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      Fixing What the Internet Broke

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyon techFixing What the Internet BrokeHow sites like Facebook and Twitter can help reduce election misinformation.Credit…Angie WangMarch 4, 2021, 12:26 p.m. ETThis article is part of the On Tech newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it weekdays.January’s riot at the U.S. Capitol showed the damage that can result when millions of people believe an election was stolen despite no evidence of widespread fraud.The Election Integrity Partnership, a coalition of online information researchers, published this week a comprehensive analysis of the false narrative of the presidential contest and recommended ways to avoid a repeat.Internet companies weren’t solely to blame for the fiction of a stolen election, but the report concluded that they were hubs where false narratives were incubated, reinforced and cemented. I’m going to summarize here three of the report’s intriguing suggestions for how companies such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter can change to help create a healthier climate of information about elections and everything else.One broad point: It can feel as if the norms and behaviors of people online are immutable and inevitable, but they’re not. Digital life is still relatively new, and what’s good or toxic is the result of deliberate choices by companies and all of us. We can fix what’s broken. And as another threat against the Capitol this week shows, it’s imperative we get this right.1) A higher bar for people with the most influence and the repeat offenders: Kim Kardashian can change more minds than your dentist. And research about the 2020 election has shown that a relatively small number of prominent organizations and people, including President Donald Trump, played an outsize role in establishing the myth of a rigged vote.Currently, sites like Facebook and YouTube mostly consider the substance of a post or video, divorced from the messenger, when determining whether it violates their policies. World leaders are given more leeway than the rest of us and other prominent people sometimes get a pass when they break the companies’ guidelines.This doesn’t make sense.If internet companies did nothing else, it would make a big difference if they changed how they treated the influential people who were most responsible for spreading falsehoods or twisted facts — and tended to do so again and again.The EIP researchers suggested three changes: create stricter rules for influential people; prioritize faster decisions on prominent accounts that have broken the rules before; and escalate consequences for habitual superspreaders of bogus information.YouTube has long had such a “three strikes” system for accounts that repeatedly break its rules, and Twitter recently adopted versions of this system for posts that it considers misleading about elections or coronavirus vaccinations.The hard part, though, is not necessarily making policies. It’s enforcing them when doing so could trigger a backlash.2) Internet companies should tell us what they’re doing and why: Big websites like Facebook and Twitter have detailed guidelines about what’s not allowed — for example, threatening others with violence or selling drugs.But internet companies often apply their policies inconsistently and don’t always provide clear reasons when people’s posts are flagged or deleted. The EIP report suggested that online companies do more to inform people about their guidelines and share evidence to support why a post broke the rules.3) More visibility and accountability for internet companies’ decisions: News organizations have reported on Facebook’s own research identifying ways that its computer recommendations steered some to fringe ideas and made people more polarized. But Facebook and other internet companies mostly keep such analyses a secret.The EIP researchers suggested that internet companies make public their research into misinformation and their assessments of attempts to counter it. That could improve people’s understanding of how these information systems work.The report also suggested a change that journalists and researchers have long wanted: ways for outsiders to see posts that have been deleted by the internet companies or labeled false. This would allow accountability for the decisions that internet companies make.There are no easy fixes to building Americans’ trust in a shared set of facts, particularly when internet sites enable lies to travel farther and faster than the truth. But the EIP recommendations show we do have options and a path forward. Before we go …Amazon goes big(ger) in New York: My colleagues Matthew Haag and Winnie Hu wrote about Amazon opening more warehouses in New York neighborhoods and suburbs to make faster deliveries. A related On Tech newsletter from 2020: Why Amazon needs more package hubs closer to where people live.Our homes are always watching: Law enforcement officials have increasingly sought videos from internet-connected doorbell cameras to help solve crimes but The Washington Post writes that the cameras have sometimes been a risk to them, too. In Florida, a man saw F.B.I. agents coming through his home camera and opened fire, killing two people.Square is buying Jay-Z’s streaming music service: Yes, the company that lets the flea market vendor swipe your credit card is going to own a streaming music company. No, it doesn’t make sense. (Square said it’s about finding new ways for musicians to make money.)Hugs to thisA kitty cat wouldn’t budge from the roof of a train in London for about two and a half hours. Here are way too many silly jokes about the train-surfing cat. (Or maybe JUST ENOUGH SILLY JOKES?)We want to hear from you. Tell us what you think of this newsletter and what else you’d like us to explore. You can reach us at ontech@nytimes.com.If you don’t already get this newsletter in your inbox, please sign up here.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Facebook Ends Ban on Political Advertising

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyFacebook Ends Ban on Political AdvertisingThe social network had prohibited political ads on its site indefinitely after the November election. Such ads have been criticized for spreading misinformation.Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook chief executive, testifying in October. Before the ban on political ads, he had said he wanted to maintain a hands-off approach toward speech on Facebook.Credit…Pool photo by Michael ReynoldsMarch 3, 2021Updated 6:16 p.m. ETSAN FRANCISCO — Facebook said on Wednesday that it planned to lift its ban on political advertising across its network, resuming a form of digital promotion that has been criticized for spreading misinformation and falsehoods and inflaming voters.The social network said it would allow advertisers to buy new ads about “social issues, elections or politics” beginning on Thursday, according to a copy of an email sent to political advertisers and viewed by The New York Times. Those advertisers must complete a series of identity checks before being authorized to place the ads, the company said.“We put this temporary ban in place after the November 2020 election to avoid confusion or abuse following Election Day,” Facebook said in a blog post. “We’ve heard a lot of feedback about this and learned more about political and electoral ads during this election cycle. As a result, we plan to use the coming months to take a closer look at how these ads work on our service to see where further changes may be merited.”Political advertising on Facebook has long faced questions. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, has said he wished to maintain a largely hands-off stance toward speech on the site — including political ads — unless it posed an immediate harm to the public or individuals, saying that he “does not want to be the arbiter of truth.”But after the 2016 presidential election, the company and intelligence officials discovered that Russians had used Facebook ads to sow discontent among Americans. Former President Donald J. Trump also used Facebook’s political ads to amplify claims about an “invasion” on the Mexican border in 2019, among other incidents.Facebook had banned political ads late last year as a way to choke off misinformation and threats of violence around the November presidential election. In September, the company said it planned to forbid new political ads for the week before Election Day and would act swiftly against posts that tried to dissuade people from voting. Then in October, Facebook expanded that action by declaring it would prohibit all political and issue-based advertising after the polls closed on Nov. 3 for an undetermined length of time.The company eventually clamped down on groups and pages that spread certain kinds of misinformation, such as discouraging people from voting or registering to vote. It has spent billions of dollars to root out foreign influence campaigns and other types of meddling from malicious state agencies and other bad actors.In December, Facebook lifted the ban to allow some advertisers to run political issue and candidacy ads in Georgia for the January runoff Senate election in the state. But the ban otherwise remained in effect for the remaining 49 states.Attitudes around how political advertising should be treated across Facebook are decidedly mixed. Politicians who are not well known often can raise their profile and awareness of their campaigns by using Facebook.“Political ads are not bad things in and of themselves,” said Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media studies professor and the author of a book studying Facebook’s effects on democracy. “They perform an essential service, in the act of directly representing the candidate’s concerns or positions.”He added, “When you ban all campaign ads on the most accessible and affordable platform out there, you tilt the balance toward the candidates who can afford radio and television.”Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, has also said that political advertising on Facebook can be a crucial component for Democratic digital campaign strategies.Some political ad buyers applauded the lifting of the ads ban.“The ad ban was something that Facebook did to appease the public for the misinformation that spread across the platform,” said Eileen Pollet, a digital campaign strategist and founder of Ravenna Strategies. “But it really ended up hurting good actors while bad actors had total free rein. And now, especially since the election is over, the ban had really been hurting nonprofits and local organizations.”Facebook has long sought to thread the needle between forceful moderation of its policies and a lighter touch. For years, Mr. Zuckerberg defended politicians’ right to say what they wanted on Facebook, but that changed last year amid rising alarm over potential violence around the November election.In January, Facebook barred Mr. Trump from using his account and posting on the platform after he took to social media to delegitimize the election results and incited a violent uprising among his supporters, who stormed the U.S. Capitol.Facebook said Mr. Trump’s suspension was “indefinite.” The decision is now under review by the Facebook Oversight Board, a third-party entity created by the company and composed of journalists, academics and others that adjudicates some of the company’s thorny content policy enforcement decisions. A decision is expected to come within the next few months.On Thursday, political advertisers on Facebook will be able to submit new ads or turn on existing political ads that have already been approved, the company said. Each ad will appear with a small disclaimer, stating that it has been “paid for by” a political organization. For those buying new ads, Facebook said it could take up to a week to clear the identity authorization and advertising review process.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      in US Politics

      Optimizing for outrage: ex-Obama digital chief urges curbs on big tech

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      [embedded content]
      A former digital strategist for Barack Obama has demanded an end to big tech’s profit-driven optimization of outrage and called for regulators to curb online disinformation and division.
      Michael Slaby – author of a new book, For All the People: Redeeming the Broken Promises of Modern Media and Reclaiming Our Civic Life – described tech giants Facebook and Google as “two gorillas” crushing the very creativity needed to combat conspiracy theories spread by former US president Donald Trump and others.
      “The systems are not broken,” Slaby, 43, told the Guardian by phone from his home in Rhinebeck, New York. “They are working exactly as they were designed for the benefit of their designers. They can be designed differently. We can express and encourage a different set of public values about the public goods that we need from our public sphere.”
      Facebook has almost 2.8 billion global monthly active users with a total of 3.3 billion using any of the company’s core products – Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger – on a monthly basis. Its revenue in the fourth quarter of last year was $28bn, up 33% from a year earlier, and profits climbed 53% to $11.2bn.
      But the social network founded by Mark Zuckerberg stands accused of poisoning the information well. Critics say it polarises users and allows hate speech and conspiracy theories to thrive, and that people who join extremist groups are often directed by the platform’s algorithm. The use of Facebook by Trump supporters involved in the 6 January insurrection at the US Capitol has drawn much scrutiny.
      Slaby believes Facebook and Twitter were too slow to remove Trump from their platforms. “This is where I think they hide behind arguments like the first amendment,” he said. “The first amendment is about government suppression of speech; it doesn’t have anything to do with your access to Facebook. More

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      Neera Tanden, Biden’s Budget Nominee, Faces Challenge to Confirmation

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyNeera Tanden, Biden’s Budget Nominee, Faces Challenge to ConfirmationSenator Joe Manchin III said he would oppose President Biden’s nominee to lead the Office of Management and Budget, a move that could scuttle her chances.Neera Tanden would need the support of at least one Republican senator in order to pass confirmation, with the vote of Vice President Kamala Harris needed to break a tie.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesFeb. 19, 2021Updated 8:11 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — Senator Joe Manchin III announced on Friday that he would oppose the nomination of Neera Tanden, President Biden’s pick to lead the Office of Management and Budget, imperiling her prospects for confirmation in an evenly divided Senate.The announcement by Mr. Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia, underscored the fragility of the ambitions of the new Democratic majority in the Senate and the outsize power that any one senator holds over the success of Mr. Biden’s administration and agenda.The fate of the nomination is now in the hands of a party that Ms. Tanden has frequently criticized in the past, particularly moderate Republicans she has previously scorned. Ms. Tanden would need the support of at least one Republican senator in order to to be confirmed, with the vote of Vice President Kamala Harris needed to break a tie.Given Ms. Tanden’s previous litany of critical public statements and posts on Twitter against members of both parties, it is unclear whether such support exists.Mr. Manchin cited statements from Ms. Tanden that were personally directed at Senators Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader; Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent now in charge of the Senate Budget Committee; and other colleagues.“I believe her overtly partisan statements will have a toxic and detrimental impact on the important working relationship between members of Congress and the next director of the Office of Management and Budget,” said Mr. Manchin, who will also cast a decisive vote on Mr. Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus plan. “For this reason, I cannot support her nomination. As I have said before, we must take meaningful steps to end the political division and dysfunction that pervades our politics.”Mr. Biden told reporters on Friday that he did not plan to withdraw her nomination.“I think we are going to find the votes and get her confirmed,” he said.Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, reiterated that position in a statement: “Neera Tanden is an accomplished policy expert who would be an excellent budget director and we look forward to the committee votes next week and to continuing to work toward her confirmation through engagement with both parties.”But the lack of support from Mr. Manchin could be enough to derail the nomination altogether, should Republicans remain united against her selection.Ms. Tanden would be the first woman of color to head the Office of Management and Budget, an agency that is critical to the execution of the administration’s economic and policy agendas. But Mr. Biden’s decision to nominate her even before Democrats won control of the Senate in January stunned several lawmakers and aides on Capitol Hill, given the slim margins in the upper chamber and Ms. Tanden’s prolific venom on social media.The New WashingtonLatest UpdatesUpdated Feb. 19, 2021, 7:17 p.m. ETGeorgia legislators want to restrict voting methods popular among Democrats.Lloyd Austin addressed a viral video about sexual harassment in the Marine Corps.House Budget Committee unveils a 600-page, $1.9 trillion economic relief bill.A senior adviser to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, Ms. Tanden had frequently clashed with Mr. Sanders and other prominent liberals long after the conclusion of the primary race that year. Once she was formally nominated to oversee the budget agency, Ms. Tanden deleted more than 1,000 negative tweets, and liberal senators rallied to her defense.But she faced tough questioning from both Republicans and Democrats during her two confirmation hearings this month, with lawmakers from both parties examining her previous tweets and statements and grilling her over the millions of dollars of corporate donations that her think tank, Center for American Progress, received.Republicans spent the first hour of her first hearing before a Senate homeland security committee asking Ms. Tanden to explain her past tweets and why she deleted more than 1,000 shortly after the November election.Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio and a former director of the Office of Management and Budget, read aloud posts in which she called Mr. McConnell “Moscow Mitch” and said that “vampires have more heart than Ted Cruz,” a Republican senator from Texas.Her second hearing was no less fiery, with Mr. Sanders confronting Ms. Tanden over her history of leveling personal attacks on social media. He also demanded details about the donations the Center for American Progress received from corporations under her leadership and a promise that it would not influence her work in the Biden administration.Ms. Tanden apologized to lawmakers during both hearings, saying she regretted many of her previous remarks, and she vowed that the donations would carry no weight over her role as budget director.“I worry less about what Mrs. Tanden did in the past than what she’s going to do in the future,” Mr. Sanders said Friday night on CNN. “I’m talking to her early next week.”Many Democrats accused Republicans of unfairly singling out Ms. Tanden’s social media posts after years of evading queries about President Donald J. Trump’s tweets, even when they espoused racist and offensive commentary or targeted their own colleagues.“Honestly, the hypocrisy is astounding,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, said at the time. “If Republicans are concerned about criticism on Twitter, their complaints are better directed at President Trump. I fully expect to see some crocodile tears spilled on the other side of the aisle over the president-elect’s cabinet nominees.”Mr. Biden’s pick for deputy director of the agency, Shalanda Young, is respected by lawmakers and aides in both parties after serving as staff director for House Democrats on the Appropriations Committee. The first Black woman to serve in the role, she helped wrangle the compromise that ended the nation’s longest government shutdown in 2019 and the coronavirus relief packages Congress approved in 2020.Jim Tankersley More

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      What Do ‘Right’ and ‘Wrong’ Mean to the G.O.P.?

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyWhat Do ‘Right’ and ‘Wrong’ Mean to the G.O.P.?These politicians are still bowing to their alpha — Trump.Opinion ColumnistFeb. 10, 2021Credit…Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York TimesIt cannot be said often enough: The first rule of politics is survival.This is a sad but pervading truth. We like to think that politicians are driven above all else by a sense of public service, a fundamental belief in the efficacy of government and in the defense of democracy.Surely that is true of some. But we are ever reminded that too many elected officials’ primary impulse is the pursuit, acquisition and maintenance of power. Power is the politicians’ profession. So just like a pack of animals, they willingly, gleefully subjugate themselves to the one among them with the most power.We see that playing out before our eyes in the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump for inciting an insurrection, a high crime of which he is clearly guilty.All but six Republican senators voted that the trial itself was unconstitutional, even though constitutional scholars overwhelmingly disagree.These politicians are still bowing to their alpha — Trump. In the early days of Trump’s presidency, Republicans in Congress either cozied up to him or sat in silence as his demagogy ensnared and entranced the Republican base.For years — decades even — the conservative elite had alternately tolerated, recruited or activated racists, white nationalists and white supremacists. The elite have their own versions of these biases, but they thought themselves more erudite and tactical, not brash and brazen. They would use surgical tools of voter suppression, states’ rights campaigns and defense of marriage and the unborn to advance their goals in a way they saw as honorable.But Trump saw the voters that the elites kept under the stairs, the ones they want to excite only around election time. He saw the resentment and rage in them. He saw that their voices had been muted and their tongues chastened.He drew them out. He let them vent. He allowed them to see they were indeed the majority of the party. He offered to be their leader, their white knight of white power, and they accepted. They grew loud and strong and he fed them red meat. They rampaged and he basked in the glow of the blaze.Leader and followers had found each other. Now the traditional Republicans were on the run or on the ropes. Rather than become victims of the mob, they yielded to it. They tried to tap into it. They tried to grab the reins of it.But this mob had only one leader: Trump. It was a cult of personality. It was a religion with one god. And that god is a jealous god. And vindictive. And mean.Anyone who would dare forsake Trump runs the risk of being smote by him, and targeted by his minions. To diverge from Trump is essentially to abdicate power, and for a career politician that is a fate worse than death.So, we watch the impeachment trial, with the impressive and clear presentation by the House impeachment managers of evidence that we already knew and some that we didn’t. We are reminded of just how heinous an episode that attempted insurrection was, that people were killed and injured.We are reminded that there were those in that band of terrorists who wanted to take even more murderous actions, but simply didn’t happen upon the opportunity and targets.And, in the end, you have to ask yourself only one question to convict Trump: Would this attempted insurrection have happened without him? The answer is no.For months Trump lied about the election and pumped into his followers the fallacy that something had been stolen from them and that they needed to fight with all they had to reclaim it. Then there are all the things he said on the eve of the assault on the Capitol, during it and even after it.Trump refused to accept that his white power presidency was coming to an end, in part because of Black and brown voters in some key states, so he asked his white power patriots to come to his defense, to help overturn a fair election.They responded, loyally, to the party leader who had truly seen them, who didn’t condemn their bigotries but amplified them. They saw themselves in Trump, and they still do.The Republicans in Congress are still afraid of their own base, their own constituencies in their own districts and states, because the Trump rot reaches down to the root. Their voters belong to Trump, therefore their futures are in Trump’s hands.Trump is essentially running a defection minority government from political exile.Republicans dare not cross him, even if they know that he is wrong, even if they know that what he did to incite the insurgency is wrong, even if they know that voting to convict him is right.Right and wrong have taken on new meanings in this Republican Party: to be right is to side with Trump, unwaveringly, while the only wrong is to do the opposite.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 and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      To restore trust in democracy, the US should lead a global 'fact fightback' | Timothy Garton Ash

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      To survive, democracy needs a minimum of shared truth. With the storming of the Capitol in Washington on 6 January, the US showed us just how dangerous it is when millions of citizens are led to deny an important, carefully verified fact – namely, who won the election.
      To prosper, democracy needs a certain kind of public sphere, one in which citizens and their representatives engage in vigorous argument on the basis of shared facts. Restoring that kind of public sphere is now a central task for the renewal of liberal democracy. Call it the fact fightback.
      The basic idea comes to us from the very beginnings of democracy, 2,500 years ago. The citizens of ancient Athens gathered in an open air debating place known as the Pnyx – the original “public square”. “Who will address the assembly?” asked the herald, and any citizen could get up on a stone platform to speak. After facts and arguments had been presented and debated, a policy was put to a vote. It was through this deliberative process that the ancient Athenians decided to fight the invading Persians at sea, in the Battle of Salamis, and saved the world’s first democracy.
      To be sure, ancient Athens never entirely measured up to its own revolutionary ideal of equal, free speech for the public good; nor did the US “public square”, even before the arrival of Fox News and Facebook. Beware the myth of a pre-Zuckerberg golden age, when only the purest waters of Truth flowed from the mouths of supremely principled newspapermen, and all citizens were rational, informed and respectfully open-minded. But most democracies have in recent years moved further away from the Athenian ideal: some rapidly (the US, Poland), others more slowly (Germany, Britain).
      To address this challenge, we need a twin-track strategy. On the first track, individual democracies must tackle the particular problems of their own national information environments. In Britain, for example, the battle to defend and improve the BBC is more important than anything the UK government does about Facebook or Twitter.
      A public service broadcaster such as the BBC gives us not just verified facts but a curated diversity of arguments in one place: a digital Pnyx. Any democracy that has a decent public service broadcaster should double its budget, strengthen its independence from government and task it with enhancing the digital public square for tomorrow’s citizens.
      In Poland, where public service broadcasting has been destroyed by a populist ruling party, it is now crucial to defend independent private media such as the TVN television channel and the onet.pl internet platform. They and others are coming under sharp attack, with measures straight out of the playbook of Viktor Orbán in Hungary.
      In the US there is no shortage of diverse, free, privately owned media, including some of the best in the world. The problem there is that Americans have largely separated out into two divorced media worlds – with different television channels, radio stations, YouTube channels, Facebook pages and Twitter feeds (such as the currently deleted @realDonaldTrump) giving them incompatible versions of reality.
      It is as if half the citizens of ancient Athens had assembled on the old Pnyx, where they were addressed by Pericles, while the other half gathered on a counter-Pnyx, where the would-be tyrant Hippias (Donald J) held them enthralled. How do you bring Americans back together so they listen to each other again?
      Yet no single nation is big enough to take on the private superpowers of the digital world – Facebook, Google, Amazon, Twitter, Apple, Netflix. Here, on this second track, we need the co-ordinated action of a critical mass of democracies, starting with the US and those of the European Union.
      Outside China, the US is the world’s leading digital trendsetter while the EU is its leading norm-setter. Put together the trendsetter and the norm-setter, add a bunch of other leading democracies, and you have a combination of market and regulatory power to which even His Digital Highness Mark Zuckerberg must bow.
      When I hear politicians confidently pontificating about Facebook or Google, I am reminded of HL Mencken’s remark: “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.” Make them pay for news links on their platforms! (The Australian solution.) Put the former Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre on to them as head of the UK media regulator Ofcom! Treat platforms as publishers!
      The US’s giant for-profit platforms are neither “dumb pipes” nor publishers, but a new creation somewhere in-between. They are algorithmic selectors, distributors and promoters of content provided by others and, at the same time, mass collectors and commercial exploiters of our data.
      At best, they are important aids to truth-seeking. (We Google the sharpest criticism of Google.) At worst, they are unprecedentedly powerful amplifiers of lies. The profit motive pushes them towards the dark side, via algorithmic maximisation of the currency of attention. In a 2016 internal report, Facebook itself found that 64% of those who joined one extremist group on Facebook did so only because the company’s algorithm recommended it to them. (“We’ve changed, you know!” protests Facebook, like a reformed alcoholic. But has he really stopped drinking?)
      What we need now is a process, led by the US and EU, to distil some coherent policies from what is already a large body of good research. Some, such as amending the US Communications Decency Act to make platforms more directly responsible for curbing harmful content, will depend on the new US Congress. Others, such as breaking what are clearly monopolies or near-monopolies, will require a strategic combination of EU competition policy and revised US anti-trust legislation.
      For content moderation, we should build on the hybrid regulation model pioneered in Facebook’s new oversight board, which has just issued its first rulings. (Next challenge: should Facebook, and by implication Twitter, continue to ban ex-president Trump?) Serious solutions will involve technological innovation, business practice, fact-checking and digital education, as well as democratically mandated law and regulation.
      Ideally, this would result in a set of proposals being put before the “summit of democracies” planned by the US president, Joe Biden. Of course, 80 different countries are not going to adopt identical measures. But there must be some coherence in the underlying principles and basic approaches, otherwise the internet of the free, which has already lost China, will become even more of a splinternet. Moreover, the private superpowers will be the only ones who can afford the cost of complying with 80 different sets of regulations, thus unintentionally strengthening the fateful trend to monopoly. Since these are US companies, a special responsibility falls on Washington. Here is a unique opportunity for Biden’s US to show that it can listen as well as lead.
      Timothy Garton Ash is the author of Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World More

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      Marjorie Taylor Greene Knows Exactly What She’s Doing

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyMarjorie Taylor Greene Knows Exactly What She’s DoingThe once-porous border between the right and the far right has dissolved.Feb. 5, 2021, 5:27 a.m. ETMarjorie Taylor Greene during the playing of the national anthem at a Second Amendment rally in Georgia on Sept. 19, 2020. Credit…C.B. Schmelter/Chattanooga Times Free Press, via Associated PressMarjorie Taylor Greene is the QAnon congresswoman, a far-right influencer and gun fanatic who dabbles in anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim bigotry. She endorsed violence against congressional leaders, claimed that the Parkland and Sandy Hook shootings were faked and once shared an anti-refugee video in which a Holocaust denier says that “Zionist supremacists have schemed to promote immigration and miscegenation.”She showed a little contrition on Wednesday with a qualified apology to her Republican colleagues. For this, she received a standing ovation. On Thursday, after an afternoon of deliberation, the House of Representatives voted to strip Greene of her committee assignments. Or rather, Democrats voted to strip her of her committee assignments. All but 11 Republicans voted in her favor.Although it is tempting to make this episode another parable exemplifying the “Trumpification” of the Republican Party, it’s better understood as yet another chapter in an ongoing story: the two-step between the far right and the Republican Party and the degree to which the former is never actually that far from the latter.There’s a story conservatives tell about themselves and their movement. It goes like this: In the mid-1960s, William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of National Review, made a decisive break with the John Birch Society, an ultra-right-wing advocacy organization whose popular co-founder, Robert Welch, believed that the United States was threatened by a far-reaching “Communist conspiracy” whose agents included former President Dwight Eisenhower and Chief Justice Earl Warren.“How can the John Birch Society be an effective political instrument while it is led by a man whose views on current affairs are, at so many critical points, so critically different from their own, and, for that matter, so far removed from common sense?” Buckley asked of Welch in a blistering 1962 essay. “There are, as we say, great things that need doing, the winning of a national election, the re-education of the governing class. John Birch chapters can do much to forward these aims, but only as they dissipate the fog of confusion that issues from Mr. Welch’s smoking typewriter.”This attack on Welch, if not the John Birch Society itself, continued into the 1964 presidential election. Birchers helped carry Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona to victory in the Republican primary with skillful moves on the convention floor, in what would be their greatest display of strength before a final repudiation from Buckley and other leading lights of the conservative movement the following year. “I am not a member” of the group, Ronald Reagan declared in September 1965, “I have no intention of becoming a member. I am not going to solicit their support.”With this, Welch and the John Birch Society were pushed to the fringe. The conservative movement would win elections and power with an appeal to the mainstream of American society.Or so goes the story.Welch and the John Birch Society were pushed to the margins. The extremist tag, as Lisa McGirr notes in “Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right,” did real damage to the organization’s ability to sustain itself: “The society was simply too strongly identified with minoritarian utterances and outdated conspiracies to remain an important vehicle for channeling the new majoritarian conservatism.” However, she continues, “The sentiments, grievances, and ideas the organization helped to define mobilize lived on and were championed by organizations and political leaders who thrust forth a new populist conservatism.”A campaign button for Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential bid quotes from his speech accepting the Republican nomination.Credit…David J. & Janice L. Frent/Corbis, via Getty ImagesThe hard right wasn’t at the front of the charge, but it wasn’t purged either. Instead, it served as part of the mass base of activists and voters who propelled conservative leaders to prominence and conservative politicians to victory. If there were boundaries between the mainstream and the extreme right, they were — as Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld argue in “The Long New Right and the World It Made” — “porous,” with movement from one to the other and back again. Several key figures of the New Right and the Christian Right of the 1970s and ’80s were, Sara Diamond points out in “Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States,” “veterans of the 1964 Goldwater campaign” who were “steeped in the conservative movement’s dual strategy of forming wide-ranging political organizations and activism based on more specific issues.”To illustrate their point about the porousness of the conservative movement, Schlozman and Rosenfeld highlight a series of interviews in which a “who’s who of the right of the late 1970s and early 1980s” sat for wide-ranging discussions with The Review of the News, a front publication of the John Birch Society. Figures from inside the Reagan administration, like Jeane Kirkpatrick and Anne Gorsuch (mother of Neil), then the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, made an appearance, as did lawmakers like Jesse Helms of North Carolina, Dick Cheney of Wyoming and Chuck Grassley of Iowa.This is a column, and I may be flattening some of the nuances here for the sake of brevity. But the essential point is sound: Extremism has always had a place in mainstream conservative politics, and this is especially true at the grass-roots level.What’s distinctive right now isn’t the fact that someone like Greene exists but that no one has emerged to play the role of Buckley. A longtime Republican leader like Mitch McConnell can try — he denounced Greene’s “loony lies and conspiracy theories” as a “cancer” on the party — but after he served four years as an ally to Donald Trump, his words aren’t worth much.Those once-porous borders, in other words, now appear to be nonexistent, and there’s no one in the Republican Party or its intellectual orbit to police the extreme right. Representative Greene is the first QAnon member of Congress, but she won’t be the last and she may not even ultimately be the worst.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, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More