Ravitch, the Michigan State University professor, said he believed agents erred in focusing on Catholicism. “What they’re really talking about is an extremely radical brand of Christian nationals,” he said, emphasizing that they are a small subset and not representative of the Roman Catholic Church or evangelicals.Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said during a September congressional hearing that he was “appalled” by the memo and that “Catholics are not extremists.” He called suggestions that the government was targeting Americans based on their faith “outrageous,” referencing the fact that his own family fled Europe to escape antisemitism before the Holocaust.And earlier this month during a Senate hearing, Mr. Wray said of the document: “That particular intelligence product is something that, as soon I saw it, I was aghast. I had it withdrawn.”In a statement this week, the F.B.I. reiterated, “Any characterization that the F.B.I. is targeting Catholics is false.”Curious about the accuracy of a claim? Email factcheck@nytimes.com. More

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      TikTok’s Influence on Young Voters Is No Simple Matter

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      We’re in a season of hand-wringing and scapegoating over social media, especially TikTok, with many Americans and politicians missing that two things can be true at once: Social media can have an outsized and sometimes pernicious influence on society, and lawmakers can unfairly use it as an excuse to deflect legitimate criticisms.Young people are overwhelmingly unhappy about U.S. policy on the war in Gaza? Must be because they get their “perspective on the world on TikTok” — at least according to Senator John Fetterman, a Democrat who holds a strong pro-Israel stance. This attitude is shared across the aisle. “It would not be surprising that the Chinese-owned TikTok is pushing pro-Hamas content,” Senator Marsha Blackburn said. Another Republican senator, Josh Hawley, called TikTok a “purveyor of virulent antisemitic lies.”Consumers are unhappy with the economy? Surely, that’s TikTok again, with some experts arguing that dismal consumer sentiment is a mere “vibecession” — feelings fueled by negativity on social media rather than by the actual effects of inflation, housing costs and more. Some blame online phenomena such as the viral TikTok “Silent Depression” videos that compare the economy today to that of the 1930s — falsely asserting things were easier then.It’s no secret that social media can spread misleading and even harmful content, given that its business model depends on increasing engagement, thus often amplifying inflammatory content (which is highly engaging!) with little to no guardrails for veracity. And, yes, TikTok, whose parent company is headquartered in Beijing and which is increasingly dominating global information flows, should generate additional concern. As far back as 2012, research published in Nature by Facebook scientists showed how companies can easily and stealthily alter real-life behavior, such as election turnout.But that doesn’t make social media automatically and solely culpable for whenever people hold opinions inconvenient to those in power. While comparisons with the horrors of the Great Depression can fall far off the mark, young people do face huge economic challenges now, and that’s their truth even if their grasp of what happened a century ago is off. Housing prices and mortgage rates are high and rents less affordable, resurgent inflation has outpaced wages until recently, groceries have become much more expensive and career paths are much less certain.Similarly, given credible estimates of heavy casualties inflicted among Gazans — about 40 percent of whom are children — by Israel’s monthslong bombing campaign, maybe a more engaged younger population is justifiably critical of President Biden’s support of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government? Even the Israeli military’s own estimates say thousands civilians have been killed, and there is a lot of harrowing video out of Gaza showing entire families wiped out. At the same time, the Committee to Protect Journalists reports that at least 69 journalists and media workers have been among those killed in the war; Israel blocks access to foreign journalists outside of a few embedded ones under its control. (Egypt does as well.) In such moments, social media can act as a bypass around censorship and silence.There’s no question that there’s antisemitic content and lies on TikTok, and on other platforms. I’ve seen many outrageous clips about Hamas’s actions on Oct. 7 that falsely and callously deny the horrific murders and atrocities. And I do wish we knew more about exactly what people were seeing on TikTok: Without meaningful transparency, it’s hard to know the scale and scope of such content on the platform.But I’m quite skeptical that young people would be more upbeat about the economy and the war in Gaza if not for viral videos.Why don’t we know more about TikTok’s true influence, or that of YouTube or Facebook? Because that requires the kind of independent research that’s both expensive and possible only with the cooperation of the platforms themselves, which hold so much key data we don’t see about the spread and impact of such content. It’s as if tobacco companies privately compiled the nation’s lung cancer rates or car companies hoarded the air quality statistics.For example, there is a strong case that social media has been harmful to the well-being of teenagers, especially girls. The percentage of 12- to 17-year-old girls who had a major depressive episode had been flat until about 2011, when smartphones and social media became more common, and then more than doubled in the next decade. Pediatric mental health hospitalizations among girls are also sharply up since 2009. Global reading, math and science test scores, too, took a nosedive right around then.The multiplicity of such findings is strongly suggestive. But is it a historic shift that would happen anyway even without smartphones and social media? Or is social media the key cause? Despite some valiant researchers trying to untangle this, the claim remains contested partly because we lack enough of the right kind of research with access to data.And lack of more precise knowledge certainly impedes action. As things stand, big tech companies can object to calls for regulation by saying we don’t really know if social media is truly harmful in the ways claimed — a convenient shrug, since they helped ensure this outcome.Meanwhile, politicians alternate between using the tools to their benefit or rushing to blame them, but without passing meaningful legislation.Back in 2008 and 2012, Facebook and big data were credited with helping Barack Obama win his presidential races. After his 2012 re-election, I wrote an article calling for regulations requiring transparency and understanding and worried whether “these new methods are more effective in manipulating people.” I concluded with “you should be worried even if your candidate is — for the moment — better at these methods.” The Democrats, though, weren’t having any of that, then. The data director of Obama for America responded that concerns such as mine were “a bunch of malarkey.” No substantive regulations were passed.The attitude changed after 2016, when it felt as if many people wanted to talk only about social media. But social media has never been some magic wand that operates in a vacuum; its power is amplified when it strikes a chord with people’s own experiences and existing ideologies. Donald Trump’s narrow victory may have been surprising, but it wasn’t solely because of social media hoodwinking people.There were many existing political dynamics that social media played on and sometimes manipulated and exacerbated, including about race and immigration (which were openly talked about) and some others that had generated much grass-roots discontent but were long met with bipartisan incuriosity from the establishment, such as the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis, America’s role in the world (including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) and how international trade had reshaped the economy.As we head into the 2024 elections, in some ways, little seems to have changed since Obama’s victory in 2008 — the first election dubbed the “Facebook Election.” We’re still discussing viral misinformation, fake news, election meddling, but there’s still no meaningful legislation that responds to the challenges brought about by the internet and social media and that seeks to bring transparency, oversight or accountability. Just add realistic A.I.-generated content, a new development, and the rise of TikTok, we’re good to go for 2024 — if Trump wins the Republican nomination as seems likely, only one candidate’s name needs updating from 2016.Do we need proper oversight and regulation of social media? You bet. Do we need to find more effective ways of countering harmful lies and hate speech? Of course. But I can only conclude that despite the heated bipartisan rhetoric of blame, scapegoating social media is more convenient to politicians than turning their shared anger into sensible legislation.Worrying about the influence of social media isn’t a mere moral panic or “kids these days” tsk-tsking. But until politicians and institutions dig into the influence of social media and try to figure out ways to regulate it, and also try addressing broader sources of discontent, blaming TikTok amounts to just noise.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. 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