El español pierde fuerza como seña de identidad latina en EE.UU.
Diversos expertos analizan en el Instituto Cervantes la salud del idioma en los medios estadounidenses
3 Diciembre 2017
En Estados Unidos, no es crucial el idioma para conformar la creciente identidad latina del siglo XXI. No por el hecho de hablar inglés los hispanos y sus descendientes dejan de sentirse como tales. Se impone el bilingüismo, pero el dominio del español se convierte más en una razón práctica que de orgullo de pertenencia. Es lo que señalan diversos expertos reunidos esta semana en la sede madrileña del Instituto Cervantes. Lo han hecho en torno a un asunto de relieve: medios de comunicación y cultura en español, con jornadas dedicadas al estado de salud en EE UU.
Así lo cree Frances Negrón-Muntaner, escritora portorriqueña, cineasta y experta en etnicidad y raza de la Universidad de Columbia. “Los latinos lo son sin tener que hablar español”, asegura. “Ese aspecto no define, hoy por hoy, al grupo y el 71% de los mismos asegura que no es un aspecto crucial en su identidad”, comenta. Emili Prados, catedrático de la Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, opina lo mismo: “Lo valoran como una herramienta que les hace competentes, más que cómo orgullo de pertenencia a una comunidad”.
En ese declive con signos, ha tenido que ver la historia y el escaso margen de poder en esferas políticas, económicas y mediáticas que aún lastra a la comunidad hispana. Todavía hoy la desproporción en el área política preocupa. Jorge Ramos, presentador de informativos de Univisión, lo pone de manifiesto: “Para una población de 55 millones [el 18% del país] hay cuatro senadores y 30 congresistas”, cuenta. La buena noticia es que en estas últimas elecciones, dos candidatos hispanos –Marco Rubio y Ted Cruz- anduvieron en liza: “Suficiente para soñar alguna vez con un latino en la Casa Blanca”, comenta Rubio.
Si se da el caso, habrá sido un largo camino. Durante décadas, el español fue castigado en las aulas de los colegios. En la sociedad se imponía el English Only como mantra –un alineamiento surgido curiosamente en Miami a causa de la fuerza latina emergente en dicho ámbito- y se desprestigiaba el uso de un idioma, para los anglos, inferior.
“Actualmente, solo tres periódicos con más de 50.000 lectores –La Opinión (Los Ángeles), El Nuevo Herald (Miami) y El Tiempo Latino (Washington)- congregan a un público hispano”, afirma María Luisa Azpiazu, que fue corresponsal de la agencia Efe en EE UU durante 25 años. Escaso margen de influencia por escrito.
“La voz de la normalidad hispana en Estados Unidos no existe”, asegura Alberto Avendaño, antiguo director de El tiempo latino, medio asociado a The Washington Post. “La cobertura de esa realidad es patética y aleja a la audiencia de las nuevas generaciones de jóvenes hispanos”. En esa línea se pronuncia Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush, profesor del Programa de Periodismo en Español de la Universidad de la Ciudad de Nueva York (CUNY): “Existen grandes desiertos en la cobertura de temas hispanos”.
Otra cosa es la televisión, aunque redunde en los estereotipos y caiga presa de una realidad: la nueva audiencia latina prefiere los contenidos anglos. La cadena de integración tiene sus consecuencias. Los inmigrantes recién llegados echaban mano de los medios en español al desconocer el idioma. Las generaciones nacidas allí, toman ya los contenidos en inglés como norma y tienden a salir de la especie de gueto que perciben en los medios latinos.
Los temas que abordan tienen que ver mucho con la realidad de la discriminación al inmigrante. “Siempre fue así”, comenta Negrón-Muntaner. “Un medio como El clamor público, el primero aparecido en California hacia 1855, lo hacía. Y El Diario La Prensa, el más antiguo todavía en circulación, lo mantiene”.
En las televisiones, con sus paradojas a cuestas, el problema es que andan en gran parte controladas por conglomerados anglosajones. O pretenden ahora, caso de Univisión, con capital hispano, captar público en inglés. “El desafío de los medios, y concretamente de la televisión, es mantener el vínculo y el interés en contenidos con un idioma que quede a la altura de la calidad de los otros”, afirma Prado.
https://elpais.com/cultura/2017/12/02/actualidad/1512209764_567642.html
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‘This is class warfare’: Tax vote sparks political brawl over populism that will carry into 2018 elections
2 December 2017
DAYTON, Ohio — The Senate Republicans’ chaotic late-night vote Friday to overhaul the tax system widened the country’s partisan divisions Saturday — sparking a political grudge match that lawmakers vowed to carry into next year’s midterm elections.
Democrats, united in their opposition, attacked the legislation as a “scam” passed to benefit wealthy donors and corporations. Republicans, promising years of wage and job growth once the bill becomes law, acknowledged that they face a difficult task convincing voters to have faith in a measure that received support from the GOP alone.
“They tend not to be popular,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), referring to bills passed with only one party’s support, told The Washington Post in an interview Saturday. “Generally speaking, in the beginning, people decide they don’t like it.”
The test for Republicans is whether they can convince voters that this legislation will put more money in their wallets — and the GOP leader is not sure whether they can do that in time for the 2018 elections.
“We don’t know,” McConnell said. But he said he thinks that in the long run, the economic boost will come and voters will eventually reward Republicans.
“Whether it’s immediately popular or not becomes irrelevant if it does what you hope,” he added.
Just hours after the vote, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who ever since his unsuccessful bid for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination has been a leading voice pushing the party to the left on economic matters, demonstrated his intention to make the tax bill a marquee issue in 2018.
Sanders headed to the airport for an urgent trip across the Midwest, starting at Dayton’s Masonic Temple to try to rally 1,300 supporters against the bill, and telling them they could still defeat it when a conference committee is formed to combine differing House and Senate packages.
“The president was lying to you,” Sanders said. “This is class warfare, and we’re going to stand up and fight.”
The back and forth Saturday showed the opportunities — and challenges — for each side as they stake their political ground on taxes.
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“Silicon Valley stands to reap huge gains from the GOP tax reform plan”
THE GOP TAX PLAN WILL MAKE SILICON VALLEY’S MEGA-RICH EVEN RICHER
26 November 2017
For all its whining and teeth-gnashing about President Donald Trump over things like immigration policy, repealing net neutrality, and restricting LGBT rights, Silicon Valley stands to reap huge gains from the GOP tax reform plan.
As currently written, both the House and Senate tax bills give the tech industry everything they wanted, and then some. This includes preserving the carried interest loophole, which allows venture capitalists and hedge funds to pay a lower tax rate on their income, as well as lowering the overall corporate income tax rate. But even more significantly, Republican tax plans would allow corporate America to bring its income earned overseas — a pile of cash estimated to be worth more than $1 trillion — back into the country during a one-off repatriated tax “holiday.”
Here are the details of the three big wins that Silicon Valley will get out of the Republican tax plans:
Bringing billions home
Among American companies, Silicon Valley has more money stored overseas than anyone else. Of the $1.84 trillion stored by U.S. corporations overseas at the end of 2016, five tech companies alone — Apple, Google, Microsoft, Oracle and Cisco — held $594 billion, according to Moody’s. And if either the House or Senate tax bills make it through Congress and onto Trump’s desk, then those companies will get to pay a tax rate on that offshore cash pile that’s several times lower than what they otherwise would have paid.
Under the House tax plan, the repatriated holiday rate would be 14 percent for liquid assets and 7 percent for everything else; in the Senate bill, those numbers are 10 percent and 5 percent, respectively.
Although the House bill was narrowly passed by the chamber last Thursday, Silicon Valley’s leading lobby group, the Consumer Technology Association, has said it that it really likes the Senate plan.
Way lower taxes
Presently, the corporate income tax rate in the U.S. clocks in at around 39 percent, and tech executives like Apple CEO Tim Cook have whined about it for years, suggesting that the rate is too high, and that it stifles job creation.
But many tech companies already pay much lower effective rates, according to Scott Kessler, a tech industry analyst with CFRA Research, who cited S&P Global Market Intelligence data. For the last 12 months, Apple has paid a 24.6 percent tax rate. Google parent company Alphabet paid 19.3 percent, and Microsoft paid 9 percent.
“For the large tech companies, the overall reduction to the corporate tax rate is not nearly as important as this proposed reduction in the tax on repatriated foreign earnings,” Kessler said.
The last time the U.S. instituted a corporate tax holiday in 2004, a House subcommittee later found that it had cost the U.S. Treasury $3.3 billion. The authors of the report from the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations called it a “failed tax policy” that reduced over 20,000 fewer American jobs, and noted that the money used from the holiday was not used to invest in America, but was instead issued back to investors in the form of stock buybacks or dividends. And because it was such a rip-roaring success at keeping billions of dollars out of the hands of the U.S. government, it only incentivized companies to store even more cash abroad — requiring another repatriation holiday to allow companies to spend it as they wish now.
No strings attached
This time around, Silicon Valley figures including Tim Cook and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff have said that they support attaching strings to repatriated money — such as requiring it to be invested in American infrastructure (which was something candidate Trump said on the campaign trail in 2016). But that may not be possible.
“As much as there were discussions and comments from President Trump as a candidate and others that companies would be required or encouraged to make investments, there’s no sign of that in any such legislation that I know of,” said Kessler, who previously worked as a telecom lawyer representing Time Warner and Disney. “It’s very difficult to force companies to use this kind of capital in a certain way.”
When reached for comment, tech companies either declined to comment or directed VICE News to their trade group the Internet Association, which in turn referred to the CTA; this includes Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. An Apple spokesperson pointed to previous interviews in which company executives praised the tax reform process and expressed support for lower taxes and a more “simplified” system.
Free money for venture capitalists
Beyond repatriation, there are other goodies in the Republican tax bills for Silicon Valley. Venture capitalists can look forward to the preservation of the carried interest loophole, which allows investors to pay lowered tax rates on a sizeable portion of their income; Congress has previously estimated that this loophole costs the government about $2 billion in taxes every year.
And although Silicon Valley has largely left the heavy lifting on tax reform to Wall Street, tech companies have used their 546 registered Washington lobbyists to flex their muscles as necessary. For example, tech industry heavyweights like investors Fred Wilson and Ron Conway expressed dismay over language in the Senate tax reform plan that would have taxed the equity options given to startup employees, even if those options had not yet been exercised.
Within 48 hours, the Senate Finance Committee relented, and removed the provision from its bill.
https://news.vice.com/story/the-gop-tax-plan-will-make-silicon-valleys-mega-rich-even-richer
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Trump, Assange, Bannon, Farage… bound together in an unholy alliance
The Wikileaks founder’s astonishing admission should prompt MPs finally to start asking questions
29 October 2017
Last Wednesday, 11 months into Donald Trump’s new world order, in the first year of normalisation, a sudden unblurring of lines took place. A shift. A door of perception swung open.
Because that was the day that the dramatis personae of two separate Trump-Russia scandals smashed headlong into one another. A high-speed news car crash between Cambridge Analytica and Wikileaks, the two organisations that arguably had the most impact on 2016, coming together last week in one head-spinning scoop.
That day, we learned that Alexander Nix, the CEO of Cambridge Analytica, the controversial data firm that helped Trump to power, had contacted Julian Assange to ask him if he wanted “help” with Wikileaks’s stash of stolen emails.
That’s the stash of stolen emails that had such a devastating impact on Hillary Clinton in the last months of the campaign. And this story brought Wikileaks, which the head of the CIA describes as a “hostile intelligence service”, directly together with the Trump campaign for which Cambridge Analytica worked. This is an amazing plot twist for the company, owned by US billionaire Robert Mercer, which is already the subject of investigations by the House intelligence committee, the Senate intelligence committee, the FBI and, it was announced late on Friday night, the Senate judiciary committee.
So far, so American. These are US scandals involving US politics and the news made the headlines in US bulletins across US networks.
But it’s also Cambridge Analytica, the data analytics company, which has its headquarters in central London and that, following a series of articles about its role in Brexit in the Guardian and the Observer, is also being investigated, by the Electoral Commission and the Information Commissioner’s Office. The company that was spun out of a British military contractor, is headed by an old Etonian and that responded to our stories earlier this year by threatening to sue us. It’s our Cambridge it’s named after, not the American one, and it was here that it processed the voter files of 240 million US citizens.
It’s also here that this “hostile intelligence service” – Wikileaks – is based. The Ecuadorian embassy is just a few miles, as the crow flies, from Cambridge Analytica’s head office. Because this is not just about America. It’s about Britain, too. This is transatlantic. It’s not possible to separate Britain and the US in this whole sorry mess – and I say this as someone who has spent months trying. Where we see this most clearly is in that other weird Wikileaks connection: Nigel Farage. Because that moment in March when Farage was caught tripping down the steps of the Ecuadorian embassy was the last moment the lines suddenly became visible. That the ideological overlaps between Wikileaks and Trump and Brexit were revealed to be not just lines, but a channel of communication.
Because if there’s one person who’s in the middle of all of this, but who has escaped any proper scrutiny, it’s Nigel Farage. That’s Nigel Farage, who led the Leave.EU campaign, which is being investigated by the Electoral Commission alongside Cambridge Analytica, about whether the latter made an “impermissible donation” of services to the Leave campaign. Nigel Farage who visited Donald Trump and then Julian Assange. Who is friends with Steve Bannon and Robert Mercer. Who headed an organisation – Ukip – which has multiple, public, visible but almost entirely unreported Russian connections. Who is paid by the Russian state via the broadcaster RT, which was banned last week from Twitter. And who appears like clockwork on British television without any word of this.
This is a power network that involves Wikileaks and Farage, and Cambridge Analytica and Farage, and Robert Mercer and Farage. Steve Bannon, former vice president of Cambridge Analytica, and Farage. It’s Nigel Farage and Brexit and Trump and Cambridge Analytica and Wikileaks… and, if the Senate intelligence committee and the House intelligence committee and the FBI are on to anything at all, somewhere in the middle of all that, Russia.
Try to follow this on a daily basis and it’s one long headspin: a spider’s web of relationships and networks of power and patronage and alliances that spans the Atlantic and embraces data firms, thinktanks and media outlets. It is about complicated corporate structures in obscure jurisdictions, involving offshore funds funnelled through the black-box algorithms of the platform tech monopolists. That it’s eye-wateringly complicated and geographically diffuse is not a coincidence. Confusion is the charlatan’s friend, noise its accessory. The babble on Twitter is a convenient cloak of darkness.
Yet it’s also quite simple. In a well-functioning democracy, a well-functioning press and a well-functioning parliament would help a well-functioning judiciary do its job. Britain is not that country. There is a vacuum where questions should be, the committees, the inquiries, the headlines on the TV bulletins. What was Nigel Farage doing in the Ecuadorian embassy? More to the point: why has no public official asked him? Why is he giving speeches – for money – in the US? Who’s paying him? I know this because my weirdest new hobby of 2017 is to harry Arron Banks, the Bristol businessman who was Ukip and Leave.EU’s main funder, and Andy Wigmore, Leave.EU’s comms man and Belize’s trade attache to the US, across the internet late at night. Wigmore told me about this new US venture – an offshore-based political consultancy working on Steve Bannon-related projects – in a series of tweets. Is it true? Who knows? Leave.EU has learned from its Trumpian friends that black is white and white is black and these half-facts are a convenient way of diffusing scandal and obscuring truth.
What on earth was Farage doing advancing Calexit – Californian Brexit? And why did I find a photo of him hanging out with Dana Rohrabacher, the Californian known in the US press as “Putin’s favourite congressman”? The same Dana Rohrabacher who’s met with Don Trump Jr’s Russian lawyer and – wait for it – also visited Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy. And who is now interceding on his behalf to obtain a pardon from Don Trump Junior’s dad.
(You got this? Farage visited Trump, then Assange, then Rohrabacher. Rohrabacher met Don Trump’s Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya. Then Assange. And is now trying to close the circle with Trump.)
In these post-truth times, journalists are fighting the equivalent of a firestorm with a bottle of water and a wet hankie. We desperately need help. We need public pressure. We need parliament to step up and start asking proper questions. There may be innocent answers to all these questions. Let’s please just ask them.
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Cambridge Analytica (CA) is a privately held company that combines data mining and data analysis with strategic communication for the electoral process. It was created in 2013 as an offshoot of its British parent company SCL Group to participate in American politics. In 2014, CA was involved in 44 U.S. political races. The company is partly owned by the family of Robert Mercer, an American hedge-fund manager who supports many politically conservative causes. The firm maintains offices in New York City, Washington, D.C., and London.
In 2015 it became known as the data analysis company working initially for Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign. In 2016, after Cruz’s campaign had faltered, CA worked for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, and on the Leave.EU-campaign for the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union. CA’s role and impact on those campaigns has been disputed and is the subject of ongoing criminal investigations in both countries.
Background and methods
SCL Group calls itself a “global election management agency” known for involvement “in military disinformation campaigns to social media branding and voter targeting”. SCL’s involvement in the political world has been primarily in the developing world where it has been used by the military and politicians to study and manipulate public opinion and political will. Slate writer Sharon Weinberger compared one of SCL’s hypothetical test scenarios to fomenting a coup.
According to the Swiss “Das Magazin” the methods of data analysis of CA are to a large degree based on the academic work of Michal Kosinski. In 2008 Kosinski had joined the Psychometrics Centre of Cambridge University where he then developed with his coworkers a profiling system using general online data, Facebook-likes, and smartphone data. He showed that with a limited number of “likes” people can be analyzed better than friends or relatives can do and that individual psychological targeting is a powerful tool to influence people.
When SCL Elections formed CA in 2013 it hired researchers from Cambridge University, hence the name. CA collects data on voters using sources such as demographics, consumer behavior, internet activity, and other public and private sources. According to The Guardian, CA is using psychological data derived from millions of Facebook users, largely without users’ permission or knowledge. Another source of information is the “Cruz Crew” mobile app that tracks physical movements and contacts and invades personal data more than any other app of presidential candidates.
“Today in the United States we have somewhere close to four or five thousand data points on every individual … So we model the personality of every adult across the United States, some 230 million people.” — Alexander Nix (Chief Executive, Cambridge Analytica), October 2016.
The company claims to use “data enhancement and audience segmentation techniques” providing “psychographic analysis” for a “deeper knowledge of the target audience”. The company uses the OCEAN scale of personality traits. Using what it calls “behavioral microtargeting” the company indicates that it can predict “needs” of subjects and how these needs may change over time. Services then can be individually targeted for the benefit of its clients from the political arena, governments, and companies providing “a better and more actionable view of their key audiences.” According to Sasha Issenberg, CA indicates that it can tell things about an individual he might not even know about himself.
CA derives much of its personality data on online surveys which it conducts on an ongoing basis. For each political client, the firm narrows voter segments from 32 different personality styles it attributes to every adult in the U.S. The personality data informs the tone of the language used in ad messages or voter contact scripts, while additional data is used to determine voters’ stances on particular issues.
The data gets updated with monthly surveys, asking about political preferences and how people get the information they use to make decisions. It also covers consumer topics about different brands and preferred products, building up an image of how someone shops as much as how they vote.
Activities:
United States of America: 2016 presidential election
CA’s involvement in the 2016 Republican Party presidential primaries became known in July 2015. As of December 2015 CA claimed to have collected up to 5,000 data points on over 220 million Americans. At that time Robert Mercer was a major supporter of Ted Cruz. The Mercer family funded CA directly and indirectly through several super-PACs as well as through payments via Cruz’s campaign.
Ted Cruz became an early major client of CA in the 2016 Presidential Campaign. Just prior to the Iowa caucuses the Cruz campaign had spent $3m for CA’s services. with additional money coming from allied Super-PACs. After Cruz’s win at the Iowa caucus CA was credited with having been able to identify and motivate potential voters. Ultimately the Cruz campaign spent $5.8 million on work by CA.
Ben Carson was a second client of CA; his campaign had paid $220,000 for “data management” and “web service” as reported in October 2015. Marco Rubio’s campaign was supported by Optimus Consulting. Meanwhile, the third competitor, Governor John Kasich, was supported by rivaling firm Applecart.
After Cruz dropped out of the race for the Republican presidential nomination in May 2016, Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah started to support Trump. In August it became known that CA followed their allegiance and worked for Trump’s presidential campaign. Trump’s campaign also worked with digital firm Giles Parscale. In September, the Trump campaign spent $5 million to purchase television advertising. The Trump campaign spent less than $1 million in data work.
In 2016, the company said that it had not used psychographics in the Trump presidential campaign.
The head of Cambridge Analytica said he asked the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, for help finding Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 deleted emails.
United States of America: 2014 midterm elections
CA had entered the US market in 2012 (or 2013), and was involved in 44 US congressional, US Senate and state-level elections in the 2014 midterm elections.
The company worked with the John Bolton Super PAC on a major digital and TV campaign focused on senate races in Arkansas, North Carolina and New Hampshire, and helped turnout voters for the Republican candidates in those states. Two of the Republican candidates backed by the Bolton SuperPAC, Thom Tillis in North Carolina and Tom Cotton in Arkansas, won their Senate bids, while Scott Brown lost in New Hampshire. The PAC ran 15 different spots each in North Carolina and Arkansas and 17 in New Hampshire—mostly online with some targeted directly to households using Dish and DirecTV. All were intended to push Mr. Bolton’s national security agenda.
CA also supported Thom Tillis’s successful campaign to oust Kay Hagan as the senator for North Carolina. The firm was credited for its role in identifying a sizeable cluster of North Carolinians who prioritized foreign affairs—which encouraged Tillis to shift the conversation from state-level debates over education policy to charges that incumbent Kay Hagan had failed to take ISIS’s rise seriously.
United Kingdom: 2016 Brexit referendum
CA became involved in the 2016 Brexit referendum supporting “persuadable” voters to vote for leaving the European Union. Articles on The Guardian website, published in February and May 2017, explored in detail the influence of CA both on Brexit and the 2016 US presidential campaign with Robert Mercer’s backing of Trump being key. They also discuss the legality concerns of using the social data farmed.
Criticism:
Investigations into Russian involvement in the 2016 US Presidential election
On May 18, 2017, Time Magazine reported that the US Congress is investigating CA in connection with Russian attempts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. The report alleges that CA may have coordinated the spread of Russian propaganda using its microtargetting capabilities. According to Trump campaign digital operations chief, CA worked “side-by-side” with representatives from Facebook, Google and Twitter on Trump’s digital campaign activities.
On August 4, 2017, Michael Flynn, who is under investigation by US counterintelligence for his contacts with Russian officials, amended a public financial filing to reflect that he had served in an advisory role in an agreement with CA during the 2016 Trump campaign.
On October 25th, 2017, Julian Assange confirmed on Twitter that he had been approached by Cambridge Analytica chief executive Alexander Nix who offered the company’s assistance with the stolen Clinton email archive, confirming a story in the Daily Beast on the data company’s attempted involvement for the Trump organisation. CNN reported via two unnamed sources that Nix intended to turn the emails into a searchable database for the campaign or a pro-Trump political action committee.
Accusations of exaggeration
In 2017 CA claimed that it has psychological profiles of 220 million US citizens based on 5,000 separate data sets. In March 2017, The New York Times reported that CA had exaggerated its capabilities: “Cambridge executives now concede that the company never used psychographics in the Trump campaign.” Trump aides have also disputed CA’s role in the campaign, describing it as “modest” and noting that none of the company’s efforts involved psychographics.
The New York Times also reported that the Ted Cruz presidential campaign stopped using CA after its psychographic models had failed to identify likely Cruz supporters.
The extent to which the American presidential and Brexit votes were decided by the data company’s psy-ops was debated, what was beyond doubt was the potential for such technology in two elections determined by wafer-thin swing votes. The presidential campaign won the electoral college by 80,000 votes in three states and the EU referendum was decided by two per cent of UK voters.
Privacy concerns
The use of personal data collected without knowledge or permission to establish sophisticated models of user’s personalities raises ethical and privacy issues. CA operates out of the United States; its operations would be illegal in Europe with its stricter privacy laws. While Cruz is outspoken about protecting personal information from the government, his data base of CA has been described as “political-voter surveillance”.
Regarding CA’s use of Facebook users, a speaker for CA indicated that these users gave permission when signing up with the provider, while Facebook declared that “misleading people or misusing information” is in violation of Facebook’s policies. In 2015 Facebook indicated that it was investigating the matter.
While Nix suggests that data collection and microtargetting benefits the voters as they receive messages about issues they care about, digital rights protection groups are concerned that private information is collected, stored, and shared while individuals are “left in the dark about (it)” and have no control.
Convincing versus manipulation
Concern raised about organizations such as this crossing the line from persuading subjects to adopt ideas by presenting convincing evidence and that of manipulating subjects, was raised by a social scientist who studies organizational behavior, Michal Kosinski, previously a researcher in the psychology department at the University of Cambridge and in 2017, an assistant professor of organizational behavior at the business school of Stanford, when he stated that, “there’s a thin line between convincing people and manipulating them.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica
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Russia is furious. That means the sanctions are working.
27 october 2017
In yet another display of spitting fury, the Russian state this week put Bill Browder on the Interpol list, an international register of “most wanted” criminals. This was the fifth time Russia had issued an international arrest warrant for Browder, a businessman who once worked in the country. Wearily, Interpol lifted the warrant on Thursday. But the gesture once again confirmed something few have yet acknowledged: The sanctions on Russia are working.
Browder’s real “crime”? He persuaded another government, this time the Canadians, to pass a “Magnitsky Act,” a bill applying sanctions on Russian tax officials and police involved in a vast scam, one that involved changing the names of companies, hijacking their bank accounts and using them to steal money from the Russian state. Browder’s lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, discovered the scam. He was investigated and imprisoned, beaten and deprived of medical care until he died. Ever since, Browder has crusaded to punish those responsible by depriving them of access to Western banks, Western vacation homes and Western educations for their children.
As I’ve argued before, the Russian government really, really hates the Magnitsky sanctions, and it hates them with disproportionate fury. Recently, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, jeered at Browder during a news conference. The Russian lawyer who met with Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort and Donald Trump Jr. in June 2016 — the one whose fixer dangled the tantalizing offer of “official documents and information that would incriminate” Hillary Clinton — was seeking to have the Magnitsky sanctions lifted, too.
The Magnitsky sanctions also set the template the Obama administration followed in 2014, when, following the invasion of Ukraine, it imposed sanctions not on “Russia,” or on “Russians,” or even on broad Russian economic sectors, but on particular Russian businessmen and officials known to be closely connected to Putin or directly responsible for his policy in Ukraine. At the time, I argued that our sanctions on Russia were too little and had come too late. For a decade, the West turned a blind eye to Russian corruption and money-laundering in Europe and the United States, as well as to growing Russian attempts to manipulate politics. Sanctions placed on a few businessmen and politicians, designed to prevent them from using their American credit cards — how could that stop the tidal wave?
But they did. The Russian invasion of Ukraine was indeed curtailed, both by the sanctions and by the Ukrainian army. A Russian plan to divide Ukraine and create a Russian-speaking state in the east (“Novorossiya”) never came to fruition. The war goes on, but at least it is confined to the far eastern corner of the country. Instead of Novorossiya, the Russian invasion created an unattractive mini-state, a tiny thugocracy (the “Donetsk People’s Republic”) that is not going to attract imitators. Russian attempts to overturn the sanctions — to persuade Europeans to squabble among themselves and drop them — have so far failed. Even the Russian plan to get Donald Trump elected so that he could lift sanctions has backfired, at least for the moment: Russian participation in the U.S. election has so constrained the Trump administration that it has found it difficult to have any kind of Russia policy at all.
Inside Russia, the sanctions have created a good deal of elite anger, some directed at Europe, the United States and Browder, but some directed, quietly, at Putin himself. Even Russian businessmen not immediately affected by the sanctions say they are far more constrained now in what they can do — and they know whom to blame. The Canadian decision on Magnitsky sanctions will add to the conviction that this won’t end soon. The gloom is building, adding to a broader sense that Putin’s Ukraine policy was a mistake and has to be amended. And this, of course, was the point of the sanctions in the first place.
I still think we need a more profound change in our policy toward Russia, one that focuses far more broadly on protecting U.S. and European politics and business from Russian corruption and manipulation, and indeed from corruption and manipulation coming from other authoritarian states. But it’s a mistake to imagine that sanctions have no impact. It was foolish for the State Department, in an amateurish attempt at consolidation, to shut down its office on sanctions. This is a sophisticated policy tool, it has its place, and it’s having an effect. Russia’s spitting fury is the proof.
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There’s a dangerous and popular fashion in Europe to be antisemitic and pro-Zionist at the same time
The European identity is under assault by enemies from within
27 October 2017
On 24 October 2017, Viktor Orban, the Prime Minister of Hungary, was reported to have called Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) “a zone without migrants”. He claimed this at the celebration of the anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution, which began on 23 October 1956.
According to him, the countries of CEE have succeeded in rebuffing illegal migration and it is the only zone on the European continent that is free from migrants.
“The Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Romanians and Hungarians should unite in this process,” Orban claimed. He is sure that every upcoming election in Europe will show citizens reflecting his views.
“We want a safe, fair, Christian and free Europe,” he concluded, and warned: “We should never underestimate the power of the dark side,” referencing Star Wars as he referred to the plots of those apparently behind the “migrant invasion”, adding that they “have no solid structure but extensive networks”.
Any association between Orban’s “zones without migrants” and the old Nazi striving to create “zones without Jews” is, of course, purely contiguous.
In the antisemitic imagination, the “Jew” is the invisible master who secretly pulls the strings, which is why Muslim immigrants are not today’s Jews – they are all too visible, not invisible. They are clearly not integrated into our societies, and nobody claims they secretly pull the strings – if one sees in their “invasion of Europe” a secret plot, then Jews have to be behind it.
This was the case in a text that recently appeared in one of the main Slovene right-wing weekly journals where we could read: “George Soros is one of the most depraved and dangerous people of our time,” responsible for “the invasion of the negroid and semitic hordes and thereby for the twilight of the EU … he is a deadly enemy of the Western civilisation, nation state and white, European man”. His goal is to build a “rainbow coalition composed of social marginals like faggots, feminists, Muslims and work-hating cultural Marxists” which would then perform “a deconstruction of the nation-state, and transform the EU into a multicultural dystopia of the United States of Europe”.
This disgusting fantasy brings together antisemitism and Islamophobia and confronts us with the paradox of Zionist antisemitism. Remember Anders Breivik, the Norwegian anti-immigrant mass murderer: he was antisemitic, but pro-Israel, since the State of Israel is the first defence line against the Muslim expansion – he even wants to see the Jerusalem Temple rebuilt.
His view is that Jews are OK as long as there aren’t too many of them – or, as he wrote in his “manifesto”: “There is no Jewish problem in Western Europe (with the exception of the UK and France) as we only have one million in Western Europe, whereas 800,000 out of these one million live in France and the UK.
“The US on the other hand, with more than six million Jews (600 per cent more than Europe) actually has a considerable Jewish problem.”
Breivik thus realises the ultimate paradox of a Zionist antisemite – and we find traces of this weird stance more often than one would expect, from the US alt-right to Orban himself.
Soon after he also attacked Soros in a speech, Orban was visited by Netanyahu, and they soon found a common language: attacking Soros is OK if you support Israel. Netanyahu’s pact with Zionist antisemites is one of the lowest and saddest moments of his career.
It is significant that Trump’s first foreign trip was to Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Israel – if we combine this with his triumphant reception of el-Sissi in the White House, we can see how a new Middle East “axis of evil” is taking form with full US support: Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Egypt.
The latest brutal pressure on Qatar was the first big act of this axis, probably a punishment for the positive role of Al Jazeera in the Arab Spring. And, in a similar way, the group of countries enumerated by Orban and which resist accepting refugees forms another new “axis of evil”: Croatia, Slovenia, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland, the Baltic countries – and now one has to add even Austria.
The most worrying aspect here is the reluctance of Europe to take a clear stand regarding this axis: either to allow its member states to adopt their own politics with regard to refugees, or to adopt efficient measures against those who break the common rules.
Orban, who was only a couple of years ago treated like a pariah, is now not only tolerated but more and more followed as a model. And this is a very dangerous sign for Europe.
The fact that Orban delivered his speech at the celebration of the anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution resonates with unintended ironies. One of the pathetic moments of the 1956 uprising occurred when the Soviet army was closing in on the rebels who send a desperate message to Vienna: “We are defending the West here.”
Now, after communism’s collapse, the Christian-conservative government paints as its main enemy Western multicultural consumerist liberal democracy for which today’s Western Europe stands, and calls for a new more organic communitarian order to replace the “turbulent” liberal democracy of the last two decades.
Orban already expressed his sympathies with “capitalism with Asian values”, so if European pressure on Orban continues, we can easily imagine him sending the message to the East: “We are defending Asia here!”
What is at stake in this conflict is nothing less than the soul of Europe, the two opposed sides of European identity. On the one side, it is the Enlightenment legacy of universal freedom and emancipation; on the other side, it is the politics of particularism, of protecting one’s identity.
If we remain faithful to the Enlightenment legacy, we have to conclude that the true threat to Europe is precisely its “defenders” who spread xenophobia and fear.
The space for these scaremongerers was opened by the economic and political compromises of the European centres of power – populists are filling up the void opened up by European neoliberal technocracy, so that only a new leftist vision can save Europe from its external and especially internal enemies.
In his Notes Towards a Definition of Culture, TS Eliot remarked that there are moments when the only choice is the one between heresy and non-belief, when the only way to keep a religion alive is to perform a sectarian split from its main corpse. This is what has to be done today if we want to keep the idea of Europe alive.
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As a history teacher, I’m horrified by the whitewashing of my curriculum – I’m being told to teach that colonialism was good
Often, my conscience leads me to digress from convoluted schemes of work and lesson plans and shine the light on how the enslavement of non-white people was in Britain’s national interest
29 October 2017
Like many history teachers, I entered the profession due to a vested interest in dismantling the inequalities generated by the abuse of power. I convinced myself that teaching involved more than simply delivering a syllabus or helping students achieve the required learning outcomes to move up the grade boundaries.
But despite my personal ambition to involve students in the struggle for freedom and equality, there is a criminal agent constantly perverting the course of justice: the national curriculum.
Under the reforms proposed by former Education Secretary Michael Gove where British history must form a minimum of 40 per cent of the assessed content, the claim that the specification remains impartial and fact-based is controversial for anyone guided by conscience, particularly those who are conversant with the brutal legacy of empire. Simply, our students are denied the opportunity of chronicling the precise evils of British imperialism due to a disproportionate focus on the distinctive features imparted by the empire.
Take for instance the GCSE thematic study titled “Britain: Migration, empires and the people”. This section purports to focus on key developments in the history of Britain over a 1,000-year period and how the identity of Britons has been shaped by their interactions with the wider world. The AQA-approved textbook from which I am teaching this unit is written and proofread by subject specialists, yet I can’t help but feel it is just another manifestation of the ugly revisionism practiced in the recounting of Britain’s bloody history.
When discussing the westward expansion of English explorers and the emergence of the plantation economy across the Atlantic in the Americas and Caribbean, textbooks have barely mentioned how the colonial enterprise was institutionalised in Britain, as part and parcel of a systemic presumption of white supremacy. Dedicating a small section of a chapter to mere polarising opinions generated by the politics of Empire does not atone for the gross bastardisation of history by ivory tower educationists.
Often, my conscience leads me to digress from convoluted schemes of work and lesson plans and shine the light on how the enslavement of non-white people was in Britain’s national interest, be it the genocide of Native Americans by early Virginia settlers or how the industrial revolution was “premised upon the de-industrialisation of India”, as eloquently argued by Dr Shashi Tharoor in front of an Oxford Union audience.
After all, as a Senior Lecturer in Colonial History opined, what good is the DfE guidance in studying “the first colony in America and first contact with India” if all the sordid details between the first contact and independence is conveniently spared? As for the teaching of slavery at Key Stage Three, it is only a non-statutory requirement.
The times when I’m teaching by the professional standards or adhering to the quality compliance criteria set out by the educational watchdog Ofsted, students will always remind me of Britain’s monopoly of the transatlantic slave trade, in which the Royal Family, Church of England, major ports and textile industries were primary beneficiaries of history’s most brutal institution, or how British slave owners were paid compensation for their “lost property” during the abolition of slavery in the 1830s. I feel refreshed by their interjections as it reminds me that teaching history involves a dispassionate and authentic inquiry into the past, however uncomfortable and politically incorrect the truths may be.
In light of Black History Month, where we celebrate the inspiring contributions of those hailing from BME communities, the weight of injustice still resonates with immigrants and ethnic minority students of formerly colonial territories. The cumulative effects of such whitewashing are the culture wars I’m negotiating in my lessons as a result of the contentious and divisive curriculum where the empire is rendered a civilising historical force with a humanising mission.
Taking our curriculum to task is not an implied demand for white people to apologise for the transgressions of their forefathers. Rather, it is intended to educate the blissfully ignorant about a racist Eurocentric narrative which for centuries anchored the national identity of ordinary Britons, so we can identify modern incarnations of history’s undeniable crimes whenever it rears its ugly head.
As the national curriculum has compromised the ability of teachers to publicly associate with the fight for black survival and crusade against the rehabilitation of empire, it becomes more urgent for teachers to “start teaching unromanticised colonial history in British schools” as Tharoor argues in his courageous riposte to the apologists of empire.
When I’m sifting through my progress trackers and target sheets, I’m reminded of the dangers of simply prepping students for standardised tests at the expense of nurturing genuine historical insight and reflection.
Teachers do not have the luxury of being selective about the past and ought to be the frontline of resistance against this historical amnesia.
Whether we like it or not, the only thing that should be vetting teachers for conformity is the yearning for justice. Unless we refuse to be caught up in a culture of Orwellian newspeak, we’ll be placating the aggressors by sanitising Britain’s imperial past.
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Tudor, English and black – and not a slave in sight
From musicians to princes, a new book by historian Miranda Kaufmann opens a window on the hitherto unknown part played by black people in 16th-century England
29 October 2017
Within moments of meeting historian Miranda Kaufmann, I learn not to make flippant assumptions about race and history. Here we are in Moorgate, I say. Is it called that because it was a great hub of black Tudor life? “You have to be careful with anything like that,” she winces, “because, for all you know, this was a moor. It’s the same with family names and emblems: if your name was Mr Moore, you’d have the choice between a moorhen or a blackamoor. It wouldn’t necessarily say something about your race.”
Her answer – meticulous, free of bombast, dovetailing memorable details with wider issues – is typical of her first book Black Tudors: The Untold Story, which debunks the idea that slavery was the beginning of Africans’ presence in England, and exploitation and discrimination their only experience. The book takes the form of 10 vivid and wide-ranging true-life stories, sprinkled with dramatic vignettes and nice, chewy details that bring each character to life.
Africans were already known to have likely been living in Roman Britain as soldiers, slaves or even free men and women. But Kaufmann shows that, by Tudor times, they were present at the royal courts of Henry VII, Henry VIII, Elizabeth I and James I, and in the households of Sir Walter Raleigh and William Cecil. The book also shows that black Tudors lived and worked at many levels of society, often far from the sophistication and patronage of court life, from a west African man called Dederi Jaquoah, who spent two years living with an English merchant, to Diego, a sailor who was enslaved by the Spanish in Panama, came to Plymouth and died in Moluccas, having circumnavigated half the globe with Sir Francis Drake.
Kaufmann’s interest in black British history came about almost by accident: she intended to study Tudor sailors’ perceptions of Asia and America for her thesis at Oxford University, but found documents demonstrating the presence of Africans within Britain. “I’d never heard anything about it, despite having studied Tudor history at every level. When I went to the National Archive for the first time, I asked an archivist where to start looking and they were like: ‘Oh well, you won’t find anything about that here.’” Kaufmann kept digging, contacted local record offices and ultimately built up to her book. So why has the existence of black Tudors been unknown, untold and untaught? “History isn’t a solid set of facts,” she replies. “It’s very much about what questions you ask of the past. If you ask different questions, you get different answers. People weren’t asking questions about diversity. Now they are.”
Despite Kaufmann’s research, it is hard to swallow the idea that black people were not treated as extreme anomalies (or worse) in Tudor England. “We need to return to England as it was at the time,” says Kaufmann – “an island nation on the edge of Europe with not much power, a struggling Protestant nation in perpetual danger of being invaded by Spain and being wiped out. It’s about going back to before the English are slave traders, before they’ve got major colonies. The English colonial project only really gets going in the middle of the 17th century.” That said, she does leave a stark question hanging in the air: “How did we go from this period of relative acceptance to becoming the biggest slave traders out there?”
Black Tudors does not make overblown claims about ethnic diversity in England – in her wider research, Kaufmann found around 360 individuals in the period 1500-1640 – but it does weave nonwhite Britons back into the texture of Tudor life. Black Tudors came to England through English trade with Africa; from southern Europe, where there were black (slave) populations in Spain and Portugal, the nations that were then the great colonisers; in the entourages of royals such as Katherine of Aragon and Philip II (who was the husband of Mary I); as merchants or aristocrats; and as the result of English privateering and raids on the Spanish empire. “If you captured a Spanish ship, it would be likely to have some Africans on board,” says Kaufmann. “One prized ship brought in to Bristol had 135. They got shipped back to Spain after being put up in a barn for a week. The authorities didn’t know quite what to do with them.”
Although there was no legislation approving or defining slavery within England, it could hardly have been fun being “the only black person in the village” – such as Cattelena, a woman who lived independently in Almondsbury and whose “most valuable item … was her cow”. Nonetheless, Kaufmann uncovers some impressive lives, such as the sailor John Anthony, who arrived in England on a pirate’s boat; Reasonable Blackman, a Southwark silk weaver; and a salvage diver called Jacques Francis. Kaufmann points to them as “examples of people who are really being valued for their skills. In a later age, you get these portraits of Africans sitting sycophantically in the corner looking up at the main character, but they’re not just these domestic playthings for the aristocracy. They’re working as a seamstress or for a brewer. Even in aristocratic households they are performing tasks – as a porter, like Edward Swarthye, or as a cook – they are doing useful things, they get wages. John Blanke, a royal trumpeter, gets paid twice the average wage of an agricultural labourer and three times that of an average servant. They’re not being whipped or beaten or put in chains or being bought and sold.”
I balk at the names black Tudors were given – Swarthye, Blanke, Blackman, Blacke – and at the idea that trudging out an existence as a Tudor prostitute, like Anne Cobbie, a “tawny Moor” with “soft skin”, is any great win for diversity. But it does seem that black Tudors are no worse off than white ones. At a basic level, they are acknowledged as citizens rather than loathed as outcasts. “It’s enormously significant, given how important religion was, that Africans were being baptised and married and buried within church life. It’s a really significant form of acceptance, particularly the baptism ritual, which states that ‘through baptism you are grafted into the community of God’s holy church’, in which we are all one body.”
Kaufmann says she feels “anxious, because people might not like” her book. “Part of it is the surprise element: people didn’t think there were Africans in Tudor England. There’s this fantasy past where it’s all white – and it wasn’t. It’s ignorance. People just don’t know these histories. Hopefully this research will inspire producers to get multiracial stories on our screens.”
Although she is very generous with her time, Kaufmann has been uneasy, even to the point of seeming dissatisfied, throughout our conversation. She goes cautiously silent when I try to link her concerns to current issues such as Brexit, racism or the rise of populist nationalism. Part of the reason might be wariness at the vicious online treatment meted out to women of expertise when they comment on current affairs or state a fact that goes against philistine fantasies. Earlier this year, the historian Mary Beard was the target of abuse for corroborating an educational film for children which showed a well-to-do black family living under the Roman empire.
This resistance to accepting a black history is not confined to the lower reaches of Twitter. The academic and novelist Sunny Singh has written about director Christopher Nolan’s film Dunkirk, which erased the presence of Royal Indian Army Services Corp personnel and lascars from south Asia and east Africa working for the British and, on the French side, Moroccan, Algerian and Tunisian troops from France’s colonies. The comedian Mark Gatiss was so disturbed by the presence of one black actor in the cast for a Doctor Who time travel episode he was filming that he sent a “very difficult” email to his bosses protesting that “there weren’t any black soldiers in Victoria’s army”. Rattled, he did his own research and discovered that there had indeed been one black soldier there, whereupon he relented.
Despite her work in filling in these historical blanks, Kaufmann laments the scarcity of complete evidence: “I wish they had kept diaries or preserved letters. Much as I’ve pieced together these lives, they’re not satisfying biographies where we know everything – more often, they are snapshots of moments.” Nonetheless, the tide is turning against the myth that England has always been a monoracial, monocultural, monolingual nation. Along with writers such as David Olusoga, Paul Gilroy and Sunny Singh, and institutions such as the University of York, which has launched a project investigating medieval multiculturalism, historians such as Miranda Kaufmann are bringing England to a necessary reckoning with its true history.
Extraordinary lives: some black people in Tudor England
John Blanke, the musician
One of the court trumpeters, he was present in the entourage of Henry VII from at least 1507. He performed at both Henry VII’s funeral and Henry VIII’s coronation in 1509.
Jacques Francis, the salvage diver
An expert swimmer and diver, he was hired to salvage guns from the wreck of the Mary Rose in 1546. When his Venetian master was accused of theft in Southampton, Francis became the first known African to give evidence in an English court of law.
Diego, the circumnavigator
Diego asked to be taken aboard Sir Francis Drake’s ship in Panama in 1572. Diego and Drake circumnavigated the globe in 1577, claiming California for the crown in 1579.
Reasonable Blackman, the silk weaver
He lived in Southwark around 1579-1592 and had probably arrived from the Netherlands. He had at least three children, but lost two to the plague in 1592.
Dederi Jaquoah, merchant and prince
Jaquoah was the son of King Caddi-biah, ruler of a kingdom in modern Liberia. He arrived in England in 1610 and was baptised in London on New Year’s Day 1611. He spent two years in England with a leading merchant.
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The Observer view on the decline in British political discourse
The rough media treatment of Cambridge student Lola Olufemi belies the fact that Britain is becoming a more tolerant society
29 October 2017
Last week, a 21-year-old black student, Lola Olufemi, found her photo splashed on a newspaper front page, accompanied by accusations that she had forced Cambridge University to drop white authors from its literature syllabus. The story was widely followed by other media outlets and Olufemi has spoken out about how her online accounts were flooded with racist and sexist abuse as a result. A correction was later issued that made clear that the key facts in the report, which should have been easily verifiable, were simply wrong.
The tone of our political discourse has coarsened in recent years, on both left and right. Words such as enemy and traitor are too easily tossed into the debate; since the Brexit referendum, toxic headlines such as “Crush the Saboteurs” and “Enemies of the People” crop up more often. But Olufemi’s treatment has the hallmarks of a new low: unverified accusations levelled against a young black student, not a public figure, in a way that was sure to create a public backlash against her.
We cherish our right to freedom of speech. That right means it is entirely possible to say and imply some hateful things that can cause an individual significant harm, all while treading on the right side of the law. But being on the right side of the law does not mean that those who take part in the political debate are absolved of any responsibility for thinking about the consequences of their actions. We all have the power to contribute to a culture and discourse that makes hatred and abuse more likely. Verbal abuse, in turn, can increase the risk of physical violence.
The tone of contemporary political discourse does Britons an injustice, because it does not reflect who we are as a society. Follow the headlines, listen in on political debates, and it might seem as though Britain is becoming a more polarised country, more hostile to outsiders.
But this ignores the fact that Britain is on the whole a tolerant and successful multicultural society. Research from Hope not Hate suggests that we have become more, not less, tolerant since 2011. Openly racist attitudes, as measured by surveys, have fallen significantly in recent decades. Yes, there are the concerns about immigration that were undoubtedly a factor in the vote for Brexit. But most of these concerns are driven by economic and cultural worries rather than open hostility to people of different ethnicities, nationalities and religions. The proportion of the English population whose hostilities to immigration are primarily driven along these lines, many of whom believe violence is an acceptable consequences of standing up for “what’s right”, has fallen from 13% to 5% in the past six years.
This must not lead to complacency. We may not be getting more extreme or intolerant as a whole society but there remains a small minority of the population who are open to messages of hate and toxic nationalism. And there are worrying signs that the intolerance of this very small minority is making itself more felt.
The number of hate crimes recorded by the police spiked after the Brexit referendum. Terrorist incidents at London Bridge and in Manchester this year triggered a significant increase in Islamophobic attacks, exactly the sort of division they are intended to create. Antisemitic hate crime is at record levels. Public figures and politicians from all sides, especially women and ethnic minorities, have spoken out about the abuse and threats they receive online.
This is unfolding against the backdrop of a volatile political context. As we get ready to leave the European Union, there is the potential for growing public anger if the benefits promised by politicians – falls in immigration, more resources for the NHS – do not come to pass. The longer politicians fail to admit that it is very likely there will be difficult trade-offs, the greater the risk that this will materialise. There is a far-right nationalist movement, led by the likes of Anne Marie Waters, the failed Ukip leadership contender who now has her own party, and the English Defence League founder, Tommy Robinson, which will attempt to capitalise on it if it does. Almost one in three referrals to Prevent, the government’s anti-extremism programme, is for people believed to be at risk of perpetrating far-right terrorism. There is no more terrible reminder of the dreadful consequences this can have than the tragic murder of the MP Jo Cox by a far-right terrorist 14 months ago.
We mustn’t allow the anger generated by the Brexit debate to obscure the fact that Britain is, on the whole, a liberal, tolerant and successfully multicultural country. But neither must we be complacent about the risks of the far-right nationalism that, in finding appeal among a tiny minority, could potentially jeopardise this. That means there’s an ever-greater burden of responsibility on those who partake in our political discourse to do so responsibly, with respect for consequences they may not always be able to predict.
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Theresa May suppressed up to nine studies that found immigration does not hit UK wages, claims Vince Cable
‘It showed that immigration had very little impact on wages or employment. But this was suppressed by the Home Office’
6 September 2017
Theresa May suppressed up to nine studies that found immigration does not hit the wages or jobs of UK workers, Vince Cable has alleged.
The Prime Minister has repeatedly defended plans to impose tough curbs on EU workers after Brexit by arguing they are needed to protect Britons in lower-paid jobs.
But, the Liberal Democrat leader said: “When I was Business Secretary, there were up to nine studies that we looked at that took in all the academic evidence.
“It showed that immigration had very little impact on wages or employment. But this was suppressed by the Home Office under Theresa May, because the results were inconvenient.”
The claims come after the leak of draconian Home Office proposals for post-Brexit curbs on immigration, triggering a major political row.
The plans would strip all newly-arrived EU migrants of their rights to live permanently in Britain, imposing permits of between two and five years.
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Brexit: an economic strategy from the left?
31 October 2017
If we are agreed that the UK economy needs an overhaul from the Left, where does Brexit come in?
“When we look to Labour for a clear and strong alternative we find a party as terminally divided on Brexit as the Conservatives. Labour cannot claim to be a government in waiting when they won’t even provide opposition on the dominant political issue of the day. Indeed, at their conference, the ‘Lexit’ wing of the Party was prepared to block a debate on Brexit.
Critically, the Left seemed to have failed to grasp that the economic damage that Brexit will do will make all their dreams of a better future for Britain and for Britain’s working people turn to dust.
There is one simple message for Labour on Brexit: you can’t be anti-austerity and pro-Brexit. Their ‘cake and eat it’ approach – believing we can secure a bespoke deal between the UK and the EU – will fail to materialise and this will be their undoing.
My hope remains that the historic mistake to leave the EU can be reversed through a ratification referendum on the final deal – or indeed no deal.
Greens will campaign to remain in the EU in such a referendum; a vote that will allow people themselves to democratically end this damaging and dangerous chapter in our county’s history.”
Italy is paying Libya to intercept migrants on the Mediterranean
25 october 2017
In the first six months of 2017, the number of migrants crossing the Mediterranean from Libya to Italy dropped by around half. This drastic fall in numbers was likely a result of a $236 million deal, signed in February, in which Italy funds and trains the Libyan coast guards to divert migrants right back to Libya.
While the Italian government sees this as reason for celebration, the brunt of the migration crisis is now firmly on Libya. This is a problem, given that the U.N.-backed Libyan Government of National Accord doesn’t have the means to effectively handle migrant trafficking and relies on the country’s 1,700 militias to do the job for them. By outsourcing this work to armed groups, who themselves are implicated in smuggling, a bloody power struggle has erupted.
VICE News was the first foreign media to reach Libya’s migrant smuggling epicenter of Sabratha, where we met the migrants caught up in the mayhem.
https://news.vice.com/story/italy-is-paying-libya-to-intercept-migrants-on-the-mediterranean
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Why Harvey Weinstein is disgraced but Donald Trump is president
The allegations against Weinstein and Trump are strikingly similar. Why have the outcomes been so different?
26 October 2017
The story, by now, reads as familiar. Summer Zervos got her big break appearing on a network television show. This was 2007, and Zervos was a young woman from Orange County, California, eager to take the next step in her career. But then her role on the show ended.
She reached out to the man behind the show, a man who was rich and powerful and connected. She wanted another job. She wanted advice. And he was happy to meet with her. He invited her to his office, in New York.
When she arrived, she says the man immediately kissed her on the mouth. It made her uncomfortable, but she rationalized it. Maybe this is just how he greets people, she thought. He told her she was great, she was smart, she was attractive. He said he would love to work with her more. When the meeting was over, she remembers, he kissed her on the mouth again.
Time passed. The powerful man called Zervos to say he was coming to the West Coast. They made plans to meet at the Beverly Hills Hotel and go out to dinner. When Zervos arrived, she was brought to the man’s bungalow. She says he immediately began kissing her, open-mouthed. She pulled away. He asked her to come sit next to him. She did so. He began kissing her again, and grabbed her breast. She moved across the room. He followed her, embraced her, and rubbed his crotch against her.
The details of Zervos’s legal complaint are familiar to anyone who has followed the Harvey Weinstein scandal. All the elements are there: the power imbalance. The putatively professional meetings that are actually settings for sexual assault. The older man trading on the connections he can offer, the plum jobs he controls, to pressure a younger woman into sex.
But Summer Zervos’s story isn’t about Harvey Weinstein. It’s about Donald J. Trump.
Zervos, a former contestant on The Apprentice, first came forward with her allegations against Trump last October, and filed suit against him in New York state court in January. Trump’s legal team is trying to get the case dismissed. Zervos’s lawyers, meanwhile, have subpoenaed any documents the Trump campaign might have on Zervos and nine other women who have made accusations against Trump, as well as “any woman alleging that Donald J. Trump touched her inappropriately.”
Since the allegations against Weinstein became public earlier this month, many have noted the similarities with Trump: two powerful men, both repeatedly accused of using their power and fame and wealth to prey on women sexually. One big difference, though, as some of Trump’s accusers have pointed out, is that while Weinstein has been ousted from his company and denounced by former friends, Trump is president of the United States, and enjoys the continued backing of his party and political allies. This difference says a lot, not just about the mores of Washington and Hollywood but about partisanship, power, and accountability.
The allegations against Weinstein and Trump are strikingly similar
To date, Weinstein has been accused of sexual harassment or assault by more than 50 women. At least 17 women have accused Trump of harassing, assaulting, or otherwise violating them. Both men have been accused of touching women against their will, of making unsolicited and sexualized comments about women’s bodies, of using their power to coerce women into sex and to protect themselves in the aftermath.
Both men have been caught on tape. In a recording published by the New Yorker, Weinstein appears to admit to groping model Ambra Battilana Gutierrez, and pressures her to come to his room. In the infamous Access Hollywood tape released last October, Trump bragged that his celebrity status allowed him to touch women: “When you’re a star, they let you do it,” he said. “Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” After the tape was released, several women, including Zervos, came forward to say that Trump had done the things he described, kissing and touching them without their consent.
Trump also boasted to Howard Stern about going backstage at the beauty pageants he owned and seeing the contestants naked. “I’m allowed to go in, because I’m the owner of the pageant and therefore I’m inspecting it,” he said. “And you see these incredible looking women, and so I sort of get away with things like that.”
A number of former pageant contestants have said that Trump did in fact walk in on them while they were changing. “Our first introduction to him was when we were at the dress rehearsal and half naked changing into our bikinis,” Tasha Dixon, who competed in the Miss USA pageant in 2001, told CBS Los Angeles last year. “He just came strolling right in. There was no second to put a robe on or any sort of clothing or anything. Some girls were topless. Other girls were naked.”
Weinstein allegedly bragged to women about actresses with whom he’d had sex. Trump made similar claims, according to Barbara Res, who worked with Trump for about 18 years. “He used to talk about famous women calling him and wanting him, even when he was married,” she said. No one believed him, she added, “but he had that tendency to equate his greatness with his conquering of women.”
Both men also used deep relationships with the gossip press and a powerful armada of lawyers and legal threats to try to bully both alleged victims and reporters into silence. Weinstein’s litigiousness was legendary, and he allegedly silenced victims through settlements with ironclad nondisclosure agreements and intimidated journalists with threats of lawsuits.
Trump, too, has used his legal resources as a shield. When the Daily Beast reported that Ivana Trump, Donald Trump’s first wife, accused him of rape in a deposition, Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen responded ferociously. “I will make sure that you and I meet one day while we’re in the courthouse,” he told the reporter. “And I will take you for every penny you still don’t have. And I will come after your Daily Beast and everybody else that you possibly know. So I’m warning you, tread very fucking lightly, because what I’m going to do to you is going to be fucking disgusting. You understand me?”
Similarly, as the allegations against Trump mounted during the campaign, Trump issued an ominous threat. “Every woman lied when they came forward to hurt my campaign,” he said at an October campaign rally. “Total fabrication. The events never happened. Never. All of these liars will be sued after the election is over.”
Weinstein and Trump are also connected, in a way, by lawyer Lisa Bloom. She advised Weinstein before resigning as allegations against him began to intensify, and she has also represented four Trump accusers, including Jill Harth, who has accused Trump of harassing and assaulting her after they met in 1992. “The work I had done against Donald Trump, especially with Jill Harth, was very prominent in my mind when I was working with Harvey Weinstein,” Bloom said.
“All my clients say the same thing,” she said: “‘Why don’t these guys just admit it and apologize? That would make a big difference in my life.’” Working with Weinstein, she believed, would be a chance to finally get a powerful man to apologize for his behavior with women. The apology Weinstein issued as allegations against him began to break, Bloom said, “was very big to me.”
Trump, meanwhile, is unlikely to apologize, she said. “He is never going to admit that he made a mistake.”
Trump himself has said as much. “I didn’t even apologize to my wife, who is sitting right here,” he said during the third presidential debate, “because I didn’t do anything. I don’t know any of these women.”
Weinstein’s community rejected him — Trump’s hasn’t
In the days after Ashley Judd, Asia Argento, and several other women publicly accused Harvey Weinstein of harassment and assault in the New York Times and the New Yorker, Weinstein was fired from the Weinstein Company and kicked out of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. His brother Bob (who has now been accused of sexual harassment as well) called him a predator and said, “I want him to get the justice that he deserves.”
In the wake of the Access Hollywood tape’s release, a few Republican members of Congress pulled their endorsements of Trump. But the party leadership remained behind him, even when women came forward with specific allegations. The reason was simple: They needed him.
“Nobody was willing to take him to task because that would’ve meant electing Hillary Clinton,” said Jennifer Lawless, the director of the Women & Politics Institute at American University. Weinstein could be deposed and replaced without seriously threatening the power of those around him, but losing the election to a Democrat would have had serious consequences for Republicans. “When you behave badly in the political arena, it’s possible to suffer fewer consequences because of partisanship,” Lawless said.
While an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll conducted just after the Access Hollywood tape’s release found Clinton with an 11-point lead over Trump, a Washington Post/ABC News poll conducted around the same time gave her just a 4-point lead. In that poll, almost 70 percent of respondents said Trump had probably made unwanted sexual advances on women. But 64 percent of respondents — and 84 percent of Republicans — said the tape would make no difference in how they voted.
“It’s not only the Republicans in Congress” who were willing to give Trump a pass, said Lawless. “It’s also the country. People think this behavior is unacceptable, but when push comes to shove, there are circumstances under which they’ll tolerate it because there are other things that matter more to them.”
Those things surely varied, to some degree, from voter to voter. Trump won 53 percent of white women and 61 percent of white women without college degrees. The latter group, as Tara Golshan reported for Vox, has been growing more conservative in recent years, and tends to have more conservative views on gender issues. In a Washington Post/ABC poll last year, about four in 10 women (and four in 10 men) said that Trump’s comments on the Access Hollywood tape were typical “locker room talk” — his excuse at the time.
Then there is the strange role elections play as validators of moral behavior in American politics. If then-FBI Director James Comey had never sent his infamous letter, and Hillary Clinton had held another 2 or 3 percentage points in the popular vote and decisively won the Electoral College, it is possible, perhaps even likely, that Trump would’ve been widely rejected in the aftermath as an abuser whose actions cost the Republican Party the election. But because he won — and with his win gained power over everything from the tax code to Supreme Court nominations to the nuclear armada — the incentive for the political system is to move on, and the tendency for the media is to suggest that the American people acted as Trump’s judge, and their verdict, such as it is, must be respected.
Will Weinstein’s fall change Trump’s future?
As the allegations against Weinstein continue, some have started to wonder whether the outpouring will refocus attention on Trump’s past with women. “Please, may this empower people to step forward about Trump,” the hostess at a gathering of former Weinstein employees said to Dana Goodyear of the New Yorker. “Trump women can come through and throw him down. That would be the biggest play women can make. That’s what we need to do.”
But many women have come forward to accuse Trump — and so far, their stories have resulted in little action. “The Trump voters gave him a pass on all of these allegations,” said Bloom. “They heard him admitting it on the Access Hollywood tape, and bragging about it, and even explaining why he did it,” she said. “Everybody heard that, and his voters still voted for him.”
Rebecca Traister has argued at the Cut that perhaps Weinstein could only be ousted when his power in Hollywood was already on the wane. The same could be said of Bill Cosby and Roger Ailes — allegations against them began to stick when they were old men, no longer at the peak of their careers. As the accusations against Bill O’Reilly piled up, he remained valuable to Fox News — this February, the network’s parent company signed a four-year contract paying him $25 million a year, despite a fresh $32 million sexual harassment settlement between O’Reilly and a legal analyst, according to the New York Times. But as Jeff Guo noted at Vox, O’Reilly’s ratings were dipping — and an advertiser boycott meant it may have made business sense for Fox to let him go.
Meanwhile, Trump is president of the United States. What’s more, the sheer number of accusations against him, concerning everything from sexual misconduct to obstruction of justice, may actually work in his favor. Allegations of sexual harassment and assault are “just part of this much, much broader set of reasons that people think he’s not equipped to be president,” Lawless said. That allows his administration to dismiss the harassment and assault accusations as “just one more thing that Democrats are throwing at the wall” — and that argument works on voters “who feel like no matter what this guy does, there’s a new investigation.”
“We’ve gotten to a point now where there are so many concerns about so many facets of his presidency that it’s hard for any of them to be damning,” Lawless said.
That doesn’t mean the Weinstein allegations will have no impact. They have focused public attention on gender dynamics, said Lawless, which could benefit Democrats in 2018. They’re likely to campaign not just on the sexual misconduct allegations against Trump but also on the Education Department’s rollback of Obama-era sexual assault guidelines and on the administration’s ban on transgender recruits in the military. “Democrats are going to make the case that we need a government and public policies to ensure that we have not only an equal playing field but one that is just,” Lawless said.
The Weinstein revelations and the ensuing conversation could make voters take allegations of sexual assault or harassment by political candidates more seriously in the future, said Res, Trump’s former employee. The next time such allegations come out, “it will be worse for the candidate than it was for Trump.”
But Trump himself likely wields too much authority now to pay for his abuses — too many other interests and politicians and factions would find themselves damaged if he were to fall.
This is, perhaps, the depressing lesson of the Weinstein and Trump stories. The allegations are similar. The evidence is similar. But power still protects, and while Weinstein had lost enough power to imperil his protection, Trump has only amassed more.
“Trump has a lifetime of doing things that would be found to be unacceptable and reprehensible in other people and would have led to their downfall,” said Tony Schwartz, Trump’s ghostwriter on The Art of the Deal, “and he has consistently, since a very early age, been able to survive his own behavior.”
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Irony used to define the English. In Brexit Britain, it’s self-importance
The Tory rampage in this divided island has warped our national identity, giving birth to a politics with no sense of the absurd
30 October 2017
It’s important not to romanticise the past, otherwise you end up like a cut-price, leftist Nigel Farage marching to a whinier, less exhilarating drumbeat. But I distinctly remember, this time 20 years ago, it being normal to object to Halloween: not because it was satanic, but because it was American. It was the festival of consumerism and excess, unmoored from any deeper significance, but most of all – being expressly conceived as fun for children, and entailing talking to strangers and asking for things – it was un-English.
Nationalism has taken a depressing turn, this past year and a half. The suspicion of foreigners and alienation of former allies are the greatest practical threats to the country’s wellbeing and prosperity. The let-Britain-roar, grow-wings-and-fly pap is the most unsettling departure from maturity and reason. But it’s the exceptionalism, freely vented for the world to hear, that is the most embarrassing: the idea that our success is assured, whatever decisions we make, because we’re the best at trading, with the best stuff, the finest minds, the most illustrious history. It’s the delusional boastfulness of sketch comedy, a parent standing in a playgroup yelling at everyone to agree that their child is the most advanced.
This is not, however, a story of a nation that was bumbling happily along when suddenly the patriotic beast within was awakened. There was no shortage of national identity before it mutated and was weaponised. There was a very clear sense of Englishness. It was just a different England.
Prior to this Tory rampage, we didn’t say “British”, because we all knew that was a euphemism for “English”, which itself was code for flag-toting, nostalgic monoculturalism. But we were pretty comfortable describing what was un-English: self-aggrandisement; vocal pride – especially for things you had no hand in, such as where you were born; and making large claims for superiority in abstract areas, like national character. These were un-English. The idea of “British values” was oxymoronic, since appropriating some value and claiming to have it in greater quantity than any other country would have been the least English thing.
Of course, you cannot claim for yourself the accolade “most modest”, unless you’re Donald Trump. So the foundation stone of this patriotism was pride in the thing you wouldn’t be seen dead taking pride in: or, to put it more briefly, all nationalism was ironic. We used the union flag ironically, as a backdrop for Patsy Kensit or to set off Liam Gallagher’s eyes. We mentioned national traits only to mock them – chiefly, a collective inability ever to say what we meant. Irony, at the turn of this century, became synonymous with insincerity: a thin gruel, no match for the hearty stew of passion.
But in fact the irony was anything but insincere. Rather, it was the navigational tool of acute self-awareness, an acknowledgment of a delicate tightrope between celebrating the achievements of your compatriots and lauding them as proof of your nation’s supremacy; between feeling loyalty to your fellow citizens, in recognition of the fact that you were all embarked on the creation of a shared future, and fostering an us-against-the-world interiority; between relishing cultural cross-pollination and importing any old nonsense, like Halloween.
A nationalism constantly asserted defines itself against the foreign; a nationalism that goes unstated defines itself from within – its tacit understandings are its connective tissue. It was no accident that we rarely talked about patriotism. But if meaningful patriotism is social – a nationhood based on building collectively within borders, not for geographical reasons but because those are the perimeters of your democratic agency – there was never any shortage of it.
Subtlety has its drawbacks. That brand of tacit solidarity has been under attack now since 2010, when it became routine to divide citizens by whether or not they claimed benefits, were hard-working, were economically active, were northern or southern, were net contributors or recipients. It would have been good to rebut these tropes and defend our sense of responsibility for one another a bit more vocally, rather than leaving it to Twitter and The News Quiz. But ironic distance, the instinctive distrust of grand passions hurled bombastically about, was also protective. It would have been impossible, when irony was the signature of national identity, to imagine a prime minister speechifying about “taking back control” when she didn’t have control even of her three nearest underlings. It would have been unthinkable for ministers to talk about importing chlorinated chicken or growing our own food as an alternative to being party to modern international trading agreements. Not because we would have laughed – we’re laughing now – but because they would have anticipated the ridicule and taken some rudimentary steps to avoid it.
A politics with no sense of the absurd starts to believe its own flourish. Without the deflation of humour, the government is locked into an ever-building climax of preposterous overstatement and bald assertion. Its decisions have never been more consequential, and their unfolding never more dramatic. Yet every week feels eerily similar, ominously stalled. Following Brexit is like trying to find your way out of the woods in twilight and seeing the same tree again and again. It’s gone from disaster movie to horror film: the May Witch Project.
I am reconciled to the import of Halloween. Tomorrow I will dress as a Person With Nits, exactly like a regular person, except with nits, and my trick will be to stand really close to people. I cannot, however, reconcile myself to this post-English politics, pumped-up, self-regarding and humourless. If our national identity meant anything, Brexit is its opposite.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/30/irony-english-brexit-britain-identity-politics
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Why just speaking English isn’t going to cut it anymore
15 June 2017
Britain is facing an uncertain future and an uneasy relationship with Europe after Brexit and the latest general election. Among other things, a key determiner of the success of Brexit will be the UK’s ability to conduct negotiations without language barriers. But the country’s woeful inability to learn languages, and the decline in foreign language learning among school and university students across Britain, does not bode well.
Of course, Welsh, Gaelic, Irish and Cornish are already spoken in some parts of the UK. And while it’s great to see many of these minority languages experiencing something of a revival over recent years, when it comes to life after Brexit it’s languages from further afield that will likely be most useful to Brits.
Many people in the UK may well ask “why we need languages” when “everyone in Europe speaks English anyway”. Indeed, all Brexit negotiations will be conducted in English. But given that the UK’s lack of foreign language skill is estimated to cost the nation up to £48 billion a year, this isn’t something that can just be ignored. Especially considering this figure is unlikely to decrease in post-Brexit Britain.
Then there is the fact that 30% of the UK’s language teachers are from Europe, so Brexit might actually deepen the current language teacher recruitment crisis – currently, half of modern foreign language teacher training posts remain unfilled.
It has also been estimated that 3,500 more teachers are needed if the government really wants to stick to its aim of 90% of students achieving the English Baccalaureate by 2025.
A look at the issue
Recent studies have blamed the UK’s language problem on the current teaching methods and materials used – indicating poor performance is a consequence of the system rather than the students. But there’s a lot more to it than that.
One of the main issues is that at GCSE level, schools often employ a policy of entering only higher attaining students, who are expected to pass with a good grade. This divides students into two groups: those likely and those not likely to get a good language GCSE. And this is detrimental to overall motivation and creates a two-tier system.
Such grouping also inevitably coincides with the different socioeconomic backgrounds of students – with students from more advantaged backgrounds more likely to be entered for languages.
Research has also shown that the higher the proportion of students eligible for free school meals, the more likely a school is to withdraw certain groups of students from language lessons. So while 84% of students in selective schools are entered for a language GCSE, only 48% of their peers in comprehensive schools are.
A lot of this may well come down to the fact that at exam level, language subjects have been shown to be marked much more harshly than other subjects. So not only are schools choosing not to enter “less able” students, but also pupils aiming for the best results and a place at a top university are also more likely to shun languages. This is because they don’t want to risk reducing their chances of getting high grades.
Making languages great again
This is a sad state of affairs, given that evidence suggests that students are generally curious about languages – including ones not offered at school.
Recent research also shows that students are more driven to take a language at GCSE when they perceive a personal relevance. And engaging students’ sense of personal importance may also mean thinking outside the box, or rather the entrenched languages of French, Spanish and German.
The 2013 Languages for the Future report highlights ten languages – Spanish, Arabic, French, Mandarin Chinese, German, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Turkish and Japanese – which are of most use to the UK. And although it is not yet clear what impact Brexit may have on the nation’s language needs, this provides a good basis for creative thinking.
But language teachers can only work within the framework set by the exam boards, so it may be that the shifting of power and loyalties that Brexit brings will provide a perfect opportunity to rethink language provision for all.
More than one choice
It cannot be denied that Europe is busier than ever learning English, and that English is used widely as a medium of discussion across Europe. English will of course continue to be an important EU working language post-Brexit, not because of the need to trade with Britain, but because many Europeans find it a convenient lingua franca.
But let’s remember that multilingual Europe has a choice of language – as recently demonstrated by European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker – unlike monolingual Britain.
The use of English by the UK’s trading and political partners depends largely on their choice and preference. And while other nations are busying themselves to become more and more bilingually functional, monolingual Britain risks increasing isolation.
http://theconversation.com/why-just-speaking-english-isnt-going-to-cut-it-anymore-77537
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“The root and fiber of the university is not equivalent to the public sphere. If a university believes that its educational mission requires it to prohibit all outside speakers, or to impose stringent tests of professional competence on all speakers allowed to address the campus, it would and should be free to do so.”
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There is no 1st Amendment right to speak on a college campus
25 October 2017
We are witnessing an escalating chorus of complaints that modern universities are trampling on the First Amendment. Universities stand accused of catering to the weakness of students with “fragile egos,” in Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s words, who cannot bear to be offended by ideas that they oppose.
“Freedom of thought and speech on the American campus are under attack,” Sessions said at Georgetown last month, in a speech that referred to several incidents that have become touchstones for free speech advocates — including the the controversy that erupted at Berkeley when right-wing columnist Ben Shapiro spoke, and the shouting down of The Bell Curve author Charles Murray at Middlebury College last spring. Especially deplorable was the fact one of Murray’s hosts, a professor, was injured in a post-speech scuffle.
Seen in its best light, the controversy about free speech in American universities bespeaks fear that the next generation of Americans will not have been educated to engage in public debate, which necessarily entails encounter with alien and frequently outrageous perspectives. That is a problem well worth addressing, especially as our politics grows more diverse and more polarized. Universities do have a great responsibility to educate students for citizenship in a country violently split along lines of ideology and identity.
The language and structure of First Amendment rights, however, is a misguided way to conceptualize the complex and subtle processes that make such education possible. First Amendment rights were developed and defined in order to protect the political life of the nation. But life within universities is not a mirror of that life.
The Supreme Court has often observed that the First Amendment is the “guardian of our democracy.” By guaranteeing that all can participate in the formation “of that public opinion which is the final source of government in a democratic state,” the First Amendment lies at the foundation of our self-governance.
The noted legal scholar Alexander Meiklejohn once said that the First Amendment created an “equality of status in the field of ideas.” It prevents the state from excluding persons from public discourse on the basis of what they have to say. It extends to each citizen the promise that they will enjoy the equal right to influence the development of public opinion.
There are many arenas in which all ideas are not considered equal
But here we are talking about public discourse: the free flow of ideas in newspapers, in public squares, on debate stages, on theatrical stages, in art galleries and concert halls. Outside of the sphere of public discourse, equality is not so obviously desirable. Consider, for example, doctors and their patients. The law properly does not treat doctors and their patients as equals. We do not apply to doctors sued for malpractice the core First Amendment doctrine that “there is no such thing as false idea.” We hold doctors accountable for their expertise.
There are in fact many areas of our social life where we expect persons to act with competence, and where the law properly defers to accepted bodies of knowledge. We abuse the First Amendment by misapplying it to such areas. We risk diluting its essential meaning and force. That is the error made by Sessions and many others.
Universities exist to serve the twin missions of education and the creation of knowledge. Universities hire and tenure faculty based on the quality of their ideas. Universities grade and evaluate students based on the quality of their ideas. The purpose of universities is to teach students how to discriminate between better and worse ideas, as well as to determine what we know on the basis of our best possible ideas.
No university, public or private, could perform its mission were it not permitted to evaluate the merit of ideas. Consider Sessions’s observation that a “first axiom of the First Amendment” is that, “as a general rule, the state has no power to ban speech on the basis of its content.” That is indeed true. But universities can and must engage in content discrimination all the time. I subject my students to constant content discrimination. If I am teaching a course on constitutional law, my students had better discuss constitutional law and not the World Series.
Professors are also subject to continual content discrimination in their teaching and their research. If I am hired to teach mathematics, I had better spend my class time talking about my equations and not the behavior of President Donald Trump. If I am being considered for tenure or for a grant, my research will be evaluated for its quality and its potential impact on my discipline. Universities, public or private, could not function if they could not make judgments based on content.
Another “bedrock principle” of the First Amendment is that “the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.” Yet no competent teacher would permit a class to descend into name-calling and insults. Even if the object of classroom education is to expose students to ideas that they might find disturbing or threatening, it is nevertheless inconsistent with learning for students to experience this encounter in settings where they are personally abused or degraded.
Just as offensive personal insults are forbidden on the floor of Congress — remember Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who was censured by the Senate during Sessions’s confirmation hearings for daring to read a letter by Coretta Scott King that “impugned the motives and conduct” of Sessions — so responsible teachers control classroom discussion in order to maintain civility.
Classrooms are not Hyde Parks
If students cannot engage in personal abuse, neither can professors. Any professor that called his students offensive or derogatory names would be appropriately disciplined. The professional ethics of professors require us to “demonstrate respect for students as individuals and adhere to their proper roles as intellectual guides and counselors.”
This is not to say that members of the university community do not enjoy special freedoms. They have the right to academic freedom, not First Amendment freedom of speech. Academic freedom is defined in terms of the twin missions of the university; it encompasses freedom of research and freedom of teaching. Academic freedom does not entail the equality of ideas. To the contrary, it is defined as the freedom to engage in professionally competent teaching and research.
By contrast, because First Amendment rights protect the right of each and every person to participate in the magnificent process of self-governance, it forbids the state from evaluating the competence of opinions. Citizens are not students under the tutelage of the state; the state is rather the servant of the people. Students are, however, under the tutelage of the university, which is an arena of education, not of political self-governance.
The situation becomes somewhat more complex when speakers from outside the university, with only tenuous connections to the community, are invited to talk. Sometime such invitations raise questions of academic freedom.
Consider a faculty member who invites an outside speaker to lecture because she believes that the speaker will contribute to her research or to her pedagogical responsibilities. If the university administration believes that the outside speaker is inconsistent with the research or educational functions of the university, there is a conflict between faculty and administration about how to attain university goals.
Principles of academic freedom require the university administration to give great (if not decisive) deference to the judgment of faculty in such contexts. First Amendment free speech principles have little to do with the matter.
The key question: what role do visiting speakers play in the mission of a university?
The situation grows yet more complex in the context of student-invited outside speakers. Students are not accountable for the research mission of the university or for its educational responsibilities. It is a genuine challenge, therefore, how to analyze student-invited speakers in terms of the goals of the university. Still, it remains clear that universities are not Hyde Parks. Unless they are wasting their resources on frolics and detours, they can support student-invited speakers only because it serves university purposes to do so. And these purposes must involve the purpose of education.
Universities typically don’t think hard enough about how authorizing students to invite speakers advances their education. One theory might be that universities support student-invited speakers because they wish to empower students to pursue research interests different from those offered by faculty. Another theory might be that universities support student-invited speakers because they wish to create a diverse and heterogeneous campus climate in which students can learn the democratic skills necessary to negotiate a public sphere filled with alien and cacophonous voices. Universities may wish to educate students in practices of citizenship by encouraging a wide variety of student groups to invite outside speakers to recreate within the campus a marketplace of ideas.
As universities clarify why they support student-invited outside speakers, they will at the same time clarify the circumstances in which the communication of such speakers can be regulated. I very much doubt that the First Amendment rights of invited speakers will be of much weight in this process. Instead judgment will turn on how supporting or not supporting a given speaker, or a given policy of supporting student groups to invite speakers, fulfills the articulated mission of the university.
(I am not now analyzing situations where students invite speakers using entirely no university resources — no student fees, no security costs, no campus auditoriums — because in such cases universities will have nothing to do with speakers or their speech. I am instead focusing on the more common circumstance where universities allocate their resources to supporting student-invited speakers.)
Universities might decide it’s okay to invite controversial speakers but still impose rules
To the extent that the educational mission of higher education includes the inculcation of critical thinking, it requires universities to instill in students the capacity to face and evaluate ideas, however threatening or dangerous they may seem. Universities must thus distinguish between offensive ideas and personal incivility. Although the First Amendment makes no such distinction, it is important for any university that seeks to encourage both rational dialogue and the mastery of ideas, however strange and off-putting.
These are essential skills for democratic citizens, yet to teach them, universities must be free to regulate speech in ways that are inconsistent with First Amendment rights, at least as ordinarily interpreted. If a campus speaker hurls personal insults at students — if he outs them or individually intimidates them — he has no business on campus.
In Dean Erwin Chemerinsky’s fine post (also published on Vox), he takes issue with the analysis I have offered and makes two major points. The first is that it is fallacious for me to presume that because the university can regulate the content of faculty and student work, it can do so “outside of this realm.” The regulation of speech within “professional settings” does “not justify” restricting campus speech “in a nonprofessional setting.”
I believe that this point by Dean Chemerinsky is fundamentally mistaken. The entire purpose of a university is to educate and to expand knowledge, and so everything a university does must be justified by reference to these twin purposes. These objectives govern all university action, inside and outside the classroom; they are as applicable to nonprofessional speech as they are to student and faculty work.
To give a simple example, students are free to march with candles chanting, “No means yes, yes means anal,” in a park. The First Amendment gives them the right to do so. But no sane university would tolerate a student group marching through its campus shouting this ugly slogan (as some male students once did at Yale). The university would be entitled to institute disciplinary proceedings because the relationship — the entire relationship — between a university and its students is governed by the goal of education. Students are members of a university community dedicated to learning, and the university is entitled to enforce the obligations of community membership.
The limits on the university’s ability to regulate the speech of its students are therefore demarcated by the limits of its educational reach over students. Such limits do in fact exist. During the days of the free speech movement in the 1960s, for example, many demanded that Berkeley punish students who had participated in the (illegal) sit-ins in the South. Berkeley Chancellor Clark Kerr correctly resisted these demands on the grounds that the educational responsibilities of the university did not reach the students’ off-campus political activities.
Chemerinsky’s second point is that we must separate the “actual” law from what I think the law should be. Fair enough. But any lawyer knows that courts say all kinds of absurd things that they cannot possibly mean. Courts cannot mean what Chemerinsky says they mean, if courts actually say that a speaker cannot be excluded from campus because of his or her viewpoint.
In fact, speakers are almost always invited to campus because of their viewpoint, because someone thinks they have something worthwhile to say. Graduation speakers are selected because deans believe their ideas are serious and should be heard. Given that all speakers are selected on the basis of their viewpoints, innumerable speakers are also excluded because of their viewpoints. Another way of saying this is that the cardinal First Amendment rule of viewpoint neutrality has absolutely no relevance to the selection of university speakers. Any court that denies this is living in fantasy, blinded by a mechanical doctrine that has no relevance to the phenomena it is supposed to control.
It is of course more complicated when a university has delegated the power to make such viewpoint-based judgments to student groups, and then wishes to countermand the decisions of those groups. In such instances, we have a question of how authority ought to be distributed within a university. This question is not usefully analyzed as a First Amendment question, because the rights of speakers are not determinative.
Underlying Chemerinsky’s post is the assumption that speech within the university (and outside the classroom) is the same as in the public sphere. But the root and fiber of the university is not equivalent to the public sphere. If a university believes that its educational mission requires it to prohibit all outside speakers, or to impose stringent tests of professional competence on all speakers allowed to address the campus, it would and should be free to do so.
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How online citizenship is unsettling rights and identities
The challenge is to transform the internet – and thus the world – from a place where identity is constantly surveilled, judged, and operationalised, to a place where we can act freely as citizens of a greater sphere of social relationships.
13 October 2017
On November 2 the Berliner Gazette‘s Friendly Fire conference asks: are digital non-/citizens the status quo? Two prolific speakers will look for answers: the artist James Bridle, whose visionary project “Citizen Ex” reflects digital citizenship and the political thinker Eleanor Saitta, whose work explores the potential of radical democracy and consistently challenges the blind spots of the digital avantgardes. Opening the three-day conference, this public talk will reflect the politics of citizenship with regard to the rampant digitalization of people’s lives – be they citizens or not. Here, James Bridle reflects on algorithmic citizenship and digital statelessness.
Historically, and for those lucky enough to be born under the aegis of stable governments and national regimes, there have been two ways in which citizenship is acquired at birth. Jus soli – the right of soil – confers citizenship upon those born within the territory of a state regardless of their parentage. This right is common in the Americas, but less so elsewhere (and, since 2004, is to be found nowhere in Europe). More frequently, Jus sanguinis – the right of blood – determines a person’s citizenship based on the rights held by their parents. One might be denied citizenship in the place of one’s birth, but obtain it elsewhere.
Citizenship law is strange and complex, with rafts of exceptions and omissions, which undercut the commonly-accepted view of citizenship in the Global North as something stable and absolute. In the United Kingdom, citizenship has only been defined in law since the early twentieth century, and the history of its definition is primarily one of exclusion and revocation, as the British state sought first to strengthen its borders, then to exclude its former subjects from the mainland, and finally to renounce those of its citizens who are deemed to have acted in such outrageous fashion that they should be denied due process of law. As Hannah Arendt famously wrote, citizenship is “the right to have rights”: the guarantee from which all other protections flow; and so citizenship law and how it is applied are worth watching, as litmus tests for wider democratic freedoms.
One of the places we see traditional notions of the nation state and its methods of organisation and control – particularly the assignation of citizenship – coming under greatest stress is online, in the apparently borderless expanses of the internet, where information and data flow almost without restriction across the boundaries between states. And as our rights and protections are increasingly assigned not to our corporeal bodies but to our digital selves – the accumulations of information which stand as proxies for us in our relationships to states, banks, and corporations – so new forms of citizenship arise at these transnational digital junctions.
Jus algoritmi is a term coined by John Cheney-Lippold to describe a new form of citizenship which is produced by the surveillance state, whose primary mode of operation, like other state forms before it, is control through identification and categorisation. Jus algoritmi – the right of the algorithm – refers to the increasing use of software to make judgements about an individual’s citizenship status, and thus to decide what rights they have, and what operations upon their person are permitted.
The origins of this form of citizenship lie with the United States’ National Security Agency (NSA), although it seems unlikely that they are the only state or other surveillant body to deploy such tests. Among the documents leaked by Edward Snowden in 2013 is to be found a file entitled “Procedures used by the National Security Agency for targeting Non-United States Persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States”. These procedures are necessary because, under US law, NSA is not supposed to surveil US citizens, or those who are located within the US. Such a division was relatively simple in the days of physical eavesdropping: black chambers for opening the nation’s post; secure rooms in exchanges for tapping telephone calls. But in an age when most of the world’s internet traffic passes through the United States, ascertaining who exactly is under surveillance is more difficult. In response, the NSA’s procedures use a points-based system to determine, on a case-by-case, byte-by-byte basis, whether a target is eligible for surveillance, based on the texture of their communications. From this determination flow all of their rights: this determination determines citizenship.
Citizen Ex
In 2015, I created Citizen Ex, a free-to-download browser extension which tracks your movements online (and does so entirely privately; I do not have access to any of the data thus generated). Every website you visit is recorded, as well as its location. Over time a map builds up, populated with the places your data has been and gone to: datacenters and servers in other places, other nations, and other legal jurisdictions. And each of these locations is weighted and judged, contributing to a percentage score of the nations you visit virtually: your algorithmic citizenship. At time of writing, my own Algorithmic Citizenship is 74.68% USA, 4.5% United Kingdom, 1.45% Germany, 1.42% Netherlands, 1.22% Ireland (home to a large number of European datacentres), and a host of lesser attributions. Of course, NSA’s determinations are far more sophisticated than these, but it’s interesting and useful to get a sense of one’s own distribution. Some users have reported attempting to “browse more locally”, while others have learned much about the physical infrastructure of the internet, an important new form of literacy in a time when this infrastructure both illuminates and reproduces the political and juridical structure of the world.
Using Citizen Ex over time, the key characteristic of algorithmic citizenship becomes clear. Every link clicked, every site visited, every HTTP call made and header sent, subtly recalibrates the balance of our rights, as percentages shift and different judgements are made. Algorithmic citizenship is significant not because it is new, or because it is distributed, or even because it is, most of the time, opaque to the subject, but because it is constantly in flux. Moment by moment, the citizenship assigned to us, and thus the rights we may claim and the laws we are subject to, are changing, subject to interrogation and processing. We have become effectively stateless, as the concrete rights we have been accustomed to flicker and shift with a moment’s (in)attention.
But in addition to showing us a new potential vector of oppression, Citizen Ex illustrates, in the same way that the internet itself illustrates political and social relationships, the distribution of identity and culture in our everyday online behaviour. The nation state has never been a sufficient container for identity, but our technology has caught up with our situation, illuminating the many and varied failures of historical models of citizenship to account for the myriad of ways in which people live, behave, and travel over the surface of the planet. This realisation and its representation are both important and potentially emancipatory, if we choose to follow its implications.
We live in a time of both mass migrations, caused by war, climate change, economic need and demographic shift, and of a shift in mass identification, as ever greater numbers of us form social bonds with other individuals and groups outside our physical locations and historical cultures. If we accept that both of these kinds of change are, if not caused by, at least widely facilitated by modern communication technologies – from social media to banking networks and military automation – then it follows that these technologies may also be deployed to produce new forms of interaction and subjectivity which better model the actual state of the world – and one which is more desirable to inhabit.
An interesting current experiment in digitally-mediated citizenship is to be found in Estonia, which since the mid-1990s has prided itself on being the most wired country on Earth, investing heavily in internet infrastructure, IT skills, and digital society innovations such as online voting, direct democracy, and electronic health records. In 2014, Estonia started offering an “e-residency” programme, which offers the benefits of Estonia’s digital society to almost everybody: the ability to open a bank account, digitally sign documents, start a business, pay taxes online – in short, many of the government services available to its own citizens, with the exception of actual, physical residency. In effect, Estonia has delaminated a raft of state actions from the substrate of its physical territory, offering citizenship-as-a-service on the model of contemporary cloud software platforms.
Ironically, Estonia has one of the largest stateless populations in Europe. In common with its Baltic neighbours, a significant proportion of the population is effectively stateless due to naturalisation laws passed after the fall of the Soviet Union. These laws required members of ethnic groups from Russia or elsewhere in the Soviet Union to reapply for their citizenship of the newly independent republics. For reasons of politics, bureaucracy, history, family, or any number of other causes, many failed to apply or pass, resulting in thousands of “non-citizens” who are still today subject to restricted democratic rights, limits on movement, and multiple forms of discrimination. It remains to be seen whether technological innovations such as e-residency will benefit those with most to gain from reengineered systems of citizenship, or, like so many other digital products, merely augment the agency of those who already have first-class passports, first-class access to information, and the first-class opportunities which flow from these privileges.
As the example of NSA’s procedures for determining citizenship illustrate, contemporary networked interventions in the sphere of identity are typically top-down, state-led, authoritarian moves to control and discipline individual subjects. Their operational processes are opaque, and they are used against their subjects, reducing their agency. The same is true for most corporate systems, from Facebook to Google to smart gas and water meters and vehicle trackers, which abstract data from the subject for financial gain. The Estonian example shows that digital citizenship regimes can point towards post-national, post-geographic territories, while continuing to reproduce the forms of identity most conducive to contemporary capitalism and nationhood. The challenge is to transform the internet, and thus the world, from a place where identity is constantly surveilled, judged, and operationalised, to a place where we can act freely as citizens of a greater sphere of social relationships: from a space which is entirely a border zone to one which is truly borderless.
Such a change requires a radical re-engineering of most of the systems we use today, which are inherently constructed as anti-privacy, data-gathering, judgement-processing and capital-accumulating networks. But the seeds for doing so are present within the technologies as well: systems of distribution, of anonymity and encryption, of proof and assertion. If we could truly own our data selves, and decide for ourselves what information to give out, and which to hoard, which to share and which to delete forever, then we would have the tools at our disposal for a more equitable negotiation with commercial and governmental forms of power. The ability to accumulate, store, and process such valuable information has historically been the prerogative of the state, and increasingly of the corporation, but as we migrate from place to space, moving between the physical to the digital, the possibility of determining and asserting our own citizenships, our own rights, becomes more and more widely available to us.
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The ties that bind Italy and Russia
Italian executives seek to build on close relations with Russia despite sanctions
20 October 2017
On the sidelines of a high-profile Italian-Russian business conference in Verona earlier this month, Intesa Sanpaolo, Italy’s largest bank, signed an agreement with Independent Petroleum Company, a Russian oil producer subject to US sanctions that is seeking to raise $5.8bn for a new drilling project.
An Intesa spokesman later told the FT that no decision had been made on assisting or financing the project, adding: “The bank has simply agreed to evaluate the compliance with international laws and regulations of any potential business opportunities related to the project.”
But the agreement highlighted the close corporate and commercial ties that still bind Italy and Russia — despite EU and US efforts to isolate Vladimir Putin following the invasion of Ukraine in 2014 — and is a sign of the sympathy for Moscow that can be found in many quarters of Italian business and politics.
“Sanctions are illegal and have been imposed due to ideological reasons,” Intesa’s Russia president Antonio Fallico said in Verona. Mr Fallico has an award from Mr Putin for arranging a €5.2bn loan to finance the sale of a stake in Kremlin-controlled oil company Rosneft last year.
Across the EU, it is not uncommon to hear executives privately lament western sanctions against Russia that have reduced the possibilities for co-operation, mainly with the country’s vast and lucrative oil and gas industry. But in Italy, the frustration is often voiced loud and clear.
“The time has come to do something tangible and concrete . . . we need to work step by step and proceed in a continuous way to strengthen our economic co-operation [with Russia] and make it more effective and fruitful,” said Emma Marcegaglia, chairman of Italian oil and gas group ENI and member of the Marcegaglia steel dynasty, which has dealings in Russia. “This is the best way to encourage politicians to take decisions that in the long term are for the benefit of Europe and Russia.”
Intesa, ENI, drilling company Saipem and others in Italy’s energy and engineering industries had some of the strongest ties to Russian businesses before Moscow’s invasion and annexation of Crimea. And they have been some of the most active since, through finance packages, dealmaking and oil and gas drilling projects, even as other US and EU companies have retreated.
International rivals such as ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, Statoil and BP have all frozen projects in Russia because of sanctions, while many US and EU banks moved to end financing deals in 2014. But at the conference in Verona, several high-profile Italian executives sought to build on Italy’s close longstanding relations with Russia, historically its second-largest European trade partner after Germany.
One senior Italian executive, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the high turnout of Russian businesses at the conference indicated the importance of relations with Italy as one of the few places in Europe where corporate Russia is still open to meet and do business.
In Rome, maintaining economic ties with Russia has been a key goal, despite concerns about possible Russian interference in Italian politics in support of populist opposition parties such as the Five Star Movement and the Northern League, which have developed and strengthened ties with Mr Putin’s United Russia party in recent years.
Commercial co-operation was high on the agenda when Paolo Gentiloni, Italy’s centre-left prime minister, visited Mr Putin in Sochi in May while Maria Elena Boschi, one of Mr Gentiloni’s top advisers, attended the Verona conference, saying that the retreat of the US into protectionism and its turn against global agreements to tackle climate change implied the need for a different approach towards Russia and Eurasia.
Meanwhile, other officials in Rome are celebrating a sharp rise in trade with Russia this year. Italian exports to Russia are up 22.6 per cent in the first three quarters of 2017 compared to the same period in 2016, according to the latest data from Istat, Italy’s statistical agency. The increase is being driven by machinery exports, a sector that is mostly exempt from sanctions except for those applied to the oil and gas business.
“There has been a rebound, the question now is whether it can be sustained or even accelerated next year,” said Alessandro Terzulli, the chief economist at Italy’s export credit agency Sace.
Sace counts Russia as its third-largest market and has claimed a “countercyclical role” in supporting Italian business in Russia despite a downturn and the sanctions.
Just this week, it was touting the end of the first phase of construction of VTB Arena Park, a €1.7bn project in Moscow — including a €400m guarantee from Sace — which includes a football stadium and a five-star hotel, that was contracted to Codest, the Russian unit of Rizzani De Eccher, a building company based in the north-eastern Italian region of Friuli.
Alessandro Profumo, chief executive of Italian aerospace and defence company Leonardo, said in Verona that his company was present “in force” in the Russian market. “[But] we work in a heavily regulated environment, political guidance is key, and it is clear that we must find areas for co-operation.”
ENI, which has joint ventures with Rosneft in the Black and Barents Seas and the Mediterranean, is considering a new liquid natural gas deal, Ms Marcegaglia said in Verona, while Sapiem signed a strategic co-operation deal with the sanctioned Russian company that included the possible creation of a joint engineering centre.
“In the present situation, in which the political issues are so starkly differentiated, business ties should be a priority,” said Romano Prodi, a former Italian prime minister and president of the European Commission. “Companies must lobby [politicians], and put on the table the damaging impacts at the moment.”
https://www.ft.com/content/ffbe03c0-b976-11e7-8c12-5661783e5589
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Gas sector spends €100 million annually on lobbying EU
31 October 2017
The gas industry and its backers spent over €100 million in lobbying activities in Brussels in 2016, according to a new report by Corporate Europe Observatory, published on Tuesday (31 October).
The sector employs at least 1,000 lobbyists, and secured hundreds of meetings with the two EU commissioners with climate and energy in their portfolios.
According to the report, gas lobbyists met with European Commission vice-president for energy union Maros Sefcovic and climate commissioner Miguel Arias Canete more than 460 times between November 2014 and August 2017 – on average three meetings a week.
“The EU has proven highly responsive to pressure from industry and member states, providing policies that give gas significant legislative, political, and financial support,” said the report.
Corporate Europe Observatory is a Brussels-based civil society lobby group, with a focus on transparency and lobbying.
It said in its report that its estimates were probably on the low-end, because many companies and organisations lobbying on gas are not on the radar.
The EU’s lobby register is not mandatory and contains self-reported data that is not independently double-checked.
“Without a legally-binding and fully-enforced transparency register that ensures accurate and detailed declarations of lobby spending and activities, it is impossible to be fully precise about the true firepower of the gas lobby,” the report said.
The NGO also criticised the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Gas (ENTSO-G), an organisation created by the EU in 2009.
It said that ENTSO-G representatives had tried to influence EU lawmaking through members of the European Parliament.
The organisation is also involved in the selection of so-called Projects of Common Interests, or PCIs.
Once categorised as PCI, an infrastructure project will receive easier treatment to get permits, and is eligible for EU funds.
Corporate Europe Observatory said that ENTSO-G is biased towards the gas industry.
The group also criticised the EU for going along with the gas lobby’s narrative, which states that “gas is clean, gas is the natural partner of renewables, and gas offers a transition to a decarbonised world”.
But while gas does emit less CO2 than coal or oil, the fossil fuel “potentially has a bigger carbon footprint than oil and even coal”, the report said, because of methane leaks.
Methane is a greenhouse gas many times more dangerous than CO2 because it traps much more heat.
https://euobserver.com/institutional/139714
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Beyond bloodsucking
29 October 2017
Unique in Fisher’s argument was an acknowledgement that in liberal politics the tendency with every political question, is to reduce it to personal responsibility instead of solidarity.
Who doesn’t want a community in which they can be loved and supported? Like many, I was drawn to social justice-oriented spaces because they are serious about providing a space for people excluded by society to feel welcome – and I felt intuitively that was worth supporting.
We seek these kinds of communities because we are constantly, through life, threatened with disposability. If we can’t work, we don’t get food on the table. If we can’t juggle the demands of family, job, and mental health, we collapse. If we do something wrong in the eyes of the law, we are jailed. If we take out too many loans, we are forever in debt. If we don’t go to school and get good grades, we end up on the street.
These threats are dangled over us from birth – we are only valuable if we live up to society’s demands. For many of us, those demands are impossible, even violent. It’s precisely for this reason that we look for spaces that will not discard us when we do something wrong.
Safe spaces rife with exclusion
Recently, there’s been a series of articles – mostly appearing as blog posts – expressing frustration with social justice communities. While these authors originally sought out spaces to feel safe and supported, they became frustrated with the vicious culture within them.
One succinct piece, “A note on call-out culture” by Asam Ahmad, pointed to leftist movements, enabled by social media, shutting down and vilifying people using the strategy of public “call-outs.” Rather than denouncing public call-outs themselves – Ahmad argues in another piece that they might be an important and useful strategy to hold those with power accountable for their actions – the article pointed to the need for accountability processes to be compassionate and not treat people as disposable.
Another recent article by Freddie deBoer noted how often he gets contacted personally by people who might share his leftist principles, but who are terrified to join the conversation for fear of being targeted publicly. DeBoer speaks to the need for a progressive culture that allows people to disagree when things go sour, “You must be willing to say, publicly, I am with the cause, but I am not with this.”
More recently, Frances Lee’s popular blog post, “Excommunicate me from the Church of Social Justice”, did the rounds. Lee’s experience in social justice circles had many things in common with certain experiences of evangelical Christianity – communities which disappointed recruits have to try to escape. Like a dogmatic religion, Lee’s activist community advocated the pursuit of moral purity, a culture of preaching to and punishing perceived wrongdoers, and even the unquestioned support of sacred texts and celebrities. Lee also found that these communities tended to make little effort to connect with those outside of them. What initially seemed a safer and more accepting space was in fact rife with exclusions.
Finally, Kai Cheng has recently written a piece, “Righteous Callings: Being Good, Leftist Orthodoxy, and the Social Justice Crisis of Faith”. Despite having all the “cred” from that same community – Cheng is a prolific author, poet, performer, social worker, and so much more – she has become increasingly uncomfortable with the directions this is going in. To list some aspects of her disillusionment: fragmented identity politics, the performance of virtue, essentialism, over-reliance on binaries (e.g. victim/abuser, problematic/pure), the use of terms like safety only to make spaces more exclusive, and bullying.
Despite the fact that these authors are all based in different cities, they have had similar experiences – and these have struck a chord with a very wide readership. Many of the responses carry a “Me too! I thought I was the only one!” sentiment. Other responses, however, express worry that these articles take away from the wider goals of the social justice community: they are often seen as attacks on the ideas that bring people to these communities in the first place.
And yet, common to each piece is the fact that the authors are trying their best to name issues within activist communities without discounting many of the gains of the social justice community at large – the formation of an analysis of power and privilege, the need to provide a space for diverse identities, and practices of accountability that can deal with harassment, racism, and abuse. Instead, what seems to be the case is that, again and again, people have very similar negative experiences, but nothing changes.
Mirroring the system
Another commonality is the realization that radical communities, initially seeming so supportive, are actually very much like the society that the authors attempted to flee in the first place. Our criminal system, our justice system, our political system already treat people as disposable. Our communities replicate those very same patterns.
This wouldn’t be such a big issue if it weren’t for the fact that these communities were formed in the first place precisely to try to be as inclusive as possible to those excluded by the systems of oppression.
It’s interesting today to re-read an early example of this kind of article, Mark Fisher’s “Exiting the Vampire Castle”, published in 2013. Unique in Fisher’s argument was an acknowledgement that these issues are part of the ever-present cycle of liberal politics – that is, the tendency of every political question to be reduced to personal responsibility instead of solidarity.
The “Vampire Castle”, then, is a space where, lacking any kind of political solidarity or organized movement, everyone goes around sucking each other’s blood. In Fisher’s words, the Vampire Castle is “where solidarity is impossible, but guilt and fear are omnipresent – and not because we are terrorised by the right, but because we have allowed bourgeois modes of subjectivity to contaminate our movement.” Regardless of their original moral intent, progressive communities replicate the social dynamics of moral superiority and inferiority, simple binaries, and too-easy categories.
Fisher’s piece rings a bit like class reductionism – for many, words like “bourgeois” and “solidarity” bring to mind a bunch of white boys with Marx t-shirts, ponytails, and goatees complaining that class is more important than race or gender (ugh). His deeper point, however, is not that racism and sexism isn’t a problem in progressive communities – it’s that, if we’re not watchful, every radical theory, such as intersectionality, queer theory, or privilege, will inevitably be absorbed back into individualism, where every problem is only a personal problem. And so the cycle of guilt, shame, and disposability repeats itself.
An individualist turn?
So what can we do? Do we give up on politics altogether? Do we move on from community to community, and find the one that is the safest? Or do we knuckle down, absorb the criticism, and try to transform the communities we’re already a part of?
As people start asking these questions, I see many accusing the left of “going wrong”, trying to pick a “moment” when the so-called individualist turn started. Was it the fall of union organizing, leading to the demise of broad-based solidarity? Was it the politics of the Weather Underground in the 1970s, which used the term “privilege” to guilt-trip white people into a revolutionary lifestyle? Many are starting to connect the “individualist turn” with the rise of identity politics – and lately, there have been many pieces arguing that, yes, we may come to politics through our identities, but we now we need to transcend individualism, and to do so, we need to go beyond identity politics.
But what we’re seeing isn’t new. The history of social struggle is a fight against individualism and to convince people of the need to participate in collective struggle. In Karl Marx’s time, individualism was “bourgeois politics”, today some call it “liberalism” or “identitarianism”. Yes, Twitter went online in 2006, but the Vampire Castle seems an awful lot like any novel set in the nineteenth century.
Many people I know hear the words “Karl Marx” and they think “boring old white man”—someone whose theories no longer have any use for their communities today. But, overwhelmingly, much of Marx’s work was trying to deal, basically, with loneliness. The condition of working for a wage, he realized, turns people against each other, turns them into disposable objects, and alienates them from each other and their environment. Because we can’t possibly survive without relying on the money system, so many of the permanent relationships we try to hold on to “melt into air”. All the traditions that we build up, the ties of kinship and care, the attachments to place – these are destroyed generation after generation as our job contracts make us pick up and leave again and again. It’s not just that capitalism makes many people poor. It’s that it makes us treat each other like shit.
Scaling the cliff of individualism
What brings the radical left together is the idea that things don’t have to be this way – we don’t have to treat each other like objects. The goal, then, is not to create the perfect anti-oppressive community – though a loving group of friends can certainly help us deal with the daily grind. The goal, instead, is to undermine the force that systematically isolates us all from each other.
From this perspective, the recent spate of blog pieces isn’t so much a reaction to a new individualist turn – an “unfortunate chapter” in the history of the left – so much as they are a response to the cliff-face of individualism that our society throws us up against, generation after generation.
These critiques stem from the – very human – desire to find a place to feel safe, to not be rejected for who we are, and the realization that what we thought was a sturdy ledge on the cliff was actually extremely precarious. The authors are, in their own ways, grappling with how our society tends to tear apart every connection we can have with each other. The more we try to build up a safe community, the more we will become disillusioned: we’ll never find it. If we want to set our sights on the plateau of liberation, we will always have to scale that cliff of individualism first.
The outrage circus
Many of the articles that appear on my news feed are a variation of the same theme: Listen up! Oppression is everywhere. This is what it looks like. You are part of it. Repent!
These articles aren’t really meant for non-believers. They’re intended for those already in the know. They thrive on the incrementalist narrative: “if only everyone reads this, they will improve their community, and then the community will grow, and so we will challenge the system as it is.” That narrative is then played out in social media bubbles, where because everyone is sharing it, it seems like everyone is having the same conversations, and it feels like progress.
But this progress is only a fantasy. Even if every reader changes their community for the better, that community will eventually disintegrate – people get jobs, start families, move away, and have to step back from organizing. Give it five, ten, or twenty years, and it will have dissolved into the ever-shifting fabric of modern society.
I’m not immune to this fantasy. One day I post an article, “Neoliberalism has conned us into fighting climate change as individuals”, the next day I confess my own complicity in patriarchy on Facebook and am met with collective absolution through likes and hearts. I move from outrage to outrage on a daily basis, proclaiming where I stand loudly on social media. Why do I do it? I constantly play out the same fantasy that, if people just listen, we could get out of this mess. We are always pressured to moralize each other and ourselves, to individualize every problem. That kind of individualism is hard to keep track of, and at the same time, it is stifling and isolating.
Lately, I’ve stopped nodding my head when I read these articles. It’s not that I no longer believe that capitalism, patriarchy, colonialism, racism, or the systematic unraveling of the world’s ecosystems are a problem. That rage still boils inside me every moment of every day. But understanding how these systems work doesn’t give me that thing I’ve been longing for: a way to demand change instead of just being a spectator in the outrage circus.
Counter-power
While the struggle against individualism is not unique to our time, I do think there is something that defines our generation more than those of the recent past. I grew up not knowing what solidarity – working with people whom I don’t really know – can accomplish. It’s only later, through research, that I came to understand what it means to be supported by an organized structure, one that has your back when things get rough, one that will listen to your needs and speak for you, one that ensures you have a place to eat, a place to learn, and a place to dance. (In the golden age of union organizing, unions built dancehalls, schools, cafeterias, and childcare centers). I did not have that experience growing up, and I think that has affected my ability to distinguish between individual change, community change, and collective power.
Now I know full well that unions had their problems (racist, sexist, too hierarchical). But what they did do was offer people a picture of what collective action can look like, that it’s possible to make demands and then have them be met. This is what the word “counter-power” means: to be able to make demands from the powers that be. But because many of us have grown up in a world bereft of examples of counter-power, it has become extremely difficult for us to identify our own individualism when it appears.
The power to give and the power to take
How can we go from being mere spectators in the outrage circus to actually building counter-power? I think that there are two ways to understand power. One is a kind of power that seeps into every institution and facet of our lives. Bringing this kind of power to light has become the main goal of the progressive media mill.
Another way to think of power is as if it were a contract or deal. Without any kind of bargaining power, we depend on performative politics. Every astute analysis of the way of the world will be useless to us, because despite knowing full well how oppression works, we will be unable to do anything but perform our discontent. A theatrical performance can be captivating, but it is not in the position to make demands of the audience.They can always just get up and leave, and it’s the actors who depend on the ticket sales for survival.
Performative politics is posting your dissent on Facebook, or adding #theresistance to your twitter bio. It’s showing up for a protest and then going home, signing a petition, putting up a “safer space” sign, or calling your senator. You may be totally correct in denouncing the powers that be, but there’s little reason why they should pay attention and change their ways.
It’s extremely difficult to know what counter-power looks like without experiencing it. But without it, all our theories of oppression will be turned into individual problems, and the communities we rely on will keep mimicking the disposability and isolation endemic in society as a whole.
Plateau of what?
Is this an argument for class reductionism – that capitalism is more pressing a problem than race or gender? No, it’s not. It’s just to note that, because of capitalism, we are always scaling the cliff on our very lonesome. No doubt, a community can provide a ledge, small as that ledge may be, on the cliff of loneliness. Nurture and build those relationships, because we all need a break from climbing. Yet a ledge is still part of a cliff, and it doesn’t make the cliff any shorter – it just increases the chances of reaching the top. We want to get to the plateau of liberation, remember?
If we ever hope to avoid replicating the disposability of society within our own communities and organizations, three goals stand out. First, let’s shift the focus away from individual rights and wrongs, and instead build structures that enable us to make choices together. In each instance, ask yourself, is your first reaction to blame, guilt, or shame someone or yourself? Are you bringing the problem back to your own virtues or faults, or putting someone on a pedestal? Then think if there is a way to address the problem collectively: could you talk to someone in person about it? Could you set up an accountability and reconciliation process? If you’re tempted to apologize on Facebook about having been shitty toward women, you might consider using that energy to start or join a support group instead. The goal is to multiply collective decision-making structures, spaces where we can tackle the problems we face, together.
Second, we can offer material resources to break isolation – both within our communities and outside of them. Once people have the means to survive, then we can start building the relationships that stop people from being disposed of, like objects. As a plus, providing real, material benefits is the best way to get along with people who are very different from you – and convince them to join your side. It’s a crucial organizing strategy, but one that we’ve let by the wayside for far too long.
Third, let’s build counter-power. There are many strategies out there – unions are just one of them. Municipal assemblies, cooperatives, housing action groups, women’s councils, autonomous zones, blocking flows of resources and energy… the list goes on. The point is that without the power to cut a good deal, we will always be left to fend by ourselves, and we will never find that safe haven.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/aaron-vansintjan/beyond-bloodsucking
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Tesla fired union supporters, UAW charges
Tesla fired workers because they were trying to start a union, according to a complaint by the United Auto Workers.
26 October 2017
The UAW, which is trying to organize at the upstart auto company, has asked the National Labor Relations Board to order the workers reinstated. Tesla says they were let go because of bad performance reviews.
Other workers were intimidated, harassed and disciplined unfairly, the union says. It issued statements from what it said were union supporters at Tesla who were dismissed despite not having any problems on their reviews.
“I worked hard for this company for five years, sometimes 72 hours a week — and never had any performance-related complaints,” said Mike Williams, who the UAW says was fired for “performance issues” and being a bad influence on coworkers.
“I did, however, wear a union shirt,” he said. “And I had union stickers on my water bottle. And I believed that a union would make us safer, and would make the company more organized and more efficient.”
The employees were fired or harassed over the past six months, according to the complaint. The union says hundreds of employees have been dismissed in that time, though it didn’t say how many it contends were fired for supporting a union. About 33,000 people work at Tesla.
CEO Elon Musk has sparred with the UAW repeatedly over the past year as the organizing movement has tried to take hold. But the company says no employee has ever been punished for supporting a union.
Tesla would not comment on the reasons that any specific employees, including Williams, were dismissed. It calls the complaint an organizing tactic by the union.
Related: Tesla could face an uphill slog in China
“At Tesla, we strive to be a fair and just company, the only kind worth being,” the company said in a statement. “Performance reviews result in promotions and occasionally in employee departures.”
The UAW has filed previous unfair labor practice complaints against Tesla, though never any that accused Tesla of firing people for backing the union movement.
Tesla also faces a lawsuit in California state court claiming that it failed to provide two months’ notice for layoffs as required by federal law. That suit, filed by a former employee, seeks two months’ pay for the workers who were let go.
Tesla says it is hiring to fill the “vast majority” of the positions left open by the terminations, and thus did not have to provide a notice of a layoff. It says the terminations took place in all areas of the company.
Related: Tesla factory at center of discrimination lawsuits
In addition to the disputes about firings, Tesla (TSLA) has been hit with four lawsuits in recent months from workers alleging racial, LGBT and gender discrimination at its plant in Fremont, California.
Tesla has told CNNMoney that it takes all complaints seriously, but, “in the history of Tesla, there has never been a single proven case of discrimination against the company. Not one.”
Tesla is ramping up production of the Model 3, its first mass-market car. It has hundreds of thousands of potential customers who have put down $1,000 deposits and are waiting for one.
But the company has had trouble meeting the production targets. In the third quarter, it built only 260 of the 1,500 cars it expected to build. The company blamed bottlenecks at its battery plant in Nevada and its assembly plant in California.
http://money.cnn.com/2017/10/26/technology/tesla-uaw-firings/index.html
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Tesla workers claim anti-LGBT threats, taunts, and racial abuse in lawsuits
Exclusive: A factory worker says he was harassed for being gay. A father and son say they faced daily racial epithets. Each claims that Tesla failed to stop it
19 October 2017
Soon after he started working on the assembly line at Tesla, Jorge Ferro said he was taunted for being gay and threatened with violence. “Watch your back,” a supervisor warned after mocking his clothes for being “gay tight”, Ferro said.
The harassment didn’t stop after he reported it to a manager, and days after he made a second complaint, Ferro was punished, according to his account. An HR representative took away Ferro’s badge, claiming that he had an “injury” that prevented him from working and saying there’s “no place for handicapped people at Tesla”, he alleged.
Tesla repeatedly failed to stop the anti-gay harassment and fired Ferro in retaliation for seeking protection, according to a wrongful termination lawsuit, the latest discrimination scandal to roil Elon Musk’s electric car company.
“It’s revolting to me,” said Chris Dolan, Ferro’s attorney. “This is classic ‘blame the victim’.”
Tesla has defended itself against charges of discrimination: “There is no company on earth with a better track record than Tesla,” it said in a statement to the Guardian.
Ferro has come forward at a time when Tesla and companies across Silicon Valley are facing widespread scrutiny over harassment, discrimination and sexual misconduct. A sexual harassment scandal at Uber launched an avalanche of complaints from women in the male-dominated industry about abuse, unwanted advances, assault and pay disparities.
Tesla – world-famous for its battery-powered vehicles and Musk’s vision of self-driving technology – has also faced accusations of sexual harassment and underpaying women. A female engineer who filed a lawsuit and spoke to the Guardian about her experiences was soon after fired, drawing allegations of “clear retaliation”. Tesla has denied the claims.
In addition to Ferro’s complaint, first reported by the Guardian, three black men who worked at Tesla have also filed a recent lawsuit alleging racist abuse and harassment, including attacks using the N-word and statements like “Go back to Africa”.
Tesla did not address specific allegations, but in a series of statements called the claims “unmeritorious” and argued that it was was not responsible since the employees are contractors.
‘I had to stand up’
Ferro, 35, began as an assembly line production worker in April 2016 at the Tesla manufacturing plant in Fremont, California. Soon after he started, a supervisor who trained him, Jamar Taylor, began harassing him and mocking his sexuality, according to a lawsuit. Taylor allegedly told Ferro his clothes were “too tight – gay tight”, repeatedly taunted him about his outfits and later said he was not “welcome” because he is gay. Taylor also “went on to suggest that [Ferro] had a lot of enemies because ‘everyone suspects that [he is] gay’”, the suit said.
Ferro became fearful when the taunts escalated to threats of violence, including “be careful” and a warning that “something might happen to his car”, according to the complaint. Ferro told plant manager Dave Rebagliati that he was gay and was facing harassment, and HR later removed Taylor from Ferro’s assembly line, the suit said.
The harassment didn’t stop, he said. Taylor allegedly began outing Ferro to other co-workers and continued to approach Ferro in the factory, at one point saying a new employee should not learn anything from “someone like” Ferro.
After his second complaint to Rebagliati, on 2 August 2016, the manager decided to transfer Ferro to another assembly line row, according to the complaint.
“The steps taken by the company were woefully inadequate,” said Dolan, arguing it was wrong to move Ferro after he complained. “It’s perceived by many to be retaliatory. It sends a message to other employees that if you complain, you’re the one who’s going to have your job changed. In essence, you’re penalizing the party who’s making the complaint.”
While training for his new job, Rebagliati noticed a scar on Ferro’s wrist from an injury 16 years ago, and although Ferro said it had no effect on his job, the manager sent him home without pay, saying he needed a doctor’s note before returning to work, the complaint alleged. An HR official who took away his badge said he was “handicapped” and that no accommodations could be made, and three days later, before Ferro could have a doctor’s appointment, he was officially terminated, according to the suit.
A doctor later confirmed that he was able to perform his duties. Regardless, it was illegal for Tesla to fire Ferro for a perceived disability, according to Dolan. “This was just a BS reason to kick him out of the workplace.”
Ferro declined an interview request, but said in a statement to the Guardian this week, “I knew that I had to stand up to make sure this did not happen to anyone else.”
Rebagliati and Taylor could not be reached for comment.
In response to a detailed summary of Ferro’s allegations, Tesla spokesman Dave Arnold sent a lengthy statement that did not address specific claims. The company pointed out that Taylor and Ferro were both contractors, adding, “Tesla still stepped in to try to keep these individuals apart from one another and to ensure a good working environment.”
The statement continued: “[E]very lawyer knows that if they name Tesla as a defendant in their lawsuit, it maximizes the chances of generating publicity for their case. They abuse our name, because they know it is catnip for journalists … There is no company on Earth with a better track record than Tesla, as they would have to have fewer than zero cases where an independent judge or jury has found a genuine case of discrimination.”
Corporations such as Tesla, however, often have employees sign arbitration agreements, which means employees are forced to privately resolve their discrimination complaints. The spokesman declined to say if Tesla has ever allowed a discrimination claim to go before a judge or jury.
‘I just couldn’t take it any more’
Owen Diaz, 49, told the Guardian that he also brought a lawsuit in hopes of protecting other black employees at Tesla from abuse. He and his son Demetric, 22, both faced racial harassment and violent threats while working in the Tesla factory, according to a discrimination complaint they filed with a third former employee on Monday.
The father and son both started working for Tesla in 2015 and were subject to daily racial epithets, including “boy”, the N-word and statements like “All you fucking niggers – I can’t stand you motherfuckers” and “Nigger, hurry up”, the lawsuit said. Employees also allegedly drew racist and derogatory caricatures of black children.
Owen said in an interview that he was most distraught hearing his son’s supervisor, who was white, calling him the N-word: “That was probably one of the lowest points in my life.” Eventually, he said, “I just couldn’t take it any more.”
According to the lawsuit, supervisors brushed aside their complaints, with one telling Demetric, “If you don’t like how you’re treated, your time here is going to end,” and another telling Owen, “Why do you people take things so hard?”
The dismissals were hurtful, said Owen. “You might as well just slap me and spit in my face.”
Both said the abuse they faced escalated after they spoke up to supervisors. Demetric was fired a week after making a complaint, allegedly for using his phone on the production line – a rule violation that did not lead other workers to be terminated, the complaint said. Owen was threatened with a demotion and eventually quit due to the ongoing abuse, according to the lawsuit, which noted that they both had good performance records.
“It was disrespectful and humiliating,” said Owen. “It was just a feeling that no person should ever have to go through.”
Their attorney Larry Organ, who first sued Tesla earlier this year in another racial discrimination case, said the conduct at the company appeared to be more egregious than similar cases he brought against the former car plant in the same facility. Dolan also said his firm was getting an “unusually high” number of calls from Tesla employees with a wide range of discrimination complaints.
Given Musk’s ambitious statements about solving some of the world’s greatest problems, he should be able to provide a safe work environment, Organ added.
“He’s a brilliant visionary. You think that if he put his mind to this issue, it would be solved.”
Tesla’s response to the Diaz lawsuit included a detailed attack on the attorney, saying his original suit was “timed to coincide with a carefully planned media blitz in an attempt to create a disingenuous narrative that was at odds with the facts” and that the “timing of these new claims and the manner in which they are being publicized is notable, particularly coming from the same attorney”.
The statement further said the three employees worked at Tesla for “a short time and have been gone for well over a year” and pointed out that they are contractors. The spokesman said Tesla was unaware of their complaints until reporters reached out this week. (The third-party staffing agencies – West Valley, Chartwell and Citistaff – did not respond to requests for comment).
Regarding the attacks against him, Organ noted that the plaintiffs had reached out to him, adding, “They want to frame this as if it’s the greedy lawyer. Actually, what it’s really about is the racist conduct.”
Owen said he was a fan of Musk’s vision and wished the company was responding to the lawsuits with promises to change: “Don’t sweep it under the rug and send your PR out to do damage control. Step up to the plate.”
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Far-right protesters give fascist salutes in Madrid as thousands rally over Catalonia crisis
Crowds flock to rival demonstrations over Catalonia’s independence referendum
8 October 2017
Hundreds of thousands of people have taken to the streets in Barcelona and Madrid this weekend to protest for – and against – the Catalan government’s push for secession from the rest of Spain.
In Madrid, a small group of protesters rallying under the slogan “for the unity of Spain” appeared to be flashing fascist salutes in a procession led by a group aligning themselves with far-right party Falange Española de las Jons, which held power during the Francoist dictatorship period of the country.
Use of the salute is illegal in some countries. In Germany, Slovakia and Austria, the gesture is considered a criminal offence, while in countries like Canada and France, it is viewed as hate speech if used for disseminating Nazi ideology.
The rallies come a week after Catalan leader Carles Puigdemont and other separatist leaders of the Catalan government held a referendum on secession that the Spanish government branded illegal.
The “Yes” side won the referendum by a landslide, winning 90 per cent of the vote, though less than half of the region’s electorate cast their ballots.
Protesters on Sunday called for the imprisonment of Mr Puigdemont after he pledged to push for independence.
The Catalan leader is set to address the regional parliament on Tuesday “to report on the current political situation”.
Meanwhile, Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy has vowed that his government will not allow Catalonia to separate from the rest of the country.
In an interview with Spanish newspaper El Pais, Mr Rajoy said he will consider employing any measure “allowed by the law” to stop the region’s separatists.
He said that also includes bringing Article 155 of the Spanish Constitution into effect, which allows the central government to take control of the governance of a region “if the regional government does not comply with the obligations of the Constitution”.
“The ideal situation would be that I don’t have to find drastic solutions,” he said. “But for that to happen there will have to be some rectifications.”
On Sunday, Barcelona police estimated as many as 350,000 people participated in a rally organised in the Spanish city. Event organisers, however, claimed the number was much higher, asserting there were at least 950,000 attendees.
Many protesters in Barcelona have called on Mr Rajoy and Mr Puigdemont to negotiate and find a solution to what has been widely regarded as Spain’s worst political crisis in nearly four decades.
Those who are opposed to Catalonia’s secession hope recent pressure from banks and major businesses will discourage Catalan leaders from attempting to separate.
A number of businesses, including Catalonia’s top two banks have announced plans to relocate their headquarters to other parts of Spain, while others have raised concerns over losing European Union membership and access to its common market in the event of secession.
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Fascist attacks in Barcelona
Over the last few weeks, the Spanish extreme right has poured onto the streets to defend the “unity of Spain”
30 October 2017
The anti-Catalan independence demonstration mobilised by the right-wing Catalan Civil Society (SCC) and supported by the Spanish nationalist parties PP, PSOE and C’s gathered tens of thousands of people in Barcelona yesterday from all over Spain.
All the far-right Spanish organisations like España2000, Spanish Falange, National Democracy (DN) and others joined the protest.
During the unionist demonstration and throughout the day, there were numerous incidents involving nazis and fascists throughout the city.
The vicious violence included racist attacks against Indian and Pakistani citizens, clashes with the Catalan police, robberies of shops owned by citizens of Arab origin, attacks on political headquarters of the Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC) and random assaults on members of leftist organisations.
Many of the incidents were reported by ordinary citizens, who via the hashtag #AlertaUltra on Twitter. At least two people were hospitalised as a result of the attacks and police made just a single arrest. Also, a taxi driver and a pregnant woman were attacked for speaking in Catalan as can be seen in videos under the #AlertaUltra hashtag on the internet.
Today, Monday, the former leader of the French National Front, Jean Marie Le Pen, has shown his support to Spain against Catalunya through Twitter with the Francoist motto “Spain One, Big and Free”.
Meanwhile, the infamous nazi paramilitaries and mercenaries of the Ukrainian Azov Battalion have published a video highlighting their support for their Spanish comrades against Catalan separatism. This follows the rumours of a possible intervention by these nazi thugs that have been swirling around the internet during the weekend.
http://www.hopenothate.org.uk/2017/10/30/catalan-diary-monday-30-october-2017/
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#PoppyFascism
The tedious annual poppy circus reminds us that, for some, remembrance isn’t about remembering, it’s about being seen to remember
Rather than forcing poppies upon sportsmen and women of varying beliefs, remembrance should be about the most obvious thing: remembering.
31 October 2017
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The poppy has become a symbol of racism – I will never wear one again
The Entente Cordiale which sent my father to France is now trash beneath the high heels of Theresa May, yet this wretched woman dares to wear a poppy
3 November 2017
Yes, the boys and girls of the BBC and ITV, and all our lively media and sports personalities and politicians, are at it again. They’re flaunting their silly poppies once more to show their super-correctness in the face of history, as ignorant or forgetful as ever that their tired fashion accessory was inspired by a poem which urged the soldiers of the Great War of 1914-18 to go on killing and slaughtering.
But that’s no longer quite the point, for I fear there are now darker reasons why these TV chumps and their MP interviewees sport their red compassion badges on their clothes.
For who are they commemorating? The dead of Sarajevo? Of Srebrenica? Of Aleppo? Nope. The television bumpkins only shed their crocodile tears for the dead of First and Second World Wars, who were (save for a colonial war or two) the last generation of Britons to get the chop before the new age of “we-bomb-you-die” technology ensured that their chaps – brown-eyed, for the most part, often Muslims, usually dark skinned – got blown to bits while our chaps flew safely home to the mess for breakfast.
Yes, I rage against the poppy disgrace every year. And yes, my father – 12th Battalion The King’s Liverpool Regiment, Third Battle of the Somme, the liberation of burning Cambrai 1918 – finally abandoned the poppy charade when he learned of the hypocrisy and lies behind the war in which he fought. His schoolboy son followed his father’s example and never wore his wretched Flanders flower again.
Oddly, the dunderheads who are taking Britain out of the European Union on a carpet of equally deceitful lies – and I include Theresa May and her buffoonery of ministers – are guilty of even greater hypocrisy than the TV presenters whose poppies, for just a few days a year, take over the function of studio make-up artists (poppies distracting viewers from the slabs of paste on their TV faces). For the fields of Flanders, the real mud and faeces and blood which those vile poppies are supposed to symbolise, showed just how European our dead generations were.
British soldiers went off to fight and die in their tens of thousands for little Catholic Belgium, today the seat of the EU where Nigel Farage disgraced his country by telling the grandchildren of those we went to fight for that they’d never done a day’s work in their lives. In France, British (and, of course, Irish) soldiers bled to death in even greater Golgothas – 20,000 alone on the first day of the Somme in 1916 – to save the nation which we are now throwing out of our shiny new insular lives.
The Entente Cordiale which sent my father to France is now trash beneath the high heels of Theresa May – yet this wretched woman dares to wear a poppy.
When Poles fought and died alongside British pilots in the 1940 Battle of Britain to save us from Nazi Germany, we idolised them, lionised them, wrote about their exploits in the RAF, filmed them, fell in love with them. For them, too, we pretend to wear the poppy. But now the poppy wearers want to throw the children of those brave men out of Britain. Shame is the only word I can find to describe our betrayal.
And perhaps I sniff something equally pernicious among the studio boys and girls. On Britain’s international television channels, Christmas was long ago banned (save for news stories on the Pope). There are no Christmas trees any more beside the presenters’ desks, not a sprig of holly. For we live in a multicultural society, in which such manifestations might be offensive to other “cultures” (I use that word advisedly, for culture to me means Beethoven and the poet Hafiz and Monet).
And for the same reason, our international screens never show the slightest clue of Eid festivities (save again for news stories) lest this, too, offends another “culture”. Yet the poppy just manages to sneak onto the screen of BBC World; it is permissable, you see, the very last symbol that “our” dead remain more precious than the millions of human beings we have killed, in the Middle East for example, for whom we wear no token of remembrance. Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara will be wearing his poppy this week – but not for those he liquidated in his grotesque invasion of Iraq.
And in this sense, I fear that the wearing of the poppy has become a symbol of racism. In his old-fashioned way (and he read a lot about post-imperial history) I think my father, who was 93 when he died, understood this.
His example was one of great courage. He fought for his country and then, unafraid, he threw his poppy away. Television celebrities do not have to fight for their country – yet they do not even have the guts to break this fake conformity and toss their sordid poppies in the office wastepaper bin.
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#RussianPropaganda
Reality Check: Was Hillary Clinton photographed with Osama Bin Laden?
31 October 2017
The claim: Photographs show Osama Bin Laden was hosted in the White House.
Reality Check verdict: An image that has been shared on social media in Russia is fake. There are no known photographs of Osama Bin Laden at the White House and no evidence such an extraordinary event ever occurred.
Maria Zakharova, a Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, was on a chat show on Russian state television on Monday, talking about the US government and its lobbying activities.
“Recall these fantastic, mind-boggling photographs of how Bin Laden was hosted in the White House,” she said.
The image is definitely a fake – Bin Laden has been superimposed on a photo of Mrs Clinton meeting musician Shubhashish Mukherjee at an event in 2004.
At the time, President George W Bush was in the White House and Hillary Clinton was a New York senator.
Analysis by the US fact-checking site Snopes found that the image had been produced as part of a Photoshop contest from a website called FreakingNews.com.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-41821923
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Joseph Mifsud: more questions than answers about mystery professor linked to Russia
Court papers paint Mifsud, who has worked at universities in the UK and Italy, as a stealthy operator with deep links to the Kremlin – but he denies wrongdoing
31 October 2017
On paper, Joseph Mifsud – who has emerged as a central figure in the criminal investigation into possible collusion between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign – looks like a seasoned professional in diplomacy and academia.
A fawning profile published in 2014 described the Malta native as a top former government official who helped negotiate his country’s entry into the European Union and later became head of the “venerable” London Academy of Diplomacy
But a closer look at Mifsud’s record raises more questions than answers about the man who federal investigators now say told a young Trump campaign adviser that the Kremlin had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. Evidence has also emerged that suggests Mifsud has a relationship with at least one senior Russian official in London.
Mifsud is not named in court documents released on Monday, which describe how the campaign aide, George Papadopoulos, lied to investigators about his contacts with “foreign agents”. But his biography and movements between Rome, London, and Moscow, match those of the unnamed “professor” described in the court documents. On Tuesday, he acknowledged to the Daily Telegraph that he was the man described in the papers, but denied any wrongdoing, or knowledge of the Clinton emails.
The court documents paint him as a stealthy operator with links deep inside the Kremlin. While initially uninterested in Papadopoulos, Mifsud’s attitude changed once he learned that Papadopoulos was working for the Trump campaign, the documents say.
Court documents say that after their initial meeting in Rome, the pair met for breakfast in London, where Mifsud introduced Papadopoulos to an unidentified Russian national who he claimed – falsely – was Putin’s niece. Mifsud told the Telegraph that this allegation was untrue.
It is not clear whether details of these exchanges were shared with then-candidate Trump, but at a 31 March meeting he attended with the future president, Papadopoulos boasted that he had “connections” that could help facilitate a meeting with Putin.
Mifsud then allegedly traveled to Moscow, met Russian senior government officials, and then told Papadopoulos that the Kremlin was sitting on “thousands” of Clinton’s emails, the documents say.
In August, Mifsud told the Washington Post that he had “absolutely no contact” with the Russian government. “I am an academic, I do not even speak Russian,” he wrote.
But there is independent evidence of Mifsud’s links to Russia, including a photograph of him and Russia’s ambassador to London taken at the ambassador’s residence in May 2014. The caption says the two discussed an academic summit in Moscow that Mifsud had attended and British-Russia relations.
Attempts by the Guardian to reach Mifsud on a London mobile phone and in Rome were not successful.
Asked if Mifsud had ever served as a diplomat for the country, Malta’s ministry of foreign affairs did not respond to requests for comment. The Malta Times reported that Mifsud once worked for the former foreign minister, Michael Frendo.
Today, there is no sign of the London Academy of Diplomacy on Middlesex Street in London. Phone numbers for the organisation that can be found online do not work and websites lead to error messages. A receptionist at the address said the organisation left the premises six months ago.
“Any stuff we get, we just send it back,” she said.
There are still some remaining traces of the academy, though, including a photograph of Mifsud and a senior representative of Russia’s embassy in London, a counsellor named Ernest Chernukhin, during a visit to the University of East Anglia. In the photograph, Mifsud is wearing a medal. The picture was taken on 10 July 2017.
The University of East Anglia, which has been linked to LAD in press reports, said the university used to validate LAD degree courses, but ended the arrangement in January 2014. A spokesperson said that Mifsud had an honorary professorship at the university from August 2013 to July 2016, a period in which Mifsud was allegedly in close contact with Papadopolous.
Another university, the University of Stirling, said Mifsud had been working as a full-time professorial teaching fellow in the politics department since May 2017, but declined to answer other questions.
Mifsud’s professional activities are not limited to the UK. In Rome, he is an official at Link Campus University, which is headed by a former Italian interior minister named Vincenzo Scotti.
One Rome-based professor claimed Link Campus had a reputation for being closely connected to some elements within the Italian intelligence services.
“Mifsud is a person who collaborates with us,” said one person who was reached at Link Campus.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/oct/31/joseph-mifsud-professor-trump-russia-inquiry-kremlin
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Il grido di Francesco per svegliare l’Europa dal letargo
1 novembre 2017
http://www.repubblica.it/politica/2017/11/01/news/il_grido_di_francesco_per_svegliare_l_europa_dal_letargo-179918120/
Pensasse piuttosto a svegliare dal letargo la sua chiesa! E magari, una volta tanto, criticasse pure la Russia, che sembra sveglissima, ma non esattamente impegnata in attività di alto spessore morale.
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Not all campus speakers are created equal (especially when they’re from the German far right)
Universities should be able to honor the spirit of free enquiry without legitimizing every viewpoint.
31 October 2017
At bucolic Bard College, overlooking the majestic Hudson River, a dispute is raging. The reason: a decision by the college’s esteemed Hannah Arendt Center to host Marc Jongen, a leader of Germany’s ascendant right-wing Alternative for Germany party (AfD). Jongen’s party won 94 seats in the Bundestag this year based on a platform of hostility to immigrants, anti-Muslim sentiment and climate change denial.
Jongen was among 20 speakers at a conference called “Crisis of Democracy: Thinking in Dark Times.”His appearance prompted a group of more than 50 academics, including notables like Yale’s Seyla Benhabib and Brown’s Bonnie Honig, to publish an open letter in the Chronicle of Higher Education criticizing Bard for affording the conservative politician and philosopher “legitimation and normalization.” The letter noted that Jongen had touted the invitation on his Facebook page as a positive sign the party wasn’t simply being shut down in elite academic circles.
Arendt Center Director Roger Berkowitz has defended the invitation, arguing that it conferred no legitimacy, but rather “opens a space for critical engagement with [the AfD’s] ideas.” He cited the AfD as “a real-world example of the crisis facing wobbling liberal democracies. The only way to respond to this crisis is to listen to, engage, and reject these arguments. That is precisely what happened at the conference.” Bard President Leon Botstein went a step further, excoriating the letter of protest as evoking “the public denouncements of the Soviet era … [that] put terror in the hearts of young musicians and writers, and deterred them from speaking and acting against a group consensus.” Author Masha Gessen weighed in a few days later, judging Botstein’s denunciation as hyperbolic and pointing out that even Hannah Arendt had certain ideas that she thought deserved to be “called out” rather than debated.
There is inherent tension between the university’s role as a bestower of authority and prestige and as a forum open to all ideas. The university’s mission in fostering unfettered inquiry and intellectual exchange is fundamental. For public colleges, First Amendment jurisprudence makes clear that virtually no speech – no matter how noxious – may be excluded from campus on grounds of viewpoint.
Most elite private universities have voluntarily adopted similar operating principles. Indeed, the university’s role as an arbiter of excellence and legitimacy is predicated in large part on that very commitment to openness; all ideas are welcomed so that the best among them can be elevated in the curriculum, showered with prizes and research funds and otherwise acclaimed. The opportunity for unbridled exploration and exposure to the widest array of thought attracts great faculty and students who, in turn, produce the scholarship, teaching and community that allow a campus to excel.
This doesn’t mean that the university should confer its legitimacy wantonly, nor should it be oblivious about how it grapples with potentially dangerous ideas. Not all campus engagements are created equal: a faculty appointment, commencement address or distinguished lectureship are far weightier tokens of esteem than an appearance at a policy conference amid a long agenda of speakers. When Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government Dean Douglas Elmendorf professed surprise that an invitation to Wikileaks conduit Chelsea Manning to be a “visiting fellow” might be construed “as an honorific,” he evinced implausible obliviousness to the currency of academic prestige.
Yet if the prospect that an unsavory speaker might later trumpet his appearance on campus were grounds to deny invitations, the range of acceptable campus speakers would narrow sharply. If any speaking engagement implies endorsement, then universities would need to vet not just a speaker’s professional attainments and proclivities, but also interpersonal conduct. Moreover, to the Twitterverse, an invitation from the Arendt Center may look very similar to one from a student organization or academic department; either way, Jongen would have made it to Bard. Subjecting all such campus speakers to a strict litmus test of legitimization would unavoidably implicate political, ideological and moral views about what ideas and individuals do and don’t merit elevation, impairing open thought on campus.
While the imperative of open intellectual exchange outweighs the risk of conferring undeserved institutional legitimacy, the university does owe a duty of care in exercising its legitimizing power. The best approach, which the Arendt Center’s critics touch on in their letter, is for the university to embrace a dual role in relation to repellent speakers: that of both open forum and of moral voice. That a campus may offer a forum for abhorrent views does not require it to be silent on the content of those opinions. By speaking out forcefully to repudiate noxious beliefs, the university can affirm its values and prevent a campus appearance from being taken as a seal of approval.
While the Arendt Center’s decision to pair Jongen with historian Ian Buruma was aimed at ensuring that his assertions did not go unanswered, this was not a substitute for Bard, as an institution, making its own convictions known. Berkowitz and Botstein claimed it was self-evident that the campus rejected Jongen’s views – to New York intellectuals, probably. To Jongen’s Facebook audience, not so much.
Masha Gessen writes that just because a set of ideas is gaining favor somewhere doesn’t entitle them to a hearing everywhere. She’s right, of course. The Arendt Center didn’t have to invite Marc Jongen. But given that they saw reason to invite him, fears of according unjustified legitimacy should not have stood in the way.
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The science behind why fake news is so hard to wipe out
It’s time for Facebook and Google to pay attention to the psychology of the illusory truth effect.
31 October 2017
In the immediate aftermath of the October 1 night massacre in Las Vegas, Facebook and Google — the two largest distributors of news and information in the world — helped to spread misinformation.
In its “top stories,” Google featured a 4chan forum — an anonymous message board notorious for fueling conspiracy theories — that misidentified the shooter as a Democrat with ties to leftist, anti-fascist groups, as BuzzFeed’s Ryan Broderick found out. On Facebook, “trending stories” featured articles about the shooter from Sputnik, a Russian propaganda outlet, a New York Times reporter noted.
And that’s just the start: An untold number of other pieces of user-generated misinformation and hoaxes on the shooting spread freely on social media. (Broderick compiled many of the hoaxes in a list here.)
The fringe conspiracy theory website Infowars ran a headline that suggested the killer specifically targeted conservatives. And as Broderick chronicled, the far-right website Gateway Pundit ran a headline that said the shooter was associated with an “anti-Trump army” (the post has since been removed).
None of these stories checked out. And the killer’s motives still have not been verified in the days since the shooting.
But each time a reader encounters one of these stories on Facebook, Google, or really anywhere, it makes a subtle impression. Each time, the story grows more familiar. And that familiarity casts the illusion of truth.
Recent and historical work in psychology shows mere exposure to fake news makes it spread. To understand why — and the extent to which false stories seep into our brains — we need to understand the psychology of the illusory truth effect.
The more we hear a piece of information repeated, the more we’re likely to believe it. “Even things that people have reason not to believe, they believe them more” if the claims are repeated, Gord Pennycook, a psychologist who studies the spread of misinformation at Yale University, says.
And recent research shows the illusory truth effect is in play when we hear or read fake news claims repeated, regardless of how ridiculous or illogical they sound.
It’s research Google and Facebook must wrestle with as the world’s most powerful media organizations. Facebook recently admitted to Congressional investigators that Russian misinformation agents reached 126 million people using their platform. It’s unclear how much of an impact those post have had on American politics and public opinion. But it’s clear from the psychological research: once falsehoods are repeated, they are very hard to wipe out.
The illusory truth effect, explained
The illusory truth effect has been studied for decades — the first citations date back to the 1970s. Typically, experimenters in these studies ask participants to rate a series of trivia statements as true or false. Hours, weeks, or even months later, the experimenters bring the participants back again for a quiz.
On that second visit, some of the statements are new and some are repeats. And it’s here that the effect shows itself: Participants are reliably more likely to rate statements they’ve seen before as being true — regardless of whether they are.
When you’re hearing something for the second or third time, your brain becomes faster to respond to it. “And your brain misattributes that fluency as a signal for it being true,” says Lisa Fazio, a psychologist who studies learning and memory at Vanderbilt University. The more you hear something, the more “you’ll have this gut-level feeling that maybe it’s true.”
Most of the time, this mental heuristic — a thinking shortcut — helps us. We don’t need to rack our brains every time we hear “the Earth is round” to decide if it’s true or not. Most of the things we hear repeated over and over again are, indeed, true. But falsehoods can hijack this mental tic as well.
The more we encounter fake news, the more likely we are to believe it
Historically, psychologists have studied the illusory truth effect with topics of trivial importance. One study in the 1970s tested the phrase “French horn players get cash bonuses to stay in the U.S. Army.”
Pennycook and his colleague David Rand at Yale are updating these tests to better understand the spread of misinformation in the real world, recreating these classic experiments with fake news headlines ripped from the 2016 presidential campaign.
In a recent study, participants were shown six real and six fake news headlines — and were asked about how accurate they were. The headlines were made to look like Facebook posts.
After evaluating the headlines, the participants were distracted with another task (not relevant to the experiment) for a while. After, the participants were given a list of 24 headlines to evaluate, which included all of the fake news stories they saw earlier.
Pennycook was able to replicate the classic finding: When participants had been exposed to a fake news headline previously, they were more likely to accept it as truth later on.
“We found essentially the same effect, which was surprising because the stories that we’re using are really quite implausible, like ‘Mike Pence’s marriage was saved by gay conversion therapy,’” Pennycook says. The effect was not limited to Republicans or Democrats in the study’s large sample. And a follow-up test revealed the effect persisted a week later.
The effect isn’t huge, but it’s meaningful.
One of the fake news headlines used in the study was “Trump to Ban All TV Shows that Promote Gay Activity Starting with Empire as President.”
If a group of participants hadn’t seen it before, about 5 percent said it was accurate. If the group of participants had seen it before in an earlier stage of the experiment, around 10 percent said it was accurate. That’s twice as many people agreeing an outlandish headline is truthful.
And while the change is small, think about this: Facebook and Google reach just about every person in the United States. A 5 percent increase in the number of people saying a fake news headline is true represents millions of people.
Though have some faith: Pennycook found truly, truly outrageous statements like “the Earth is a square” didn’t gain acceptance with repetition.
I should mention: Pennycook’s work has only been published in preprint form, which means it has not yet been through peer review. So treat these findings as preliminary. His team did preregister the study design, which is one safeguard in ensuring objective results. But other studies have found similar results.
In 2012, a small-scale paper in Europe’s Journal of Psychology found that “exposure to false news stories increased the perceived plausibility and truthfulness of those stories.” The study had participants read made-up (but not totally outlandish) news stories — like one on a California bill to limit the number of credit cards an in-debt person could own. Five weeks later, they were more likely to rate these false stories as being truthful as compared to a group of participants who had never seen those stories before.
Studying up on a topic isn’t likely to help
The frustrating truth about the illusory truth effect is that it happens to us unthinkingly. Even people who are highly knowledgeable about topics can fall prey to it.
And it can happen whether or not we have some prior knowledge about a subject. In 2015, Fazio and co-authors published a paper that found prior knowledge about a topic doesn’t inoculate you to the effect.
In her study, participants who knew facts like “kilts are the skirts that Scottish men wear” became more doubtful if they read, “Saris are the skirts Scottish men wear.” And they became even more doubtful if they read, “Saris are the skirts Scottish men wear,” for a second time. (Participants rated the truthfulness of the statements on a scale of 1 to 6.)
Fazio stresses that it’s not that people completely change their understanding of Scottish fashion customs by reading one sentence. But doubt begins to creep in. “They moved from ‘definitely false’ to ‘probably false,’” she says. Every time a lie is repeated, it appears slightly more plausible to some people.
Our memories are very prone to mixing up real and false information
The research here suggests that even when there are fact-checks around bullshit claims, the illusory truth effect still influences our memories to confuse fact and fiction.
It’s because our memories aren’t so great. Recently I had a conversation with Roddy Roediger, one of the nation’s foremost experts on learning and memory. In his experiments, he shows how even small suggestions from others can push us to remember whole scenes and experiences differently. And we tend to sloppily remember events like news reports.
“When you see a news report that repeats the misinformation and then tries to correct it, you might have people remembering the misinformation because it’s really surprising and interesting, and not remembering the correction,” Roediger, a psychologist at Washington University in Saint Louis, said.
Many of the fake news claims and hoaxes that followed the Las Vegas shooting implied that the shooter specifically targeted conservative-minded Trump supporters. That may also prove to be sticky. Stereotypically, we may think of country music fans as Trump supporters.
There isn’t an easy fix to this problem
In one arm of his experiment, Pennycook even put a warning around the fake news headlines when participants first read them. “Disputed by 3rd Party Fact-Checkers,” the note read (which is Facebook’s exact wording for how it labels dubious stories). The warning made no difference.
“We basically said, ‘This is something you shouldn’t believe,’” he says. But participants later on still rated those headlines as being more accurate than ones they had never seen before.
Pennycook and Rand followed up with another paper looking at whether Facebook’s warnings could have any effect on whether readers perceive a news article as being accurate. Rand explains that the warnings did slightly decrease accuracy ratings — but not to an extent that it overcame the illusory truth effect. “The size of that decrease is smaller than the increase you get from just having seen it,” he says. “So what that means is seeing an article with a disputed tag on it still leaves you a little bit more inclined to believe it’s true than not having seen it at all.”
The experiment was pretty simple: Participants saw an array of real and fake news headlines either without warnings or with the warnings added. They were simply asked to state how accurate they thought the headlines were. (One caveat here: This study was not performed on Facebook itself, but on a web survey designed to look like Facebook. But as Pennycook says, Facebook hasn’t made data on the effectiveness of its warnings public.)
Facebook and Google need to step up in their role as news publishers
The stakes here are extremely high, with democracy itself under attack. Increasingly there’s evidence that the Russian government used Facebook to target Americans with misinformation and messaging to sow unrest during the 2016 election. Facebook made it easy.
“These companies are the most powerful information gatekeepers that the world has ever known, and yet they refuse to take responsibility for their active role in damaging the quality of information reaching the public,” Alexis Madrigal writes in the Atlantic. He asks us to imagine: What if a newspaper had done this?
Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other forms of social media are the newspapers of today. They need to take the spread of misinformation on their platforms more seriously. They need to step up in their role as near-ubiquitous news publisher.
We’re not sheep. It’s not like we’ll believe anything we read on Facebook. The effect misinformation has on our minds is much subtler; it works on the margins. But in today’s world, where a few platforms dominate information sharing, the margins are huge, filled with millions, and influential.
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Putin and his inner circle valued at nearly £18bn but report finds ‘no obvious explanation for their hidden wealth’
Close friends of Russian President may hold wealth on his behalf, report claims
26 October 2017
The combined wealth of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle stands at nearly $24bn (£18bn) a new investigation has claimed.
In 2016, Mr Putin’s official income was was reported at just $133,000 and he has repeatedly denied he is one of the world’s wealthiest men.
But a joint investigation by Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta and Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), has valued him at considerably more, although it suggested that his wealth may be tied up in a series of “proxies”.
Some of the President’s inner ring have “no obvious explanation for their hidden wealth”, according to the report.
“These proxies’ wealth may be accounted for by the simplest explanation: It may really be Putin’s money. But in Russia, nothing is simple,” the authors wrote.
One alleged “proxy” is Mikhail Shelomov, a relative of Mr Putin, who works at a Russian shipping company for a job which would usually pay around $8,500 a year.
Mr Shelomov is a major investor in a new race track near StPetersburg, and has a personal wealth of $573m according to OCCRP, as well as links to the state energy giant Gazprom.
A childhood friend of the President, Pyotr Kolbin, a former butcher, has amassed a personal fortune of $550m – despite telling the Russian press he is “not a businessman”.
William Browder, a US-born anti-Putin campaigner, told OCCRP Mr Shelomov, Mr Kolbin and other cronies were “nominees” who formally own assets, while really holding them in trust for Putin. While Mr Kolbin has been sanctioned by the United States, Mr Shelomov, who keeps such a low profile the OCRUP could not find any photograph of him, has so far escaped the penalties.
The investigation has not been widely reported in Russia, which is currently ranked 148 out of 180 countries on Reporters Without Borders’ Press Freedom Index.
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Cyprus defends reputation on Russia money laundering
27 October 2017
Cyprus has defended its reputation on money laundering after a British MP called for its international rating to be downgraded.
The Cypriot justice ministry said on Friday (27 October) that Moneyval, a European rating body, had “established … that the Republic of Cyprus was in full compliance with international measures”.
It said allegations that it sat on evidence in a high-level Russian case and stonewalled French prosecutors were “completely groundless”.
“The investigation [into the Russian case] on the part of Cypriot authorities is open and ongoing” and “cooperation with French authorities … is underway without any problems,” it said.
It spoke out after a British MP said Moneyval should cut Cyprus’ rating from “largely compliant” to “non compliant”.
The MP, Ian Austin, from the opposition Labour Party, urged the British treasury to recommend the step.
His letter, dated 13 October, said he had “grave concerns about the Cypriot government’s complicity in facilitating Russian organised crime and money-laundering.”
He said it had been “actively involved in the obstruction of an international money-laundering investigation” into a €195-million fraud against the Russian tax office.
He also said French prosecutors had requested help from Cyprus, but the Cypriot justice ministry “blocked this request for over two years with the result that the documents were supplied only last week”.
Cyprus rating
The British treasury said it was looking into the complaint.
Moneyval, a branch of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, is to evaluate Cyprus in early 2019, with preparations to start next year.
But Jaime Rodriguez, a spokesman, told EUobserver it would be difficult to speak of “downgrades” because Moneyval had adopted new ratings since its previous Cyprus assessments.
“Technically speaking, there is no such thing as ‘downgrading’ from previous ratings, as all ratings will be based on revised standards,” he said.
The €195-million Russia fraud was exposed by Sergei Magnitsky, an accountant, who was subsequently jailed and killed.
Some of the money was moved out of Russia via Cyprus into other EU states. It paid for real estate, art, and yachts. It also trickled back, via shell firms, to Russian president Vladimir Putin’s inner circle.
Bill Browder, Magnitsky’s former employer, who has campaigned for EU sanctions in his name, gave Cyprus 133 pages of evidence on the case four years ago.
Bank extracts, seen by this website, showed that €26 million of the money was moved via Cypriot banks.
Flight records also showed that Russian suspects frequently visited the island.
Russian crime
Browder told EUobserver on Friday that Cypriot authorities sat on it because they were “unwilling to go after the Russian fraudsters who planned this crime in Cyprus”.
He said Paris had had to appeal to Eurojust, an EU judicial agency, to get Nicosia to cooperate.
He also said Cyprus was helping Russia to go after him instead.
Browder, a British former hedge fund manager in Russia, is fighting a court battle to stop Cyprus from inviting Russian interrogators to question his lawyers.
The Russian mission is meant to dig up material for Russia’s claim that Magnitsky stole the money and that Browder had him killed.
Putin personally raised the issue with Cypriot president Nicos Anastasiades on his visit to Moscow on Tuesday.
The Russian leader said he looked forward to a decision that would allow the two countries to cooperate on the “multimillionaire Bill Browder”.
Anastasiades said the matter lay with the court, which holds a hearing on 5 November.
Offshore ‘colony’
Cyprus is a financial centre that hosts more than 14,000 offshore firms, at least 12,000 of which have no physical presence on the island.
Russian clients love it for its favourable tax regime and as a holiday spot.
It also has a weak record of going after fraudsters – Moneyval’s last Cyprus review, in 2011, said it had convicted just two people and issued only nine orders to freeze accounts since 2005.
Cyprus already let Russian interrogators question Browder’s lawyers on a previous occasion, even though France and the UK, as well as Interpol, the international police agency, denied such Russian requests on grounds they were politically motivated.
Browder said events had shown that Russia’s jurisdiction now extended into the EU country.
The lack of rule of law in Russia posed a threat to investors in both places, he said.
“Cyprus has unfortunately become a de facto colony of Russia and that makes its business climate dangerous and unpredictable,” he said.
https://euobserver.com/justice/139688
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Cyprus helping Russia to roll back US sanctions
27 September 2017
Cyprus is helping Russia to roll back US sanctions against human rights abusers, a leading activist has warned.
The accusation, by Bill Browder, a British campaigner, comes after Cypriot authorities honoured Russia’s request to question Browder’s law firm, Georgiades & Pelides, in Nicosia, for a second time.
https://euobserver.com/justice/139163
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Russia used Interpol ‘loophole’ against EU activist
23 October 2017
Russia has used Interpol for a fifth time to attack one of its European enemies – British human rights activist Bill Browder.
It called for his arrest and extradition via a “diffusion” that it filed in the international police agency on 17 October, Browder told EUobserver.
https://euobserver.com/foreign/139582
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Alienation Online: An Analysis Of Facebook Populist Pages
24 October 2017
http://socialscienceworks.org/2017/10/alienation-online-an-analysis-of-populist-facebook-pages-in-brandenburg/
This year, as part of the Social Science Works project ‘Deliberation gegen Populismus[1]’ we have been monitoring right-wing populist Facebook pages associated with Brandenburg. The project was financed by Tolerantes Brandenburg and included work from a group of students at the Alice Salomon Hochschule in Berlin. This led to the collection of more than 1000 public Facebook profiles of individuals which had expressed far-right opinions or had otherwise expressed their dissatisfaction with mainstream political parties. In the following, I will offer an overview of methods behind this analysis, the themes, topics and problems that came up most regularly across the profiles and pages viewed in this time as well as a preliminary analysis of some of the roots than underpin these things, informed in part via conversations with some of these individuals in person and online. Finally, I will outline the beginnings of an extension of this as a research project on the role of echo chambers online in Germany.
Finding Resentment Online
In order to undertake this task, it was first necessary to find potential Facebook pages where the target group would likely access. Facebook was the preferred method for attempting this monitoring because of its relative openness as compared with other social channels and because of its reach (38.98 million Germans count as ‘regular’ users of Facebook – that is they login to Facebook at least once per month[2], and approximately 82.5% of internet users in Germany have a Facebook account) which compares favourably to other sites like Twitter (which counts only 21% of internet users in Germany as members[3]). YouTube, the second most popular social media channel in Germany, with approximately 50% of internet users visiting its pages regularly was also considered as a monitoring platform. However, because the content there is arranged mostly as individual videos, or at best as a ‘channel’ without connecting with other sources, and because contacting individual users is more difficult on this platform, Facebook was the obvious choice for this project.
In this project, the first step was to locate Facebook pages which posted content most likely to attract the kinds of individuals we wanted to get into contact with. Having identified our target group as individuals living in Brandenburg which might vote for populist right-wing parties in the upcoming election, populist party Facebook pages were a good place to start. From there, we followed the network of connected pages of various sizes, including: Zukunft Heimat Brandenburg (3,098 Facebook fans), Identitäre Bewegung Berlin-Brandenburg (9,259 Facebook fans) and Ein Prozent für unser Land (62,468 Facebook fans). The next step was to find truly local pages where we could find individuals to invite to our workshops. We decided to host events in Cottbus and Frankfurt an der Oder on the basis of the polling showing a strong preference for populist parties; this decision was later vindicated in the election results which showed the populist parties polling 25.3% and 21.9%, the first and third best showing for the party respectively in Brandenburg, both ahead of the Brandenburg average of 19.4%[4]. For this purpose we focused on local sites like Frankfurt/Oder wehrt sich (3,604 Facebook fans) and Bürgerforum Südbrandenburg (365 Facebook fans). On these pages, we looked for individuals commenting, liking and sharing posts that indicated that they felt resentment to the political establishment or expressed views which could be understood to be extreme[5]. For example, a recent post commenting on the election that typifies the kinds of individuals we were targeting reads:
„Pffft nothing happens. 1. the election is manipulated, CDU, Greens, FDP, The Left, would all be thrown out of the Bundestag and AfD would have ruled alone. 2. AfD will not sit in the government, only in the opposition, so they do not get anything! Everything will be manipulated, as planned and Germany will be destroyed, step by step!”[6]
(Comment from 26.9.17 on Frankfurt/Oder wehrt sich’s Facebook page)
The individual above demonstrates the lack of trust in the mainstream political establishment as well as a distrust of the political processes. Individuals expressing views like those above were contacted directly over Facebook messenger and were invited to the events in either Cottbus or Frankfurt Oder.
A Comment on Gender, Privacy & Accessibility
The majority of the people that interact with these pages are men. Indeed, for the first few months, as we collected profiles, nearly 70% of the profiles we collected were of men. In a bid to redress this, we focused on collecting more women’s profiles in an attempt to keep the gender balance of the workshops more or less equal, and succeeded to that end. This is not to suggest that men are inherently more likely to vote for populist parties than women (initial calculations suggest that around 9% of women and 16% of men voted for populist parties in the 2017 Bundeswahl[7]), only to say that there is something about these online spaces that means women are less inclined to participate in them.
Furthermore, as a new field, the ethical implications of this kind of project do not have a long-established ethical code on which to rely on. There are considerations about privacy and the rights of academics and civil society to publish research relating to individual’s behaviour on social media channels. Although for some users, Facebook is a kind of public platform, for many users, it is used mostly to keep in touch with family and friends. However, our target group do not neatly fit into the latter category, insofar as they use Facebook to discuss politics and vent their frustrations with likeminded strangers. Hence, the Facebook users targeted for this project should be understood as using the site as a semi-public platform. As such, all participants’ names, identifying details and posts have been anonymised and the project relied only on information and content that is available to all Facebook users (‘semi-public’). In instances where we have posted content from personal conversations or interactions, the language has been either edited or paraphrased to preserve participants’ anonymity[8].
Analysis: Status Quo: Merkel, The Media & Political Elites
“Merkel muss weg!” (‘Merkel must go!’) is a familiar slogan. Indeed, it appears on posts and comments we have seen throughout this process. The Chancellor is singled out as a ‘traitor’ for her stance towards refugees in 2015 and her handling of the ‘crisis’ since then. Likewise, there is a strong sense that the media is biased towards the political mainstream, the so-called Lügenpresse theme is very much in evidence across these pages. Across on Twitter, the handle @einzelfallinfos (currently 3,208 followers, after its temporary ban in 2015[9]) demonstrates this clearly. The handle is dedicating to sharing reports of crimes committed by refugees in Germany, the handle itself satirising what many on the right see as the tendency of the German media to describe such events as ‘isolated cases’.
“If something is “more precious than gold” right now, then its the experiences of the past election campaign. We have gained a new self-confidence! And an inkling of our own strength! Against mainstream politics and mainstream media, we have set mass immigration and its consequences as the No. 1 theme and reject the lie of Merkel’s popularity. We have achieved this with an anger and force that has not been seen since 1989, but always peacefully. We objected to Merkel and the elites loudly and openly. Repeatedly Merkel was judged at public events by citizens. We have begun to vent our outrage. And we understand how good we are!”[10]
(Translated post from 26.9.17 Zukunft Heimat’s Facebook page)
This of course should come as no surprise to anyone that has paid attention to the reporting around the rise of populist parties in recent years; Chancellor Merkel’s stance on refugees and distrust of the media has been widely reported and the Chancellor is regularly referred to among this group as the ‘Volksverräter’ (traitor of the people) In fact, for a group of those commenting on these pages, they take a certain pride in being called out in the mainstream media and by mainstream political politicians. In part, it is the view that mentions in the media should be seen as a victory insofar as they own the political agenda, and in part the view is that it is absurd that the mainstream describes citizens like this as ‘extremists’ or ‘far right’. The view instead is that they are simply giving voice to what many others feel but are too afraid to say for fear of repercussions.
Perhaps more interesting is the resentment felt towards the political establishment in general and towards the SPD in particular. The SPD doesn’t often feature in these kinds of online spaces, but when it does its appearance is entirely negative. The SPD are held responsible for the reforms to Hartz IV and are seen as an ineffective opposition. Likewise, as the long-standing party of power in Brandenburg, frustrations with the SPD on a local level are also high.
(Post from 22.9.17 Frankfurt/Oder Wehrt sich)
Similarly, in the run up to the election, for many populist party supporters, the weakness of the SPD was seen simultaneously as a clear sign of the party’s failure to engage with its core vote and as an opportunity for the AFD to win voters.
“The AfD is on the way to a safe third place. The SPD could land under 20% and would thus only be 8% in front of the AfD. We are looking forward to the election evening!”[11]
(Translated post 14.9.17 Junge Alternative Brandenburg)
Refugees, Migrants, Criminality & Islamification
An inescapable theme we have seen across the accounts and pages monitored for this project is the role of refugees, migration and the supposed link between the two and criminality as a driving motivation for many of the individuals to vote for extremist parties. This too is often coupled with fears relating to the supposed Islamification of Germany. For example, one useful source for this research, the Facebook page Frankfurt/Oder wehrt sich features as its description: “Schluss mit dem Asylmissbrauch!” (‘End Aslyum Abuse!’) and includes as its cover photo the words “Asylflut Stoppen” (Stop Asylum). This is a typical for many of the pages monitored.
Very often the most popular content featured on these pages (as measured by number of likes, comments and shares) was content that related to crime, and especially violent crime, committed by refugees. For example, on one page we monitored over a one week period, an article relating to a knife crime committed by a refugee received five times the number of likes, comments and shares as the other content shared by the same page over the week[12]. Likewise, comments on an article about the role of Islam in Germany[13] provoked many responses including:
“The Muslims came over 30 years ago, and you did not do anything about it. For the next 30 years on, thousands are coming and you have done nothing about it, and now you choose Merkel again in Sept.”[14]
(Translated comment from 12.9.17 Frankfurt/Oder Wehrt sich)
This combination of fear relating to refugees and the belief that refugees‘ presence in Germany will lead to a rise in criminality and the ‘Islamification‘ of Germany, is something we heard in our conversations with participants. One individual wrote that:
“Only a very small percentage of the refugees are criminal, but, if for example, 2% of 1,000,000 are a whole lot. Here the German legal system is overstretched. In the countries where the refugees come from, there are tougher and, above all, faster penalties. If there is a trial here it is only after the 20th offense, it is perceived as a weakness and it is continued (see crime statistics). Things here need to be redressed… Wearing the headscarf, etc. should be prohibited in public. Mosques should be banned. Try to build a church in Saudi Arabia! Our country, our values our rules … whoever does not want to stick to this can gladly go away again. Parallel societies and large families are to be eliminated. Equal rights e.g. law enforcement and tax recovery for all. Understanding of Turkish influence in Germany.”[15]
(Written correspondence with a participant)
These responses are representative of the kinds of comments and responses we have seen most often throughout this project. The refugee situation remains the most important contemporary political topic for almost all individuals interacting on these pages. Indeed, this trend was no less pronounced in areas with fewer overall numbers of refugees. In fact, the inverse is true, the fewer the total number of foreign nationals living in the area, the more prevalent the topic became.
Ostalgie & Inequality in the East
Beyond the themes that stood out in the comments and shared content monitored for this project, there were subtler elements that require comment in order to develop a fuller understanding of the individuals that are likely to vote for far right populist parties. One of the key themes that came out, first online and later in discussion with participants is a nostalgia for life in the DDR, and a pride in the individual’s Prussian origins. A familiar refrain heard from many of the participants at the workshops themselves was “In der DDR Zeit” (‘In the GDR times’), a comment that was typically followed by a favourable comparison with their lives in the DDR and now. One participant at the workshop in Cottbus put it even more bluntly:
“In the DDR, I made 500 Marks a month, and paid 60 Marks in rent. Now I make 1000€ a month, but rent is 600€ – so where is the progress?”
(Participant in the workshop in Cottbus)
For the most part, this sense of inequality is only expressed online via comparisons to the supposedly favourable conditions of refugees living in Germany. A popular type of content would post the benefits available to refugees and contrast them with the benefits available to an unemployed German native, or a German pensioner. Naturally, the numbers featured are wildly exaggerated,[16] often suggesting that individual refugees are in receipt of thousands of Euros in benefits monthly.
There are a number of other ways that this feeling of being ‘left behind’ is communicated online however. A number of individuals monitored for this project proudly displayed their fondness of their history by changing their Facebook surnames to ‘Prussian’, and a number featured Prussian iconography prominently on their pages. Similarly, a very large number of participants (nearly 100) listed their education on Facebook as either “The School of Life” or “The School of Hard Knocks”. Taken together, it is clear that this kind of signalling demonstrates a simultaneous distaste for the elite and a feeling of inferiority relating to their status.
The feeling of being ‘left behind’ should be understood in the broadest possible terms, and is coupled with the growing distrust towards the mainstream media. For many of the participants we spoke to there was a real disconnect between what they read in newspapers, visited online and heard from the news and their lived realities; that many return to an idealised past in the GDR should not come as a complete surprise in this context. Over the course of this project, while the participants were expressing difficulties with low-wage work and making rent payments, the German national press was as likely to run front pages proclaiming the success of the German economy and that the country is the power-house of Europe. For example, on the 9th July 2017 more or less in the middle of this project, the Süddeutsche Zeitung ran an article ‘The World & Its Germany Problem’ which proclaimed that the Germany economy is so strong that it was causing problems worldwide:
“Yes, unemployment has halved, employment is higher than ever, the state has as much money as ever, and the Confederation has no new debt. Many companies do well, the export industry is setting one record after another. Germany is so well represented in the world that the colleagues of the internationally renowned magazine The Economist illustrated the current issue with a Bundesadler black on gold and the headline: “The German problem”. “[17]
For the participants we met in Cottbus and Frankfurt an der Oder, this kind of reporting seems very alien. It is not difficult, therefore, to see how the distrust seeps in. When citizens feel so far removed from a country’s own image of itself, it breeds distrust in the establishment that oversees it. How can it be the case that Germany is so successful when participants in Frankfurt an der Oder, for example, have to travel hours on the train every day to Potsdam find low paying work experience in retail, as one of our participants had to? This kind of fundamental disconnect between citizens and the establishment can only be fostered via stark inequalities of opportunity both for individuals and for regions, as we see clearly in the former East Germany.
Digital Echo Chambers
For anyone that has been paying attention to the questions relating to how social media can shape a person’s political preferences, the idea that an individual’s social media feed is an ‘echo chamber’ of their own opinions is nothing new. These echo chambers, formed by the collective voices of friends and acquaintances that typically share social and political positions, the repetition of content that aligns with their beliefs through the pages they follow and reinforced by algorithms that seek to target content based on pre-established interest and opinions mean that digital spaces typically reflect back one’s own opinions very strongly. This is to say that contacting someone ‘cold’ online, and especially someone from the opposite side of the political divide, is very contentious and is treated with extreme suspicion.
Perhaps the most common response to outreach from Social Science Work (save from being ignored altogether, by far the most popular response of all) was to ask ‘how did you find me’? Some responded with hostility, including blocking and swearing at Social Science Works’ team, and others opted to make aggressively sexual comments, probably with an aim to make me block them. Even for those willing to engage in real conversation, distrust was extremely high. One example of this is the woman that left me a two-minute voice message where she demanded to know where I had found her profile, what I wanted with her and why were we interested in her at all. Similarly, one participant objected to the location of the workshop because the hotel we met in was next to the local state administration, and he mistook the location as part of the state’s apparatus.
Part of the reason for this, as outlined above, is undoubtedly that digital echo chambers are mostly impenetrable and the intrusion of outside voices is unwelcome. However, given the opinions examined above, especially those relating to distrust of the ‘establishment’ this should only be understood as a partial answer. It seems likely, therefore, that part of the problem with reaching people online in this way is that is allows distrust to breed. At the workshops, the first item on the agenda was to make clear that Social Science Works is not part of the government, and everything participants shared would be treated with total anonymity which went a long way towards creating a more accepting and trusting environment.
Next Steps Towards Understanding Segregation Online in Brandenburg
This project has made clear that the problems of digital echo chambers persists among those likely to vote for populist parties in Brandenburg. Although there is much discussion surrounding the prevalence and problems of online echo chambers, there have been only a few attempts made to measure the phenomenon close up, still fewer in the German context. The work of Flaxman, Goel and Rao (2016), which relies on Groseclose and Milyo’s (2006) categories of media bias, represents a replicable model in the German context, however. In these studies, the degree to which an individual user or a Facebook page is ‘informationally segregated’ is measured.
In their work, Flaxman et al. examined 50,000 Facebook pages. The posted content on each page was ranked according to the publisher’s political leanings (for example, crudely, posts from the BBC, the New York Times and the Washington Post were ranked as left-leaning, while posts from Fox News, NBC and the Daily Mail were ranked as right-leaning). Using data made available from the Bing Toolbar, they accessed more than a billion individual data points. They conclude:
“We find that individuals generally read publications that are ideologically quite similar, and moreover, users that regularly read partisan articles are almost exclusively exposed to only one side of the political spectrum. In this sense, many— indeed nearly all—users exist in so-called echo chambers.” (Flaxman, Goel and Rao, 2016:317).
This method could be carried over to our research in Germany. As a first step, it would be necessary to develop an ideological categorisation of the major news outlets in Germany (Die Zeit, Bild etc.) as Groseclose and Milyo have for the US press[18]. From there, it would be useful to rank the content shared on some of the major Facebook pages that are used by those likely to vote for extremist parties. In order to measure the degree to which this differs from more mainstream pages, it would also be useful to measure the kinds of content shared on other citizens’ group pages.
Hence, an examination of 100 extremist pages and 100 mainstream pages would be a first step towards systematically understanding the degree to which information segregation, or digital echo chambers, exist in these formats in Germany. This project could also include an attempt to measure the effects of following certain types of Facebook pages by analysing the kinds of ‘suggested content’ Facebook sends to the Newsfeed for users following different pages. This would involve creating new ‘blank’ profiles specifically to follow certain Facebook pages to measure the political slant of the suggested content. It would offer an insight into the influence of these kinds of groups to the kinds of content that appears in an individual’s Newsfeed and provide a deeper understanding of the echo chamber effect[19]. This project would offer valuable insights for policy makers hoping to get a better understanding of the current digital landscape of citizens in Brandenburg and the scale of the problem.
Conclusion
Key throughout this project has been the need to get a complete understanding of both the kinds of online spaces occupied by those likely to vote for right wing populist parties, and the need to understand the problems and concerns they have that have led them to potentially vote for populist parties. It comes as no surprise that much of the problems initially appear to stem from the so-called ‘refugee crisis’, but is perhaps more interesting to focus on the details on display here. Very often what typifies this kind of content is demonstrably false misinformation and half facts which are deliberately misleading. The example mentioned above about the value of benefits available to refugees as compared to an unemployed German native is just one example for this.
It seems that media literacy, and especially social media literacy is lacking among this demographic. While the world, and the internet, has taken the concept of ‘fake news’ to heart, many among this group are extremely distrusting of the mainstream media, and I would argue in part this is because the reporting of the quality press directly contradicts the information they receive via their social feeds. The longer this goes on, the more it reinforces their echo chamber and the more that their distrust of the quality press and the establishment grows. This problem needs to be urgently addressed.
Notes
[1] See: http://socialscienceworks.org/2017/10/deliberation-against-populism-reconnecting-radicalizing-citizens-in-east-germany-elsewhere/ for a comprehensive overview of the project.
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/568790/forecast-of-facebook-user-numbers-in-germany/
[3] http://www.adweek.com/digital/germany-social-media/
[4] https://www.wahlergebnisse.brandenburg.de/wahlen/BU2017/ergebnis/karten/erststimmen/erst_bwkr_karte_html5.asp?sel1=2156&sel2=0658
[5] All of the content monitored for the purposes of this project was available to anyone with a Facebook account, no private content was included unless with was directly shared by the individual themselves with me and names have been omitted.
[6] Original German: “Pffft da passiert gar nichts. 1. die Wahl ist manipuliert, CDU, Grüne, FDP, Linke, wären alle aus dem Bundestag geflogen und AfD hätte allein regiert. 2. AfD wird nicht in der Regierung sitzen, nur in der Opposition, damit erreichen sie gar nichts! Alles wird durchgepeitscht werden, wie geplant und Deutschland zerstört, Schritt für Schritt!“
[7] https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.welt.de%2Fpolitik%2Fdeutschland%2Farticle168986852%2FAeltere-Frauen-retten-Merkels-vierte-Kanzlerschaft.html&h=ATPl_K45tEjwHsTcyGlfckvBG6SvGAw8EXAqaM1YjBKUaUnWhIlNNBzkI8RyrJU0vhsauFzZIyFodCjlJL2uQD2pNHnAowPtnzY1WQ-978ugrVJZYhou0dCt_mONtFwbmHMyZ8ppbHHmBsDeLrd_hu4duA
[8] These standards were also applied in the formal reporting we completed for Tolerantes Brandenburg.
[9] The handle @einzelfallinfos was banned from appearing in German newsfeeds in 2015 following a decision by Twitter which ruled that it propagated hate. Its followers responded to the ruling by sharing similar content with the English-language hashtag #withheldingermany – a comment on freedom of expression.
[10] Original German: “Wenn zu dieser Zeit etwas” kostbarer als Gold “ist, dann die Erfahrungen des vergangenen Wahlkampfes. Wir haben ein neues Selbstvertrauen gewonnen! Und eine Ahnung von unserer eigenen Stärke! Gegen die Mainstream-Politik und Mainstream-Medien haben wir die Masseneinwanderung und ihre Konsequenzen als Thema Nr. 1 gesetzt und die Lüge von Merkels Popularität abgelehnt. Wir haben dies mit einer Wut und Gewalt erreicht, die seit 1989 nicht mehr gesehen wurde, aber immer friedlich. Wir protestierten gegen Merkel und die Eliten laut und mit offenem Visier. Immer wieder wurde Merkel bei öffentlichen Veranstaltungen von Bürgern gemessen. Wir haben angefangen zu empören. Und wir machen die Erfahrung, wie gut wir sind!”
[11] Original German: “Die AfD ist auf dem Weg zu einem sicheren dritten Platz. Die SPD könnte unter 20% landen und wäre damit nur 8% vor der AfD. Wir freuen uns auf den Wahlabend! “
[12] In the week between 22.5.17-29.5.17 the article relating to knife crime received 93 likes, 104 shares and 124 comments a total of 321 interactions (correct at time of writing). The other content from the same week averaged 67 interactions on page – nearly five times less.
[13] http://www.moz.de/artikel-ansicht/dg/0/1/1603437/
[14] Original German: “schon vor zweitausendfünfzehn kamen die Muslime und ihr habt nix dagegen getan, ab Zweitausendfünfzehn kommen tausende und ihr habt nix dagegen getan und nun im Sept. wählt ihr erneut Merkel, also was regt ihr Euch auf”
[15] Original German: “Nur ein sehr kleiner Prozentsatz der Flüchtlinge ist kriminell aber z.B. 2% von 1.000.000 sind eine ganze Menge. Hier ist das deutsche Rechtssystem überfordert. In den Ländern, wo die Flüchtlinge herkommen, gibt es härtere und vor allem schnellere Strafen. Wenn bei uns erst nach der 20. Straftat der Prozess kommt, wird das als Schwäche empfunden und es wird weiter gemacht(siehe Kriminalitätsstatistik). Hier muss sofort nachgesteuert werden… Das Kopftuchtragen usw. ist in der Öffentlichkeit zu verbieten. Moscheebauten sind einzustellen. Versuchen Sie in Saudi- Arabien eine Kirche zu bauen. Unser Land, unsere Werte unsere Regeln…wer sich nicht daran halten will, kann gern wieder gehen. Parallelgesellschaft, Großfamilien sind zu beseitigen. Gleiche Rechte z.B. bei Strafverfolgung und Steuererhebung für alle. Unterbindung des türkischen Einflusses in Deutschland.”
[16] The most up to date numbers available at the time of writing suggest that a single jobseeker in Germany receives 409€/monthly plus housing cost, and a single asylum seeker in Germany receives 392€/monthly plus housing costs.
[17] Original German: “Ja, die Arbeitslosigkeit hat sich halbiert, die Erwerbstätigkeit liegt so hoch wie nie, der Staat hat so viel Geld wie nie, der Bund kommt ohne neue Schulden aus. Viele Unternehmen verdienen gut, die Exportindustrie fährt einen Rekord nach dem anderen ein. Deutschland steht in der Welt so gut da, dass die Kollegen des international angesehenen Magazins The Economist das aktuelle Heft mit einem Bundesadler schwarz auf gold illustriert haben und der Schlagzeile: “The German problem”.
[18] See: A Measure of Media Bias, Tim Groseclose and Jeffrey Milyo, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 120, No. 4 (Nov., 2005), pp. 1191-1237
Filter Bubbles, Echo Chambers, And Online News Consumption, Seth Flaxman, Sharad Goel, Justin M. Rao, Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 80, Special Issue, 2016, pp. 298–320
[19] This approach was based on the work from Data for Democracy, who trialled something similar using Pinterest, with amusing results. See: https://medium.com/data-for-democracy/crafting-projects-islam-and-russian-propaganda-ccba9a409fb5
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Could populism be a side effect of the Personalized Algorithm?
24 October 2017
And can we work together so that one day we can use filter bubbles against themselves?
In a democracy, the way information circulates is a power in itself. The landscape of the so-called ‘fourth estate’ has metamorphosed out of all recognition in the last 15 years. Currently, social networking is the technology that is used to share our perceptions of the public space.
Given the addict-like compulsion to adopt such technologies, we have endowed those advertising firms who profit from this (that’s the business, the category, that they are in) a de facto role they do not deserve.
During recent decades, it has become clear that the information generated by your thousands of friends can be considered as so much noise if you don’t want to listen to them. Algorithms have been developed by these platforms to replace this unorganized information flow, keeping us satisfied by prioritizing content more likely to enable you to interact, engage, or get the solution that you aspire to.
These communication platforms intermediate both public and private exchanges. But whatever their superiority to other communication networks such as the telephone or the television, they are far less transparent on the rules that govern our conversations.
Transparency is essential when it comes to the way that the public discourse gets shaped. This is what motivates us at Tracking Exposed: we want to make the Personalization Algorithm – the algorithm that learns from the user and provides personalized content – transparent and accountable.
Imagine yourself as a Facebook user; you follow a certain Nobel prizewinner among your sources, and they publish a post. On Facebook, the complex multi-paragraph text full of articulate concepts gets posted, and a few minutes later you access the article.
Something happens behind the curtain: a “posts competition”. All the posts you are eligible to see have been attributed a numeric value by Facebook, (probably) proportional to the likelihood that you are going to interact with them. The posts will show up ordered. In the primary position, the one that it is most likely you will interact with, and so on and so forth. Who won that competition appears on the timeline.
Coming back to our Nobel prize text, it has entered a competition with another more uncomplicated, and swifter gratification: a lovely landscape perhaps, or a puppy. But you have never told the algorithm that you prefer cats to the Nobel prize – the algorithm has just assumed this is the case based on your previous interactions.
Is this in our best interest? Is it censorship? Do we have some control over it? This is a question even the mainstream media are pondering because most of their visits (and consequently their income) depend on what Facebook ‘favorites’ or penalizes.
The most creditable and official way out of this conundrum is to have a proper policy. But it is not happening so far, and so, we are still in the field of civic activism.
Our goal
We know that the real goodies in social networks lie in the users’ data. A veritable goldmine. Our goal: to make that goldmine accessible to everyone (wait, in a not totally unregulated, but privacy-preserving way). In this millennium, the power lies within the data? Then we must aim to re-possess the data, own our gold, keep it under our control and thank only those who display openly how social media works, why they manipulate our perceptions, and how they do it.
That’s how our techno-activist venture begins. It starts with that theory, and becomes over time a browser extension that records the posts showing up in your Facebook Newsfeed. In the beginning, it is just a personal copy of the public posts, structured, and re-useable under certain conditions.
Our mission is to display and highlight how this business logic distorts and plays with our time, our expectations and, even more fundamentally, with our perception of reality.
So far, this might look a little like an academic project: collecting what the user saw, detecting which content has been promoted despite the chronological order. But that’s not the goal!
Researchers, journalists, analysts, and policymakers are among our target users, but we aim for a far broader audience.
Algorithms have a collective impact, and can only be addressed collectively. If we can make the problem accessible to users with average skills, our activism will have achieved its goal.
We need lots of users, not a ‘critical mass’ like Facebook itself, but enough to observe the features of the so-called “walled garden.” To get this kind of user base, we have to offer them some kind of functionality, and we are currently researching the socially helpful types of functionality Facebook doesn’t ( and won’t?) provide.
The first and basic exploration this puts in the user’s hands is “look at your information diet.” No tool in this world can enable you to pop the filter bubble you are in, and anyway, you really don’t need a technical solution to fix what another technology has mistakenly forced on you.
But seeing your information diet allows you to access what is informing you, which topics, and where you stand in the world.
If we can’t be on a network without a filter, at least we have to know the nature of that filter and some day in the future, have enough power to determine our algorithm.
There is a secondary functionality we can offer, too. If you have ever used the legacy mass media, you know that they have an agenda. The Editor has it; it influences a little bit the observations contained in the stories as reported.
With Facebook, the algorithm is our personalized Editor. And again, the best way to understand such technocratic subterfuges, is to compare your information diet with that of another person you know. It is like watching something together and exchanging comments. It is a way to get some human feedback from a place, the social net, where gamification is usually reserved for researchers on a dopamine high.
The last functionality, which will not be ready for some time, is to use the filter bubbles against themselves.
We can assume that populist waves lead to audience fragmentation and, perhaps, filtered interactions confirming their positions have been complicit in this fragmentation.
This fragmented condition has made it even more difficult to relate to problems far removed from our reality. How do you understand the problem of a migrant, for example, if you have never been away from home and you don’t spend time directly in their company?
Can we use their filter bubble to understand their world? Can we navigate a cluster of aggregated information, perhaps, to register the different points of view, the comments, the feelings about any specific topic?
Developing this functionality is a complex exercise because it immediately imposes on us two barriers before we start. The first is that “a navigator cannot be allowed access to the original post”. As individuals, we know that information shared in some context is often inappropriate to share in another. That’s why we have different disclosure expectations of the same bit of information in respect to different situations or people. Our ability to keep track of the flow of information we send and receive through a different context is what makes privacy valuable for our individual autonomy.
Even if we are working with only publically posted posts, and the author has willingly consented to go public with these, we must not display such content outside the expected channels and original purpose of their consumption. The content must at least be anonymized and minimized, before it can be served up to others. This “privacy-by-design” commitment and technology reduces content misuse and privacy loss. To be more precise, I want to protect the users involved from what is called “social media intelligence”. See more about social media intelligence here.
Secondly, we are proud to be developing “stupid tools, for smart users”, which empower critical judgment rather than extending the influence of the algorithm or its capacity for surveillance. These are robust, simple tools which do not try to give you answers, just an output of your usage.
This whole system, which empowers researchers by giving them the data to work on and users the highlights that inform them, is a collaborative project. More supporters can only mean bigger benefits for all those who will join us later on. At the moment, a user can only support us by using the browser extension for Firefox or Chrome, and to know more look here at facebook.tracking.exposed.
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‘We must do better,’ social media giants tell Congress
1 November 2017
Washington (AFP) – American internet giants told Congress Tuesday they were committed to cracking down on fake news operations on their platforms like the ones Russians conducted to meddle in last year’s US presidential elections.
A day after bombshell indictments in a US probe of Moscow’s election interference and possible coordination between President Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia, Facebook,Google and Twitter sought to assure concerned lawmakers that they were taking necessary steps to rid their platforms of disinformation, propaganda and provocation.
In their testimony, the social media companies revealed startling new data showing many more millions of Americans were exposed to the fake news than previously thought.
The new information gives the broadest picture yet of the Russian effort to spread discord across US society.
“We are deeply concerned about all of these threats,” Facebook general counsel Colin Stretch told the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism.
“That foreign actors, hiding behind fake accounts, abused our platform and other internet services to try to sow division and discord — and to try to undermine our election process — is an assault on democracy, and it violates all of our values.”
The closely-watched hearing comes as the first charges in a US probe into Russian meddling reverberated through Washington.
One of three unsealed indictments brought by US special prosecutor Robert Mueller revealed early contacts between Kremlin-linked figures and a former advisor of Trump’s campaign.
In Moscow, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov insisted the US accusations of election-meddling were being made “without one piece of evidence.”
– Staying ahead of threats –
Testimony by the three companies, whose executives face more congressional questioning Wednesday, shows that Russian activities were far greater than they had previously reported.
Twitter has found that nearly 37,000 automated “bot” accounts with Russian links generated 1.4 million tweets that were seen by a potential 288 million people in the three months before the November 8, 2016 presidential election, the company said.
Twitter’s acting general counsel Sean Edgett acknowledged that despite improvements that have helped the company identify and suppress malicious automated and human-generated activity, “we will need to evolve to stay ahead of new tactics.”
“We agree that we must do better to prevent it,” he added.
Facebook testified that some 126 million US users, a potentially huge portion of the voting public, may have seen stories, posts or other content from Russian sources.
“Foreign governments like Russia -– in the 2016 election cycle -– were deeply involved in manipulating popular social media websites with misinformation to sow discord among Americans,” Senator Lindsey Graham, the subcommittee’s chairman, said in a statement.
He said social media manipulation by terror networks and foreign governments is “one of the greatest challenges to American democracy” and national security.
Analysts say Russia’s social media interference was part of a broader effort to help Trump defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Some lawmakers sounded exasperated about the extent of the meddling, conducted in part by “troll armies” like the Russia-based Internet Research Agency.
“What is really staggering, and hard to fully comprehend, is how easily and successfully they turned modern technologies to their advantage,” Senator Dianne Feinstein said.
All three executives faced intense questioning about how they will counter such operations.
Google’s information security director Richard Salgado said users next year will be able to learn the source of each political ad on YouTube with a single click on an icon above the ads.
“We are committed to doing our part,” Salgado said.
– Twitter blocking Russian media –
But the social media firms face the difficult challenge of keeping their platforms open, in order to avoid accusations of censorship and bias, and not becoming the curators of truth in society.
The trio has already begun taking measures to try to screen out manipulative Russian content.
Researchers have identified efforts in the past year that aimed to make white Americans angry at blacks, to hurt the image of feminists, and other such targeting that may have hurt Clinton and helped Trump.
Twitter announced last week it would no longer accept advertising from Russia Today and Sputnik, two Russian government-backed media groups that allegedly hone their stories and news placement for political impact.
Facebook’s Stretch said the threat was of a global magnitude.
Asked by Graham whether he believed countries like Iran or North Korea could launch similar social media campaigns of misinformation, Stretch noted it was “certainly” possible.
“The internet is borderless,” he said.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/russian-fake-news-reach-massive-social-media-giants-165017585.html
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Russian propaganda on Twitter
31 October 2017
“Hyperpartisan websites acted as a multiplier for the influence of alleged Russian accounts, as they did with @TEN_GOP, giving them a reach they may not have had otherwise and thus aiding the Russians’ likely goal of ensuring tumult in the country.”
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Russian agents crushed it on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube during the election
31 October 2017
Executives from Facebook, Twitter, and Google head to Washington this week for a round of questioning from congressional panels on the disinformation and Russia-linked political ads that flooded their platforms during the 2016 election.
The hearings, which start Tuesday afternoon, come just a day after the special counsel investigation into Russian election meddling netted two indictments and a guilty plea from former Trump campaign officials, setting the stage for an even deeper reckoning over how the Kremlin sought to sway the presidential contest.
But just how bad was Russian influence on social media during the election? Here it is, by the numbers:
FACEBOOK
126 million people
That’s how many Americans—roughly a third of the population—saw Russia-created Facebook content between January 2015 and August 2017, according to the latest disclosures from the social network.
80,000 pieces of content
The Internet Research Agency, a shadowy internet company linked to the Kremlin, reached these people by posting 80,000 pieces of free content on the site, meant to inflame debate on divisive social issues like race, religion, gun rights, and LGBT issues. It originally reached 29 million people, but its audience quintupled as users liked, shared and commented.
This blows previous Facebook estimates out of the water. Paid political ads from the Internet Research Agency, which Facebook reported at the beginning of October, reached around 11.4 million people.
120,000 posts
Russia-linked accounts also posted about 120,000 photos across 170 accounts on Instagram, which Facebook owns.
TWITTER
288 million impressions
Twitter also released information about Russian meddling in the run-up to the hearings on the Hill this week, disclosing that 36,746 Russia-linked accounts posted 1.4 million election-related tweets , whichgot 288 million impressions.
131,000 tweets
The Internet Research Agency also tweeted roughly 131,000 times across 2700 accounts.
In just 3 months Twitter analyzed a much more limited period than Facebook did: Sept. 1 to Nov. 15, 2016.
GOOGLE
Google, meanwhile, disclosed what looks to be the smallest Russian footprint of the three. The Internet Research Agency purchased $4,700 in ads on the search engine.
43 hours of content
But Russia didn’t stop there. Russian agents were “likely associated” with 18 YouTube channels that posted 43 hours of video between 2015 and summer 2017.
309,000 views
These videos didn’t exactly go viral, though. All together, they only got around 309,000 views between 2015 and late 2016.
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Social media firms under scrutiny for ‘Russian meddling’
1 November 2017
Facebook, Twitter and Google lawyers defended themselves to US lawmakers probing whether Russia used social media to influence the 2016 election.
The three firms faced hard questions at a Senate panel on crime and terrorism about why they missed political ads bought with Russian money.
Lawmakers are eyeing new regulations for social media firms in the wake of Russia’s alleged meddling in 2016.
The firms said they would tighten advertising policies and guidelines.
Senator Al Franken, a Democrat from Minnesota, asked Facebook – which absorbed much of the heat from lawmakers – why payment in Russian rubles did not tip off the firm to suspicious activity.
“In hindsight, we should have had a broader lens,” said Colin Stretch, general counsel for Facebook. “There are signals we missed.”
A day earlier Facebook said as many as 126m US users may have seen Russia-backed content over the last two years.
Lawyers for the three firms are facing two days of congressional hearings as lawmakers consider legislation that would extend regulations for television, radio and satellite to also cover social media platforms.
The firms said they are increasing efforts to identify bots and spam, as well as make political advertising more transparent.
Facebook, for example, said it expects to have 20,000 people working on “safety and security” by the end of 2018 – double the current number.
Reality Check: When 126m isn’t 126m on Facebook
Facebook uncovers ‘Russian-funded’ misinformation campaign
“I do appreciate these efforts, but I don’t think it’s enough,” said Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat from Minnesota.
Ms Klobuchar has proposed legislation that she says would make social media firms subject to the same disclosure rules for political and issue pages as print, radio and television companies.
The companies said they would work with her on the bill, but did not say they would support it.
Senators questioned whether the firms are up to the task of weighing free speech and privacy rights against concerns over terrorism and state-sponsored propaganda.
“I think you do enormous good, but your power sometimes scares me,” said Senator John Kennedy, a Republican from Louisiana.
What happened during the election?
Russia has repeatedly denied allegations that it attempted to influence the last US presidential election, in which Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton.
But Facebook revealed as many as 126m American users may have seen content uploaded by Russia-based operatives.
The social media company said about 80,000 posts published between June 2015 and August 2017 and were seen by about 29m Americans directly.
These posts, which Facebook says were created by a Kremlin-linked company, were amplified through likes, shares and comments, and spread to tens of millions of people.
That company, Internet Research Agency, was also linked to about 2750 Twitter accounts, which have been suspended, Twitter said.
The firm also said it had identified more than 36,000 Russian bots that generated 1.4m automated, election-related Tweets, which may have been viewed as many as 288m times.
Google also revealed on Monday that Russian trolls had uploaded more than 1,000 political videos on YouTube on 18 different channels. The company said they had very low view counts and there was no evidence they had been targeting American viewers.
Most of the posts focused on sowing political and social divisions, the firms have said.
The companies said they used a combination of staff and big data to police that content, disabling fake and spam accounts.
Key recent developments:
Nov 2016: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg says “the idea that fake news on Facebook influenced the (US) election in any way is a pretty crazy idea”
Aug 2017: Facebook says it will fight fake news by sending more suspected hoax stories to fact-checkers and publishing their findings online
Oct 2017: Google finds evidence that Russian agents spent tens of thousands of dollars on ads in a bid to sway the election, reports say
Oct 2017: Twitter bans Russia’s RT and Sputnik media outlets from buying advertising amid fears they attempted to interfere in the election
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-41821359
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Team Trump Had At Least 8 Silicon Valley Embeds
31 October 2017
Understaffed, outspent, and running way behind in the polls, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign appeared to be floundering weeks before Election Day. But he got some help from a platoon of at least eight staffers from Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Microsoft that helped the Trump team hone its digital strategy.
While it’s not unusual for tech companies to provide de-facto consulting for big advertisers, the number and the extent to which employees from those companies acted as surrogate staff for political campaigns in 2016 was unprecedented in national politics, according to a study from that professors from the University of Utah and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill published in the journal Political Communications.
Those staffers, two each from Twitter and Facebook, and one from Google, and three from Microsoft, joined 12 more digital experts embedded in the campaign from Cambridge Analytica, the Boston-based data firm which is under investigation in both the U.S. and abroad, and is funded by Trump benefactor and billionaire Robert Mercer. The Facebook, Google, and Twitter employees worked on Trump’s digital ad strategy; Microsoft’s three staffers worked with the RNC on digital infrastructure and traveled occasionally to the Trump team’s digital headquarters in San Antonio.
Taken together, the Trump campaign had at least 20 outside staffers with extensive data analytics and digital marketing expertise to drive a strategy that propelled Trump to a big electoral margin on Election Day. Beginning on Tuesday, executives from Facebook, Google, and Twitter will face a series of hearings on Capitol Hill to answer questions about how Russian propaganda was spread so effectively across their networks.
The embeds from Silicon Valley traveled to campaign office several times a week to assist with digital ad buys, including who the campaign should be targeting and how much the Trump campaign needed to spend to reach his desired audiences, according to a RNC official.
Red state tech
Like a lot of political consultancies that specialize in servicing one side of the political aisle or the other, big tech firms have hired specialists in red and blue politics, making them particularly useful to Trump, which took full advantage.
“These firms have developed organizational structures and staffing patterns that accord with the partisan nature of American politics,” said UNC’s Daniel Kreiss and Utah’s Shannon McGregor, the authors of the new study. “Further, Facebook, Twitter, and Google go beyond promoting their services and facilitating digital advertising buys, actively shaping campaign communication through their close collaboration with political staffers.”
Similar offers of support was made to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, which turned it down in favor of using their own strategists and more fully built-out digital operation, a source familiar with the matter told VICE News. “Clinton viewed us as vendors rather than consultants,” one anonymous representative of a tech company told Kreiss and McGregor.
These Silicon Valley giants operated as de facto digital advertising sales consultants during last year’s election, on behalf of multiple Democratic and Republican campaigns both prior to and during the general election.
But these “consultants” and embeds were not provided freely as an act of political charity; these tech workers more easily facilitate the purchase of advertising and other technology services, which makes it easier for tech companies to make money from the election cycle.
In separate statements, Twitter, Google, and Facebook told VICE News basically the same thing: they provide these kinds of services to corporate customers as well as campaigns, and they offer them to campaigns regardless of their political affiliation. A Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement that it “did not embed staff at the Trump campaign offices.”
The Trump 2016 campaign digital chief Brad Parscale responded to a Politico report that first outlined the details of the study by disputing its characterization of embeds’ work as “free.”
Silicon Valley in DC
Tech companies have offered these services to political campaigns for years; experts in the field point to Howard Dean’s digital mobilization during the 2004 cycle as the moment that politicos started taking notice. And in 2008, staffed with Dean alums, Barack Obama leaned heavily on Facebook to get the message out about his first presidential campaign.
All major tech platforms now employ significant ad sales staff based in DC to take advantage of congressional and presidential election cycles.
The former RNC official, who requested anonymity to speak freely about his past work on the 2016 election, noted that the last four years marked rapid progress in digital advertising from a time when Mitt Romney was toying around with Apple’s iAds and Facebook’s then-new mobile advertising platform.
“Technology didn’t catch up to our demand until this cycle,” the official said. “Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Twitter offered stuff in 2016 that was light years ahead of eight years ago.”
Between 2012 and 2016, according to the research firm Borrell Associates, spending on digital political advertising from campaigns across the country increased by 789 percent to about $1.4 billion. The Trump campaign’s spend in the 2016 election on Facebook alone was at least $70 million, per the Washington Post.
To facilitate all of that new business growth, Silicon Valley consulted with academics, hired more political staff, and created specialized tools for politicians. Facebook, for example, created a “blueprint” that showed how political advertisers can reach “small town America” and “values voters,” according to BuzzFeed News.
“I’ve been doing digital stuff since the late 90s, I’ve seen it develop from nothing,” Chris Maiorana, a digital strategist for Mike Huckabee’s 2016 campaign, said to VICE News. “From the beginning of digital to where we are now, digital’s presence in the campaigns has grown, and the importance of the tools has grown.”
https://news.vice.com/story/trump-campaign-had-help-from-8-silicon-valley-staffers
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Oxbridge may be unfixable. Perhaps it should be abolished
The entrenchment of privilege is woven into the fabric of Oxford and Cambridge. Only by stopping them admitting undergraduates can we counter this
1 November 2017
The regularly occurring furore over admissions to Oxford and Cambridge reignited recently thanks to David Lammy. The Labour MP pointed out huge gaps in admissions when it comes to race, geography, and class, and criticised the universities’ deep bias towards those students whose parents can afford an expensive private education.
Just days later the Daily Telegraph published an inaccurate report accusing a black woman of “forcing Cambridge to drop white authors”. Much like the Mail’s “our remainer universities” report, this was so exquisitely tailored towards producing a specific kind of outrage that it seems very unlikely to have been the result of mere shoddy reporting.
These stories about Britain’s answer to America’s Ivy League colleges, are all skirmishes in the war over who owns Oxbridge – not the buildings, but the very concept itself.
Oxbridge is generally recognised as being a home of excellence in learning, but these conflicts would not occur if that were all that was at stake. The reality is these that institutions sit at the very heart of the British establishment. An Oxbridge degree is a passport to the upper echelons of British power and public life. The myth of the Oxbridge meritocracy sees no issue in theory with giving these passports out to a wider range of people, but what rankles is how Oxford and Cambridge might themselves be changed in the process.
Lammy’s focus on access answers half a question. To the extent that Oxbridge really does filter for the best of the best and provide them with world-class teaching, letting more minorities in so that they can be passported into parliament, the media and the judiciary makes sense. But Oxbridge isn’t simply a place where students go to get taught. As one academic said to me, its “function as a positional good is more important than the knowledge, habitus and skills it delivers”.
Access itself is hardly an easy problem to solve. Dr Phil Edwards, who studied at Cambridge and now teaches at Manchester Metropolitan university, remembers being struck by the “general ambient poshness” of Cambridge but did not feel excluded by it – “for those three years, we felt it was ours”. However, there are stories of students being filtered out through self-selection rather than by the university itself turning anyone down. I heard of students with northern accents being called “pit monkeys” when they attended open days, and from disabled students who had to suspend studies because the system was too inflexible to accommodate their needs. Tautologically, if you’re a natural fit you’ll fit in easily, but we must ask if “being a natural fit for the culture of Oxford and Cambridge” and “being one of the intellectual elite of the country” are actually strict synonyms.
One academic, who wished to remain anonymous, told me: “A few years ago one of our external examiners noted that our best students were producing work as good as [that of] those at their Oxford college. They were a little bit surprised. We weren’t.” Writer and academic Sunny Singh, of London Metropolitan University, said that “aside from the ability to blag with confidence,” she saw “nothing better” about an Oxbridge graduate compared to those on her own course. She was dismissive of people who are “lauded as a great intellect because [they] can recite Kipling from memory,” without the critical understanding of why you shouldn’t do it in a temple in Myanmar.
As much as Oxford and Cambridge can produce well-educated, well-rounded students, there is no denying that this output comes with a degree of pollution, like the smoke billowing out of a coal-fired power plant. What they also seem to produce is a glut of erudite wags who are charming at dinner parties; well-spoken people who pride themselves on being able to “debate” any topic regardless of expertise or even basic knowledge. As research has shown, institutions often reward overconfidence as if it was competence, what Daniel Kahneman describes as a “substitution” error. While by no means exclusive to government circles, it is surely not hard to draw to mind examples of people whose baseless overconfidence has led to them being put in charge of situations they had no idea how to actually manage. These qualities seem like negatives rather than positives for the job of governance (as distinct from getting elected), but they are nurtured and rewarded by the culture of our elite universities.
If the Bullingdon Club boys promoted above their ability are the obvious pollutants, a congealed fatberg of privilege clogging the arteries of government, the broader hidden pollution of Oxbridge’s domination of public life is the creation of an intellectual monoculture. Such institutional biases are emergent rather than explicitly imposed – a result of internal cultures that mistake the range of diversity within an organisation for the full range of possible diversity in the wider world. An attitude of “what we don’t know isn’t worth knowing” can lead to organisations careering off the unseen cliff edge of their own collective ignorance.
Oxbridge colleges may offer excellent teaching, but they do so in a shielded environment. Leafy lawns, rowing rivalries, and centuries of history are part of the appeal. As someone who used to teach in Oxbridge told me, even academics can be tripped up by the idiosyncratic systems. “It’s not that people won’t tell you if you ask them,” they said, “it’s rather that if you’re not someone brought up in the system … you identify yourself as the outsider because you constantly have to ask ‘what does this mean’ ‘how do I do that’ etc. It’s very alienating, without even being a deliberate act.”
Adapting to this system can be impossible for some, not through lack of “natural talent” but simply because the system can’t be adjusted sufficiently for the needs of, say, single parents or poor students living at home, without losing much of what makes it special. It seems absolutely unfair to say that people in the admissions system aren’t working hard and trying their very best to reform – everything I’ve seen suggests the exact opposite. But Oxbridge is Oxbridge fundamentally because of its character and traditions, not because of its exam results, and if those traditions are the problem, then what?
In some ways thinking about Oxbridge as a coal-power plant is instructive. If it can’t be reformed, if something singular about it means it will always spew black smoke over the countryside, then the externalities need to be dealt with in a clear-eyed manner. So should Oxbridge be mothballed in the same way as we would close down any other industry at the end of its useful life?
Or is there a way we could practise the equivalent of carbon capture and storage, attempting to retain the benefits while cutting down on the toxic emissions? Prof David Andress of the University of Portsmouth, has suggested a novel approach. In his view Oxford and Cambridge should stop taking undergraduate students altogether, breaking the conveyor belt from private school to cushy establishment sinecure midway.
He suggests instead that they become “postgraduate centres of excellence,” open to UK and international graduates, “with appropriate financial support”.
Some might suggest this would simply push the problem on to other Russell Group universities, which have their own problems. But these problems seem more tractable at that level, and there are more of them, which would help dilute the issue. In addition, taking Oxbridge out of the equation would mean the other Russell Group universities could no longer hide their own issues with student recruitment behind the regular furores over the big two.
Such proposals are almost absurdly radical within our current Overton window of acceptable thought, but that is precisely the point. If marginal reforms seem unlikely to work, then we need to consider the big moves. If clinging to tradition ends up damaging our society, surely it is time to let those traditions go.
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Electoral Commission to investigate Arron Banks’ Brexit donations
Watchdog to consider whether leave campaigner broke campaign finance rules in run-up to EU referendum
1 November 2017
The election watchdog has launched an investigation into whether donations and loans from the Brexit campaigner Arron Banks and one of his companies broke campaign finance rules in the run-up to the EU referendum.
The Electoral Commission will investigate whether Banks was the “true source” of loans made in his name and whether Better for the Country Ltd was the true source of donations made to Brexit campaigners.
It will also examine whether some of the donations or loans were funnelled to the Brexit campaign from a “non-qualifying person”, which could include foreign money.
The rules around donations to permitted participants at the EU referendum are set out in the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000.
Bob Posner, the director of political finance and regulation and legal counsel at the Electoral Commission, said there were “questions over the legitimacy” of the donations.
Posner said: “Interest in the funding of the EU referendum campaigns remains widespread. Questions over the legitimacy of funding provided to campaigners at the referendum risks causing harm to voters’ confidence. It is therefore in the public interest that the Electoral Commission seeks to ascertain whether or not impermissible donations were given to referendum campaigners and if any other related offences have taken place.”
The money given by Banks to Leave.EU in the run-up to the referendum was the biggest donation in British political history. The Bristol-based businessman says he contributed almost £9m in cash, loans and services to the pro-Brexit cause.
Last month, a Labour MP called for an inquiry into Banks and the use of “dark money” in the referendum campaign. Ben Bradshaw urged parliament and the Electoral Commission to examine claims of illegal donations “very carefully”.
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Russian propaganda outlet ‘staged fake LGBT rights rally’ in the US
31 October 2017
Facebook accounts run by Russian operatives staged real-life protests for a string of causes across the US, it has been revealed.
The social network has been rocked by a scandal this month after Facebook execs admitted that the Russian government had run online propaganda pages aimed at US citizens.
Facebook has since confirmed it has shuttered hundreds of pages that were confirmed to be the product of a Russian government-run content farm.
As many as 126 million Americans saw content uploaded to Facebook by Russia-based operatives since 2015, the social network admitted.
Many of the pages appeared to be geared towards stoking divisions in US society.
The troll farm running pages targeting minority groups – LGBT United, Blacktivists, and United Muslims of America – as well as right-wing and nationalist pages Being Patriotic, Heart of Texas and Secured Borders.
But its influence extended beyond the internet.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the pages succeeded in organising at least 22 real-life rallies inside the US, duping real-life activists into helping set up the events.
Among the events organised by Russian operatives was a “candlelight vigil” in support of LGBT rights, in the wake of the tragic massacre at an Orlando gay bar.
The Journal reports that the event “attracted a dozen or more attendees” including the relative of a victim, and was covered by local media.
Ironically, such an event would be illegal in Russia due to the country’s gay propaganda law.
The network of operatives were brazen in promoting events related to a number of contradictory causes.
One Russia-linked page even organised a rally in support of a black man shot dead by police – on the same day that a separate page ran a ‘Blue Lives Matter’ march.
The goal appears to have been to undermine American cohesion by stoking divisions, rather than to directly influence the 2016 election.
Social media analyst Jonathan Albright, research director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, previously looked at the influence of the pages.
His analysis found that posts from LGBT United received more than 5 million shares.
The page seldom referenced the 2016 election, primarily dedicating itself to building an influence base among LGBT people, as well as potentially ‘drowning out’ election coverage from legitimate LGBT outlets.
Much of its activity was dedicated to sharing memes and posts supportive of LGBT people, with its fictional author referring to herself as a lesbian.
It did appear critical of mainstream Republicans, branding a supporter of Ted Cruz a “thunderc*nt”.
Albright said: “The tone of the posts [from the different pages] varies strikingly… the one seemingly managed by a lesbian is intimate, confidential and chatty, with complaints about parents and teachers not understanding the challenges of being young and gay.
“The English is nearly flawless. One popular post said simply, ‘Bi and proud!’ with a thumbs-up emoji attached to the end.”
He added: “The goal seemed less to inspire enthusiasm for one candidate than to dampen support for voting at all.”
Ironically, many of the Russian government-sanctioned posts – which positively celebrate LGBT rights – would be illegal on Russian social media platforms under the country’s laws outlawing gay ‘propaganda’.
The pages have since been shuttered by Facebook.
In a blog, Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s Vice President of Policy and Communications, addressed the growing scandal.
He said: “Approximately 470 accounts and Pages we shut down recently were identified by our dedicated security team that manually investigates specific, organized threats. They found that this set of accounts and Pages were affiliated with one another — and were likely operated out of Russia.”
He added that it was possible there were more pages undiscovered.
Schrage said: “When we’re looking for this type of abuse, we cast a wide net in trying to identify any activity that looks suspicious. But it’s a game of cat and mouse.
“Bad actors are always working to use more sophisticated methods to obfuscate their origins and cover their tracks.
“That in turn leads us to devise new methods and smarter tactics to catch them — things like machine learning, data science and highly trained human investigators. And, of course, our internal inquiry continues.
“It’s possible that government investigators have information that could help us, and we welcome any information the authorities are willing to share to help with our own investigations.
“Using ads and other messaging to affect political discourse has become a common part of the cybersecurity arsenal for organized, advanced actors.
“This means all online platforms will need to address this issue, and get smarter about how to address it, now and in the future.”
The Facebook scandal comes after US intelligence forces raised fears about Russian involvement in damaging hacks that targeted Democrats during the election and severely damaged Hillary Clinton.
Meanwhile, Special Counsel Robert Mueller is overseeing an investigation into any links or coordination between Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump.
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Russiagate, la “fabbrica dei troll” raccontata da chi ci ha lavorato: l’inchiesta di FqMillenniuM
Nei documenti inviati al Congresso Usa, Facebook, Twitter e Google svelano che dagli account di un’azienda russa son partiti decine di miglia di post su argomenti “divisivi”, dall’omosessualità alla guerra in Siria, anche in piena campagna per le presidenziali. La società si chiama Internet Reserach Agency, ma altro non è che la famigerata centrale della disinformazione putiniana basata a San Pietroburgo. E raccontata in un reportage del mensile del Fatto, che pubblichiamo integralmente
1 novembre 2017
Numeri alla mano, i giganti di internet – Facebook, Twitter, Google – svelano che l’azienda russa Internet Research Agency ha inondato la rete di decine di migliaia di contenuti “divisivi” e “disturbanti”, anche a sfondo razziale e omofobo, che hanno raggiunto milioni di utenti tra il gennaio 2015 e l’agosto 2017, centrando in pieno anche la campagna per il voto che avrebbe visto trionfare Donald Trump su Hillary Clinton. La Internet Research Agency altro non è che la famigerata “fabbrica dei troll” di San Pietroburgo, epicentro della propaganda pro Cremlino, che il mensile Fq MillenniuM ha raccontato, con numerose testimonianze anche dall’interno della struttura, nel numero di giugno 2017 dedicato alla “voglia di uomo forte”. In particolare, nei documenti inviati al congresso Usa e svelati dal New York Times, Facebook attribuisce alla “fabbrica” 80mila contenuti di quel tipo, che hanno raggiunto 29 milioni di persone; la stessa Internet Research Agency ha investito nella piattaforma social 100mila dollari per rendere più visibili i propri post. Quanto a Twitter, gli account messi in relazione con l’azienda russa e poi sospesi sono stati 2.700, scoperti fra settembre e novembre 2016 (in piena corsa per le presidenziali Usa), con all’attivo un totale di 131mila tweet. Anche Google imputa a Internet Research Agency di aver fatto incetta di servizi pubblicitari e canali Youtube per diffondere messaggi divisivi, anche sulla guerra in Siria, che vede la Russia di Putin fra i protagonisti in campo. Il motore di ricerca spiega anche che l’azienda russa ha speso 4.700 dollari in pubblicità.
Ecco l’inchiesta di Fq Millennium sulla “fabbrica dei troll”, alias Internet Reserach Agency, a firma di Anna Lesnevskaya.
LA FABBRICA DEI TROLL – DENTRO GLI UFFICI DELLA DEZINFORMATSIJA
da FqMillennium n. 2, giugno 2017
Per essere assunti bisogna passare il test della macchina della verità. Che certifica la sincera adesione ai valori politici della ditta. Una volta dentro – appena acceso il computer – ecco apparire il “compito” della giornata, scritto da mano ignota, ma impeccabile nel dettare la linea sui principali avvenimenti della giornata. «C’è una moltitudine di persone che batte, batte, batte senza fine sulla tastiera. Non hanno limiti…» racconta a Fq Millennium una fonte interna.
Siamo al numero 55 di Savushkina, un palazzo anonimo nella tranquilla zona residenziale di Primorskij rajon, periferia nord di San Pietroburgo. Duemilacinquecento metri quadri distribuiti su quattro piani, per 48 mila euro al mese di affitto, a quanto si deduce da un precedente annuncio immobiliare. Da fuori sembra un business center qualsiasi, ma non è così. All’ingresso, tornelli e guardie. Le videocamere interne sono ovunque, sempre accese, giorno e notte. Banditi, al contrario, gli smartphone dei dipendenti, per evitare che i video su quanto accade lì dentro finiscano in rete, come già successo. L’edificio è attraversato da corridoi lunghissimi con tanti uffici chiusi. Sulle porte non ci sono targhette, ma è pieno di gente. «Si inventano delle cose mentre scrivono…», prosegue la nostra fonte. Blog sotto falso nome, commenti anonimi ad articoli pubblicati da testate web, interventi in forum online. Sulla guerra in Ucraina, sugli oppositori di Putin, sull’America di Trump e sulla nostra Europa. Con una sola preoccupazione: inondare la rete di interventi fedeli alla linea del Cremlino. Non certo dire la verità.
La “fabbrica dei troll”, questo il nomignolo acquisito dalla struttura, avrebbe dovuto restare un luogo segreto, come anche la sua attività. Invece negli ultimi anni gli spifferi di infiltrati e insider hanno raggiunto il mondo esterno, svelandone, almeno in parte, metodi e strategie. La fabbrica, però, non si è arresa ed è ancora oggi in piena attività. Anzi, è cresciuta e si è trasferita in una sede più grande. Gli impiegati, a quanto filtra, sono centinaia. In tre anni di vita, anche per sfuggire alle soffiate, ha mutato per ben quattro volte ragione sociale. Oggi si chiama Teka. Le politiche di assunzione sono diventate a maglie più strette: niente più annunci per reclutare copywriter, si entra soltanto se presentati da un dipendente. E, come nei vecchi film di agenti segreti, bisogna affrontare il test della verità, introdotta per smascherare nuovi ficcanaso sotto mentite spoglie.
È quello che raccontano a Fq Millennium diverse persone che sono riuscite a infiltrarsi nella fabbrica e continuano ancora oggi a ricevere informazioni di prima mano dall’interno. Complici anche due cause di lavoro intentate da ex dipendenti e seguite dai legali di Team 29, organizzazione nota in Russia per le battaglie in nome della trasparenza dello Stato.
Ljudmila Savchuk 36 anni, giornalista freelance e mamma di due bimbi, è da sempre impegnata come attivista ambientale. Nel 2014 corre anche come indipendente alle elezioni per il Consiglio comunale della sua Puškin. È qui, nella cittadina a sud di San Pietroburgo, celebre “villaggio degli Zar”, che la incontriamo. Ljudmila conosce bene gli effetti nefasti dalla propaganda via web e la capacità che ha di plasmare le menti. Per questo, con un gruppo di amici, ha creato un movimento chiamato La pace dell’informazione. Sempre nel 2014, però, si è spinta oltre: si è infiltrata fra i troll grazie all’aiuto di una sua collega. «Ero convinta che non bastasse scrivere un articolo. Se fossi riuscita a entrare nella “fabbrica”, avrei capito anche come combatterla». Dopo tre anni è ancora in contatto con degli insider che le passano informazioni esclusive.
La donna racconta che, secondo quanto appreso dall’interno, il finanziatore della struttura continua a essere un imprenditore privato molto vicino a Putin: Evgenij Prigozhin, noto come il «cuoco del Cremlino», originario della vecchia Leningrado. Classe 1961, a vent’anni fu condannato da un tribunale dell’allora Leningrado a 12 anni di carcere per rapina in gruppo organizzato, frode, induzione alla prostituzione minorile. Scontati nove anni, Prigozhin si getta nel settore alimentare, nel periodo post frantumazione dell’Urss. Apre una catena di negozi, poi si cimenta nella ristorazione inaugurando il New Island, locale di successo nel quale l’amico presidente porterà a cena Jacques Chirac, George W. Bush e tanti altri.
«All’interno dell’edificio si producono tutti i tipi di contenuti, dai commenti alle immagini», riprende Shavcuk. «Ci sono persino dei disegnatori che realizzano orrende caricature dei politici». Marat Mindiyarov, un altro troll uscito allo scoperto, ha raccontato il compito più assurdo assegnatogli: scrivere 135 commenti sul fatto che Barack Obama, durante la visita in India nel 2015, masticava la cicca. Bisognava presentare il presidente Usa come «una scimmia nera che non sa niente della cultura». Dell’opera si trovano ancora tracce in un forum locale della città di Ufa.
Ljudmila Shavchuk stava al terzo piano, dove allora si trovavano i blogger – come lei, che scriveva con altri sei troll sulla popolare piattaforma russa LiveJournal –, i commentatori di articoli pubblicati da altri media online e quelli che intervenivano sui forum. Tra le sue mansioni c’era quella di gestire, con altre persone, il blog di un personaggio inventato: una cartomante che parlava di magia e dava consigli per la salute e la bellezza. A volte, però, questa misteriosa fattucchiera faceva dei sogni che annunciavano cose nefaste per l’Ucraina… «La cartomante è uno dei personaggi prediletti della propaganda russa», ci spiega l’infiltrata. «I post politici – prosegue – venivano affidati soprattutto ai redattori mentre io, fortunatamente, mi concentravo su varie sciocchezze: erbe, pietre e così via». Quando la donna era all’interno della fabbrica, gli argomenti più trattati, oltre all’Ucraina, erano: l’Ue e l’America (da criticare, ovviamente); Vladimir Putin e soprattutto il ministro della Difesa, Sergey Shoygu (in questo caso, da lodare). Perché proprio lui? «Prigozhin credo abbia un grande giro d’affari legato al ministero della Difesa».
Ljudmila racconta anche di quando si è presentata al colloquio di lavoro. «Mi dissero che si trattava di un progetto molto importante per il Paese, segretissimo. Ho capito subito l’allusione alla “fabbrica”». Per accedere alla selezione, oltre al curriculum, era necessario inviare anche il link del proprio profilo social. Così Ljudmila ha ripulito la sua pagina VKonatke (il Facebook russo) da qualsiasi immagine “compromettente”. Via le foto delle manifestazioni di protesta, restavano solo quelle di famiglia. Poi l’incontro con Oleg Vasilyev, l’unica figura dirigente emersa dall’ombra. «Sembrava il tipico “nuovo russo” degli anni Novanta, giacca sgargiante, prepotente». Di lui si sa poco, a parte che aveva un blog sul sito di Moj Rajon – uno dei principali quotidiani di San Pietroburgo – in veste di imprenditore.
L’incipit del colloquio di Ljudmila non lascia spazio a fraintendimenti. «Mi hanno chiesto: “Di chi è la Crimea? È nostra o non è nostra?”». Nonostante qualche imbarazzo iniziale, la ragazza viene assunta. In nero, come tutti i troll. Nessun contratto, l’unica firma richiesta è stata quella per l’obbligo di segretezza. Siamo ai primi di gennaio 2015, nella “fabbrica” ci resterà per circa due mesi.
Oltre alla videosorveglianza, ci spiega, c’era una persona fissa che controllava a vista i lavoratori. Prima di cominciare il turno, i troll attivavano un servizio di proxy per camuffare l’Ip (il codice che identifica un dispositivo collegato in rete, ndr) del computer. «A volte qualcuno si dimentica di farlo e capita che un troll si finga ucraino mentre in realtà ha un Ip russo».
Ma chi detta la linea? All’inizio della giornata i blogger trovano in un’apposita cartella i cosiddetti «compiti tecnici»: le notizie più d’attualità con la relativa tesi politica da diffondere. Il 28 febbraio 2015, per esempio, all’indomani dell’omicidio del politico Boris Nemtsov sotto le mura del Cremlino, un “compito” trafugato da Savchuk impartiva le seguenti indicazioni: «Il concetto base: plasmiamo un’opinione secondo la quale degli attivisti ucraini possano essere coinvolti nella morte dell’oppositore (…). Ora la Federazione è di nuovo un Paese visto negativamente dall’Occidente. È un’evidente provocazione diretta a creare un’ondata di scontento dell’opposizione, che comincerà a chiamare la gente a scendere in piazza per rovesciare il governo».
Ljudmila iniziava alle nove del mattino. Il turno durava 12 ore, ogni minimo ritardo veniva multato. Si lavorava due giorni sì e due no, altri troll arrivavano alle 21 per il servizio notturno. Nulla è lasciato al caso. «Operano su tutte le piattaforme, anche su forum sconosciuti delle città di provincia», chiosa Savchuk.
E quanto si guadagna? «Un blogger come me prende 40mila rubli al mese», circa 640 euro; i commentatori ancora meno.
Ljudmila non è la sola a portarci dentro la fabbrica dei troll. Incontriamo il giornalista investigativo Andrej Soshnikov, che ci racconta dei meccanismi di reclutamento. Andrej è stato il primo a intrufolarsi nelle segrete stanze della propaganda, nel 2013, dopo aver appreso – da un’attivista del “Movimento per le elezioni oneste” – di un colloquio di lavoro bruscamente interrotto all’emergere di divergenze politiche. Proprio a ridosso di diverse elezioni in programma in quel periodo, comprese quelle nell’oblast’ di Leningrado e del sindaco di Mosca, con il grande oppositore Aleksej Naval’nyj a fronteggiare il candidato del Cremlino, Sergej Sobjanin, che alla fine la spunterà. Il giornalista di Moj Rajon, oggi in forza al Bbc Russian Service, a quel punto decide di contattare il bizzarro datore di lavoro e scoprire, sotto mentite spoglie, di che cosa si trattasse.
Quando nel 2013 Soshnikov si infiltra nella fabbrica dei troll, allora ospitata in un edificio in stile nordico nella zona di Olgino, si ritrova a parlare con l’imprenditore Alexei Soskovets, in quel periodo vicino al Comitato per la gioventù del Comune di San Pietroburgo. All’Agenzia delle ricerche di Internet (Agentstvo internet-issledovanij) – così si chiamava la società – si scrivono recensioni, gli spiega. Solo che non si tratta di recensire prodotti, ma di stilare commenti su argomenti politici. Mentre finge di redigere un commento di prova, il giornalista ritrova diversi post precedentemente pubblicati e salvati sul pc, in cui viene massacrato l’oppositore Naval’nyj, definito «un Hitler dei nostri giorni».
Non solo. Poco prima di lasciare il covo dei troll, il reporter e un’altra infiltrata della Novaja gazeta, vedono aggirarsi nella sede Maria Kuprashevich, la bionda attrice nota per aver tentato di spiare i media indipendenti alla ricerca di informazioni compromettenti. Così entra in scena Evgenij Prigozhin. Secondo la Novaja, infatti, la donna agisce per conto dell’imprenditore, in veste di impiegata dell’ufficio pubbliche relazioni della sua azienda di catering Concord. Presto si scopriranno altri fili che portano a Prigozhin. A maggio del 2014, per esempio, un gruppo di hacker conosciuto come Shaltay Boltay (o Anonymous International), noto per aver pubblicato la corrispondenza di alti funzionari russi, annuncia di essersi intrufolato nella casella di posta del direttore finanziario della fabbrica dei troll, diffondendone i contenuti in rete. Secondo questi dati, i resoconti dell’Agenzia vengono mandati alla Concord di Prigozhin. Si preventivavano mensilmente 33,5 milioni di rubli (circa 700 mila euro) per tenere in piedi la struttura. Cifra non particolarmente ingente per l’imprenditore, visto che secondo diverse inchieste pubblicate dai media russi, le società a lui connesse guadagnano miliardi di rubli in appalti statali, tra i quali spiccano quelli con il ministero della Difesa per l’erogazione dei servizi e la manutenzione delle cittadelle militari.
Soshnikov farà di più. Dopo un lungo e paziente lavoro, riuscirà a dimostrare che il video di un militare americano che spara sul Corano, apparso in rete nel settembre 2015, poco prima dell’inizio dell’intervento militare russo in Siria, è in realtà un fake confezionato nella fabbrica dei troll. Il “soldato”, scoprirà su Instagram, è in realtà un barista di San Pietroburgo amico di un’impiegata della struttura propagandistica. In un altro filmato vengono mostrati dei militari ucraini che bruciano la bandiera olandese. Il fake viene pubblicato all’inizio del 2016, con l’intento di influenzare il referendum consultivo indetto il 6 aprile nei Paesi Bassi sull’accordo di associazione tra Kiev e Ue (per la cronaca, la vittoria è andata ai contrari).
Oggi, l’unico modo per stanare gli alti papaveri che muovono la fabbrica sembra essere rappresentato dalle cause di lavoro intentate dai troll fuoriusciti. Come quelle sostenute dai legali del Team 29. Ljudmila Savchuk è stata la prima a rivolgersi all’avvocato Ivan Pavlov, animatore del pool, chiedendogli se fosse possibile perseguire la società Ricerche di Internet (che nel frattempo ha cambiato diversi nomi) «per fomentazione dell’odio». Secondo Pavlov, però, la strada da seguire è un’altra: il contenzioso per impiego in nero e mancato versamento dell’ultimo stipendio. In più, la richiesta di restituire alla parte lesa i danni morali, quantificati in una cifra simbolica di un rublo. E nell’agosto 2015 proprio Ljudmila ha vinto, al termine di un processo altamente mediatico.
«Questi processi contro la fabbrica dei troll hanno un carattere artificioso», dice Pavlov a Fq Millennium. «Ci siamo rivolti a un giudice non per difendere i diritti dei lavoratori, che sì sono stati violati, ma per far uscire questi troll alla luce del sole». Non è in discussione la libertà d’opinione, precisa, ma «dev’essere chiaro chi c’è dietro la fabbrica». Perché, «quando fai delle schifezze, non hai nessuna voglia di sbandierare la tua attività su Internet», argomenta. «I troll, quando li porti alla luce del giorno e li fai vedere a tutti, è come se perdessero la loro forza. Non hanno più la stessa aggressività di quando lavorano rinchiusi nelle loro stanze».
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Gli stretti legami che uniscono Italia e Russia
30 ottobre 2017
Londra, 30 ott – (Agenzia Nova) – A margine di un importante forum di affari che si è tenuto negli scorsi giorni a Verona, la principale banca italiana Intesa Sanpaolo ha firmato un accordo con la Independent Petroleum Company, una società petrolifera russa colpita dalle sanzioni degli Stati Uniti che è alla ricerca di finanziamenti per un nuovo progetto di trivellazioni: l’accordo, benché ancora a livello di dichiarazione di intenti, sottolinea gli stretti rapporti commerciali che legano Italia e Russia nonostante gli sforzi di USA ed Unione Europea per isolare il presidente russo Vladimir Putin dopo l’invasione dell’Ucraina nel 2014 ed è un chiaro segno della simpatia per Mosca che si può riscontrare in molti ambienti politici ed economici italiani; lo sostiene il quotidiano finanziario britannico “The Financial Times” in un’inchiesta pubblicata ieri domenica 29 ottobre. Un pò dappertutto in Europa, scrive il giornale, le sanzioni anti-russe provocano frustrazione tra gli uomini d’affari per aver ridotto le possibilità di cooperazione soprattutto nel lucrativo mercato del petrolio e del gas; ma solo in Italia questa frustrazione viene espressa ad alta voce ed in maniera chiara. Nell’articolo firmato dal suo corrispondente da Roma James Politi e dai suoi due inviati a Verona e Milano, Henry Foy e Rachel Sanderson, il “Financial Times” raccoglie queste voci che vanno dal presidente di Intesa Sanpaolo, Antonio Falico, fino alla presidente di Eni, Emma Marcegaglia; e dall’amministratore delegato del gruppo aerospaziale e della difesa Leonardo, Alessandro Profumo, fino ad un manager della Sace, l’ente statale per il credito all’esportazione. Mentre dunque i rivali internazionali come ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, Statoil e BP hanno tutti dovuto congelare i propri progetti in Russia a causa delle sanzioni e diverse banche europee e statunitensi hanno posto fine alle linee di credito all’industria petrolifera russa, molte società italiane stanno invece puntando forte sulle buone relazioni con la Russia, che è il secondo partner commerciale dell’Italia in Europa, subito dietro la Germania. Questa tendenza filo-russa secondo il quotidiano britannico non si limita agli ambienti economici italiani, ma si estende al mondo politico che è pressoché unanime nel considerare essenziale l’obbiettivo di mantenere i legami economici con la Russia; questa determinazione di Roma viene sintetizzata dal “Financial Times” con la citazione di una dichiarazione di Romano Prodi: “In questa fase di scontro geopolitico, i legami economici devono essere una priorità”, ha detto l’ex presidente del Consiglio ed ex presidente della Commissione europea, secondo cui addirittura “le aziende devono fare pressione sui governi mettendo sul tavolo il dannoso impatto” delle sanzioni.
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“Non si erano mai visti tanti italiani sul libro paga di Mosca nemmeno ai tempi dell’Unione Sovietica.”
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I “troll” sono soltanto la sparuta fanteria di un esercito che può contare su ben altre risorse, molto più difficili da contrastare. Le “fake news” non possono essere delle semplici bufale: per servire allo scopo della disinformazione devono contenere elementi di verità opportunamente distorti. Occorre usare voci dotate di una certa autorevolezza: opinionisti, celebrità, personaggi pubblici… Ci sono quindi i “testimonial,” ovvero i VIP amici dello zar e del club dei grandi oligarchi. Ci sono macchine mediatiche molto efficienti che fanno da altoparlante a queste voci e che lavorano per creare, ingigantire, minimizzare o, più tipicamente, diffondere notizie a orologeria (il tempismo di certe “rivelazioni” è la cartina di tornasole che ne denuncia la strategia). Ci sono interi partiti e movimenti politici foraggiati per diffondere la propaganda filorussa e accreditare le sue molteplici fonti di disinformazione. E ci sono infine i grandi magnati dell’industria e della finanza che fanno affari con la Russia in barba alle sanzioni, sempre deprecate come una disgrazia (mentre non sembrano mai essere una disgrazia la dipendenza energetica o l’opacità di certi accordi). L’economia è, ovviamente, il motore di ogni ingranaggio. Ma l’economia dei fondi neri non è facile da investigare. La reale entità delle fortune patrimoniali di Putin e della sua cerchia può solo essere oggetto di congetture, un po’ come la materia oscura di cui è fatto l’universo: potrebbe darci la chiave per capire tutto, ma resta invisibile.
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“So let’s call patriotic education by its proper name: propaganda.”
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Patriotic education is textbook propaganda
1 November 2017
Resistance is vital if we are to spare children from the mind-numbing diet of national superiority and state allegiance that governments around the world are trying to feed them.
Something strange is happening in Indian universities. A few days ago, the Ministry for Human Resources called for ‘patriotic rock music’ to be performed at the nation’s campuses. In July, the Vice-Chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University, one of the country’s largest, asked that a tank be displayed on site to spark ‘patriotic inspiration’ in students. A recently-passed law requires all state-funded universities to fly the national flag ‘to evoke nationalistic sentiments.’ And in March this year, students protesting the ABVP, the country’s powerful right-wing student association, were branded ‘anti-national’ traitors and pelted with stones.
The Indian government, under their Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi, is aggressively pushing a programme of ‘patriotic education’ upon the country. What we see happening in higher education is just part of their plan to raise a generation of highly patriotic citizens. In schools, the government hopes to introduce mandatory singing of the national anthem, compulsory hoisting of the country’s flag, a greater focus on the lives of national heroes, and even military lessons, in order to ‘instil patriotism and nationalism in the curriculum.’ As the head of Veterans India ominously declared in July this year: ‘We will create a situation where people will love the nation. And if they don’t, we will force them to love it.’
Young Army Initiatives
Patriotic education is by no means unique to India. In Japan, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has explicitly stated that ‘love of country’ should be a goal of education. Likewise, Chinese President Xi Jinping has called for China’s education system to be infused with ‘patriotic spirit.’ In the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte is currently pushing through (as ‘urgent’) a law that would force all sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds to take part in military training, ‘to instil nationalism, patriotism and discipline among the Filipino youth.’
Since 2005, Russian children have been subject to the State Programme for the Patriotic Education of Citizens, which has quadrupled the country’s spending on patriotic projects in a bid to make national pride the ‘spiritual backbone’ of Russia. Central to this has been the Young Army initiative, a ‘military and patriotic’ venture teaching military skills to children as young as ten. Alternatively, the country’s youth can visit Patriot Park, Russia’s ‘military Disneyland’, which President Vladimir Putin has designated ‘an important element in our system of military-patriotic work with young people.’
Even in relatively free and democratic countries we can find the philosophy of patriotic education in action. In the UK, for example, teachers have been threatened with losing their jobs and even being barred from their profession if they ‘fail to protect British values in their schools’. And in the USA, it is stipulated in the country’s stringent Flag Code that the stars and stripes ‘should be displayed during school days in or near every schoolhouse.’ In October this year, a private college in Missouri launched a mandatory patriotism class for all freshmen.
Why?
Patriotic education is clearly popular among governments. But why? Consider these few simple observations. Firstly, patriotism is a mercurial and loosely defined sentiment, encapsulating wildly different ideas to different people – just look at the USA, where patriots for and against President Trump are arguing over whether patriotism means loyalty or dissent. This means that national pride can easily be moulded to support various beliefs and ideologies. Secondly, most if not all of the governments championing patriotic education are at pains to equate themselves with the country. As one Chinese citizen put it, ‘loving the country equals loving the Party.’ Lastly, and quite simply: children are impressionable. They tend to believe what their teachers tell them.
Put these observations together and it doesn’t seem outlandish to suggest an ulterior motive behind these education campaigns. Could it be, as critics of the Chinese education system have charged, that these governments are engaged in patriotic ‘brainwashing’, employing national pride to inculcate in children obedience and unwavering loyalty to the state and its leaders?
If this seems outlandish, consider the effect that such ‘education’ is already having. Research has shown that the longer a Chinese individual stays in state education, the more likely they are to support the Communist Party. In this way Beijing has avoided another Tiananmen-style protest, as a large proportion of the country’s youth, pumped up with national superiority, no longer look to ‘the West’ with envy. In Russia, the classroom obsession with national pride and foreign enemies has helped distract the public from the cocktail of economic and social ills – such as shrinking real wages, rising poverty and high inflation – that are plaguing the country. And in India, the deteriorating and polarising political climate has forged an extremely patriotic body of students that profess unswerving loyalty to Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party. So let’s call patriotic education by its proper name: propaganda.
Patriotic education can be resisted, and has been on several occasions. In 2010, public opposition to an education bill in Slovakia, which would have forced every classroom to display the national flag and coat of arms, forced President Ivan Gasparovic to veto the measures. The creeping patriotism infiltrating Japan’s education system has been met with considerable opposition from the country’s teachers, who, angry at being disciplined or even suspended for refusing to sing the national anthem in school, have launched dozens of lawsuits against education authorities. Perhaps the biggest pushback occurred in Hong Kong in 2012, when attempts by the Chinese government to extend its patriotic education to the city drew tens of thousands of protestors into the streets, eventually forcing Beijing to back down.
Resistance such as this is vital if we are to spare children from the mind-numbing diet of national superiority and state allegiance that governments around the world are trying to feed them. No country can consider itself free from this danger: as patriotism is found in every country, so too is the potential for its manipulation and abuse. We ought to ask ourselves: who has the most to gain from a generation of die-hard patriots – the people saluting the flag, or the power that waves it? It’s a lesson we could all do with learning.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/david-mountain/patriotic-education-is-textbook-propaganda
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What Russian Facebook ads would you have seen?
1 November 2017
Between June 2015 and August 2017, millions of Americans were exposed to Facebook ads and posts generated by Russian operatives who sought to influence voter behavior and exploit divisions in American society on hot-button issues. A number of the ads released during the House Intelligence Committee hearing on Nov. 1 reveal how the Russians used Facebook’s advertiser tools, as well as free posts, to target people by their interests, political leanings, location, age and other traits.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/business/russian-ads-facebook-targeting/
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Silicon Valley dodged senators’ questions about Russian propaganda
1 Novembre 2017
The Senate Intelligence Committee finally got its chance Wednesday to grill Silicon Valley about Russian propaganda on their platforms during the 2016 election. And after months of relatively restrained disagreement between the committee and Google, Facebook, and Twitter, the conflict spilled out into the open.
The three companies have each sent their general counsels in lieu of their CEOs and other top executives, and these lawyers — Twitter’s Sean Edgett, Google’s Kent Walker, and Facebook’s Colin Stretch — mostly succeeded in dodging tough questions from the senators.
They’ve also had ample time to prepare for this week, as these companies have all revealed to Congress in the past couple months the extent of the Russia-engineered social media campaign to influence the 2016 election. Here’s a rundown of what they added to the story at Wednesday’s hearing:
Senators from both parties expressed frustration that they were speaking with Google, Facebook, and Twitter lawyers instead of the CEOs.
Virginia Democrat Mark Warner, the vice chair of the Intel Committee, castigated the tech platforms for initial reports on 2016 election interference that “showed a lack of resources, lack of commitment, and a lack of genuine effort” on the part of Silicon Valley.
Facebook’s Colin Stretch stated that since October 2016, Russian ads reached 129 million on Facebook and 16 million on Instagram; counting the 4 million views prior to October, Facebook now concedes that 150 million people saw Russian propaganda during the 2016 election.
The tech lawyers again declined to signal support for the Honest Ads Act, a bipartisan bill that would align Federal Election Commission rules for internet ads with the rules for TV and print broadcasting. The bill was co-authored by Democratic Sens. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Mark Warner.
Right-wing Arkansas senator Tom Cotton castigated tech companies for not being sufficiently “America First” in their policies.
Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden, known as a staunch defender of privacy rights and freedom of speech, said that “you need to stop paying lip service to shutting down bad actors… you’ve got the power, and Congress has given you the legal protection to actually act and deal with this.”
https://news.vice.com/story/silicon-valley-dodged-senators-questions-about-russian-propaganda
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How the crisis in Catalonia is helping Rajoy consolidate power
2 November 2017
The news from Catalonia is alarming and confusing. How did things come to this, in a European Union member state, in 2017?
First came a referendum vote in favor of secession with police blocking voters from balloting and a declaration of independence.
The backlash swiftly followed: The autonomous government of Catalonia was suspended by the Spanish government in Madrid, huge crowds demonstrated in Barcelona against Catalan independence and independence leaders were threatened with arrest for sedition and rebellion.
As a student of the political history of Catalonia, especially the region’s relationship with Spain, I’m alarmed by these unprecedented events. The key question is: Why now?
Changing the rules
After all, Catalan nationalism and the Spanish state are not new. Catalonia has been a nation with a distinctive culture for centuries. It was the center of the Crown of Aragon, then united with Castille in 1492 to create Spain as we know it. Spain and Catalonia also have a long history of pragmatic accommodation. Spanish political culture is marked by memories of the nation’s Civil War and the dictator Francisco Franco. That means there is little popular support for conflict, unilateral declarations of independence or police action.
And yet, I don’t find the test of wills surprising. What’s surprising is the extent to which leaders are breaking “rules” of conflict between the Spanish government and Catalan nationalists. Under the old rules, the game would start with dramatic claims, divert into dialogue and end in complex pacts. One example of such an approach is the democratic Spanish constitution adopted in 1978 after Franco’s death and Spain’s democratic transition.
But now key players have stopped playing by these rules. A previous Spanish government, led by the Socialists, agreed to give Catalonia more autonomy in 2006. The current ruling party – Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s Partido Popular – contested this agreement to the Constitutional Tribunal in 2010 and won. The move fit with the traditional view of the Partido Popular as supporting Spanish unity. Then came a nonbinding vote in Catalonia, sponsored by the Catalan government, which led to the president of Catalonia, Artur Mas, being removed from office by Spanish courts.
Frustration in Catalonia – frustration with a Spanish state that first agreed to autonomy, then repudiated the agreement, and finally elected the Partido Popular – set in motion the events of this year.
Catalonia’s nationalist leaders, including President Carles Puigdemont, have tried to abide by the old rules. They do something dramatic that shores up their base and might strengthen their hand in negotiations, and then they wait for the government in Madrid to enter negotiations. If Madrid played its expected role, there would be dialogue and a pact and business would then continue as normal, with everybody’s dignity intact.
Instead, Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy keeps choosing a strategy of confrontation. Each time he ignored or rejected a Catalan offer to negotiate, he boxed the Catalan nationalists into going further. Even now, it is not clear that most Catalan nationalists actually want independence. No survey has shown a majority support it. Nationalist leader Artur Mas, the same leader who was banned from politics and fined for his nationalism, has said Catalonia is not ready for “real independence.” That is a signal he still wants negotiations.
But Rajoy continues to escalate the situation.
Why this, why now?
I see two plausible reasons Rajoy is doing this, and they both lie in party politics.
One is the heritage and beliefs of his party, the Partido Popular. Founded by Francoists, senior officials of the old dictatorship, its ideology has authoritarian tones and focuses on order and Spanish unity. They don’t recognize a Catalan national right to self-determination, and believe all of Spain would have to agree on Catalan secession since Catalans are Spanish.
The other reason is that Rajoy’s Partido Popular is weak, which makes him weak. No party received a majority in the 2015 elections. During snap elections in 2016, the Partido Popular won only a small plurality and had to depend on temporary support from other parties to enter office.
Conflict with Catalonia strengthens Rajoy and the Partido Popular. It frames political conflict around national issues rather than inequality, unemployment and the structural, long-term decline of the Spanish economy. It also puts every one of his three big rival parties in a fix by forcing them to choose sides between Spanish unity or Catalan nationalism.
Unike its rivals, the Partido Popular doesn’t have many voters to lose in Catalonia – its Francoist past already significantly limits its appeal there.
It’s a different story for the center-right Ciudadanos, or the Citizens Party, which is the new alternative to a Partido Popular badly damaged by corruption and the economic crisis. Ciudadanos now looks like an annex of the Partido Popular. Weakening them strengthens the Partido Popular position as the party of the Spanish right – voters who value Spanish unity might come to see the Partido Popular as their champion. The Partido Popular’s historic but declining rivals, the Socialists, will also likely be badly damaged in the next election. The Socialists have supported the Partido Popular against Catalan nationalism, costing them their credibility as supporters of Catalan nationhood.
Outside of Catalonia, the conflict has sucked the oxygen from the issues of corruption and economic decline that had fueled the rise of Ciudadanos, the new left party Podemos and given the Socialists some hope. Podemos, which has supported the referendum, might lose Spanish nationalist voters to the Socialists. It will now be associated not just with left-wing anger at Spain’s inequality and economic underperformance, its preferred issues, but also with its sympathy for Catalan nationalism.
Rajoy and Spain are winning in the sense that a state which refuses to negotiate can defeat any peaceful challenge. But the political leaders in Barcelona and Madrid who created this confrontation have done great damage by creating a fracture between Spain and Catalonia.
Consequences of the rupture
These events have also fractured society within Catalonia.
As a result of huge migratory waves from rural Spain over the last century, only about half of people in Catalonia identify as Catalan. For decades, Catalan politics has been about managing that division – promoting Catalan autonomy, language and identity without sparking a backlash by people who feel Spanish. The big demonstrations in favor of Spanish unity in Barcelona mark the destruction of much of that work.
Catalan elites have a long tradition, at this point in crisis, of leaving their radical leaders out on a breaking limb and retreating. They tend to cut off support for nationalist politics, assert their fealty to Spain and perhaps put money into less visibly confrontational Catalan civil society. We have seen them do this during almost every political transition in modern Spanish history. Some might see this as the reputed pragmatism of Catalans, withdrawing from a conflict they can’t win into nation building that will serve them well in the future. Some will say it is the pragmatism of bankers and businesspeople who prefer not to face the turbulence of secession followed by the prospect of life in a small left-wing country. That is what is happening now, with almost 2,000 businesses switching their corporate registrations out of Catalonia. There is no such clear sense of what other elites are doing behind the scenes, but most elites in Catalonia, however sentimentally nationalist, value stability more than nationalist adventures.
The Spanish government, which has suspended the Catalan government, has called elections on Dec. 21 to elect a new Catalan legislature. It is hard to predict what will happen. Maybe Spanish-identified voters who often abstain will be roused to put an end to the independence movement. Maybe Rajoy has so alienated moderate Catalans as to turn them into nationalists. Maybe the two sides will continue to remain about equal with votes shifting around between parties within each camp. Maybe police action and life without self-government in Catalonia will create new forms of radicalism.
Two things are certain: The damage to society and politics in Spain and Catalonia will be hard to mend – and fewer people will want to try. That is a shame, since a majority of people in Catalonia and Spain never wanted any of this.
https://theconversation.com/how-the-crisis-in-catalonia-is-helping-rajoy-consolidate-power-86528
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BBC News / Business / Leadership / Psychology
Do psychopaths really make better leaders?
Psychopathic personality traits are often seen as desirable in the corporate environment, but research suggests they can do more harm than good.
2 November 2017
While it may be a term more often associated with film industry depictions of knife-wielding killers like Hannibal Lecter and Dexter Morgan, there is evidence that suggests psychopaths are surprisingly common in the business environment.
Studies have indicated that, depending where you look, up to one in five of those filling company boardrooms and senior management positions are hiding psychopathic tendencies, using certain personality traits to charm and manipulate their way through the workplace.
Research by New York-based psychologist Paul Babiak’s has suggested up to 4% of business leaders in the US could be psychopaths. Another study of supply chain managers found between 3% and 21% had clinically significant psychopathy, compared to 1% of the general population.
These figures paint a picture of business leaders who put ruthless ambition above everything else and have no qualms about using people for their own advantage.
But new research is challenging the idea that psychopaths might not be as well suited to the boardroom as these earlier studies have suggested.
Challenging assumptions
Hedge fund managers scoring higher for psychopathy perform worse than their colleagues, according to a new study by researchers from the University of Denver and the University of California, Berkeley. They compared the personality traits of 101 hedge fund managers with their investments and financial returns from 2005 to 2015, and found those with greater psychopathic tendencies produced lower returns.
Leanne ten Brinke, lead author of the research and an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Denver, believes it is time to “rethink” old assumption that ruthlessness and callousness are favourable traits for business managers.
“Our findings are consistent with other research suggesting that individuals with more psychopathic traits seems to be able to ‘talk the talk’, but not ‘walk the walk’,” she says.
Psychopaths are more likely to gain power through dominance, bullying and intimidation, rather than respect, she adds. “However, gaining power is not the same as wielding it effectively.”
Research shows that psychopaths often leave behind a trail of chaos. One psychopathic CEO of a charity, for example, caused higher staff turnover and a decline in revenue. Another study found that, despite their charm, psychopaths cause counterproductive behaviour, bullying and conflict in the workplace, as well as lower employee wellbeing.
Yet, there are some roles where being a psychopath can bring benefits. Dr Kevin Dutton, research psychologist at the University of Oxford and author of The Wisdom of Psychopaths, argues that as well as the right skills for the job, personality also plays a big part in how someone gets on in the workplace.
“You need the right kind of personality to enable you to optimally operationalise that skill set,” he says.” There are some professions which, at times, require higher levels of psychopathic traits than we might be comfortable with in everyday life.”
One common way of assessing the presence of psychopathic traits in people is to use an assessment known as the Hare Psychopathy Checklist. Let’s take a look at some of the traits it lists to see whether they can cause destruction or promotion in a work environment.
Superficial charm
Psychopaths are often considered to be charming, engaging and smooth, due to a lack of self-consciousness which frees them from the inhibitions and worries about saying the wrong thing that can cause others to be more socially awkward.
Studies show that chief executives with high psychopathy scores tend to be seen as charismatic, creative and adept at communicating. This is because a psychopath’s charm can smooth over behavioural issues, according to a study in 2010 by Babiak. He found that those who score highly on a measure of psychopathy had overall poorer performance reviews, but were associated with good communication skills, strategic thinking, and creativity.
Impulsivity
There is a close link between psychopathy and dysfunctional impulsivity, including criminal and violent behaviour. But it can also mean psychopaths have a tendency to engage in risky behaviour without thinking of the consequences. This impulsivity comes from a lack of fear, according to criminal psychologist David Lykke.
While it can hurt others at times, this impulsivity can sometimes be a force for good. Researchers have found a link between psychopathy and heroics, such as helping rescue someone from a dangerous situation.
Adrian Furnham, professor of psychology at University College London, wrote in a Psychology Today article that highly impulsive people can thrive in fast-paced environments, such as a busy workplace, but they also speak and make decisions without thinking of the implications first.
Risk-taking goes hand-in-hand with entrepreneurship, according to research from Cambridge University. Tests of 16 entrepreneurs showed they had highly adaptive, risk-taking behaviour that allowed them to make decisions quickly under stress.
Lack of remorse or guilt
It is commonly thought that psychopaths don’t feel any guilt or remorse, but recent research shows they are capable of such negative emotions, but only when something impacts them directly. In other words, if they hurt someone else, they won’t be racked with guilt like someone else might, but if a situation leaves them worse off financially, for instance, they may feel regret.
A series of studies in 2014 found that those prone to feeling guilt tend to avoid forming interdependent relationships with other people they perceive to be more competent than themselves. The reason – the prospect of not contributing enough to the relationship could make them feel guilty.
But clearly there are upsides to feeling guilt too. The studies also found that when guilt-prone people do form these relationships, they work harder to avoid letting people down. A study from Stanford Graduate School of Business also found that guilt can act as a motivator. It also helps guide people morally by acting as a deterrent from doing things that are legally and morally wrong. Psychopaths know intellectually what’s right and wrong, but they don’t feel it, as one expert puts it.
Parasitic lifestyle
Another key characteristic of the psychopath is that they mostly form superficial, short-term relationships with others, before casually discarding them.
“Psychopaths generally try to perform best for themselves, but not necessarily for the people they work with or for,” says Galynker. “They’re very good at making good impressions, getting promoted and having their salaries raised, but not necessarily good in management. They’re only invested in a company if it’s needed for them to be promoted and make more money.”
People who act in their own self-interest can be seen as more dominant, even compared to people who contribute more, according to a series of experiments from Kellogg School of Management. But self-interest needs to be balanced with altruism, says to researcher Robert Livingston.
“If you’re too soft – no matter how competent and able you are – people may not respect your authority,” he says. “But if you only have dominance and you don’t have great ideas, and you use force to stay in power, then people will resent you. Being successful as a leader requires one to have both dominance and prestige.”
The right context
While there are clearly some traits that can be bad for business, the impact of personality traits ultimately come down to context, says Dutton.
“Whether psychopathic traits are useful depends on context,” he says. “Ruthlessness is not a bad thing but in the wrong context can morph into callousness. Fearlessness can also be advantageous, but in the wrong context can slip into recklessness. The key is having the right combination of traits at the right levels and in the right context.”
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20171102-do-psychopaths-really-make-better-leaders
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Putin’s Russia can’t celebrate its revolutionary past. It has to smother it
The Russian Revolution was a fight against the excesses of the rich. No wonder Vladimir Putin wants to ignore the centenary
3 November 2017
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/03/putin-russia-revolution-ignore-centenary
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How does an oppressive government celebrate a revolution?
3 November 2017
“And what, exactly, is there to be celebrating?” snapped Vladimir Putin’s press secretary on Oct. 25, a little more than a week before the 100th anniversary of what, in Soviet times, was lauded as the country’s greatest victory.
On Nov. 7, 1917, Vladimir Lenin seized power in St. Petersburg. Soviet authorities glorified that day as the dawn of the world’s first successful communist revolution – and the creation of the first country to promise racial, gender and even economic equality.
In 1967, to honor the Soviet Union’s first half-century, leaders staged countrywide displays of mass jubilation. They ordered sausages be made with the number “50,” in white fat, running through every slice.
But today, though Lenin still remains embalmed and on show in a giant mausoleum in Red Square, Moscow is strangely silent. Putin – whose grandfather cooked for Lenin – has simply called the event “ambiguous.”
Why this official disinterest, even as the upcoming centennial generates global headlines?
Perhaps because if you wish to project an image of a strong state and united people, then it’s awkward to toast the overturning of a seated government and beginning of civil war. All the more when Bolshevik actions in 1917 can be compared to those of Euromaidan protestors in 2014 Ukraine, who ousted a pro-Russian president in a move the Kremlin condemned as “an anti-constitutional takeover and armed seizure of power.”
While he’s capable of acknowledging the complexity of the Soviet origin story, Putin apparently sees no need to broadcast such confusion. Instead, he promotes an idea of “Russian greatness” in which history is used selectively, not to inform as much as to inspire. The Russian Revolution, however politically inconvenient, is no exception.
A popular uprising in name only?
In the Soviet era, the tricky thing about Revolution Day was that it was a holiday celebrating an uprising of the masses that didn’t, in fact, actually happen.
On that day, Lenin’s followers stormed into all of two buildings in the capital city of the Russian Empire. Occupying only the Winter Palace and the Central Telegraph Office, they proclaimed a government in the name of the people.
Exactly how the Bolsheviks managed to go from controlling two buildings to taking over an empire that spanned one-sixth of the world is, admittedly, quite a story. But there’s no getting around the fact that the initial, much-exalted Soviet “revolutionary moment” was little more than a coup. It was conducted by a ragtag group of political extremists who understood, at the time, that they were emphatically not acting with the support – or awareness – of most Russian citizens.
But if the Soviets struggled to recast Nov. 7 as a day when the poor turned against their rich oppressors, Russia, 100 years later, now has to grapple with the fact that it’s a capitalist country, a place where, according to Credit Suisse, 111 people control almost 20 percent of the country’s wealth. It’s also a nation that’s been ruled for 17 years by the same man – one who’s about to declare his candidacy for what would be a fourth presidential term.
At a time when Putin is keeping a tight lid on any potential opposition, the last thing the Kremlin wants to do is condone the violent overthrow of an oppressive, undemocratic regime.
Filling a symbolic void
Most pressing is the desire to project state power and national pride.
These aims were already evident in 2005, when Putin canceled the Nov. 7 holiday altogether and replaced it with a Nov. 4 “National Unity Day.”
To the extent that the Kremlin is acknowledging the upcoming centennial at all, it is with this theme of solidarity in mind. On Oct. 26, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs tweeted that it will host an international conference titled “100 Years of the Russian Revolution: Unity for the Future.” The message of the event is clear: Focus on achievements to come rather than past conflict.
It’s not that Putin or his people are anti-Soviet. Putin, in his own memoir, has unapologetically cast himself as a patriot, eager to serve in the KGB and incensed when the Berlin Wall was allowed to come down in 1989. He has called the disintegration of the USSR a “geopolitical catastrophe.”
Above all, he has been deeply critical of the Yeltsin era and the early years of Russia’s transition from communism to capitalism. During this period of mass economic hardship, Russia’s natural resources were auctioned off for laughably small sums.
The collapse of the Soviet Union also left a huge symbolic void. Faced with a history of submission – first to ruthless and opulent tsars, and then to ruthless and slightly less-opulent Soviet dictators – Russians found themselves with little to be proud of.
Everything is great
Putin and his people changed that, but largely by cherry-picking their way through the past.
For the president, the Soviet era wasn’t about repression. Nor was it about the upending of traditional order. Instead, he portrays it as a giant modernization project, marked by the defeat of Nazi Germany, the launching of the first satellite into space, and advances in education and industry.
But in contemporary Russia, the aristocratic era that the Bolsheviks swept away isn’t depicted as all that bad, either.
Recent films of the period tend to ignore the fact that, in 1917, at least 80 percent of the population were abjectly poor peasants laboring in a country that possessed only 165 tractors. (At the time, 85,000 were operating in U.S. fields.) Instead, such dramas celebrate the beauty, broad spirit, sense of honor and daring of the Russian aristocracy (including the ability of great men to absorb prodigious amounts of alcohol).
The horrific violence involved in transforming this imperial empire into a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics tends to be glossed over.
Take, for example, the opening ceremony of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. There, dancers telling a story of Russian history needed only a brief interlude of darkness and snow to move from a ballroom waltz – a nod to a famous scene in Leo Tolstoy’s novel “War and Peace,” which celebrates the country’s defeat of Napoleon – to an acrobatic march amid giant pieces of machinery.
In the blink of an eye, glamorous aristocrats defending their empire from invasion morphed into smiling proletarians carrying ladders and building up their country.
A right and a wrong way to do history
Such “happy stories” can be sustained only by discouraging critical examination.
Soviet censors used to argue that open discussion of past wrongdoing could serve only to demoralize the people, tarnish their achievements and weaken the regime. Kremlin pronouncements today remain in line with such principles.
Here it’s worth remembering that Putin comes out of the same security milieu as did Lavrenti Beria, a notorious leader of Stalin’s secret police and a lifelong proponent of doing whatever it takes to promote state power. After Stalin’s death, Beria warned his fellow Politburo members against any public critique of the great leader.
He scorned Nikita Khrushchev’s ideas of reexamining the cases of political prisoners serving time in labor camps and setting free those found to have been unjustly condemned. Release prisoners early for economic reasons, he argued, but never, ever admit the government made a mistake.
Beria lost the succession struggle, only to be unjustly condemned and shot as a spy. But his ideas live on.
This year the Kremlin did not participate in local services commemorating the anniversaries of two hostage tragedies and a nuclear submarine accident that took place during Putin’s presidency. All three incidents involved controversial government responses that the Kremlin has never acknowledged as flawed. In April, Moscow officials angrily rejected a finding by the European Court of Human Rights that Russia had been guilty of “serious failings” in its handling of one – a shootout at an elementary school in Beslan, in which 330 people were killed.
This strategy of denial extends into the cultural sphere. For example, a new British film, “Death of Stalin,” hasn’t yet been licensed for screening in Russia – but it’s already received blistering reviews in the Russian press. Various sources have deemed the political satire “more like a circus performance of clowns than a movie,” a “provocation” and “a new form of psychological warfare.”
In contrast, the minister of culture recently extolled an upcoming, domestically produced movie called “To See Stalin,” about the man who designed the Soviet T-34 tanks in WWII. He called it “a great example of correct Russian film.”
Coverage of the revolution in state-sponsored media outlets similarly tends to downplay any unsavory aspects. Rather than focus on class conflict and coup, programs highlight the admirable qualities of the various the Russian leaders involved: Leon Trotsky, Lenin and even the last Russian tsar, Nicholas II. They aim to make citizens feel proud of their past, however problematic that past might be.
As Putin remarked last December in regard to 1917: “It is not permissible to drag the schisms, animosity, insults, and callousness of the past into our contemporary life.”
The Soviet-era politician Leonid Brezhnev was less circumspect.
Rejecting a poet’s appeal for permission to publish a diary recounting the terrors of Nazi invasion, Brezhnev proclaimed: “The main truth is that we won. All other truths fade before it.”
That is the message the Kremlin sends today. The mistakes, abuses, and countless individual tragedies of history should not drag the country down.
All should be subsumed within an overarching narrative of Russian glory.
http://theconversation.com/how-does-an-oppressive-government-celebrate-a-revolution-86428
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Paragraph 175 Revisited: Genocide In Chechnya And Its Global Impact On The Criminalization Of Being LGBT
31 May 2017
Transgender rights are near nonexistent in the United States. The Russian government openly supports the persecution of LGBT individuals and imprisons detractors. Chechnya is full force LGBT genocide and concentration camps. Needless to say, around the globe, homophobia and hate continue to severely affect the LGBT community. So what’s next? Why do we sit idle and watch? There is still hope for the tide to turn in favor of the American transgender community, but the same cannot be said for LGBT people in Chechnya. The situation is code red and signifies a terrifying reality that could impact the criminalization of being LGBT around the world.
Chechnya is an eastern European country that has a degree of, but not complete, self-government. The country is under Russia’s heavy influence and it can be inferred that Russia is the common denominator in most of the nation’s social problems. Chechnya imposes the death penalty for homosexuality and there are no securities for LGBT citizens. The government encourages the killing of people suspected of homosexuality by their families. Not only does the Chechen government sanction the endorsement of families murdering their own LGBT relatives, including children, there are zero repercussions for these acts.
In February of 2017, the Chechen government reportedly launched its “gay purge.” The first concentration camps for homosexuals since World War II have been opened in Chechnya. LGBT individuals are routinely rounded up and detained in these facilities where they have been tortured and murdered. Recently, international attention was focused on the genocide in Chechnya when video surfaced of a teenage boy being thrown off the roof of an apartment building. The teenager’s family suspected him of being a homosexual and in retribution for bringing shame to his family they murdered him. The heartbreaking video sent shockwaves around the world and confirmed the horrors that the Chechen LGBT community are up against.
The situation in Chechnya is an unwelcome return to paragraph 175 under Nazi Germany. Paragraph 175 added homosexuality to the criminal code. LGBT individuals were forced to wear pink triangles and imprisoned in concentration camps across Nazis controlled Europe. Only 40 percent of “pink triangle prisoners” survived their captivity. The horrors of concentration camps have now returned to Europe, but solely targeting LGBT individuals. This in itself is a frightening gateway that could lead to the reinforcement of LGBT persecution around the world.
The future is uncertain for LGBT in Chechnya and the world has been slow to respond. Hope is beginning to emerge as the United Nations has issued condemnations against the human rights violations occurring in Chechnya. Europe and the U.S. State Department have urged Russia to investigate these crimes against humanity, but little has changed and there remain to be any sanctions placed on Chechnya for their crimes. To complicate matters, the Russian government and President Vladimir Putin are staunchly anti—LGBT, supporting laws discriminating against homosexuals. Russia vehemently arrests LGBT activists who protest against the actions in Chechnya. President Trump and his administrations close ties to Putin only add to the problem.
Solidarity amongst the global LGBT community is needed now more than ever. Diminishing LGBT rights in the U.S. under the Trump administration is a concern that must not be ignored. Our lesbian, gay, and bisexual communities have failed to fight hard enough for our transgender community. We have seen their rights be slowly stripped away, yet few voices have actively demanded that our lawmakers do not ignore the plight of our transgender allies. How can our community fight for those in Chechnya and ensure that our hard fought rights will not be infringed upon if we aren’t fighting tooth and nail for transgender rights as well. We are truly a global community and no longer can afford to be complacent when any LGBT at home or abroad are vulnerable. When voices demand action openly and keep educated on the broader community is when change occurs. It is the only way to protect our communities. The realization that any LGBT communities worldwide can so easily have their rights infringed upon and lives ended so inhumanely should terrify every soul. Speak up, speak out, and realize what happens to one LGBT community affects us all.
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United Nations LGBT rights expert warns of ‘global crisis’ as homophobic crackdowns continue
27 October 2017
The UN’s independent LGBT human rights expert has warned of a brewing global crisis amid reports of homophobic purges in several countries.
This year there have been a number of crackdowns against the gay community in a string of separate countries across the world.
Human rights monitors in Russia have warned about a homophobic purge in the autonomous Chechnya region, with dozens of gay men reportedly killed by authorities and vigilantes while many others were forced to flee.
More recently authorities in Egypt launched a crackdown on the gay community, sparked by a ‘moral panic’ over the waving of a rainbow flag at a music concert.
Since the concert, Egyptian authorities began a ‘purge’ targeted at the country’s gay community, raiding homes and arresting more than 60 people. The state has also banned local media from mentioning the issue.
Tanzania also this month clamped down on the LGBT community, raiding a summit and arresting legal experts who had had been discussing a proposed legal challenge to an anti-LGBT government policy.
The country has since outlawed the human rights charity behind the summit, accusing it of “promoting homosexuality”.
There has also been a recorded rise in anti-LGBT sentiment in other countries across the world, including Indonesia,
In a landmark address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York, a UN expert on LGBT issues warned about a “crucible” of rights violations.
The UN’s first Independent Expert on protection against violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, Vitit Muntarbhorn, made the warning today.
The Thai human rights monitor warned that immediate action is needed to stop a global crisis, as LGBT people around the world suffer horrific violations of their human rights.
Mr Muntarbhorn said: “It is unconscionable that people with an actual or perceived sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression different from a particular social norm, are targeted for violence and discrimination in many parts of the world.
“LGBT people are suffering a crucible of egregious violations, including killings, rape, mutilation, torture, arbitrary detention, abduction, harassment, physical and mental assaults. They are subjected to lashings and forced surgical interventions, bullying from a young age, incitement to hatred and pressures leading to suicide.
“More than 70 countries around the world today still criminalize same-sex relations, and in some of them the death penalty may be applied.
“Even where there is no law criminalizing consensual same-sex relations, laws on public decency, public order and social peace are used in some countries to incriminate people under the umbrella of sexual orientation, gender identity and related gender expression.”
The human rights expert called for all laws criminalizing same-sex relationships to be removed from the statute books, also calling for an end to anti-LGBT ‘gagging’ laws used for the purpose of consolidating power and suppressing dissent.
He also warned that human rights defenders were being increasingly targeted for their work in the field.
He said: “Non-governmental organizations, human rights defenders and activists, as well as independent national human rights institutions, play a crucial role in the advancement of an inclusive agenda for all without discrimination and distinction, including through the promotion of understanding of and respect for human rights and gender diversity.
“They are agents of change which can activate significant reform processes.”
Mr Muntarbhorn was first appointed to the role last year, as the UN’s first ever independent LGBT rights expert.
He said: “It is anchored in international human rights law, and it is a momentous commitment to multilateralism. It is an invitation to be forward looking and an incentive to move forward together.”
Mr Muntarbhorn said the “universal umbrella of human rights” offered a blueprint for the respect of diversity and appreciation of our common humanity.
However, his report has been met with derision from some countries.
Just last week, a delegate representing Egypt, Belarus, Russia, and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) States, minus Albania, rejected all cooperation with the international expert.
They said: “Our position on the matter is clear, that we do not recognize the mandate of the independent expert and therefore are not in a position to engage, interact or cooperate with the mandate holder.
“While reiterating our firm commitment to combat different forms of violence and discrimination, we believe that the resolution establishing the mandate adopted by a margin vote is highly divisive.
“Moreover the introduction and imposition of controversial notions outside the internationally agreed human rights legal framework contradicts the fundamental universality and would lead to polarization.”
But UN Member States across the world stood up for the integrity of the human rights system during the process, and by doing so showed their support for the IE SOGI position.
This included countries across the Asia-Pacific such as Japan, whose delegate stated: “Picking and choosing the outcomes of the Human Rights Council and blocking the ones which are not favorable for some of the delegations in the General Assembly undermines the discussions and the decisions made in the Human Rights Council and it therefore sets a dangerous precedent.
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From Dayton To Jerusalem – Federalism Is The Green Way To Build Peace
October 2017
Federalism can be a means to achieving this, in some cases even where the will of the those concerned is not yet present, as long as the international community stands together and ensures respect for the fundamental values of justice, equality, and mutual tolerance.
European Greens believe not only in biodiversity in nature, but also among humans. They believe and cherish national and cultural diversity, in humans being ‘different but equal’. They should therefore propose an alternative path towards ending wars across the world which reflects our political visions and beliefs. Greens believe in sustainable solutions for problems, thinking ahead for the next generations. Conflict resolution and peace-making does not mean simply separating the fighting parties. On the other hand, we should not become idealistic or utopian either in designing our foreign policy.
This is not about ‘peace and love’. Imposing federalism in a conflict-zone is enforcing a political framework which enables different national groups to live together, not only preventing a new eruption of violence, but also allowing the slow process of trust-building and transitional justice. Federalism is not a short-term cease-fire but rather a long-term political framework in which the different elites learn to share power and find compromises.
The end of ethnically homogeneous states
In the past, Europe ended wars by creating new nation-states, with new national borders. This often required a mass transfer of population (or forced ‘ethnic cleansing’) in order to create geographical areas which were ‘ethnically’ or ‘nationally’ homogenous, without which the creation of the nation-state was meaningless. Millions lost their homes, moving to their new ‘national home’, while national minorities which remained within the nation-state of the ‘other’ often suffered from structural and legal discrimination in all aspects of life. Moreover, as nations were separated, mistrust and hatred remained intact, and even growing behind the closed borders. Signed peace treaties were therefore often short-term tactical breaks between wars. Conflicts were not really resolved and therefore would flare up again once conditions were ripe.
Today, after having succeeded in making peace among ourselves, after hundreds of years of mutual killing and destruction, Europeans have some important experience to build on. The secret for long-term sustainable peace in Europe was not more separation between the peoples, higher borders and deeper trenches, but rather the opposite. The way to sustainable peace is a long-term process of integration and cooperation between the peoples’ representatives, the nations’ governing elites. It is federalism.
Federalism is a particularly useful instrument to manage different nations within the borders of a single state, to consolidate the different national groups sharing one single polity. Multinational federalism is an appropriate tool of peaceful conflict-management in ethnically or nationally divided states, a way to manage the aspirations of different nations within the borders of one state. Federalism is not based on strict separation between the peoples but on power-sharing among the elites, compromise-seeking, consensus and deliberation, learning how to live together. The federal framework should also be accompanied with mechanisms of transitional justice, facing the injustices of the past and the war crimes committed. Imposing a federation on fighting peoples is a long-term process, but it has the promise to engender trust and enable reconciliation between the rival parties.
Imposing federalism
Europe today, as part of the international community at large, has the power to impose federalism on fighting parties across the world, and to closely follow the implementation of the new federation once it is installed. The international community imposed federalism in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) by the Dayton Peace Agreement of 1995, and in Iraq with the new constitution of 2005. Other examples of attempts to impose federalism are the Annan plans of the UN for Cyprus or the discussion on possible solutions to Sri-Lanka. In Israel/Palestine, the two-state-solution is losing its viability on the ground, mainly due to Israeli colonisation of the West Bank. However, even if a Palestinian State eventually sees the day with 1967 borders, it is difficult to see how to practically resolve crucial issues such as the refugees of 1948, the rights of the Arab minority within Israel (20% of the state’s population), or how to practically divide the city of Jerusalem. An imposed federation, based on the right to self-government to the different national entities, together with a thin central level of shared government, sharing one territorial unit from the river Jordan to the mediterranean Sea, may be a more sustainable solution for generations to come.
The main argument we hear against possible federal solutions in these cases is that the local political elites do not believe in federalism and power-sharing, only in self-determination and separation. What is often missing when we discuss federalism is a clear distinction between federalism and federation. Federalism is the normative political ideology behind federations, while federation is the practical framework, the federal political system in a state. Federalism is not necessarily a goal and a value in itself, but can also be simply used as a tool in order to transform an ethnic or national conflict into a peaceful state.
The fact is when resolving a conflict by creating a federation, we do not necessarily need the willingness of leaders to unite in a common state. The international community can impose a federation as a state structure on warring parties in order to pacify a country and to keep it together. This kind of federalism is not based on volition, the agreement of all parties is not required, and the international community plays a key role in the creation of the federal union. Federalism can be a new form of conflict resolution and peace-building.
Back to Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Dayton Agreement of 1995, establishing the federation of BiH, was not a voluntary contract, reached in good faith and though co-operation and compromise, but an imposed treaty, reached by international pressure, primarily by the US government and the EU. In fact, the agreement itself was substantially designed by American lawyers. Thus, a very important element of federalism, its voluntary nature, may be totally absent when federations are created.
Internationally administrated federation
In 1995, there was no will among the three constituent peoples of the federation, Croats, Serbs and Bosniaks, to unite in a federal union. Moreover, the federal system which was imposed on the parties in 1995 has since developed into an internationally administrated federation. Representatives of the international community have had a massive impact on the state. The United Nations’ High Representative (HR) is the guarantor of the Dayton Agreements and their final interpreter. In addition, through NATO and the EU, via its Special Representative (EUSR) and the IMF, the international community became part of the implementation of Dayton. Since 1995, competences were gradually transferred from the entity-level to the central level. Also this transfer was not always based on the consent of the Bosnian parties, but rather on the imposition of the international community as part of its policy of the implementation of the Dayton Accords.
The most visible examples are the imposition by the Office of the High Representative (HR) of ‘ethnically neutral’ symbols such as a common flag, a common currency, a national anthem, a new coat of arms, and a new law on citizenship, all without any reference to Bosnia’s multinational character. Bosnian representatives were always given the chance to find a decision first, but failed to reach a common position. Imposed federalism is also a process, not a static framework. It is a process of centralisation and strengthening of the state-level institutions, reducing the influence of the entities, as part of the internationally administrated federation.
A need for political will
Federation has also been raised as a possible solution to the current crisis in Ukraine (as Greens-EFA co-chair, Rebecca Harms, mentions in this volume). However, we should carefully consider our own role in a foreign country when imposing federalism on it. Federalism is not simply the decentralisation of a country as we observe in France, Spain or the UK. When a country is in a state of deep crisis, facing a national/ethnic conflict, which is tearing it dramatically apart, with the danger of war crimes and ethnic cleansing, a federal structure is a good tool, but it needs to be administrated and implemented by the international community. In other words, it requires an active political will.
The model of Bosnia-Herzegovina is also an interesting one in this respect, since the country´s federalism was also accompanied by a process of its international integration into NATO and the EU. This is very different from the case of Ukraine. It is important to highlight that federalism in conflict-ridden countries is not merely a simple decentralisation, where different local governments can be left to govern their own territories and handle their own business. The international community has a key role to play in the implementation of the process on the ground, preventing the security situation from deteriorating and enforcing the federal framework of shared governance.
Start with demilitarisation
The first step in this process is a sort of demilitarisation of the different armed forces which co-exist in the country, transforming them into legitimate coordinated Police Units. This was the case in Israel/Palestine during the 1990s, when the armed Fatah militants in the West Bank and Gaza became the legitimate police force of the newly created Palestinian Authority, controlling security in certain areas in coordination with the Israeli security forces. Furthermore, an important measure to be taken when imposing federalism in such cases is a massive deployment of international troops in order to enforce the cease-fire and the implementation of the peace accords, as was done in Bosnia and Herzegovina after 1995.
However, in the case of Ukraine, Russia and the EU do not seem to share a common political will, and therefore are not likely to agree on a joint international intervention of this kind. In Israel-Palestine following the 1993 Oslo accords, the peace process suffered from a lack of international intervention forces to ensure the overall framework of the agreement, and a lack of imposed implementation of the accords on the ground. When distrust is so high between the parties, the international community´s role is necessary. Finally, the Oslo accords turned out to be merely a partial measure of decentralisation of the country, and was therefore not a suitable and sustainable solution to the conflict, which was triggered once again a few years later.
Transitional justice
What is also often missing in imposed solutions after conflict are effective mechanisms of transitional justice, reconciliation and forgiving the other’s atrocities and getting to know better the narrative of the other. One of the core elements of power-sharing is the focus on moderate elites, who are willing to co-operate and find compromise. However, post-Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina is dominated by fully-fledged nationalist parties which focus on their own national groups and are unwilling to compromise. In fact, the main reasons for the war in the early 1990s were not addressed in Dayton. Because of a blockade among the national groups’ representatives and international imposition, a climate of co-operation and trust has not yet developed.
This is why it is necessary to complement the imposition of a federal framework with a process of transitional justice, a long-term process of people to people dialogue and trust-building across communities. This bottom-up, sustainable approach is, after all, the Green approach to doing politics.
From Dayton to Jerusalem – Federalism Is the Green Way to Build Peace
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Beware: this Russian cyber warfare threatens every democracy
Kremlin-inspired interference is about much more than skewed elections. It’s the world of mind control imagined by George Orwell
4 November 2017
Anyone in Europe and Britain worried about the state of US democracy should take time to watch the videos of this week’s congressional hearings over Russian online meddling in the 2016 presidential election. If the words “checks and balances” mean anything, this surely is it.
My favourite moment is when senator Dianne Feinstein leans into the microphone and says sternly to the Facebook, Twitter and Google representatives (whose evasive answers have exasperated her): “You don’t get it! This is a very big deal. What we’re talking about is cataclysmic. It is cyber warfare. A major foreign power with sophistication and ability got involved in our presidential election.”
We don’t yet know the full picture. In particular, we don’t know if Russian-promoted bots, trolls and online ads had an impact that in any way altered the outcome of the US election. At this stage, to claim they did may be crediting Vladimir Putin with more power than he actually wields. What emerged from the hearings is that Russia’s likeliest goal was to sow discord and confusion among citizens of the world’s most powerful democracy.
Still, it would be wrong to think this affects America alone. Europe and Britain are directly concerned by what the US investigations will uncover. Atlanticism and its security dimensions are much debated these days. (Questions also lurk in the background over the national act of self-mutilation that is Brexit.) But the transatlantic relationship has a new dimension to explore: the online world. Feinstein hinted at this when she said: “The US is the first country to bring attention” to the “responsibility” of tech giants in making sure social media isn’t turned into an instrument of authoritarianism rather than a platform for citizens’ freedom. “Other countries will follow,” she said.
The ripple effects of the US investigations into Russian meddling will be felt in Europe also.
Russian interference in Europe’s politics and its information space is not new, of course. Its roots lie in old KGB disinformation methods, now actively combined with new technologies. In Britain, the question has taken on an important new twist, with growing calls for parliamentary scrutiny of the financing of the pro-Brexit campaign, whose social media dimension mattered greatly. If the “special relationship” still has meaning, surely it must now include a joint effort to get to the bottom of how Russian social media manipulation in the US resonated with what happened in the UK referendum.
The ramifications of this debate are huge. The US and the UK, the two countries that laid the foundations of the post-1945 global liberal order, may have had their political integrity compromised by hostile foreign meddling in a way that helped produce Trump and Brexit. If that turns out to be true, then we are looking at an entirely new world – one whose complexities we may only be starting to fathom. Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, written 70 years ago, contained not just “newspeak”, “facecrime” and surveillance screens. It also described a geopolitical vision in which “Oceania” (including the Americas and Britain), “Eurasia” and “Eastasia” were all in the grip of totalitarian nightmares, with control over minds even more important than control over bodies.
Literary analogies shouldn’t be abused, but the US probe surely has deep significance for other parts of the world too – and European democracies need to pay close attention. Make no mistake, this isn’t just about Trump and whether his campaign colluded with the Kremlin. It is about how the large, ungoverned areas of cyberspace are the new arena where authoritarian powers and democracies will increasingly be waging a battle – one that the latter are insufficiently prepared for. Likewise, Russia’s attempts to undermine western democracies from within may be only the tip of an iceberg that is heading towards us. Think China. At a recent thinktank conference in Brussels, I was struck by how some European business people were head over heels about China’s “One Belt One Road” project to Europe. One participant gushed that the Chinese firms were “so good” at using new technologies and data – no matter that the regime has utilised its skill at data mining for the purposes of crowd control and suppressing dissent. Recent revelations about how China imposed online censorship on entities such as Cambridge University Press and the Springer publishing group should be ringing more alarm bells. China has incomparably larger resources than Russia, whose economy is the size of Italy’s.
In the US hearings, another senator, Mark Warner, pointed out that Russian cyber strategies in the US “will no doubt be duplicated by other powers who are enemies of democracy. This is not just an American problem. Other foreign operatives have read this playbook.”
Interestingly, the Facebook representative was then asked whether the platform would suppress specific content in a geographical area to abide by local laws including, for example, taking down a Chinese dissident’s postings. He partly deflected the question by answering that Facebook did so already in Germany, where legislation bans Holocaust denial. That moment, if anything, brought a small glimpse into the many complex aspects of a debate that will define much about whether democratic principles can be upheld in a technologically interconnected world.
Europe has no tech giants of its own. In fact, it’s only starting to build its single digital market. So the US probe into how Silicon Valley platforms are used as Trojan horses by foreign autocracies serves as a groundbreaking exercise. Marietje Schaake, a Dutch MEP, notes that “the digital revolution has led to a redistribution of power, but not to a redistribution of accountability and oversight”. She adds: “The global tech companies are the new sovereigns, but are designed to maximise profit – not democracy.” She’s calling for “digital democratic conventions” that might help set up rules.
None of this is simple. But if there’s a lesson to be drawn from the US hearings, it is that the law of the jungle rules in social media. That has massive implications. With Europe’s populist wave still pounding the continent, it is high time for us, too, to find solutions. After all, if Russian troll farms can impersonate Black Lives Matter activists and white supremacists in the US, what can they be up to in Europe? And who’s looking into this?
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Brexit, the ministers, the professor and the spy: how Russia pulls strings in UK
The charges filed against a Trump aide shocked the US – but also shed new light on the complex connections that link Russia to Brexit and the Foreign Office
4 November 2017
On “or about” 25 April 2016, a member of Donald Trump’s campaign team emailed his line manager with good news. His efforts to make contact with the highest levels of power in Moscow had borne fruit: “The Russian government has an open invitation by Putin for Mr Trump to meet him when he is ready.”
This was George Papadopoulos, a 30-year-old foreign policy adviser for the Trump campaign who was arrested by the FBI in July, it was revealed last week, after lying about a series of meetings with a man the FBI described as “a professor based in London”.
The next sentence in his email added a line of explanation: “The advantage of being in London is that these governments tend to speak a bit more openly in ‘neutral cities’.”
The Papadopoulos indictment is a riveting read – a sober, tautly worded document whose contents may have exploded across the news cycle like a dirty bomb, but which sticks to the facts. In doing so, it could provide not just evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Putin regime, but also the first cold, hard evidence of Britain’s central role.
This is a political scandal in which the stakes keep rising. Evidence of Russian influence keeps mounting. And in Britain, hard questions are only just starting to be asked despite the dramatic developments in the US. Last week also saw two US Senate committees hauling Facebook, Google and Twitter before them. Russian-sourced US election ads they had run had been paid for in roubles, a senator pointed out. Why didn’t Facebook spot that?
But on Brexit, Facebook has said nothing. Not a word. No ads have been scrutinised. Nothing – even though Ben Nimmo of the Atlantic Council thinktank, asked to testify before the senate intelligence committee last week, says evidence of Russian interference online is now “incontrovertible”. He says: “It is frankly implausible to think that we weren’t targeted too.”
Last weekend, the Observer asked why Nigel Farage has not been questioned about his connections to the Trump-Russia investigation, particularly regarding his relationship to Julian Assange, whose WikiLeaks website published thousands of internal Democratic party emails in the run-up to the US election. But last week’s revelations introduce a whole new cast of characters. And at the centre of it all is London – this “neutral city” – playing the same strategic role that Vienna did during the cold war.
“The entire city is a nest of spies,” a British intelligence source told the Observer this year. “There’s more espionage activity here now than there was even at the height of the cold war.”
On 25 April 2016, the world had no clue about Papadopoulos, about Trump and Russia, or about the man quickly identified as the “London professor” – a 57-year-old Maltese academic, Joseph Mifsud. Reached by journalists, Mifsud confirmed that the US indictment refers to him but denied any knowledge of its claims about links to the Kremlin, or of knowing about “dirt on Hillary” in “thousands of emails”.
But what the document does not spell out – and what the Observer has learned – is that both Mifsud and Papadopoulos also had links into the heart of the British government.
We publish evidence today of several confirmed meetings between Mifsud and Alok Sharma, the MP for Reading West and a Foreign Office minister until June this year. It was this relationship between Mifsud and Sharma that put the “London professor” directly into the orbit of the foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, two weeks ago – at a fundraising dinner attended by both Johnson and Mifsud, with Mifsud telling a colleague he was returning to London from Rome to “have dinner with Boris Johnson … re: Brexit”.
The Foreign Office has confirmed that a third minister, Tobias Ellwood, met Papadopoulos at the UN general assembly in September 2016. Ellwood ignored multiple attempts by the Observer to contact him and has refused to comment on how the contact was made or what was discussed.
Three Foreign Office ministers approached in three different ways. Yet when asked last week if there was any evidence of Russian interference in British politics, Johnson said: “I haven’t seen a sausage.”
Johnson cannot have been looking very hard. He is far from the first senior politician to be targeted – a group that includes some of his closest colleagues in the Leave campaign. Because what the Observer and Guardian’s investigation into foreign influence in the EU referendum is starting to reveal is that the tentacles of US influence and money, and Russian influence and money, reach much deeper and further into the British political establishment than we have yet understood.
In Britain, on 25 April 2016, the news was dominated by the forthcoming vote. “EU referendum: Boris Johnson claims ‘elites want to remain in Europe to keep hold of power’” said the headline in the Independent. The referendum was less than two months away and Johnson was the figurehead of the official Vote Leave campaign.
The surprise announcement last week from the Electoral Commission of an inquiry into “the true source of donations” to Leave campaigners is focused on Arron Banks – the main donor behind Farage’s fringe Leave.EU campaign. But Johnson was at the head of the “official” campaign – the commission designated Vote Leave as the government-approved campaign, an honour that meant it got to spend £7m, including £600,000 of taxpayers’ money. And although he was still mayor of London, Johnson was Vote Leave’s show pony – the charismatic figurehead who led from the front.
He was not the legal head of the campaign. That was Matthew Elliott, 39, a political strategist who had registered Vote Leave Ltd at Companies House and filed the legal documents with the commission. In 2004, Elliott had founded the TaxPayers’ Alliance, a rightwing pressure group advocating low taxes and minimal government, and he had worked his way up the political ladder to win one of the most coveted and responsible jobs of 2016: chief executive of Vote Leave.
If Johnson wanted to understand how the Russian government had deliberately targeted British political figures and spent years cultivating relationships with key individuals, he could have looked to the man responsible for leading his own campaign.
In 2012 – or possibly earlier – Matthew Elliott was targeted by a man the Home Office now believes was a Russian spy. Sergey Nalobin was the first secretary in the Russian embassy’s political section in London when Elliott met him – a man who, according to a Daily Telegraph report, “was tasked with building relations with MPs [and] a regular fixture on the Westminster drinks circuit and at political party conferences”.
Nalobin was also a man who, in August 2015, had his permission to stay in Britain suddenly revoked. The Home Office refused to renew the visas of four Russian diplomats, normally a rubber-stamping exercise, Nalobin among them. The timing was not a coincidence: a week earlier, the inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko concluded he was “probably murdered on the personal orders of Putin”.
Nalobin had long been a person of interest. In 2012, he was the key figure at the heart of an organisation called Conservative Friends of Russia, a high-profile new group that threw a high-profile launch in the Russian ambassador’s garden – the same ambassador, Alexander Yakovenko, who was named last week in the FBI documents – and that attracted the endorsement of senior politicians including, initially, Malcolm Rifkind, until he resigned. Rifkind was then chair of the Commons intelligence and security committee.
But the Conservative Friends of Russia was not what it seemed, and nor was Nalobin. A series of reports by the Guardian’s Luke Harding and others revealed that Nalobin was intimately connected to the FSB, and that the Conservative Friends of Russia was a Moscow influence operation.
Sergei Cristo, a Russian-born financier and long-time Conservative activist who helped expose the organisation, told the Observer last week how he was targeted first by Nalobin but quickly became aware that there was something very wrong. “He was trying very hard to find an entry route into the Conservative party, and initially he thought that would be me. I met with him several times and he told me how he could help with fundraising. He said: ‘We have companies. We have Russian companies here in London willing to donate to the party.’ I knew this was illegal, of course. I went away thinking, ‘I wish I was wired.’”
This, he said, was about six months before the group’s launch.
Cristo reveals an even more extraordinary detail – a detail that he first told to a journalist in 2013 so which has not been inflected by more recent events: “The most pressing question Nalobin asked was whether or not there really was a personal rivalry between David Cameron and Boris Johnson.”
At the time, Cristo thought, “it was completely trivial”. “It was all chatty, chatty, chatty. It was only question he pressed me on. ‘Do you think it’s personal?’ he kept on asking.
“I think he was trying to work out if it was a deep-seated alpha-male-type thing. I do wonder now if they were looking to exploit that antipathy even way back then. It’s very interesting, given the crucial role that Boris played in Brexit.”
Matthew Elliott has never made his association with the Conservative Friends of Russia public. In 2012, he was not publicly known. Since the referendum, he has launched a new organisation, Brexit Central, and the Times reported last week that he was being lined up for a senior role at the head of the party – most likely vice-chairman, as a reassuring “signal of intent on Brexit” for the hardliners.
But photographs from 2012 reveal that he was a founding member of the group and later that year went on a 10-day trip to Moscow with all expenses paid by the Russian government. No names were ever released but on 11 September, Elliott tweeted: “New photos on my Facebook page from my recent trip to Moscow, here’s a teaser! Back to the grind …”
Most extraordinary of all, when he announced his engagement on Twitter on 10 January 2014, the first person to congratulate him was Sergey Nalobin. “@matthew_elliott @SarahBSmithVA congratulations, guys! All the best in the long-long journey.” Sarah Smith – now Elliott’s wife – responded warmly: “thank you!! I’m excited to have a great partner next to me :)”
Just over 18 months later, Nalobin was “expelled” from Britain. And yesterday, Elliott declined to answer any questions from the Observer about his relationship with Nalobin or Conservative Friends of Russia. He declined also to explain the nature of the political work he claims to have done in Ukraine in some official biographies.
Did Johnson know of Elliott’s connections to a Russian operative? Probably – because he also knew Nalobin. They are photographed at Russian embassy events together. Did the British intelligence services? An intelligence source told the Observer of “enormous sensitivity” around any investigation of politicians. And Elliott was not an MP, but in 2016 he did hold an official position – designated by an official body, the Electoral Commission. Was his relationship to Nalobin flagged by the security services? If so, by whom, to who? If not, why not?
Will the FBI’s revelations last week finally shine some light on Russia’s relationship with Britain? And if so, what else will we find out? Because it is clear that the relationships and meetings the Observer has uncovered between Papadopoulos, Mifsud and British ministers are likely to be the tip of the iceberg.
Which other ministers were contacted? Who else met them? Are the Conservatives, and indeed other parties, ready to start examining their relationships with Russian individuals and companies, going back years? And who is going to take a stand and force Facebook, Google and Twitter to face parliament and start answering questions?
Bill Browder, an Anglo-American businessman who is leading a global campaign for a “Magnitsky Act” – aimed at punishing Russia for the murder of his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, in Moscow in 2009 – said he was unsurprised by Britain’s role.
“London is one of the main outposts for Russian financial and political influence programmes in the west. It’s floating on a tide of dirty money. All the oligarchs have bases there. They all have homes. All the professional service firms are in London – lawyers, investigations agencies – all running private influence ops on behalf of the oligarchs who are working on behalf of Putin. There’s a huge reluctance in Britain to strangle the golden goose. Because a lot of people very close the centre of power are financially benefiting.”
The question is who? And how? Speaking to the Observer about the inquiry into the sources of funds for his Leave.EU campaign, Banks complained about the focus on him. “There should be an inquiry into all the campaigns, not just us.” And later: “What about Vote Leave?”
What about Vote Leave? And what about the new man in the Russian embassy? Some of the suspicion that has encircled Banks has been a result of his Russian wife, Katya, his vocal support of Putin, and the fact that in his memoir, The Bad Boys of Brexit, he is quite open about his Russian contacts, describing how he met a man called “Oleg” in Doncaster at the Ukip conference.
“He was introduced to us as the first secretary at the embassy – in other words, the KGB’s man in London.” “Oleg” then introduced him to a figure now of significant interest to the FBI – Alexander Yakovenko, the Russian ambassador to London.
Ukip’s power is all but spent in Britain. It is the Conservatives who now hold the keys to the kingdom. And Sergei Cristo tells me he met another senior Russian diplomat at this year’s Conservative party conference.
Cristo is not a man out to discredit the Conservatives. He is a committed supporter of the party. But he’s also a close friend of Marina Litvinenko, the widow of the man murdered on Putin’s orders. The problem, he says, is that so many MPs and party officials are “hopelessly naive and uneducated” on the subject of Russia.
The rest of us too, perhaps?
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/nov/04/brexit-ministers-spy-russia-uk-brexit
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Boris Johnson in spotlight as questions raised over Russian influence on UK
Foreign secretary among three ministers targeted by people linked to FBI investigation into Donald Trump’s alleged collusion with Moscow
4 November 2017
Three senior past and present Foreign Office ministers, including the foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, were targeted by individuals identified by the FBI last week as central to their investigation into Trump-Russia collusion, the Observer has learned.
Tom Watson, deputy leader of the Labour party, called the revelations “extraordinary” and said the government must say whether other ministers were targeted or had meetings. The reports from the US had shocked MPs, he said, and it was vital to know if the Russian state had also sought to influence British politics.
The Observer has learned of meetings and encounters between British ministers and two individuals named in FBI indictments unsealed last week – George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy adviser for Donald Trump’s campaign, and a “London professor” with high-level connections to the Russian state, subsequently identified as a Maltese academic, Joseph Mifsud.
Alok Sharma, a Foreign Office minister until June year and MP for Reading West, confirmed he had met Mifsud “a couple of times” and he had attended a fundraising dinner in his constituency on 19 October this year, where he had “briefly greeted” him.
An email from Mifsud to a colleague, seen by the Observer and uncovered by Byline, the crowdfunded independent journalism site, revealed Mifsud had told a colleague he would be “meeting Boris Johnson for dinner re Brexit” on that date. Sharma confirmed Johnson was the guest speaker at the event.
A Foreign Office source said: “The foreign secretary has not knowingly met this person, planned to meet this person, or indeed ever heard of this person before.”
Sharma said: “I did not introduce him to Boris Johnson and I don’t think anyone else did either.” But indications of Russian efforts to make contacts with British officials could prove embarrassing for Johnson, who was asked about possible foreign interference in Britain last week and replied: “I haven’t seen a sausage.”
The revelation comes as the Observer investigation into foreign influence places him in a web of relationships between a known Russian spy, Sergey Nalobin, expelled from Britain in 2015, and Matthew Elliott, the chief executive of Vote Leave, the official Leave campaign headed by Johnson.
Watson said: “We’re starting to have a much clearer picture from America of how the Russian state sought to influence the US election and I think there are multiple questions to be asked about how and in what ways the Russian state may have been exerting influence in British politics. Given the gravity of the allegations against Mr Papadopoulos, the government should make public any meetings these two individuals had with British officials and what was discussed.”
Even more questions are raised by a meeting the Observer has discovered between Papadopoulos and Tobias Ellwood, then a senior minister in the Foreign Office, at the UN general assembly in September 2016.
This was when Papadopoulos was still working for the Trump campaign and, according to the FBI’s documents, had made multiple contacts through his intermediary – the “London professor” – with “high-level Russian officials”. Ellwood’s meeting occurred after Papadopoulos had discovered in April that the Russians had “dirt on Hillary [Clinton]” in the form of “thousands of emails” but before WikiLeaks started publishing her emails in October.
Ben Bradshaw, the MP who has been one of the few voices asking questions about possible Russian interference in British democracy, said the Foreign Office’s explanation that such a meeting was “routine” was implausible. “In my experience, it is not normal for a minister to meet party campaign operatives while on official government business.” He added: “If Mr Papadopoulos’s role was as junior as Trump has been claiming, I would be surprised that a minister as senior and experienced as Mr Ellwood would agree to meet him.”
Tom Brake, the Liberal Democrat spokesman for Brexit, said it was time to launch a formal inquiry. “With concerns emerging about possible Russian interference here in the EU referendum, the [Commons] intelligence and security committee needs to be reconstituted as a matter of urgency.”
“Their first inquiry should focus on possible Russian meddling in the EU referendum. People need to know if Russian roubles played any part in securing the small majority for Brexit on 23June 2016.”
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/nov/04/boris-johnson-brexit-russia-trump
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Buried in a government bill, an immigration rule strips millions of their data protection
3 November 2017
The government’s data protection bill was meant to give people control over their information. Instead it will strip millions of their rights.
The supposed intention of the legislation is to “empower people to take control of their data”. But schedule 2.4 removes data protection rights from individuals when their personal information is processed for “the maintenance of effective immigration control” or “the investigation or detection of activities that would interfere with effective immigration control”.
In technical terms, that means any government agency processing data for immigration purposes will be free of those pesky data protection obligations we’ve developed through successive Acts of parliament – and signed up to through the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
In practice the exemption will create a two-tier data rights regime. When an agency relies on the exemption, individuals will lose their right to know what information is held about them, who is processing it and why.
They will not be able to correct or erase information held about them – which doesn’t bode well considering how much of the data held on us is out of date or just plain wrong.
The Home Office is a notoriously poor data controller. There are countless examples. Just last month Dr Mohsen Danaie was told he had “no lawful basis to be in the UK”. He would be forcibly removed if he didn’t leave voluntarily. Dr Danaie is a research scientist – and has a work visa valid until 2019.
A 2016 investigation by the Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration found that of a sample of 169 refusals to open bank accounts, ten per cent were dismissed in error.
People’s lives could be ruined in an instant. And it won’t just affect migrants.
The lack of a definition of “effective immigration control” or activities that would interfere with it makes it practically impossible to draw up a list of all those who could be caught up.
Would people working to help migrants – maybe those running food banks or night shelters – be seen as frustrating the Home Office strategy of incentivising people to ‘go home’ through enforced destitution?
The exemption could also be used to facilitate the sharing of personal data between public services and the Home Office if it’s decided checking everyone’s entitlement to access healthcare, education or social housing is necessary for effective immigration control.
This would effectively create a digital ID card for each and every one of us without us knowing what data is being shared, or being able to have it corrected or deleted.
The idea that personal data collected for one purpose can’t be used for another without the individual’s informed consent is the cardinal principle of data protection. This exemption makes a mockery of it and sets a damaging precedent for the privacy rights of all of us.
Hostile environment
Exemptions for crime – including immigration offences – are covered elsewhere in the bill. So why add this all-encompassing immigration exemption?
The Home Office has been publicly committed to creating a “hostile environment” for undocumented migrants since 2012 – turning public servants and even private citizens into border guards.
Charging the masses with reporting on others has affected the very fabric of our society, creating the potential for discrimination against all migrants and ethnic minority communities, and spreading suspicion and division. The widespread and routine sharing of personal data collected by frontline agencies with the Home Office is the cornerstone of the hostile environment.
In the last year alone, secret deals to aid immigration enforcement have been exposed between the Home Office and the Department of Health and NHS Digital, Department for Education, the Greater London Authority and more. They’ve all been set up without public consultation or parliamentary scrutiny, and have only been exposed through FoI requests.
If the immigration exemption stays in the Data Protection Bill, agencies including the Home Office will have the virtually limitless ability to process data without transparency or oversight – with no need for suspicion of criminal activity as long as they cite “immigration control”.
In other words, it would give the green light for these backroom data-sharing deals to operate in secret even when no crime is suspected – extending a regime that is already causing migrants to avoid seeking healthcare and keep their children away from school.
Strike it down
When the Data Protection Act 1983 was working its way through parliament, it contained a nearly identical clause which – widely and rightly condemned – never became law.
This new incarnation would turn the clock back on more than 30 years of improved community relations and human rights protections. The Lords must stand against this and scrap the immigration exemption.
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Russia funded Facebook and Twitter investments through Kushner associate
Institutions with close links to Kremlin financed stakes through business associate of Trump’s son-in-law, leaked files reveal
5 November 2017
Two Russian state institutions with close ties to Vladimir Putin funded substantial investments in Twitter and Facebook through a business associate of Jared Kushner, leaked documents reveal.
The investments were made through a Russian technology magnate, Yuri Milner, who also holds a stake in a company co-owned by Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior White House adviser.
The discovery is likely to stir concerns over Russian influence in US politics and the role played by social media in last year’s presidential election. It may also raise new questions for the social media companies and for Kushner.
Alexander Vershbow, who was a US ambassador to Russia under George W Bush and to Nato under Bill Clinton, said the Russian state institutions were frequently used as “tools for Putin’s pet political projects”.
Vershbow said the findings were concerning in light of efforts by Moscow to disrupt US democracy and public debate. “There clearly was a wider plan, despite Putin’s protestations to the contrary,” he said.
The investments are detailed in the Paradise Papers, a trove of millions of leaked documents reviewed by the Guardian, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and other partners, along with other previously unreported filings.
Facebook and Twitter were not made aware that funding for the investments came from the state-controlled VTB Bank and a financial arm of the state oil and gas firm Gazprom, according to Milner. A spokesman for Kushner declined to comment.
The files show that in 2011, VTB funded a $191m investment in Twitter. About the same time, Gazprom Investholding financed an opaque offshore company, which in turn funded a vehicle that held $1bn-worth of Facebook shares.
The money flowed through investment vehicles controlled by Milner, who in 2015 invested in a startup in New York that Kushner co-owns with his brother. Kushner initially failed to disclose his own holding in the startup, Cadre, when he joined Trump’s White House.
Milner once advised the Russian government on technology through a presidential commission chaired by Dmitry Medvedev, the former president and current prime minister. Now based in California’s Silicon Valley, Milner has invested $7bn in more than 30 online companies including Airbnb, Spotify and the Chinese retailers Alibaba and JD.com.
In a series of interviews, Milner said VTB’s funding did not buy it influence at Twitter. He said he was not aware that Gazprom Investholding had backed the stake in Facebook. Milner said the deals were a small part of his overall investment portfolio and were done when US-Russia relations were better.
Milner contests he is an associate of Kushner. He said he had invested in Kushner’s business purely for commercial reasons, and disputed the notion that they were associates. He said they had met only once, over cocktails in the US last year. “I’m not involved in any political activity. I’m not funding any political activity,” said Milner.
The disclosure that stakes in two of the US’s biggest technology companies were financed by Russian entities with links to the Kremlin comes as the covert use of their platforms by Russians aiming to boost Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign is under intense scrutiny. Both VTB and Gazprom are now under US sanctions.
Though Milner said the investments had no connection to the controversy, the findings are likely to add to pressure on Facebook and Twitter to give a full and transparent account of their interactions with Moscow entities before and during the US election.
Vanessa Chan, a spokeswoman for Facebook, said the investment backed by Gazprom Investholding had been sold five years ago, after Facebook went public. Chan said Facebook “rejected the notion of a lack of due diligence” being done on its investors. A Twitter spokesperson said: “As a matter of policy Twitter conducted reviews of all pre-IPO investors.”
The Twitter and Facebook investments were made by Milner’s investment company DST Global, which was set up in 2009. At the time, Milner joined forces with the Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov, a co-owner of Arsenal FC, who invested heavily in DST Global funds.
Purchases of Facebook and Twitter were public knowledge and turned out to be lucrative. Usmanov is estimated to have made more than $1bn on his original $200m stake. He sold the last of his Facebook holdings in September 2013. But the role of major state-run Russian banks in funding some stakes – including in Twitter, Trump’s favourite medium – was previously unknown.
Born in Soviet Moscow in 1961, Milner was named after Yuri Gagarin, who had become the first man in outer space earlier that year. Milner studied theoretical physics at Moscow State University and in 1990 moved from the Soviet Union to the US, where he attended the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
After a stint at the World Bank in Washington, he returned to Russia and set up Mail.ru, an email and social networking service, which became popular and profitable. In 2009, he was asked to join Medvedev’s innovation commission. Milner said the role involved advising Russian ministers and officials on moving public services online.
Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, was so impressed with Milner’s rise that he invited the Russian to invest in Facebook. Milner’s company “stood out because of the global perspective they bring”, Zuckerberg said when announcing their first $200m deal in 2009. “I believe I had some expertise at the time that Mark found valuable,” Milner said.
The pair became friends and Zuckerberg attended Milner’s wedding in California late in 2011. The ceremony was held at a vast mansion atop a hillside near Silicon Valley that Milner had recently bought for $100m. Milner and Zuckerberg are advisers to each other’s philanthropic ventures and remain close.
Associates of Milner told the Guardian that he tried to secure funding for new investments from western banks. But they turned him down, forcing him after the 2008 financial crisis to go instead to Russian institutions. His exit from Moscow followed Putin’s return as president in 2012, as Russia moved in a more authoritarian direction. Milner has lived in the US with his family since 2014.
Milner said that as a management company, DST Global had sole discretion over its investment decisions. He said that he, like other investment managers, did not disclose the identities of his funders to the companies where DST Global invested. He said funders such as VTB received only basic updates on investments.
He briefly mentioned VTB’s role in the Twitter investment during an interview with Forbes magazine last month. The partial disclosure appeared to have been prompted by questions put to him by the Guardian and other media partners.
It is unclear if Moscow saw a political interest in funding stakes in Facebook and Twitter, or if the acquisitions were only intended to make money. Sources familiar with the situation told the Guardian that Facebook had carried out a discreet internal review of Russian investments before its IPO in 2012, and that the review was unable to draw firm conclusions.
Karen Vartapetov, the director of sovereign ratings at Standard & Poor’s, said the Russian government had “a strong influence on VTB’s strategic and business plans” even when these were not expected to be lucrative. “VTB plays a very important role for government policies, including implementation of some less profitable and socially important tasks,” said Vartapetov.
Russia’s role in exploiting Facebook and Twitter to influence the 2016 US election is an important strand of an FBI inquiry and congressional investigations. Facebook has identified 3,000 advertisements and 470 fake accounts on its network that were set up by a “troll factory” in St Petersburg. Details have been passed to Congress and to the special prosecutor, Robert Mueller, who is examining alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow.
VTB has a close relationship with the Kremlin and, according to analysts, has received more state subsidies than any other Russian bank. In 2009, the bank boasted that its investment banking arm was “pivotal in managing the state’s interests”.
VTB also has close ties to Putin’s FSB intelligence agency. The bank’s chairman, Andrey Kostin, is a former KGB foreign intelligence operative who has received several state decorations from Putin. Milner denied knowing about VTB’s ties to Russian intelligence. VTB funded 45% of the Twitter stake.
In an email, Milner’s spokeswoman said: “Yuri Milner has never been an employee of the Russian government.” Milner said he not spoken to Medvedev nor any other Russian minister about social media, and that he and Zuckerberg had not discussed the controversy over Russian exploitation of social media. “Politics is something I’m very uninterested in,” Milner told the Guardian.
‘They operate in the shadows’
The Paradise Papers help to unravel complex arrangements that led Russian state money to fund investments in the US social media companies.
They involve a bewildering array of companies using similar names and acronyms, some registered offshore in places that offer secrecy about ownership. The arrangements are legal, but have led campaigners to demand more transparency.
The trail begins in December 2005, when Gazprom Investholding began putting money into Kanton Services, a company registered in the British Virgin Islands. Usmanov was at the time general director of Gazprom Investholding, which the Kremlin has used to renationalise assets sold off in the 1990s.
Gazprom in effect took control of Kanton in 2009 in return for $920m. In 2011, Kanton in turn took a majority stake in DST USA II, a vehicle publicly associated with Milner. By 2012, DST USA II had bought more than 50m shares in Facebook, according to filings at the US Securities and Exchange Commission, amounting to more than 3% of the social media company.
Over the following months, ownership of DST USA II was transferred to an Usmanov company, which sold off $1bn worth of the shares in Facebook at a significant profit after the social network floated on the stock market.
The ultimate owner of Kanton was not made clear, but the company has several ties to Usmanov. An executive who dealt with Kanton on another deal, who requested anonymity to discuss private details, said: “I was led to believe this was one of Usmanov’s investment companies.”
Milner said he knew who owned Kanton but declined to name them, citing a confidentiality agreement. He said he did not know where Usmanov and his other partners obtained funding. “I had no knowledge of him using state funds to invest with us – he had enough funds already from the holdings that he owned,” said Milner.
Rollo Head, a spokesman for Usmanov, said in an email: “To be absolutely clear, Mr Usmanov did not borrow from or use state or quasi-state funds to make investments in Facebook.”
Alina Polyakova, a specialist in Russian foreign policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said Moscow frequently used intermediaries to ensure “plausible deniability” for the actions of senior officials.
“Russia’s influence over operations – whether that be allocating funds for disinformation campaigns or providing financing to extremist movements, or others – are intentionally opaque,” said Polyakova. “They operate in the shadows.”
The leaked documents, together with public filings, show that VTB funded another offshore investment vehicle, DST Investments 3, which was registered on the Isle of Man, a tax haven and UK crown dependency.
VTB put about $191m into this vehicle, which bought 11m shares in Twitter in 2011. When Twitter was preparing to float on the stock market in 2013, the VTB-funded vehicle held a 2% stake in the company. The VTB-funded stake was sold in May 2014, according to Milner. Stock prices from that time indicate the sale would have returned more than $240m in profit.
In July 2014, shortly before the US imposed sanctions on Russian entities such as VTB and Gazprom over the Kremlin’s aggression in Ukraine, control of DST Investments 3 was transferred to Kanton, the same company tied to Usmanov that was used as a go-between in the Facebook deal.
Milner insisted VTB had been treated like his other investors, but acknowledged it was different in one respect. “VTB Bank is clearly an institution controlled by the Russian government,” he said.
The Russian companies denied that their funding of the investments was politically motivated.
“The loans were provided for general corporate purposes,” said Oleg Maksimov, a spokesman for Gazprom Investholding. A VTB spokesperson said that in 2011 the bank “executed several deals in the high-tech industry, as we considered this field to have high potential” but had since sold its stakes.
Russian investor backed Kushner
The disclosure of Milner’s partial backing by Russian state interests may also cause difficulties for Kushner.
Milner in 2015 contributed $850,000 from his family trust to a $50m investment in Cadre, a New-York-based company that Kushner co-founded in 2014 with his brother, Joshua, and a friend of theirs from Harvard. The startup, which the Kushners claim is worth $800m, is based around an online marketplace where wealthy financiers can club together to invest in properties.
Cadre has attracted an estimated $133m of venture capital from backers including Peter Thiel, the controversial libertarian billionaire who co-founded PayPal and backed Trump’s campaign for president in 2016.
The company has already caused controversy for Kushner, after he initially failed to detail his stake in Cadre in financial disclosures to the US Office of Government Ethics. Kushner later added Cadre to revised paperwork, saying his stake in the firm was worth up to $25m.
Cadre initially said in a June press release that Milner’s stake in the company was held through his firm DST. A different version of the release on Cadre’s website said, however, that Milner himself was the investor in Cadre. The breakdown of the $50m funding was not made public by Cadre.
Milner said in an interview that he had invested in Cadre based only on the merits of the business. “I just thought it was an attractive opportunity,” he said.
He said he knew Joshua Kushner and had met Jared Kushner once, at a conference in Aspen, Colorado, in autumn 2016. “He was very pleasant and nice, and it was sort of a cocktail-type conversation,” said Milner, adding that politics was not discussed.
Cadre operates from the Puck Building in the Nolita section of Manhattan. The Kushners’ father, Charles, bought the building in the 1980s before being jailed for a string of crimes including 18 counts of tax evasion. The building, a red-brick Romanesque revival, was named after the 19th-century satirical magazine based there. A gilded Puck statue, wearing a top hat and tails, gazes down on staff as they arrive for work.
Mueller’s inquiry is believed to be reviewing Jared Kushner’s finances. Kushner was questioned by US senators in July about his connections to Russia. The closed-door session followed a series of explosive reports, including that Kushner had undisclosed contacts with Sergey Kislyak, then Russia’s ambassador to the US.
In remarks at the White House in July, Kushner said he had “not relied on Russian funds to finance my business activities in the private sector”.
Kushner attended a meeting at Trump Tower in June last year at which Donald Trump Jr was expecting to receive damaging information on Hillary Clinton, their Democratic opponent, which he was told had come from the Russian government. Kushner claimed he knew nothing about the meeting’s purpose before attending and left shortly after it began.
He has also denied reports that following his father-in-law’s election victory, he proposed setting up a secure communication channel between Trump’s team and Moscow to avoid snooping by the US before Trump took office. Kislyak reportedly told his superiors in Moscow, during conversations intercepted by American intelligence, that Kushner had asked for the backchannel during a meeting at Trump Tower last December.
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Techno-brilliance or techno-stupidity?
We pay a high price when we confuse addictive pseudo-significance with real meaning.
5 November 2017
Several years back the physicist Stephen Hawking proposed that the full development of Artificial Intelligence could spell the end of the human race by out-thinking our species and perhaps even out-competing it—through programs that not only self-replicate but generate novelty and select for advantage.
Without question, technological innovation will dramatically transform major aspects of our lives, but in what direction? All inventions have costs, benefits, and unintended consequences. In order to use technology wisely we must accept the reality of limits, recognize that every question is ultimately a moral question—a question of value and not just technological efficiency—and learn to combine all the different facets of our intelligence in new ways.
To do this we’ll need much more cultural maturity, a fundamental ‘growing up’ as a species. A distinctive feature of human beings is their capacity as tool-makers, but too often we treat our tools—especially our new digital tools—as truths, if not gods. This can’t work going forward. The future will require a greater ability to step back and consider the consequences of what we humans create—if for no other reason than we are now capable of so much that would cause great harm as well as great good.
Take, for example, our growing addiction to electronic devices, whose dangers easily sneak up on us. These devices do many things that we find useful—and are fun. But their dangers far outweigh those of other addictions around food or drugs.
The dynamics of addiction are most obvious with video games where shootings and explosions create readily repeatable jolts of excitement. Addiction works by promoting artificial substitutes for real fulfillment, as when real relationships are replaced by the stimulation we get from our electronic devices, a phenomenon we see with growing frequency in relation to social media.
It’s even easier to use Virtual Reality to confuse or deceive. ‘Fake news’ lies and distorts; ‘fake realities’ have even more potential to be used for demagoguery and manipulation. Artificial stimulation in the name of meaning—as in Virtual Reality or video games—readily translates into ever-more sophisticated digital ‘designer drugs’ which are immensely profitable.
Such dynamics are also present in the ways we relate to our cell phones. That’s partly because cell phones have become such an aspect of almost everyone’s life, and partly because of the immense commercial rewards that come with the ability of cell phone companies to control our attention.
It’s important to recognize that what we see is not simply a product of the usefulness of these devices. There are specific chemical reasons why people feel they have to check their cell phones every few minutes. A dirty little secret of the tech world is that programmers consciously design their software to be addictive. They build in rewards that make visiting a favorite site just like playing a slot machine. And they intend us to feel anxiety if we are away from our devices for any period of time. The fact that most of the content on our cell phones is advertising-driven means that such addictive methodologies will only become more sophisticated in the future.
These concerns are amplified by what I call a ‘crisis of purpose.’ As traditional cultural beliefs stop providing essential guidance, we can be left feeling adrift and alone, and this can make us particularly vulnerable to addiction. But we pay a high price (both personally and as a species) when we confuse addictive pseudo-significance with real meaning, because this diminishes who we are and undermines future possibilities. The antidote lies in asking what matters most to us with new depth and courage. Being distracted and addicted undermines our capacity to take on this essential task.
The internet promised a new democratization of information and has often provided just that. But if we do not pay attention, rather than freeing us and making communication more democratic, the information revolution could end up by undermining the democratic experiment—and even put the larger human experiment at risk. In his dystopian novel 1984, George Orwell warned of Big Brother taking control of our minds. The real danger in the future is not government manipulation, but artificial stimulation masquerading as substance so that information is used in ways that ultimately disconnect us from matters of real importance.
In fact the term “Artificial Intelligence” is a misnomer, since compared to the human variety it is so much more limited. Some computers may have already passed the famous Turing Test that says that Artificial Intelligence has been achieved if a computer responds to your questions and you can’t tell that it’s a computer. But the Turing test is bad science. Think about it. Imagine a bright red toy sports car made out of candy that someone pulls along with an invisible string. From a distance, you can’t tell that it isn’t real. Such a toy might be fun and useful for many things, even amazing things. But that doesn’t make it a car, just as a computer isn’t human because it can mimic the way we process information.
Managing Artificial Intelligence wisely depends on drawing on precisely what makes living intelligence, and in particular human intelligence, so different. Human intelligence—when all its complexity is included—is not just creative in ways we are only just beginning to grasp, but also inherently moral. Different moral codes follow from how human intelligence works, including our capacity for rational processing. But this dynamic breaks down if intelligence becomes ever-more machine-like and hence vulnerable to exploitation.
The only way to keep Artificial Intelligence from becoming our undoing is to manage it with greater cultural maturity, so that we become better able both to draw consciously on the whole of our cognitive complexity, and to step back and appreciate our tools as simply tools. That will also help us to discover new skills and capacities that can help us utilize our tools in the most life-enhancing ways.
By contrast, levels of technological enthusiasm today are sometimes extrapolated to the point that they become literally religious. I’m thinking in particular of the techno-utopian assertions of people like futurist Ray Kurzweil, who proposes that we are rapidly approaching a point in history—what he calls the “singularity”—when artificial intelligence will surpass the human variety. He proposes that a whole new form of existence will result, one that will transcend not just our biology but also our mortality. Kurzweil describes digitally downloading our neurological contents and thereby attaining eternal life—which he hopes to be able to do in his own lifetime.
There’s no doubt that the technologies of the future will affect how we think about ourselves in important ways. But it is important to appreciate that—while modern day techno-utopian thinking is put forward as radical in its newness—it is not new in any fundamental sense. Rather, it reflects an ultimate expression of the Modern Age’s heroic, onward-and-upward story.
We can also tie techno-utopian thinking to even older impulses: the desire, for example, to eliminate polarities between the body and the mind, the unconscious in favor of an all-knowing consciousness (even if devoid of real human knowing), and the reality of death in favor of a now triumphant digital immortality. But far from being new to our times, these efforts to eliminate the body, the unconscious, and death have been common to utopian beliefs for thousands of years.
Instead of succumbing to such techno-utopian fantasies, our future depends on appreciating both the possibilities and the limitations that come with invention, and taking responsibility for thinking and acting about these costs and benefits in more mature ways. That will be the key to making good choices about issues such as climate change, avoiding nuclear catastrophe, guaranteeing clean air and water and adequate food for the world’s people, slowing the ever-increasing rate of species extinction, and addressing inequality.
None of these questions have a convenient technological fix. The fact of new invention is exciting, and the inventions yet to come are important for us to contemplate. But much more important are the need for new ways of thinking about ourselves and finding the right relationships to the technologies we create.
With these things in place, our relationship to invention changes fundamentally, as we begin to see more clearly that electronic devices must serve what human beings are at their best, and what machines are not: moral, creative and loving, capable of being not just intelligent but also wise. There lies the critical fork in the road. Our tools can free us or replace us, depending on how we understand them—and how we understand ourselves.
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Why social media may not be so good for democracy
6 November 2017
Recent revelations about how Russian agents inserted ads on Facebook, in an attempt to influence the 2016 election, present a troubling question: Is Facebook bad for democracy?
As a scholar of the social and political implications of technology, I believe that the problem is not about Facebook alone, but much larger: Social media is actively undermining some of the social conditions that have historically made democratic nation states possible.
I understand that’s a huge claim, and I don’t expect anyone to believe it right away. But, considering that nearly half of all eligible voters received Russian-sponsored fake news on Facebook, it’s an argument that needs to be on the table.
How we create a shared reality
Let’s start with two concepts: an “imagined community” and a “filter bubble.”
The late political scientist Benedict Anderson famously argued that the modern nation-state is best understood as an “imagined community” partly enabled by the rise of mass media such as newspapers. What Anderson meant is that the sense of cohesion that citizens of modern nations felt with one another – the degree to which they could be considered part of a national community – was one that was both artificial and facilitated by mass media.
Of course there are many things that enable nation-states like the U.S. to hold together. We all learn (more or less) the same national history in school, for example. Still, the average lobster fisherman in Maine, for example, doesn’t actually have that much in common with the average schoolteacher in South Dakota. But, the mass media contribute toward helping them view themselves as part of something larger: that is, the “nation.”
Democratic polities depend on this shared sense of commonality. It enables what we call “national” policies – an idea that citizens see their interests aligned on some issues. Legal scholar Cass Sunstein explains this idea by taking us back to the time when there were only three broadcast news outlets and they all said more or less the same thing. As Sunstein says, we have historically depended on these “general interest intermediaries” to frame and articulate our sense of shared reality.
Filter bubbles
The term “filter bubble” emerged in a 2010 book by activist Eli Pariser to characterize an internet phenomenon.
Legal scholar Lawrence Lessig and Sunstein too had identified this phenomenon of group isolation on the internet in the late 1990s. Inside a filter bubble, individuals basically receive only the kinds of information that they have either preselected, or, more ominously, that third parties have decided they want to hear.
The targeted advertising behind Facebook’s newsfeed helps to create such filter bubbles. Advertising on Facebook works by determining its user’s interests, based on data it collects from their browsing, likes and so on. This is a very sophisticated operation.
Facebook does not disclose its own algorithms. However, research led by psychologist and data scientist at Stanford University Michael Kosinski demonstrated that automated analysis of people’s Facebook likes was able to identify their demographic information and basic political beliefs. Such targeting can also apparently be extremely precise. There is evidence, for example, that anti-Clinton ads from Russia were able to micro-target specific voters in Michigan.
The problem is that inside a filter bubble, you never receive any news that you do not agree with. This poses two problems: First, there is never any independent verification of that news. Individuals who want independent confirmation will have to actively seek it out.
Second, psychologists have known for a long time about “confirmation bias,” the tendency of people to seek out only information they agree with. Confirmation bias also limits people’s ability to question information that confirms or upholds their beliefs.
Not only that, research at Yale University’s Cultural Cognition Project strongly suggests that people are inclined to interpret new evidence in light of beliefs associated with their social groups. This can tend to polarize those groups.
All of this means that if you are inclined to dislike President Donald Trump, any negative information on him is likely to further strengthen that belief. Conversely, you are likely to discredit or ignore pro-Trump information.
It is this pair of features of filter bubbles – preselection and confirmation bias – that fake news exploits with precision.
Creating polarized groups?
These features are also hardwired into the business model of social media like Facebook, which is predicated precisely on the idea that one can create a group of “friends” with whom one shares information. This group is largely insular, separated from other groups.
The software very carefully curates the transfer of information across these social networks and tries very hard to be the primary portal through which its users – about 2 billion of them – access the internet.
Facebook depends on advertising for its revenue, and that advertising can be readily exploited: A recent ProPublica investigation shows how easy it was to target Facebook ads to “Jew Haters.” More generally, the site also wants to keep users online, and it knows that it is able to manipulate the emotions of its users – who are happiest when they see things they agree with.
As the Washington Post documents, it is precisely these features that were exploited by Russian ads. As a writer at Wired observed in an ominously prescient commentary immediately after the election, he never saw a pro-Trump post that had been shared over 1.5 million times – and neither did any of his liberal friends. They saw only liberal-leaning news on their social media feeds.
In this environment, a recent Pew Research Center survey should not come as a surprise. The survey shows that the American electorate is both deeply divided on partisan grounds, even on fundamental political issues, and is becoming more so.
All of this combines to mean that the world of social media tends to create small, deeply polarized groups of individuals who will tend to believe everything they hear, no matter how divorced from reality. The filter bubble sets us up to be vulnerable to polarizing fake news and to become more insular.
The end of the imagined community?
At this point, two-thirds of Americans get at least some of their news from social media outlets. This means that two-thirds of Americans get at least some of their news from highly curated and personalized black-box algorithms.
Facebook remains, by a significant margin, the most prevalent source of fake news. Not unlike forced, false confessions of witchcraft in the Middle Ages, these stories get repeated often enough that they could appear legitimate.
What we are witnessing, in other words, is the potential collapse of a significant part of the imagined community that is the American polity. Although the U.S. is also divided demographically and there are sharp demographic differences between regions within the country, partisan differences are dwarfing other divisions in society.
This is a recent trend: In the mid-1990s, partisan divisions were similar in size to demographic divisions. For example, then and now, women and men would be about the same modest distance apart on political questions, such as whether government should do more to help the poor. In the 1990s, this was also true for Democrats and Republicans. In other words, partisan divisions were no better than demographic factors at predicting people’s political views. Today, if you want to know someone’s political views, you would first want to find out their partisan affiliation.
The reality of social media
To be sure, it would be overly simplistic to lay all of this at the feet of social media. Certainly the structure of the American political system, which tends to polarize the political parties in primary elections, plays a major role. And it is true that plenty of us also still get news from other sources, outside of our Facebook filter bubbles.
But, I would argue that Facebook and social media offer an additional layer: Not only do they tend to create filter bubbles on their own, they offer a rich environment for those who want to increase polarization to do so.
Communities share and create social realities. In its current role, social media risks abetting a social reality where differing groups could disagree not only about what to do, but about what reality is.
http://theconversation.com/why-social-media-may-not-be-so-good-for-democracy-86285
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“The Paradise Papers link the Russian government to Facebook and Twitter investments through billionaire Yuri Milner.”
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Everything you need to know about the massive Paradise Papers leak
5 November 2017
A vast new trove of 13.4 million leaked documents dubbed the Paradise Papers have been published by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) exposing the offshore banking activities of more than 120 politicians around the world. Included in the leak are documents connecting U.S. Commerce Secretary and billionaire financier Wilbur Ross to a shipping company that does business with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s son-in-law.
The leak is the latest to draw back the curtain on the shadowy world of offshore banking where shell companies allow the wealthy, kleptocrats, or anyone else with something to hide to conduct business largely in secret in known tax havens. This trove, which comes largely from Bermuda-based Appleby law firm, reveals offshore ties of a dozen Trump Cabinet members, advisors, and donors. It also shows the connections between a major investor in Twitter and Facebook with Russian state-owned businesses.
The documents very much resemble the massive Panama Papers leak of 2016, and were obtained much the same way: an anonymous source leaked them to the German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung, which shared them with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and several other news organizations which published their reports simultaneously Sunday afternoon.
Like the “Panama Papers,” the new trove of documents will provide source material for investigations that may last for months. It comes at an awkward time for the Trump administration as Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team is issuing indictments and Facebook and Twitter are facing questions of how they were used as tools by Russian interests to influence the 2016 election.
Here are the big takeaways:
WILBUR ROSS’ CONNECTION TO PUTIN “CRONIES”
Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, a long-time business partner of President Donald Trump, still has investments in a shipping firm with significant ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s son-in-law and a Russian oligarch under American economic sanctions — “cronies of Putin,” in one analyst’s words to The Guardian
Ross divested himself of many of his investments upon entering the Trump administration where he has been a strong supporter of the president’s “America First” agenda. But the leaked documents reveal that Ross kept a multi-million dollar investment in Navigator Holdings, a shipping company that makes millions every year moving gas for Russian energy company Sibur. The owners of Sibur include Putin’s son-in-law Kirill Shamalov and Gennady Timchenko, the Russian president’s close friend and Judo partner.
Ross’ holdings in Navigator were disclosed at the time of his confirmation hearings in front of this Senate earlier this year but the holdings did not receive additional scrutiny. Ross’ spokesman claimed the deal had been signed in February 2012 before Ross joined on March 31 of that year. But a press release to the Securities and Exchange Commision on March 2 stated that Ross was already on the board, according to reporting by The Guardian.
Before entering the Trump administration, Ross’ net-worth was estimated to be in the billions of dollars. His appearance in the Paradise Papers is another example of the labyrinth of financial tools the ultra-rich use in order to gain leverage and at odds with Trump’s populist promises to stop the elites from ripping off American workers.
Ross is just the latest member of Trump’s orbit to have close financial ties with Kremlin-aligned actors. The federal government indicted and arrested Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort this past week in part for his work lobbying on behalf of the Russia-friendly president of Ukraine. Manafort also had an intricate maze of offshore accounts where he hid money from U.S. scrutiny.
There is no evidence that Ross is under scrutiny by special prosecutor Robert Mueller but yet another Russia connection is not welcome news for the Trump administration.
A spokesman for Ross told the New York Times that the commerce secretary “recused himself from any matters focused on transoceanic shipping vessels, but has been generally supportive of the administration’s sanction of Russian and Venezuelan entities.”
FACEBOOK, TWITTER WERE PARTLY FUNDED WITH RUSSIAN MONEY
The Paradise Papers link the Russian government to investments in Facebook and Twitter through the firm of Russian-American billionaire and Silicon Valley impresario Yuri Milner.
Records indicate that two Kremlin-controlled entities — VTB Bank and the energy conglomerate Gazprom — partnered with Milner’s investment fund DST Global to acquire sizable chunks of Facebook and Twitter. VTB bank paid $191 million for a stake in Twitter in 2011, and a Gazprom subsidiary financed a company that worked with DST Global on the Facebook deal.
Milner, Gazprom, and VTB Bank all made a killing on the deals, selling their stakes after Facebook’s 2012 initial public offering and when Twitter went public in 2013. Milner’s funds, the New York Times notes, controlled more than 8 percent of Facebook and 5 percent of Twitter before the stakes were sold off.
Though the Russian government appears not to have used its stakes to affect the decision making at Facebook or Twitter, the revelation comes amid growing scrutiny of how Russian agents used the social networks to influence the 2016 election.
Facebook, Twitter, and DST Global did not immediately respond to requests for comment from VICE News. In interviews with ICIJ, Milner stressed that the Russian government entities were passive investors and that “it never even occurred to me back then that VTB Bank was not just another investor for us.”
https://news.vice.com/story/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-massive-paradise-papers-leak
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Paradise Papers: Tax haven secrets of ultra-rich exposed.
A huge new leak of financial documents has revealed how the powerful and ultra-wealthy, including the Queen’s private estate, secretly invest vast amounts of cash in offshore tax havens.
6 November 2017
Donald Trump’s commerce secretary is shown to have a stake in a firm dealing with Russians sanctioned by the US.
The leak, dubbed the Paradise Papers, contains 13.4m documents, mostly from one leading firm in offshore finance.
BBC Panorama is part of nearly 100 media groups investigating the papers.
As with last year’s Panama Papers leak, the documents were obtained by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, which called in the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) to oversee the investigation. The Guardian is also among the organisations investigating the documents.
Sunday’s revelations form only a small part of a week of disclosures that will expose the tax and financial affairs of some of the hundreds of people and companies named in the data, some with strong UK connections.
Many of the stories focus on how politicians, multinationals, celebrities and high-net-worth individuals use complex structures of trusts, foundations and shell companies to protect their cash from tax officials or hide their dealings behind a veil of secrecy.
How is the Queen involved?
The Paradise Papers show that about £10m ($13m) of the Queen’s private money was invested offshore.
It was put into funds in the Cayman Islands and Bermuda by the Duchy of Lancaster, which provides the Queen with an income and handles investments for her £500m private estate.
There is nothing illegal in the investments and no suggestion that the Queen is avoiding tax, but questions may be asked about whether the monarch should be investing offshore.
There were small investments in the rent-to-buy retailer BrightHouse, which has been accused of exploiting the poor, and the Threshers chain of off-licences, which later went bust owing £17.5m in tax and costing almost 6,000 people their jobs.
Embarrassment for Ross and Trump?
Wilbur Ross helped stave off bankruptcy for Donald Trump in the 1990s and was later appointed commerce secretary in Mr Trump’s administration.
The documents reveal Mr Ross has retained an interest in a shipping company which earns millions of dollars a year transporting oil and gas for a Russian energy firm whose shareholders include Vladimir Putin’s son-in-law and two men subject to US sanctions.
It will again raise questions about the Russian connections of Donald Trump’s team. His presidency has been dogged by allegations that Russians colluded to try to influence the outcome of last year’s US election. He has called the allegations “fake news”.
Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal has called for an investigation, telling NBC News that Mr Ross had given Congress the impression he no longer held shares in the shipping company.
“Our committee was misled, the American people were misled by the concealment of those companies.”
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-41876942
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Facebook has a history of breaking things – now maybe democracy
8 November 2017
Facebook appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee last week, revealing that 126 million people saw Russia-created Facebook content during the 2016 election. It’s a blow to CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s initial dismissal of the idea that the spread of fake news on Facebook could have any impact on a U.S. election.
Now, under intense scrutiny from lawmakers, the social media giant is singing a different tune — promising to hire more people to monitor content and advertising. But this wasn’t the first time Zuckerberg has brushed off critics and then had to backtrack. Inside sources told VICE News it’s part of a decade-long pattern of product rollouts, embarrassing exposures, and denials that put profit ahead of Facebook’s 2 billion users.
https://news.vice.com/story/facebook-has-a-history-of-breaking-things-now-maybe-democracy
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“We need to understand what happens when data is the prime currency of a company. There’s no such thing as a free lunch. Eventually, consumers will have to pay” — Margrethe Vestager
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Margrethe Vestager, technophobe
The EU competition chief’s growing mistrust of Big Tech is reflected in her online habits.
8 November 2017
If you want an indication of how Margrethe Vestager views Silicon Valley’s tech giants, look no further than the way she uses their services.
Europe’s competition commissioner uses Facebook and Twitter for work, but she keeps her accounts carefully scrubbed of personal information. She has installed WhatsApp on her phone but blocked the app from compiling a list of her friends. “I don’t allow them to trawl my contact book,” is how she put it in an interview with POLITICO. When communicating with friends and family, she prefers to use SMS text messages.
She has not opened a Gmail account and makes a point of using alternatives to Google Search, such as its competitor Bing or DuckDuckGo, a privacy-friendly search engine that claims not to track its users. She regularly wipes her devices’ browsing history and deletes the cookies installed by internet firms like Google or Facebook to track users online.
This obsession with digital hygiene — by one of the most powerful people in the world of tech — reveals a sense of suspicion that has only grown during her time in Brussels spent rummaging under the bonnets of large internet firms.
“The more I have reflected, the more private I have become,” Vestager said.
Her mounting misgivings are also visible in the focus of her work and in her public statements.
At the podium, she rarely misses an opportunity to warn of Silicon Valley’s intrusions into people’s private lives.
In an address at a film festival in Switzerland in August, she compared the behavior of companies like Google and Facebook — whose business models involve the harvesting and use of personal data — to the protagonist of the Bulgarian film “Godless“: “A nurse whose only interest in her patients is selling their identity cards on the black market.”
The following month, delivering a TED talk in New York, she argued that careful oversight of tech companies is necessary for the smooth functioning of the online economy.
“No one’s going to agree to hand over their medical data, or step into a car that’s driven by an algorithm, unless they trust the companies they’re dealing with,” she said. “And that trust isn’t always there. Today, for example, less than a quarter of Europeans trust online businesses to protect their personal information.”
Vestager’s most high-profile cases have so far concerned tax practices (such as the €13 billion tax bill she doled out to Apple in August 2016) or unfair competitive practices (like her €2.4 billion slapdown of Google shopping in June).
But she has shown a growing interest in a career-defining case tackling the way companies collect and use personal data. Officials in her department say her team has pushed hard for them to come up with cases in the area.
“We need to understand what happens when data is the prime currency of a company,” she said in an interview last year. “There’s no such thing as a free lunch. Eventually, consumers will have to pay.”
https://www.politico.eu/article/margrethe-vestager-technophobe/
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The Fakebook Inside Facebook
What to do about a global info-and-disinfo pipeline, and who can do it?
7 November 2017
Beginning in 2004, Mark Zuckerberg and his companions made a historic contribution to the annals of alchemy: They converted the lust for human contact into gold. Facebook’s current net worth is more than $500 billion, with Zuckerberg’s own share tallied at $74.2 billion, which makes him something like the fifth-wealthiest person in the world.
What can be said about Facebook can also more or less be said of Google, Twitter, YouTube and other internet platforms, but here I’ll confine myself mainly to Facebook. What a business model! Whenever their 2-billion-and-counting users click, the company (a) sells their attention to advertisers, and (b) rakes in data, which it transmutes into information that it uses to optimize the deal it offers its advertisers. Facebook is the grandest, most seductive, farthest-flung, most profitable attention-getting machine ever. Meanwhile, according to a post-election BuzzFeed analysis by Craig Silverman, who popularized the term “fake news”:
In the final three months of the US presidential campaign, the top-performing fake election news stories on Facebook generated more engagement [industry jargon for shares, reactions and comments] than the top stories from major news outlets such as The New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, NBC News and others.
What has to be faced by those aghast at the prevalence of online disinformation is that it follows directly from the social-media business model. Ease of disinformation — so far, at least — is a feature, not a bug.
Zuckerberg presents himself (and has often been lionized as) a Promethean bringer of benefits to all humanity. He is always on the side of the information angels. He does not present himself as an immoralist, like latter-day Nazi-turned-American-missile-scientist Wernher von Braun, as channeled by Tom Lehrer in this memorable lyric:
Don’t say that he’s hypocritical
Say rather that he’s apolitical
“Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That’s not my department!” says Wernher von Braun.
To the contrary, Zuckerberg is a moralist. He does not affect to be apolitical. He wants his platform to be a “force for good in democracy.” He wants to promote voting. He wants to “give all people a voice.” These are political values. Which is a fine thing. Whenever you hear powerful people purport to be apolitical, check your wallet.
There’s no evidence that in 2004, when Mark Zuckerberg and his Harvard computer-savvy buddies devised their amazing apparatus and wrote the code for it, that they intended to expose Egyptian police torture and thereby mobilize Egyptians to overthrow Hosni Mubarak, or to help white supremacists distribute their bile, or to throw open the gates through which Russians could cheaply circulate disinformation about American politics. They were ingenious technicians who wholeheartedly shared the modern prejudice that more communication means more good for the world — more connection, more community, more knowledge, more, more, more. They were not the only techno-entrepreneurs who figured out how to keep their customers coming back for more, but they were among the most astute. These engineer-entrepreneurs devised intricate means toward a time-honored end, pursuing the standard modern media strategy: package the attention of viewers and readers into commodities that somebody pays for. Their product was our attention.
Sounds like a nifty win-win. The user gets (and relays) information, and the proprietor, for supplying the service, gets rich. Information is good, so the more of it, the better. In Zuckerberg’s words, the goal was, and remains, “a community for all people.” What could go wrong?
So it’s startling to see the cover of this week’s Economist, a publication not hitherto noted for hostility to global interconnection under the auspices of international capital. The magazine’s cover graphic shows the Facebook “f” being wielded as a smoking gun. The cover story asks, “Do social media threaten democracy,” and proceeds to cite numbers that have become fairly familiar now that American politicians are sounding alarms:
Facebook acknowledged that before and after last year’s American election, between January 2015 and August this year, 146 million users may have seen Russian misinformation on its platform. Google’s YouTube admitted to 1,108 Russian-linked videos and Twitter to 36,746 accounts. Far from bringing enlightenment, social media have been spreading poison.
Facebook’s chief response to increasingly vigorous criticism is an engineer’s rationalization: that it is a technological thing — a platform, not a medium. You may call that fatuously naïve. You may recognize it as a commonplace instance of the Silicon Valley belief that if you figure out a way to please people, you are entitled to make tons of money without much attention to potentially or actually destructive social consequences. It’s reminiscent of what Thomas Edison would have said if asked if he intended to bring about the electric chair, Las Vegas shining in the desert, or, for that matter, the internet; or what Johannes Gutenberg have said if asked if he realized he was going to make possible the Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf. Probably something like: We’re in the tech business. And: None of your business. Or even: We may spread poison, sure, but also candy.
This candy not only tastes good, Zuckerberg believes, but it’s nutritious. Thus on Facebook — his preferred platform, no surprise — Mark Zuckerberg calls his brainchild “a platform for all ideas” and defends Facebook’s part in the 2016 election with this ringing declaration: “More people had a voice in this election than ever before.” It’s a bit like saying that Mao Zedong succeeded in assembling the biggest crowds ever seen in China, but never mind. Zuckerberg now “regrets” saying after the election that it was “crazy” to think that “misinformation on Facebook changed the outcome of the election.” But he still boasts about “our broader impact … giving people a voice to enabling candidates to communicate directly to helping millions of people vote.”
Senators as well as journalists are gnashing their teeth. Hearings are held. As always when irresponsible power outruns reasonable regulation, the first recourse of reformers is disclosure. This is, after all, the age of freedom of information (see my colleague Michael Schudson’s book, The Rise of the Right to Know: Politics and the Culture of Transparency, 1945–1975). On the top-10 list of cultural virtues, transparency has moved right up next to godliness. Accordingly, Sens. Amy Klobuchar, Mark Warner and John McCain have introduced an Honest Ads Act, requiring disclosure of the sources of funds for online political ads and (in the words of the senators’ news release) “requiring online platforms to make all reasonable efforts to ensure that foreign individuals and entities are not purchasing political advertisements in order to influence the American electorate. (A parallel bill has been introduced in the House.) And indeed, disclosure is a good thing, a place to start.
But it’s a start, not a finish. Consider how disclosure was supposed to remedy deficiencies in the laissez-faire system of political donations. Thanks to the post-Watergate reforms, any curiosity-seeker can today readily find out who donated to whom in which election. Data piles higher than mountains. But you may have noticed that disclosure has not drained any swamps. As the law and political science professor Richard L. Hasen wrote in 2010, just after the Supreme Court decided in Citizens United that corporations (and unions) could donate as much as they like to any political committee, the disclosure rules are not only largely toothless but “porous.” That’s one word for the plutocratic chew-up of American political finance.
What to do? That’s the question of the hour. The midterm elections of 2018 are less than a year away.
Europeans have their own ideas, which make Facebook unhappy, though it ought not be surprising that a global medium runs into global impediments — and laws. In September the European Union told Facebook, Twitter and other social media to take down hate speech or face legal consequences. In May 2016, the companies had “promised to review a majority of hate speech flagged by users within 24 hours and to remove any illegal content.” But 17 months later, the EU’s top regulator said the promise wasn’t good enough, for “in more than 28 percent of cases, it takes more than one week for online platforms to take down illegal content.” Meanwhile, Europe has no First Amendment to impede online (or other) speech controls. Holocaust denial, to take a conspicuous example, is a crime in 16 countries. And so, consider a German law that went into effect on Oct. 1 to force Facebook and other social-media companies to conform to federal law governing the freedom of speech. According to The Atlantic:
The Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz, or the “Network Enforcement Law,” colloquially referred to as the “Facebook Law,” allows the government to fine social-media platforms with more than 2 million registered users in Germany … up to 50 million euros for leaving “manifestly unlawful” posts up for more than 24 hours. Unlawful content is defined as anything that violates Germany’s Criminal Code, which bans incitement to hatred, incitement to crime, the spread of symbols belonging to unconstitutional groups and more.
As for the United Kingdom, Facebook has not responded to charges that foreign intervention through social media also tilted the Brexit vote. As Carole Cadwalladr writes in The Guardian:
No ads have been scrutinized. Nothing — even though Ben Nimmo of the Atlantic Council think tank, asked to testify before the Senate intelligence committee last week, says evidence of Russian interference online is now “incontrovertible.” He says: “It is frankly implausible to think that we weren’t targeted too.”
Then what? In First Amendment America, of course, censorship laws would never fly. Then can reform be left up to Facebook management?
Unsurprisingly, that’s what the company wants. At congressional hearings last week, their representatives said that by the end of 2018 they would double the number of employees who would inspect online content. But as New York Times reporters Mike Isaac and Daisuke Wakabayashi wrote, “in a conference call with investors, Facebook said many of the new workers are not likely to be full-time employees; the company will largely rely on third-party contractors.”
Suppose that company is serious about scrubbing their contacts of lies and defamations. It’s unlikely that temps and third-party contractors, however sage, however algorithm-equipped, can do the job. So back to the question: Beyond disclosure, which is a no-brainer, what’s to be done, and by whom?
For one thing, as the fierce Facebook critic Zeynep Tufekci notes, many on-the-ground employees are troubled by less-than-forceful actions by company owners. Why don’t wise heads in the tech world reorganize Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (which existed through 2013)? Through recent decades, we have seen excellent organizations of this sort arise from many professional quarters: scientists — nuclear scientists in particular, lawyers, doctors, social workers and so on. Ever since 1921, when in a short book called The Engineers and the Price System the great economic historian Thorstein Veblen looked to engineers to overcome the venality of the corporations that employed them, such dreams have led a sort of subterranean, but sometimes aboveground, life.
The Economist is not interested in such radical ideas. Having sounded an alarm about the toxicity of social media, The Economist predictably — and reasonably — goes on to warn against government intrusion. Also reasonably, it allots responsibility to thoughtless consumers, though while blaming the complicit victims it might well reflect on the utter breakdown of democratic norms under the spell of Republican fraudulence and insanity:
[P]olitics is not like other kinds of speech; it is dangerous to ask a handful of big firms to deem what is healthy for society. Congress wants transparency about who pays for political ads, but a lot of malign influence comes through people carelessly sharing barely credible news posts. Breaking up social-media giants might make sense in antitrust terms, but it would not help with political speech — indeed, by multiplying the number of platforms, it could make the industry harder to manage.
Not content to stop there, though, The Economist offers other remedies:
The social-media companies should adjust their sites to make clearer if a post comes from a friend or a trusted source. They could accompany the sharing of posts with reminders of the harm from misinformation. Bots are often used to amplify political messages. Twitter could disallow the worst — or mark them as such. Most powerfully, they could adapt their algorithms to put clickbait lower down the feed. Because these changes cut against a business model designed to monopolize attention, they may well have to be imposed by law or by a regulator.
But in the US, it’s time to consider more dramatic measures. Speaking of disclosure, many social scientists outside the company would like Facebook to open up more of its data — for one reason among others, to understand how their algorithms work. There are those in the company who say they would respond reasonably if reformers and researchers got specific about what data they want to see. What specifically should they ask?
Should there be, along British lines, a centrally appointed regulatory board? Since 2003, the UK has had an Office of Communications with regulatory powers. Its board is appointed by a Cabinet minister. Britain also has a press regulation apparatus for newspapers. How effective these are I cannot say. In the US, should a sort of council of elders be established in Washington, serving staggered terms, to minimize political rigging? But if so, what happens when Steve Bannon gets appointed?
Columbia law professor Tim Wu, author of The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads, advocates converting Facebook into a public benefit or nonprofit company. The logic is clear, though for now it’s a nonstarter.
But we badly need the debate.
The Economist’s conclusion is unimpeachable:
Social media are being abused. But, with a will, society can harness them and revive that early dream of enlightenment. The stakes for liberal democracy could hardly be higher.
The notion of automatic enlightenment through clicks was, of course, a pipe dream. What’s more plausible today is a nightmare. It is no longer a decent option for a democracy — even a would-be democracy — to stand by mumbling incantations to laissez faire while the institutions of reason are shaking.
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Sean Parker unloads on Facebook “exploiting” human psychology
9 November 2017
Sean Parker, the founding president of Facebook, gave me a candid insider’s look at how social networks purposely hook and potentially hurt our brains.
Be smart: Parker’s I-was-there account provides priceless perspective in the rising debate about the power and effects of the social networks, which now have scale and reach unknown in human history. He’s worried enough that he’s sounding the alarm.
Parker, 38, now founder and chair of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, spoke yesterday at an Axios event at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, about accelerating cancer innovation. In the green room, Parker mentioned that he has become “something of a conscientious objector” on social media.
By the time he left stage, he jokingly said Mark Zuckerberg will probably block his account after reading this:
“When Facebook was getting going, I had these people who would come up to me and they would say, ‘I’m not on social media.’ And I would say, ‘OK. You know, you will be.’ And then they would say, ‘No, no, no. I value my real-life interactions. I value the moment. I value presence. I value intimacy.’ And I would say, … ‘We’ll get you eventually.'”
“I don’t know if I really understood the consequences of what I was saying, because [of] the unintended consequences of a network when it grows to a billion or 2 billion people and … it literally changes your relationship with society, with each other … It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”
“The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them, … was all about: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?'”
“And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that’s going to get you to contribute more content, and that’s going to get you … more likes and comments.”
“It’s a social-validation feedback loop … exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.”
“The inventors, creators — it’s me, it’s Mark [Zuckerberg], it’s Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it’s all of these people — understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.”
P.S. Parker, on life science allowing us to “live much longer, more productive lives”: “Because I’m a billionaire, I’m going to have access to better health care So … I’m going to be like 160 and I’m going to be part of this, like, class of immortal overlords. [Laughter] Because, you know the [Warren Buffett] expression about compound interest. … [G]ive us billionaires an extra hundred years and you’ll know what … wealth disparity looks like.”
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Facebook first president Sean Parker says app has secretely snared billions of people into using it.
The app has been purposefully getting people hooked and potentially destroying society as it does so.
9 November 2017
Facebook has got the world hooked and might be using that to damage people’s lives, according to its first president.
Sean Parker, whose role in the site was dramatised in the film The Social Network, has revealed the various secret ways that the site has managed to make people use it. The man who helped create Facebook is so terrified that he feels he needs to sound the alarm about the tricks it uses to keep people engaged – and the damage that is doing to society – he has suggested.
The site has developed special ways of ensuring that people give their personal life over to it without even knowing it, he told Axios. He said that some people might try and resist the pull of the site – but that it had special tricks to hook people in and ensure they stayed.
“When Facebook was getting going, I had these people who would come up to me and they would say, ‘I’m not on social media,'” he told the site’s editor Mike Allen. “And I would say, ‘OK. You know, you will be.’ And then they would say, ‘No, no, no. I value my real-life interactions. I value the moment. I value presence. I value intimacy.’ And I would say, … ‘We’ll get you eventually.'”
He said that he hadn’t quite understood the consequences of that belief that everyone should and would join up eventually. “It literally changes your relationship with society, with each other,” he said, saying that the app could be changing the way that people’s mind works.
“God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains,” he said.
The ways Facebook keeps people hooked includes the various features that people use every day, he said. Those were built to ensure that people were kept happy and excited by the app, according to Mr Parker, who was among the first people to start work on it.
“The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them, … was all about: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?'” he said.
“And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that’s going to get you to contribute more content, and that’s going to get you … more likes and comments.”
He described that process as a “social validation feedback loop”, that means that the longer people spend on Facebook, the more they need that validation – which in turn makes them spend more time there and upload more to the site.
He said that that process was conscious decision at the beginning of the app and website’s development.
“The inventors, creators — it’s me, it’s Mark [Zuckerberg], it’s Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it’s all of these people — understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.”
Mr Parker has since left the tech industry and is now working for his own group that attempts to develop treatments for cancer.
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Real Humans Will Review the Nudes You Send Facebook as Part of Its Anti Revenge-Porn Program
Facebook is testing a new feature in Australia to combat revenge porn on the platform. This is how it works.
9 November 2017
Will Mark Zuckerberg one day witness a blurred photo of my nude body? I asked myself this question after finding out how Facebook designed a new pilot program its testing in Australia to curb the spread of revenge porn. We now have more clarity from Facebook about how it will work.
As part of the program, users are being asked to upload nude photos of themselves to the social network voluntarily. The process works like this: First a user files a report with the Australian eSafety Commissioner’s office. Then, they upload an explicit picture of themselves to Facebook Messenger (they can do this by starting a conversation with themselves) and flag it as a “non-consensual intimate image” for the social network.
A member of Facebook’s community operations team then manually confirms that the image is in violation of the company’s policies. The images will be blurred-out and only accessible to a specially-trained team, according to an email from a Facebook spokesperson.
The remainder of the process is then automated. Facebook builds what is a referred to as a “hash” of the image, meaning it creates a unique sketch or fingerprint of the file. If another user tries to upload the image to Facebook or Instagram, Facebook will test it against its stored hashes, and stop it from being distributed if it is marked as revenge porn.
In the original article I wrote explaining the new anti-revenge porn feature, I said that Facebook was not storing the photos, only the hashes. Answers to a series of follow-up questions I sent to Facebook revealed that the social network is indeed storing the blurred out images for a period of time. It’s not clear how long that period is.
The spokesperson said that while they are being stored, the naked photos will only be accessible to a small group of people. After Facebook discards the images, it will only retain the hashes. The spokesperson said that Facebook is not able to reconstruct images based on the hashes they keep.
Facebook is likely having human reviewers be part of the process in order to prevent legitimate images from being inadvertently tagged as revenge porn. As recent studies have shown, image-recognition algorithms are still extremely easy to spoof.
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Facebook’s Live Problem
17 April 2017
On Easter Sunday, Cleveland-area health clinic worker Steve Stephens apparently shot and killed 74-year-old Robert Godwin Sr., recorded a video of the alleged murder, and then posted it on Facebook, where it stayed up several hours before it was removed. At some point during the day he also broadcasted a message on Facebook Live, but it was unclear what he said, and his account has now been deactivated.
The incident once again brought unwelcome attention to Facebook Live, a feature that the social network has aggressively hyped over the past year, but which has been marred by a string of killings, assaults and other acts of violence. Facebook has said that while Live can can provide “a window into the best moments in people’s lives, it can also let us bear witness to the worst.” Godwin’s death raises, not for the first time, the question of how quickly Facebook deals with the “worst.”
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UK shell companies linked to £80bn money laundering
Britain is home to network of companies hiding illicit wealth, say researchers
9 November 2017
Hundreds of British shell companies are implicated in nearly £80bn of money laundering scandals, according to researchers calling for an overhaul of the UK’s “light touch” regulation.
Transparency International UK, a non-governmental organisation, said the UK was home to a network that operated much like the companies at the heart of the Paradise and Panama papers.
Duncan Hames, director, said: “As fingers point to jurisdictions like Panama and Bermuda, it shames the UK that companies are being set up under our noses, with the sole purpose of laundering illicit wealth; money very often stolen from some of the poorest populations in the world, starving them of vital resources.”
Opposition MPs renewed calls this week for the government to force the Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies to adopt the UK’s system of providing public access to information about who really controls companies.
Transparency International said the UK’s approach constituted “real progress” but threatened to be undermined by lack of checks on the company register and inadequate money laundering supervision.
It also said the UK had insufficient controls when it came to setting up companies: “There are practically no barriers to UK companies being incorporated by money launderers and no way of tracing their use after they have been established.”
Arguments about the effectiveness of the UK’s approach to regulation have been a big issue for offshore finance centres in recent years as they have come under pressure to open up company ownership registries to public scrutiny. The Cayman Islands, for example, has branded the UK’s transparency drive as “pointless” because it does not require the information on the register to be verified. It said it had a better system because it required company service providers to collect and verify the information.
Transparency International said it had found 766 companies registered in the UK that had been directly involved in laundering stolen money out of at least 13 countries. These companies are used as layers to hide money that would otherwise appear suspicious, and have the added advantage of providing a respectability uniquely associated with being registered in the UK
It described the UK’s defence mechanisms as “woefully inadequate” with just six staff in Companies House policing 4m companies. Trust and service company providers had a poor record of identifying and reporting money laundering with only 77 of the 400,000 suspicious activity reports filed last year coming from this sector.
https://www.ft.com/content/11d83f24-c496-11e7-a1d2-6786f39ef675
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Facebook founding president sounds alarm
9 November 2017
“God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”
A view on social media shared not by some uninformed luddite, but by one of the people responsible for building Facebook into the social media titan it is today.
Sean Parker, Facebook’s founding president, unloaded his worries and criticisms of the network, saying he had no idea what he was doing at the time of its creation.
Speaking on stage to Mike Allen from Axios, Mr Parker said: “The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them, was all about: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’”
“That means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever.
“And that’s going to get you to contribute more content, and that’s going to get you… more likes and comments.”
‘Unintended consequences’
Mr Parker first rose to tech prominence as the creator of pioneering file-sharing service Napster.
In the Facebook story, it was Mr Parker who steered the firm into Silicon Valley and put Mark Zuckerberg’s idea in front of big name investors.
Those early days were reimagined in the film the Social Network. Mr Parker was played by Justin Timberlake.
“When Facebook was getting going,” Mr Parker said on Wednesday, “I had these people who would come up to me and they would say, ‘I’m not on social media.’
“And I would say, ‘OK. You know, you will be.’”
He then added: “I don’t know if I really understood the consequences of what I was saying, because [of] the unintended consequences of a network when it grows to a billion or two billion people and, it literally changes your relationship with society, with each other.
“It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”
As for his own habits, Mr Parker said he no longer used social media as it was “too much of a time sink”.
However, he said he still had an account on Facebook. “If Mark hears this he’s probably going to suspend my account,” he joked.
Facebook did not respond to the BBC’s request for reaction to the comments.
“I use these platforms, I just don’t let these platforms use me,” Mr Parker concluded.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-41936791
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Facebook is messing with kids’ brains, says its ex president
9 November 2017
The former president of Facebook now says the social media platform is “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology” and messing with kids’ brains.
Speaking with Axios’ Mike Allen at an event for cancer research, Sean Parker negatively characterized the primary goal of social media as collecting as many eyeballs and attention time from its users as possible.
“The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them, … was all about: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’” said Parker, who headed the company about 10 years ago, when it was in its infancy. “And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in awhile, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that’s going to get you to contribute more content, and that’s going to get you … more likes and comments.
“I don’t know if I really understood the consequences of what I was saying, because [of] the unintended consequences of a network when it grows to a billion or 2 billion people,” Parker told Allen. “It literally changes your relationship with society, with each other … It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”
Parker hasn’t been actively involved with Facebook for many years, although he influenced Mark Zuckerberg heavily in the early years — a time immortalized in the movie The Social Network. Before his time at Facebook, Parker was most famous for co-founding Napster, the music file sharing service that upended the music industry.
After leaving Facebook in 2006, Parker linked up with Facebook board member Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, a job that he left three years back. Since then, he has become more focused on giving away chunks of the $2.6 billion fortune he got from his early association with the company.
But even if Parker may now think Facebook is damaging civilization, he’s continued to collaborate with Thiel; the two are jointly funding a startup called 3T Biosciences that is developing a new cancer treatment.
https://news.vice.com/story/facebook-is-messing-with-kids-brains-says-its-ex-president
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How did the news go ‘fake’? When the media went social
In all the fuss over misinformation, one crucial aspect is ignored: the way people now perform their relationship with news in order to win the approval of others
10 November 2017
The Collins Dictionary word of the year for 2017 is, disappointingly, “fake news”. We say disappointingly, because the ubiquity of that phrase among journalists, academics and policymakers is partly why the debate around this issue is so simplistic. The phrase is grossly inadequate to explain the nature and scale of the problem. (Were those Russian ads displayed at the congressional hearings last week news, for example?) But what’s more troubling, and the reason that we simply cannot use the phrase any more, is that it is being used by politicians around the world as a weapon against the fourth estate and an excuse to censor free speech.
Definitions matter. Take, for example, the question of why this type of content is created in the first place. There are four distinct motivations for why people do this: political, financial, psychological (for personal satisfaction) and social (to reinforce our belonging to communities or “tribes”). If we’re serious about tackling mis- and disinformation, we need to address these motivations separately. And we think it’s time to give much more serious consideration to the social element.
Social media force us to live our lives in public, positioned centre-stage in our very own daily performances. Erving Goffman, the American sociologist, articulated the idea of “life as theatre” in his 1956 book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, and while the book was published more than half a century ago, the concept is even more relevant today. It is increasingly difficult to live a private life, in terms not just of keeping our personal data away from governments or corporations, but also of keeping our movements, interests and, most worryingly, information consumption habits from the wider world.
The social networks are engineered so that we are constantly assessing others – and being assessed ourselves. In fact our “selves” are scattered across different platforms, and our decisions, which are public or semi-public performances, are driven by our desire to make a good impression on our audiences, imagined and actual.
We grudgingly accept these public performances when it comes to our travels, shopping, dating, and dining. We know the deal. The online tools that we use are free in return for us giving up our data, and we understand that they need us to publicly share our lifestyle decisions to encourage people in our network to join, connect and purchase.
But, critically, the same forces have impacted the way we consume news and information. Before our media became “social”, only our closest family or friends knew what we read or watched, and if we wanted to keep our guilty pleasures secret, we could. Now, for those of us who consume news via the social networks, what we “like” and what we follow is visible to many – or, in Twitter’s case, to all, unless we are in that small minority of users who protect their tweets. Consumption of the news has become a performance that can’t be solely about seeking information or even entertainment. What we choose to “like” or follow is part of our identity, an indication of our social class and status, and most frequently our political persuasion.
When we try to understand why people are sharing misleading, manipulated and fabricated information, we need to appreciate that those shares and retweets are playing an incredibly important function, which is less about their veracity or truth. The act of sharing is often about signalling to others that we agree with the sentiment of the message, or that even if we don’t agree, we recognise it as important and worth paying attention to. We want to feel connected to others, and these mini-performances allow us to do that.
Understanding this is easier if we read the work of media scholar James Carey. He argued that the dominant lens through which we understand communication is a “transmission model”, with a focus simply on the mechanics through which a message is transmitted from Sender A to Receiver B. However, he said, we should actually view communication through the lens of ritual if we want to understand why people seek out, consume and make sense of information. From this vantage point, Carey argued: “News is not information, it is drama.” A ritual view of communication views “reading a newspaper less as sending or gaining information and more as attending a mass”, where “a particular view of the world is portrayed and confirmed”.
When we consider many of the solutions being proposed to tackle the spread of disinformation, it certainly seems that the focus is on this transmission model. Ideas such as flagging disputed content are founded on the idea that information consumption is rational. If we are serious about slowing down the dissemination of mis- and disinformation, we need to start recognising the emotional and social drivers that shape people’s relationship with information.
There has been much discussion over the past year about the need for us to pop our filter bubbles, to follow a much more diverse set of people and accounts. But how do we do this when those actions are public? Do we need to explain to our network why we are following that hyper-partisan Facebook page that sits at the opposite end of the political spectrum from our own views? And how to “heart” a tweet to go back to later for research when that action is public? Seeing Twitter tell you that your most ardent Trump-hating friend just “liked” one of his tweets can be jarring.
As a French thinker of the 1960s, Guy Debord, would second, we’ve evolved from being informed to having information in order to appear informed. While the architecture of the platforms isn’t the root cause of why mis- and disinformation are being created on the scale we’re now seeing, these features are a significant reason that they are being disseminated. And when the algorithms that power these networks are designed to capitalise on our emotional responses, but proposed solutions require rational responses. Unfortunately, no significant change is likely.
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Inside the FBI Files on James Baldwin
Baldwin is a literary touchstone for Black Lives Matter. A new book offers a deeper appreciation of the cost the queer black author paid for speaking truth to power.
9 November 2017
James Baldwin: The FBI File by William J. Maxwell argues that James Baldwin isn’t just the most tweeted literary authority of the Black Lives Matter movement but also the most relevant 20th-century author in our current political moment. Maxwell shows that Baldwin is the “literary conscience, touchstone, and pinup” for this generation’s activists, connecting a black queer-led movement with a black queer writer whose voice reaches across generations.
Baldwin has emerged as a central figure for the Black Lives Matter era largely because he is a kind of queer father to those of us coming of age in the post-post-civil rights era, a symbol of the intersection of black art and black activism, and evidence that one can be confronted by years of state violence and still survive.
Baldwin’s FBI file is excerpted and reproduced throughout the work as evidence of a witch hunt, a collage of acts of terror waged against Baldwin because he was considered a threat. Commentary by Maxwell is effectively sprinkled in to provide continuity and context. The commentary is in fact often critical, because Maxwell’s observations connect the files with Baldwin’s biography. Baldwin emerges as a more complex individual in the process. Even those familiar with his work will find a deeper appreciation of what he endured and the cost he paid for speaking truth to power.
Baldwin first becomes of significant interest to the FBI in 1961, when he spoke at the Liberation Committee for Africa — in the audience was an FBI spy. Being stalked by the agency was a reoccurring experience throughout Baldwin’s life. The book effectively assembles the FBI’s records of Baldwin (essential reports and clips of media about him) to paint a picture of an obsessive and monstrous FBI director and an agency intent on destroying Baldwin’s life.
The files read less as boring, bureaucratic, lifeless memos, and more as obsessive and paranoid recordings by Hoover and his underlings. Baldwin’s sexuality was constantly scrutinized, with the agents attempting to find evidence of his suspected — but never quite confirmed — homosexuality. A 1966 report indicates “it has been heard that Baldwin may be a homosexual and he appeared as if he may.” The impression one conjures of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover is of a desperate voyeur: constantly following Baldwin, going through his garbage, listening in on his calls, attending speaking events to record what he said, reading his interviews, and most intriguingly, reading his books.
The reaction of the FBI to Baldwin’s literary work is particularly interesting. Maxwell recounts a report by the Justice Department’s General Crimes Section that found the novel Another Country by James Baldwin to contain “literary merit” and “may be of value to students of psychology and social behavior.” This was after considerable scrutiny of the novel and consideration of whether it could even be sold and possessed legally.
Despite a lifetime being pursued by the FBI, Baldwin was never detained or interviewed. Their fear justified their pursuit, and their fear also justified their unwillingness to apprehend him. As it was pointed out in a 1964 memo, because of his platform, prominence, and involvement in civil rights, any attempt to interview him might prove to be “embarrassing.” That fear ultimately saved Baldwin from more direct FBI intimidation.
https://www.advocate.com/current-issue/2017/11/09/inside-fbi-files-james-baldwin
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Even the humble poppy can’t escape the culture wars
The war over the poppy has been building for some time, and it has become practically a national truism that anyone who fails to wear one is a traitor
11 November 2017
Consider the innocent poppy – for some time in this country a symbol of the memory of the fallen soldiers in the first world war, and all servicemen and women killed in conflict. Now, I don’t want to go too far out on a controversial limb here but that seems like a… good thing? Or – I ask whirling around to camera – is it? Because, in a sign of the absurdity of our times, even the humble poppy has been caught up in the all-consuming culture wars.
Culture wars represent a clash between traditional and progressive values, and they emerge in times of toxic division, like poisonous mushrooms popping up in mulchy earth. So people’s opinions about things – poppies, for example – are less about the thing itself and more about what it represents, and how that chimes with their political values. Post-Brexit, culture wars are ubiquitous in Britain, an overspill of the giant stew of stupid that is now swamping this country.
The war over the poppy has been building for some time, and it has become practically a national truism that anyone who fails to wear one is a traitor. The obvious irony of people being told there is only one way to remember soldiers who died fighting for freedom is lost here. But, hey, patriotism is complicated.
Well, it used to be. Now, of course, everything is very black and white, and patriotism means believing this country is the national equivalent of Superman, mightier than everyone else, and wholly capable of going it alone. And rather like patriotism itself, poppies have been firmly appropriated by the likes of Ukip and the far right. Poppy Watch has been off the charts this year, with Moeen Ali having to issue an apology when his poppy fell off in an official photo. “My daughter is called Poppy. So I won’t forget… Will you?” tweeted fundamentalist preacher Katie Hopkins last week. Presumably she named her other daughter India so she could always remember the Bhopal disaster.
You’d think the remembering was the important thing here, but all importance has been placed on to a symbolic object, which is what happens with culture wars. So are poppies still nice, or are they a symbol of reactionary nationalism? Are white poppies, a symbol of pacifism, an acceptable compromise – or are they, as Chesterfield borough council deemed earlier this month when it refused to let a pro-peace group lay a white poppy wreath at a Remembrance Day ceremony, “inappropriate”? Sorry, poppies: you might have survived the battlefields but you’re not coming through this war unscathed.
This is the problem with culture wars: things that once seemed straightforward are suddenly riven with perils and connotations. Populist politics and social media, which is built on combativeness and grandstanding, both encourage this nonsense. So to guide you through the rest of the year, here are some of 2017’s other stupidest culture wars:
Sexual harassment
Is sexual harassment good or bad? Bad, I’d heretofore thought. How one-sided of me! Last week the Today programme, for reasons of balance, held a debate on the matter and, in the pro camp, Petronella Wyatt deemed it “flattering”. Indeed, if you read certain male columnists, you’d think that anyone who dislikes being felt up by their boss is a self-pitying leftwing metropolitan millennial, whereas real women on the right love a roll in the hay, apparently. We are one tweet away from harassment being an elitist issue, ladies.
Dunkirk
A lot of people (men, if I’m being entirely honest) got excited about the film Dunkirk last summer, but then Nigel Farage tweeted a photo of his Big Sad Face next to the movie poster and wrote “I urge every youngster to go out and watch Dunkirk.” Incredibly, director Christopher Nolan declined to use that promotional quote, but maybe he hadn’t recovered from the overwhelming irony of a man who campaigns against the EU, which has helped maintain peace longer than at any other point in Europe’s history, promoting a movie about the war that nearly destroyed the continent.
Experts
One year on from Michael Gove’s famous claim that Britain has “had enough of experts”, anyone with expertise who queries the wisdom of Brexit is still being roundly trashed, from Mark Carney to Michael Bloomberg. And you, too! Brexiters repeatedly claim that the only reason Brexit might not turn out to be the magical wonderland voters were promised is because some people are unpatriotically questioning that theory.
It’s also probably because you’re not wearing your poppy enough.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/11/poppies-culture-wars
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In this time of culture wars between traditional and progressive values, every issue tends to be over-politicized and endlessly debated across the media. People’s opinions about things – sexual harassment, for example – are less about the facts and more about their political connotations. So you might end up watching some absurd TV debates where politicians or other opinion leaders actually take side on things like groping, as if there could be pros and cons. Of course, everything is political, but there’s a huge difference between debating an ethical issue and trying to justify an obvious form of misconduct. What’s even more absurd is to hear the same opinion leaders condem or justify, depending on whether the sexual predator of the day is known to gravitate towards one political pole or the other. As it’s become all too apparent, this kind of double standard is actually more typical of conservative commentators, who seem to be quite selective when they decide which sexual predators are worth shaming. Some careers are destroyed in one day, while others are left virtually unscathed. Allegations of misconduct hardly seem to hinder the political career of conservative leaders such as Trump and Berlusconi, for example. The right-wing community doesn’t normally marginalize any male member who turns out to be a bit of a “womanizer” (euphemisms are a conservative speciality). But it suddenly becomes very vocal when it has the opportunity to shame the disgraced members of certain minorities (particularly, the LGBT, the African-American, and the Jewish ones). There are, of course, bad apples in every barrel, but only some communities actually seem willing to clean up their mess. Others tend to keep their bad apples and, sometimes, they even keep them as leaders. Right-wing bigots are always very quick to absolve themselves: their own sins are immediately forgiven (or very easily expiated), only the ones committed by members of certain minorities seem to require a lifetime of penitence and atonement.
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What’s the deal with Milner, Facebook, Twitter and Russia?
Following the money in the Paradise Papers has raised more questions than answers
7 November 2017
Leaked papers have revealed that hundreds of millions of dollars in Kremlin cash was behind major investments in Facebook and Twitter. The man at the centre of the money chain is Russian billionaire Yuri Milner.
The Paradise Papers have allowed us to unpack how Russian state money flowed through offshore companies into America’s technology giants. These revelations come as Congress conducts an investigation into how social media firms spread Russian propaganda during the 2016 US presidential election campaign.
This is how the money moved.
In 2011, Kremlin-owned VTB Bank funnelled $191 million into investment fund, DST Global, that used the money to buy 11 million shares in Twitter. The shares were sold in May 2014 and, looking at stock prices at the time, it could have sold for more than $240 million in profit. VTB Bank was one of over 40 limited partners of DST Global invested in Twitter.
The Russian state funds two large investment companies: Gazprom Investholding and VTB Bank. Gazprom Investholding is “used for politically important and strategically important deals for the Kremlin,” according to Ilya Zaslavskiy, a Research Expert at the Free Russia Foundation.
In 2009, Gazprom Investholdings loaned $920 million to Kanton, a company registered in the British Virgin Islands. Two years later, Kanton took a majority stake in DST USA II, an investment firm that is publicly associated with Milner and was used to invest in Facebook. The papers also show that Kanton received $197 million of the Gazprom Investholding loans three months before Facebook announced its first deal with Milner.
Kanton has links to Alisher Usmanov — an Uzbek-Russian oligarch close to the Russian prime minister, Dmitri A. Medvedev. Milner told The Guardian he cannot name the company owner, based on a confidentiality agreement.
According to Milner, Facebook and Twitter were not aware that funding for the investments came from the state-controlled VTB Bank and Gazprom. It is not customary for DST Global to disclose the identity of its lenders. Mark Zuckerberg invited Milner to invest in Facebook, saying, “A number of firms approached us, but DST stood out because of the global perspective they bring”. The company now denies it knew where the investment came from.
Both Facebook and Twitter emphasised that DST Global is a well-known tech investor that has backed Spotify, Zynga, Airbnb and Snapchat. The firm also invested $125 million in WhatsApp and $160 million in Slack in 2015. In a statement to The New York Times, DST said it was a passive investor in Facebook and Twitter “meaning that it did not seek any board seats or have any influence on these companies’ operations and management.” DST also had no voting rights or a seat on the board.
The statement also claims that VTB Bank was the only Russian government institution that invested in any DST Global funds, and all investors in DST Global — “including Mr. Usmanov, VTB Bank, and a number of sovereign wealth funds from all over the world” — are passive investors, suggesting that the Kermlin did not influence who Milner and his company invested in.
Milner’s companies once owned more than eight percent of Facebook and five percent of Twitter, but they sold these shares years ago. He is still known as Russia’s most influential tech investor. The billionaire venture capitalist lives and works in Silicon Valley, and has invested $7 billion in more than 30 online companies. He also once advised the Russian government on technology, through a commission chaired by current prime minister Dmitry Medvedev. Now 55 years old, he graduated with a degree in theoretical physics from Moscow State University in 1985. Five years later he became the first Soviet Union student to gain a place at Wharton Business School in America.
Milner has always had an interest in internet technology. Digital Sky Technologies, of which Milner was CEO, was established in 2005 as a holding company to operate a number of Russian based internet assets. In 2010, Digital Sky Technologies was renamed Mail.ru Group Limited. Then in 2009, Milner met with Mark Zuckerberg and, a few months later, Mail.ru bought a 1.96% stake in Facebook for $200 million. DST Global was established in 2009 as a global investment manager. Since them, DST Global has invested in over 30 internet companies worldwide.
In September 2017, Forbes included Milner in the list of 100 greatest living business minds. He has rubbed shoulders with world renowned scientist Stephen Hawking, with whom he announced a $100m investment for research into a voyage to the Alpha Centauri star system, 4.37 light-years away, with a tiny laser-propelled craft travelling at 20 per cent the speed of light.
Milner also invested $850,000 into the startup Cadre, which was co-founded by Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. Mr Milner’s investment was a small part of a $50 million fundraising round, which amounts to below 0.2% of Cadre’s shares. Donald Trump has spoken publicly about America’s financial relationship with the Russian state. Back in 2008, Donald Trump said: “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”
Foreign state-owned institutions can legally invest in American companies. In an open letter, Milner called the suggestion that he was working on behalf of Russia to punctuate social media with misinformation a “fairy tale”.
“Our initial investment in Facebook was in May 2009 – a time when US-Russian relations were very different, just after Hillary Clinton visited Moscow to press the “reset” button; and we divested from both Facebook and Twitter in 2013-2014, well before the US election,” Milner wrote. He went on to explain that the investment from DST Global didn’t give them any influence over the company’s decisions. “When we negotiated the Facebook and Twitter deals we asked for no board seats, and assigned all our votes to their founders, figuring they knew best how to run their companies.” DST Global didn’t disclose MTB Bank as one of its partners. Milner said it is “normal practice in venture capital funds not to disclose limited partners”.
He also said that DST Global’s investments in Silicon Valley were motivated by “pure business logic”. “By the way, accepting funding from a Russian bank does not automatically make you a Kremlin agent.”
THE PARADISE PAPERS EXPLAINED
WHAT ARE THE PARADISE PAPERS
The Paradise Papers are a leak of 13.4 million documents from two offshore service providers and 19 tax havens’ company registries. They detail the tax affairs of the wealthiest individuals and the biggest companies from across the globe. Nearly 100 news organisations, including The Guardian, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and The New York Times, analysed the leaked documents.
WHO IS IN THE PARADISE PAPERS?
As well as Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, the papers detailed the tax affairs of major corporates such as Nike and Apple. Individuals named in the papers include U2 lead singer Bono, who invested in a small-town Lithuanian shopping centre through a shell company in Malta. The papers also detailed how around £10 million from Queen Elizabeth’s fund was held in the Cayman Islands and Bermuda between 2004 and 2005.
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This weekend’s march in Poland proves the far right isn’t going away without a fight
Emmanuel Macron’s victory convinced centrists that fascism had been turned back, but the 60,000 demonstrating in Warsaw shows how wrong they were
13 November 2017
My friend was late for Sunday brunch in Berlin so I decided to wander the streets of Neukölln, Googling sites of historic interest. After a few minutes, I wished I hadn’t. Although 40% of its population are migrants, mainly from Turkey, Neukölln is gentrifying fast: the cobbled streets bordering the old Tempelhof airfield are buzzing with upmarket cafes, interior-design stores and the retro bicycles of the middle class.
But this is the place where, on 11 November 1926 Josef Goebbels began the Nazi takeover of Berlin. As a gesture of intent, he led 300 of the party’s brownshirt stormtroopers into what was then a stronghold of the left: “Four seriously injured, four slightly hurt, but we’re on the march,” recorded the future war criminal in his diary.
Today, Neukölln is Berlin’s main venue for Nazi attacks – this time anonymous. Out of 45 recorded cases of racist violence in Berlin this year, 35 took place in Neukölln. They involve arson, swastika graffiti, bricks through shop windows and threatening notes sent to migrant shopkeepers. There have been neo-Nazis around this district for years, but, according to the Mobile Counsel Against Rightwing Extremism, an anti-fascist monitoring group, the attacks have changed – from the torching of the cars of leftwing politicians to the targeting of migrants and the NGOs helping them. The attackers originally operated in a Facebook group, but it was taken down after it published a Berlin-wide map of Jewish institutions.
Amid the mix of halal meat stores and veggie cafes, I don’t sense tension: there is strong community organisation here, supported by the city’s left-led government – almost every lamp-post has an antifa sticker on it and there’s a liberal, multicultural vibe. But what’s happening here dramatises the dangers facing Europe.
In Poland this weekend 60,000 neo-Nazis staged a march celebrating the country’s independence day, chanting: “Refugees out!” and carrying banners calling for an “Islamic holocaust”. The interior minister, Mariusz Błaszczak, called the march a “beautiful sight”; the pro-government TV news called it “a great march of patriots”. Tommy Robinson, the British far-right campaigner, tweeted that he had “an amazing trip to Poland and was shown great hospitality”, adding: “Poland is fortress Europe.”
The Italian far-right group Forza Nuova, whose leader was also at the Polish march, staged a smaller demo in Rome last week, while in the unionist agitation against Catalan independence in Spain, Francoist flags and salutes have been repeatedly spotted.
After the victory of Emmanuel Macron, and the failure of the far-right PVV to break through in the Netherlands, European centrism had been congratulating itself on stemming the tide. The massive vote for the far-right FPO in Austria, and its potential entry into a coalition government, cast a dark shadow over the political mainstream, and Saturday’s march in Warsaw will do the same.
This is happening when Europe’s economy is growing faster than at any time since the 2008 crisis. Poland’s unemployment rate is 5.3%, a record low. In the late 1920s, fascism was driven by economic desperation. In Poland, it is being driven by a white, Christian supremacist ideology that political and social elites seem unwilling to challenge. Its core message is: no more social change.
The assumption in the political mainstream is that if you police the borders demonstratively, acknowledge people’s fears about integration, maintain economic growth and throw development aid at north Africa, eventually the tensions driving neofascism will go away. But modern fascism is no longer a response to single events: it is – as the outpourings of people such as Tommy Robinson repeatedly remind us – about Islam and white identity. It is the headscarf, the mosque and the Qur’an that the fascists marching through Warsaw care about, not the economic strain brought about by refugees. Poland has dealt with a grand total of 1,474 asylum claims this year, just 18 of them from Syria; the rest mostly from white, Christian Russia and Ukraine.
I will not criticise those who try to stop fascists marching: it is a legitimate tactic given the danger. But the 2,000-strong antifa mobilisation in Warsaw – up against 60,000 people enjoying the moral support of the government and the media – suggests we are not going to stop them that way this time.
In the places where it was stopped, as in France in 1934, the left and the liberal centre achieved tactical unity and created a narrative of hope. Centre-left and leftwing governments in power delivered radical change; the fascist media was counteracted by a vibrant liberal media; the massive social power of the labour movements, the churches and the synagogues was mobilised.
This time around, the forces are different: labour movements are weaker and democratic constitutions stronger; the media is often in the hands of xenophobic billionaires, while many state TV stations are paralysed by or even complicit in the racist narrative. Probably the biggest difference is the high level of theory and consciousness you find in the online groups of the new far right. It is an international movement, fuelled by dollars and airtime both from the pro-Trump right and, in some cases, by Russian intelligence.
Its breakthrough moments will not take place through street fights, as in the 30s, but through symbiosis with sections of the mainstream, nationalist conservative right. And this is happening: in the Austrian coalition talks, in Poland, in Hungary and, of course, in the US, where the entire narrative of the pro-Trump news media feeds the paranoias of the far right.
The far right across Europe has challenged progressive politics to a death match. Anybody who thinks this is going away without a fight is displaying an irrational appetite for political risk.
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The Guardian view on money: enough is enough
13 November 2017
Denise Coates is probably the most successful entrepreneur you have never heard of. She started a business, Bet365, in a Portakabin in a Stoke car park 17 years ago which is now the second largest bookmaker in Britain and one of the largest online operations in the world. She and her family, who still live in Stoke, are now worth between them perhaps half as much as the annual economic output of everyone else in the town. But is she – is anyone – really worth the £217m salary she paid herself this year? That made her Britain’s highest-paid executive by an astonishing margin: the previous record salary had been held by the advertising man Martin Sorrell, who was paid a comparatively pathetic £48.1m last year. For comparison, the chairman of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, made only $22.3m – and by far the greatest part of that was in stock options. Cristiano Ronaldo, the best-paid sportsman in the world, is arguably overpaid for what he does, with an estimated annual income four times as much as the banker – but that isn’t even half Ms Coates’s.
By all accounts she is a modest and decent person. She built the business from nothing, through hard work and a willingness to make bets rather more sensible than those of her customers. She does not represent the most rapacious and damaging forms of the industry, the fixed-odds betting terminals. Unlike her rivals, she has not moved operations abroad to dodge tax. But to take nearly half the year’s profits as salary for herself is a cause for bogglement. It outrages any egalitarian instinct. There comes a point where the sheer quantity of money defeats the imagination. How much work would be needed to spend all that, and, to spend it all again next year? Her success makes a serious point about inequality. If anyone deserves to be so rich, she does. Yet instinct tells us no one does, and instinct here is right.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/13/the-guardian-view-on-money-enough-is-enough
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The Tories won’t deal with this tax scandal. The fingers point too close to home
For years, Conservative ministers have pledged to tackle the abuse at the heart of the Paradise Papers. If they won’t do it, Labour will
6 November 2017
The revelations in the Paradise Papers leak have showed, once again, that our economy is rigged to the benefit of the powerful, the wealthy and giant corporations. While most of us are expected to – and do – pay the taxes that are due from us, a tiny minority operate under different rules. If you’re rich enough, you can join the same exclusive club – a world of offshore trusts and secretive tax havens, administered by offshore specialists like Appleby’s, the firm at the centre of current revelations. It is one rule for the super-rich and another for the rest of us.
What the 13.4m documents that comprise the Paradise Papers show, like the Panama Papers before them, is the sheer extent of offshore tax avoidance. The problem is endemic to the global financial system, and Britain is at the centre of it. Investigations over the summer revealed that more than £1 in every £7 that corporations placed in tax havens came through the UK – making it, with the Netherlands, the largest single conduit for corporate avoidance by some distance. Our historical connections to notorious tax havens such as Bermuda and the Channel Islands, along with the City of London’s massive financial infrastructure, make Britain an ideal sluice for finances seeking secrecy and dodging taxes.
This is not about a few individuals seeking to undermine the system, it is the system. It developed over decades, and ending the unfairness of it will require the serious, systematic efforts from committed governments here and across the world. Thanks to its historical links, Britain is uniquely placed to help end the scourge of tax avoidance, freeing up resources for essential public services like the NHS after years of grinding Tory spending cuts. Labour is absolutely committed to stamping out tax avoidance once and for all. We announced before the election the most comprehensive anti-avoidance programme ever published by a major political party in Britain and are pushing this government hard on the issue.
The Tories have attempted some of the same rhetoric. David Cameron called tax avoidance “morally wrong”. His chancellor, George Osborne, called tax avoiders “leeches on society”. Prime Minister Theresa May said companies have a “duty” and “responsibility” to pay their taxes.
But at every step of the way, whatever fine words are said in public, Tory governments consistently seek to undermine and reverse efforts to clamp down on tax dodging.
HMRC set up a specialist unit to investigate “high net worth individuals” in 2009. When the House of Commons public accounts committee examined the unit earlier this year, they discovered it was today bringing in £1bn less than when it was set up. The same report found that of the 72 investigations into wealthy individuals opened by HMRC in the five years to 2016, only one resulted in a prosecution. HMRC has been woefully under-resourced by this government, losing 40% of its staff in a decade.
Tory failure has antagonised our closest international partners. The European parliament has directly criticised this government for obstructing the fight against money-laundering, tax evasion and tax avoidance, with Tory MEPs repeatedly seeking to block anti-avoidance measures. Osborne’s changes to the “controlled foreign company” regime – allowing multinationals a further tax loophole through which to funnel funds – has been placed under investigation by the European commission.
Despite promises made by David Cameron as far back as 2013 – and despite her rhetoric upon becoming prime minister – Theresa May is today pointedly refusing to back a full, public register of offshore companies and trusts. Campaigners have demanded this as an essential step towards shining a light on the activities of tax dodgers and the structures they exploit. Yet successive Conservative ministers have now spent four years rowing back from Cameron’s promise.
This year’s finance bill contained important amendments, tabled by Labour, to secure full transparency for offshore trusts. But the Tories voted them down, and preferred instead to keep protections in place for the ludicrous, anachronistic “non-dom” tax status that means someone born, living, and working here need never pay the full rate of tax.
Again and again, the Tories have failed to act on avoidance and have blocked the efforts of others. The only person who seems to believe the Tories are serious about tackling avoidance is Theresa May, who vainly clings to her “impossible to corroborate” figure for extra taxes collected by her government. Yet her own senior colleagues and associates now have serious questions to answer after the Paradise Papers revelations.
Lord Ashcroft is a former deputy chair of the Conservative party and one of the Tories’ biggest donors, reportedly handing over half a million pounds to the Conservatives for this year’s general election campaign. He let it be known, as a condition of receiving his peerage, that he had given up his non-dom status. But he is named in the Paradise Papers as receiving $200m from his offshore trust in the tax haven of Bermuda.
Was Lord Ashcroft subject to proper due diligence checks before his donation was accepted by the Tories? Can the Conservatives assure us that he was paying taxes on his considerable wealth while he was a major donor to the Tory party? HMRC needs to investigate the amount of tax paid by Lord Ashcroft, and clarify his non-dom status. But beyond that we need a full public inquiry into aggressive tax avoidance and UK companies’ and individuals’ role in it.
There is the faint smell of venality hanging over this affair and this government that will only be cleared by a credible investigation through a public inquiry. But if this government is not prepared to take the action needed to end the scourge of tax avoidance, it must step aside for a Labour government that will.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/06/tories-tax-scandal-tory-paradise-papers-labour
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The student finance system needs shaking up – for the sake of poorer students
13 November 2017
Students from the poorest households in England now graduate with the highest levels of debt. On average the poorest 40% of students owe around £57,000 after three years of study, compared with an average of £43,000 for students from the richest third of families.
This outcome is due to the way the student finance system is currently set up. First time undergraduate students can borrow money for both tuition fees and maintenance. But unlike previous years when students from poorer households were also entitled to non-repayable maintenance grants, since 2016 this has been replaced with an “enhanced loan allowance” – which inevitably just leads to more debt.
Our recent research found that coupled with higher debts for the poorest students, the inequalities in the funding system are directly impacting students’ day-to-day budgeting, which is creating a number of issues.
Gaps in the system
While prospective students have been found to have significant concerns about the level of debt now associated with university study, figures show nine in ten undergraduates still take out maintenance loans. This is currently a maximum of £8,430 available for full-time students studying away from home, outside of London.
Eligibility for this type of funding is based on household income – which implies parents are expected to supplement student budgets. In this way, for many of these semi-independent young adults, parental support is a financial necessity.
But for students from low income families – not to mention care leavers, estranged, and mature students – it is not always possible to fall back on contributions from parents, as one student we spoke to explained: “For me, if my mum comes to visit me, and doesn’t need me to pay half of the petrol money, that’s a treat.”
These students are then forced to make up this often significant shortfall. Most of the time this means either indebting their future – by using up savings or dipping into private credit – or indebting their present – by having to work part-time to make ends meet.
Making ends meet
As part of our research into student experiences of funding university, we followed the second cohort of undergraduates under the tuition fee system that has been in place since 2012. We also continued our annual evaluations of available institutional financial support. We saw how poorer students often only had enough savings to balance cash-flow issues across their first year. When this money dried up, students highlighted their growing reliance on commercial credit, such as interest-free student overdrafts. These often start at £500 and can go up to as much as £3,000.
We found more students also turn to term-time work over the course of their studies. Our latest institutional survey suggests 37% of undergraduates work while they study full-time. This is consistent with national estimates which show a third of students work alongside their studies.
Term-time work does of course bring with it a number of benefits beyond improved cash-flow – think new skills, new contacts and improved time management. But depending on the type of job and contract – as well as the number of hours worked and the flexibility offered – term-time work can put substantial pressure on students and their academic work. It can also impact the amount of time students have for extracurricular activities. And on top of the stresses and strains of full-time study, it can start to have an effect on mental well-being. One of the students we spoke to explained the impact of having a term time job in her third year: “It made me ill, but I had to get the money. I work all my rent out until the next finance [installment], then I count the weeks to the next finance and split whatever’s left weekly. This semester I was on £9 a week.”
University bursaries
This is in part why most universities offer non-repayable bursaries to students from low income backgrounds, in line with access agreement spending. Like maintenance loan entitlement, how much bursaries are worth – depends on a student’s declared household income. These are awarded to eligible students automatically in instalments across each academic year.
Our research found these university administered bursaries can help to alleviate day-to-day budgeting concerns, providing students with the extra cash they need to get by – as one student explained: “[Without the bursary] I’d have to probably work more hours on the job, but that sometimes would clash with lectures. I guess I’d maybe have to make a decision – is the lecture important or not?”
But while these bursaries can provide important support for those most in need, eligibility and the amount available to students differs significantly from university to university. This means poorer individuals from universities with higher proportions of eligible students receive less support.
Access for everyone?
As the Conservative government scrambles to appeal to younger voters, it has proposed further changes to the student loan repayment system – and even floated the idea of cancelling student debt altogether.
But none of these proposals address the pressing issue of day-to-day budgeting while at university. As our research shows, it will not be solved by students simply being “more frugal” – as universities minister Jo Johnson recently suggested.
What is needed is a dusting down of the old government grant system – complimenting the bursaries offered institutionally – to reach those students most in need. This would help to ensure those from low income households are properly supported, and that they don’t leave university with considerably more debt than their peers.
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The Guardian view on school funding: pay fair
The worst intergenerational unfairness starts with 18-year-olds leaving school without the right qualifications through no fault of their own
13 November 2017
A well-aimed, well-founded campaign from the chalk face of the school system can put the chancellor under more pressure than any political assault. Jules White, a headteacher from West Sussex, has been coordinating a letter backed by up to 5,000 fellow heads of primary and secondary schools. They are all from counties that are at the lower end of the per-pupil funding league: they stretch from across England from Cornwall to Cumbria, and on Tuesday they will call on the chancellor to point out exactly what the Department for Education’s new national funding formula will mean in practice to their budgets. Conservative chancellors are often swift to dismiss such protest as producer interest, but if this is producer interest, it is what producers should be interested in – and what any parent would want their child’s teachers to be campaigning for: the resources available to the children that go to their schools. In the summer, more money has already been found to smooth the introduction of a scheme that, when it was shown to then prime minister David Cameron, was rejected instantly as an electoral disaster in the making. In fact this is a reform that is long overdue. It needs to work. For that reason alone getting it right should be high in Philip Hammond’s priorities, as he sweats through the final days of budget preparation.
The new national funding formula is meant to end the unintended unfairness of some schools getting very much more cash per pupil than other similar schools in a different part of England. It ends local councils’ power to use their own formula to fund schools, and it is meant to stop the postcode lottery. Yet because of the way the system tries to limit the losses any one school can be hit with, the new formula will still see some schools getting up to 60% less than a similar school in a better-funded borough. And many schools are already struggling financially because their budgets have not allowed for rises in costs like pensions and national insurance contributions, or inflation. Nor was there extra cash for a 1% teachers’ pay rise. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has estimated that schools are set to lose nearly £2bn by 2020.
The education secretary Justine Greening insists that per pupil funding is protected at least until 2019. That’s not how it feels in the classroom, where heads face battles to recruit and retain teachers, put off by larger class sizes, fewer teaching assistants and a shortage of basic resources like props for the school play. Ms Greening has tried to innovate, proposing schemes to offer rebates on student loans to entice teachers into shortage subjects like science and languages, and bursaries for maths teachers. But this is fiddling at the margins.
Mr Hammond is under instruction to produce a budget that, among the numerous other challenges and uncertainties that he faces, addresses the Tories’ new anxiety about intergenerational unfairness, in particular the cost of housing. But intergenerational unfairness goes far beyond the housing crisis, although that too is an urgent matter. Being fair to the next generation starts with ensuring that every child has the same chance of going to a good school and being taught by the best teachers. Schools can’t entirely make up for what happens at home. Some children will always find school easier than others. But every child should be taught in a school that is decently resourced so that it can meet the needs of the pupils who attend it. No amount of fiddling with the housing market will make up for the terrible unfairness embodied in an 18-year-old who has missed out on the qualifications, knowledge and skills they need to have their best chance of making a success of their life.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/13/the-guardian-view-on-school-funding-pay-fair
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No reason to apologise to xenophobic leavers
The call for remainers to apologise to leave voters is rejected by Guill Gil, Patricia Borlenghi and Barry Mellor
13 November 2017
Brian Forsdick says he voted Brexit for good reasons but now he sees a good Brexit is not possible (Letters, 13 November); if only remain politicians were to apologise for their errors, Brexiters would then change their minds. So, people who were right have to apologise so that people who were wrong can feel better – without in turn apologising for bringing the country to great economic loss because of their xenophobia, isolationism, exceptionalism, and all the other worthy feelings behind their pro-Brexit votes.
Guill Gil
London
• So if prominent remainers apologise to angry leavers, Brexit can still be avoided? Nothing to do with the media-hugging fanatic Farage and weak-minded, cowardly Cameron for calling the referendum in the first place? Bloody-minded Brexit voters have to be cosseted and cuddled to avoid disaster. I don’t quite see the logic of this. Theresa May, Gove, Johnson and many in her minority government are firmly on the side of Brexit. If prominent remainers apologise (to whom and how?), it won’t make an iota of difference. The rest of us don’t matter. Of course there is much obstinacy, blindness and arrogance in plunging ahead, but sadly, apologies won’t change this.
Surely when voting in the referendum, it wasn’t that difficult to foresee the mess that the negotiations leaving the EU would become? Who thought it would be easy? Certainly not me. A messy and very expensive divorce from 27 countries can’t be finalised in such a short time period.
Incidentally, all the letters published on this subject were written by British men. Don’t women and those of a different ethnic background or nationality have a voice on this particular subject?
Patricia Borlenghi
Manningtree, Essex
• I suggest it might be more appropriate for Messrs Johnson and Gove to write a letter to the British people along the following lines: “In the lead up to last year’s referendum, we realise that we told you many lies, and that we failed to tell you that a vote for leave would make you poorer and would greatly diminish Britain’s status in the world. We apologise for our mendacious duplicity, will now resign our positions in the cabinet, and will return to the back benches, where we will maintain a Trappist-like silence for the foreseeable future.”
Barry Mellor
London
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/nov/13/no-reason-to-apologise-to-xenophobic-leavers
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EU citizens ‘worth £4.42bn to Scotland’
11 November 2017
The amount added to national output by the average EU citizen working in Scotland is £34,400, according to a new study.
With 128,400 EU citizens employed in Scotland, that implies a value of £4.42bn.
It is estimated that, on average, each additional EU citizen working in Scotland contributes £10,400 to government revenues.
The reckoning has been published in new research from the Scottish government.
It has been submitted to the Migration Advisory Committee, as that body looks into the UK’s future immigration policy post-Brexit.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-scotland-business-41950355
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Far-Right groups are trying to hijack British symbols and institutions for their own warped ideals
11 November 2017
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/11/11/far-right-groups-trying-hijack-poppy-saysamber-rudd/
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The Guardian view on white nationalism: a rising danger
Almost a century after the end of ‘the war to end all wars’, Europe is in danger of forgetting lessons from the 20th century
12 November 2017
In Britain, 11 November is known as Armistice Day, but in Poland the same anniversary of the end of the first world war is remembered as Independence Day. In the west it is a memory of futile victory, but in the east it commemorates a moment of triumph, although one that would be followed by still more crushing defeat. The bright ideals of 1918 were built around a romantic conception of nationalism. Eastern Europe was to be freed from the multinational empires that had ruled it from Vienna and St Petersburg, and in their place would rise a host of little nations from Finland to Yugoslavia, to live in brotherhood and prosperity under the aegis of the League of Nations. It was a patchwork that would within 25 years disintegrate into the most terrible war – and genocide – of European history, followed by ethnic cleansings of the survivors all across eastern Europe as the old nations were reconstituted as homogenous prison camps.
The end of the second world war gave rise in the west to a very different ideal of nationhood. The European Union was built on the hope that national boundaries might become very much less salient, preserved as wrinkles on the gentle face of history rather than its fixed expression; and after the fall of the Berlin Wall it seemed that this pattern must in time spread east, even into the former Yugoslavia. If there was one lesson that every European – and not just Jewish ones – had learned from the first half of the 20th century, it was “never again”.
Never has that slogan sounded more hollow than on Saturday, when a white nationalist parade drew 60,000 people, mostly men, to Warsaw to march through the streets with most banners proclaiming “We want God” but others demanding a “White Poland”, “A holocaust for Muslims”, and “a brotherhood of white nations” – as if that had worked out after 1918. Of course, the breakdown of international order between the wars was blamed by the far right on Jews, whereas the threat now is supposed to be Muslims. But the present coalition extends to traditional antisemites, too. The organisers included groups who had been active in the antisemitic agitation of 1930s Poland, and Richard Spencer, the American neo-Nazi, had been invited, although he was kept out of the country by the merely authoritarian nationalist Law and Justice party.
Self-conscious Nazis are still a very small part of this movement. We are not seeing a straightforward return to the 1930s. But the slogans shouted today still wake disturbing echoes from 80 years ago. What we have once more is a growing cohort of men who know that the economy has no dignified use for them, and who feel this insult to their own personal self-worth is also an insult to the nation, the religion, or even the race, that they are proud to belong to. Their reaction brings shame on all three. These are dangerous emotions. When we watch these marches, we should remember the delirious enthusiasm that greeted the outbreak of the war whose ghastly end four years later we still commemorate. The hard-won common sense of each generation is easily forgotten by the children to whom it is offered as a gift. The only counter to this kind of twisted idealism is an idealism of progress and decency which can carry an equivalent meaning and urgency, but values all people for themselves, not for their race or creed.
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Theresa May accuses Russia of interfering in elections and fake news
At lord mayor’s banquet, PM launches extraordinary attack, saying actions were ‘threatening the international order’
14 November 2017
Theresa May has accused Russia of meddling in elections and planting fake stories in the media in an extraordinary attack on its attempts to “weaponise information” in order to sow discord in the west.
The prime minister spoke out against “the scale and nature” of Russia’s actions during an address at the lord mayor’s banquet, saying it was “threatening the international order on which we all depend”.
Listing Russia’s attempts to undermine western institutions in recent years, she said: “I have a very simple message for Russia. We know what you are doing. And you will not succeed. Because you underestimate the resilience of our democracies, the enduring attraction of free and open societies, and the commitment of western nations to the alliances that bind us.
“The UK will do what is necessary to protect ourselves, and work with our allies to do likewise.”
Her speech is a serious escalation of the UK’s warnings about Russia as Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary, prepares to visit Moscow before the end of the year as part of a strategy of cautious engagement with Vladimir Putin’s administration.
Since Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, May said Russia had “fomented conflict in the Donbass [eastern Ukraine], repeatedly violated the national airspace of several European countries, and mounted a sustained campaign of cyber-espionage and disruption”.
“This has included meddling in elections, and hacking the Danish ministry of defence and the Bundestag [German parliament], among many others,” she told the audience of City of London business figures.
“It is seeking to weaponise information. Deploying its state-run media organisations to plant fake stories and photo-shopped images in an attempt to sow discord in the west and undermine our institutions.”
She said the UK did not want to “return to the Cold War, or to be in a state of perpetual confrontation” but the UK would have to act to protect the interests of the UK, Europe and rest of the world if Russia continues on its current path.
A Downing Street source said May was not making the intervention in response to any specific event but rather to a growing body of evidence that Russian agencies have been attempting to interfere with western politics.
The prime minister’s strong criticism of Russia’s activities comes in contrast to comments this weekend by Donald Trump, who said on Saturday that he believed Vladimir Putin’s denials of having meddled in the American presidential elections.
Asked by reporters if he had raised the issue of Russian interference during conversations with Putin at a summit in Vietnam during a tour of Asia, Trump said: “Every time he sees me, he says, ‘I didn’t do that.’ And I believe – I really believe that when he tells me that, he means it.”
The US president appeared to contradict that stance on Sunday when he said he was “with our agencies” on the issue.
May did not say on Monday whether she was concerned with Russian intervention in any UK democratic processes, but Ben Bradshaw, a leading Labour MP, is among those to have called for a judge-led inquiry into the possibility that Moscow tried to influence the result of the Brexit referendum.
Russia has been accused of running “troll factories” that disseminate fake news and divisive posts on social media. It emerged on Monday that a Russian bot account was one of those that shared a viral image that claimed a Muslim woman ignored victims of the Westminster terror attack as she walked across the bridge.
The account that tweeted the picture, @SouthLoneStar, was identified as a Russian bot as part of a US investigation into the country’s influence on the 2016 presidential election.
The prime minister’s attack on Russia’s actions also come as MPs on the House of Commons media committee prepare to begin an inquiry into whether Moscow has tried to interfere in British politics, which is due to hear from representatives of both Twitter and Facebook.
May told the banquet that she would do everything possible to protect Europe’s security cooperation even though the UK is leaving the EU and argued that reform of Nato would maintain a vital alliance in deterring and countering hostile Russian activity.
“It is why we have stepped up our military and economic support to Ukraine,” she said. “It is why we are strengthening our cybersecurity and looking at how we tighten our financial regimes to ensure the profits of corruption cannot flow from Russia into the UK. So we will take the necessary actions to counter Russian activity.”
May spoke about her desire to build a “global Britain” stressing recent talks on trade with Japan and India, and her commitment to “maintaining the golden era of our relationship with China” on both economic and security terms.
But the prime minister stressed that securing “the best possible Brexit deal” with the EU was critical “to underpin our shared commitment to open economies and free societies in the face of those who seek to undermine them. Chief among those … is Russia”.
The prime minister said she still hoped that Russia would become a strong state that plays by the rules and promotes international security as a permanent member of the United Nations security council.
“Russia can, and I hope one day will, choose this different path,” she said. “But for as long as Russia does not, we will act together to protect our interests and the international order on which they depend.”
May previously spoke out against Russia’s aggression towards eastern Europe during a visit to Estonia in September but this is her most strident language accusing Moscow of manufacturing fake stories and propaganda.
Her former defence secretary, Michael Fallon, was also regarded as very hawkish in his approach to Russia, warning last month that Moscow’s spending on defence was twice that of the UK.
Since resigning at the beginning of this month over inappropriate conduct towards women, he has been replaced by Gavin Williamson, the former chief whip.
May also used her lord mayor’s speech to condemn the Myanmar regime over the treatment of the Rohingya Muslim minority, more than 600,000 of whom have fled the country’s north-western Rakhine state for neighbouring Bangladesh.
She said: “This is a major humanitarian crisis which looks like ethnic cleansing. And it is something for which the Burmese authorities – and especially the military – must take full responsibility.”
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If Theresa May really cares about #fakenews why is she ignoring attempts to better regulate social media? https://t.co/gMZUd1JnlI
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Why regulators like Ofcom are dropping the ball on ‘Fake News’, dark advertising and extremism
Ofcom’s position on Facebook and Google is inconsistent, illogical and incoherent.
25 September 2017
During the course of 2017, the large ‘big tech’ internet intermediaries have come under an unprecedented degree of scrutiny worldwide. Facebook posts and Google search listings have come under fire as enablers of so-called ‘fake news’ and propaganda by extremist, terrorist and hate groups, with Facebook’s role in ‘dark advertising’ by hostile foreign powers particularly in the spotlight. Google’s YouTube has been hit by a backlash from advertisers. Google is currently fighting a heavy European Commission fine for steering customers to its own platform.
But the dominance of Facebook and Google on digital and particularly mobile markets continues to grow, outpacing all others. They are the main recipients of the growth of digital and mobile advertising revenue in the UK, at the expense of the rest of the media landscape.
Yet the UK’s media regulator, Ofcom, does not currently regulate Facebook and Google, at all, despite admitting they are ‘media companies’ who have a huge impact on the media landscape where Ofcom has a legal duty both to regulate and to promote competition, investment and innovation http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/21/section/3 .
Over the course of the last year, its representatives have, with different levels of nuance and emphasis, swayed around the issue like cyclists avoiding a dead squirrel in the road. Last autumn, Ofcom’s chief executive Sharon White told the Royal Television Society that she did not think Ofcom should regulate Facebook or Google (or indeed, Twitter).
There are some signs that Ofcom board members are thinking about the impact of the duopoly’s dominance of advertising and the media market. This February, when Ofcom presented its annual plan in Cardiff, I asked Ofcom board member Dame Lynne Brindley what was their view of the duopoly’s dominance of the UK advertising market. She told me that the dominant position held by Google and Facebook in respect of mobile advertising was ‘a big issue’ and that as a regulator, Ofcom would not want to be left with responsibility for regulating only a smaller area of the overall media market. She rightly said that this was a matter for the Government and for Parliament. In March, I asked Ofcom’s chief executive herself at the Oxford Media Convention whether, given the duopoly’s dominance of UK media advertising, there wasn’t a case for intervention, and that surely Ofcom would not want to be left regulating a small portion of the media market. She replied that while she was nervous of regulation, and wouldn’t be pressed into supporting it, “it was a big concern”, and she could see the case if the commercial viability of the sector was threatened.
This month Ofcom’s Chief Executive told the Royal Television Society in Cambridge that she thought Facebook and Google were media companies. But then she said:
“I don’t think regulation is the answer because I think it is really hard to navigate the boundary between regulation and censorship of the internet. I do think though that the companies need to take more responsibility as publishers as well as platforms and I also think to be frank that content providers and advertisers – as you’re beginning to see – need to be increasingly fussy about the environment in which they’re putting their content.”
Ofcom is caught in a trap of its own making. It accepts that the Big Tech duopoly’s impact on the UK advertising market is ‘a big issue’. It accepts that they are ‘media companies’. But it does not want to regulate them.
The notion that it is hard ‘to navigate the boundary between regulation and censorship of the internet’ shows just how far the big tech companies have captured the discourse around regulation. The internet intermediaries have been able to rely on provisions dating from the early days of US, EU and UK internet laws in the 1990s to shield themselves from certain kinds of regulation. But regulation and censorship are not the same thing.
We need to nail the argument that regulation equals censorship. It does not. Ofcom regulates broadcasters but no-one calls that ‘censorship’. Five years ago, former senior Ofcom regulator Robin Foster made a series of proposals which carefully avoided the danger of intermediary regulation becoming any form of censorship. As he said then “experience of media self-regulation elsewhere suggests that there are advantages in having some form of statutory underpinning”. As the former Ofcom chief executive, Ed Richards, told the House of Lords back in 2014, regulatory interest can ‘nudge’ dominant players to modify behaviours.
It is actually Facebook and Google and their algorithms that do much of the censoring of the Internet now. Last year a senior Ofcom staff member presented to the European Parliament the case of Facebook censoring the famous Vietnam War photo of a young naked girl fleeing a napalm attack as an example of the problems of algorithms acting as curators of content. The biggest censors on the Internet, outside authoritarian regimes, are the Internet Intermediaries. Their actions should not be left without some form of statutory accountability.
Of course, not all of the issues raised by the behaviours of the Internet intermediaries fall to be regulated by Ofcom. Open Democracy’s reports on breaches of UK electoral law in the Brexit referendum raise the role of the Electoral Commission, and the LSE’s Damian Tambini and others have called for a new approach to personally targeted advertising on social media platforms. The Information Commissioner commenced an investigation of possible data breaches during the Brexit referendum. The Advertising Standards Authority has responsibility for personalised advertising. The CMA would have responsibilities in respect of competition for digital advertising. It is not clear that the scope and power of Facebook and Google has been considered by regulators on a cross-regulatory basis, and some of the issues raised by data, algorithms and advertising could cross the boundaries of regulatory knowledge and capacity.
The House of Commons Select Committee on Digital, Culture, Media and Sport has re-opened the former Culture Committee’s inquiry into fake news, and responses are due by October 31st . These issues should be raised in that committee – and Ofcom’s contradictions and evasions need to be brought into sharp focus.
Worse still, they’re bankrolled by dark money – we’ve exposed the shady group behind their lavish pro-Brexit campaigning, but they’re still refusing to name their secret donors. Now they hold the balance of power at Westminster, it’s even more vital that we find out who their paymasters are.
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Facebook is not listening to the fake news furore
Mark Zuckerberg’s absence from Capitol Hill to face questioning about the firm’s role in the spread of bogus election ads spoke volumes about his priorities
5 November 2017
One of the most instructive sights of the week was that of representatives of Twitter, Google and Facebook getting a grilling from a US Senate judiciary subcommittee on Capitol Hill. The topic at hand? “Extremist content and Russian disinformation online”, which, translated, reads: how did Russian use of social media affect the outcome of the 2016 presidential election? The committee chairman, Senator Lindsey Graham, set it up nicely in his opening statement by quoting what Trump had said on Fox News on 20 October: “I doubt I’d be here if it weren’t for social media, to be honest with you.”
For three tech companies that, like all of Silicon Valley, loathe and despise politics, this was a nightmarish week. I mean to say, there they were, at the mercy of the low-IQ technophobes of Capitol Hill, live on C-Span (the congressional TV channel), something they had lobbied furiously to avoid. Their appearances were presaged by a flurry of press releases and revelations. The Russian exploitation of their advertising machines that they had once pooh-poohed was, it turned out, much more extensive than they had imagined. Facebook, for example, had belatedly discovered that 126 million people in the US may have seen posts produced by Russian-government-backed agents on its site. Very devious coves, those Ruskies.
A few things emerged from the hearing. The first is that legislators seem to be getting worried about the power of the big tech companies, especially Facebook. “How does Facebook,” asked Senator Al Franken, “which prides itself on being able to process billions of data points and instantly transform them into personal connections for its users, somehow not make the connection that electoral ads, paid for in rubles, were coming from Russia?” Good question, which produced no answer from Colin Stretch, the company’s general counsel.
Second, the legislators focused too much on the Russian ads and ignored what may be a bigger problem, namely the 80,000 “organic” posts that appeared in the news feeds of a third of American Facebook users. These were ingenious posts that appeared to come from US users and carried messages that, though not overtly political, were designed to press emotional buttons in a way that could have had a political impact.
To a detached observer, though, it looked like classical political theatre. The politicians huffed and puffed and kept an eye on their Twitter feeds. There was much cant about “finding solutions”. And the company representatives mimed contrition but yielded little ground.
All of which was predictable. My guess is that nothing much will happen. On the political side, the Republicans who control Congress have no intention of doing anything to regulate the tech companies. Three Democratic senators have put forward a bill that would require the companies to provide more information about the political ads that they accept and run. It’s called the Honest Ads Act, which would make it the first oxymoron to make it on to the statute book. But its chances of progressing are infinitesimally small, if only because the midterm elections loom.
On the corporate side, nothing much will happen either. Of course the companies are promising to recruit lots of people to help them stamp out abuses of their advertising engines. They are also investing heavily (they say) in AI that will be smart enough to outwit those fiendish Russians. (Good luck with that.) The one thing they will not do, however, is anything that might undermine their business models, which are, at least in the cases of Google and Facebook, licences to print money.
Just to emphasise that point, Facebook has just released its results for the third quarter of 2017. They show that its number of “daily active users” grew by 50 million to 1.37 billion. Its revenues are up by 47% from what they were a year ago. And its share price now stands at $182 compared with $127 last November. It will take more than a spot of public humiliation at the hands of a few senators to persuade them to switch off a money-making machine like that.
Summing up: the companies have no incentive to change their ways. And there’s no real political will in the US to make them. All of which perhaps explains why Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t on Capitol Hill but in China to meet the great Thought Leader Xi Jinping. Now there’s a politician worth sucking up to.
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The Guardian view on Theresa May and Russia: keep pouring the sunshine
The prime minister’s annual speech on foreign affairs might have highlighted Brexit or the disruptive effect of Trump. But it was vital to call out Russia’s propaganda war too
14 November 2017
Britain’s prime minister makes a sharp and critical speech about Russian attempts to undermine the UK’s institutions. In one sense, not much new there. This is what British prime ministers do, and have done for decades, before, during and after the cold war. This is the UK’s default setting. So when Theresa May made the prime minister’s annual speech to the lord mayor’s banquet this week, a speech traditionally about UK foreign policy, it is not entirely surprising that she used it to mount an attack on Vladimir Putin and his propaganda war against the west. The real surprise might have been if she had done otherwise.
Mrs May pulled no punches. She said the alliances that maintain the global rules-based order must be defended. (It was less clear from her speech in what way, if at all, Brexit contributes to this worthy effort.) But the chief threat to the rules-based order was Russia. Mr Putin’s actions threaten that order, she said, in Crimea, in the Donbass, and through cyber-espionage and disruption. Russia has violated the national airspace of several countries, meddled in elections, hacked the Danish defence ministry and the German Bundestag. In the most striking lines of the speech, Mrs May said: “I have a very simple message for Russia. We know what you are doing.”
Why now? The great issue of the moment for Britain is Brexit. Mrs May could have given a speech about Brexit and still fulfilled the brief of speaking about foreign affairs. She could even have talked about the future of the transatlantic alliance after 12 months of Donald Trump’s presidency. Remember also that Mrs May is not by history and temperament someone who likes to pick a fight with Russia. When she was home secretary she tried to block an inquiry into the killing of Alexander Litvinenko. When she lost that fight she did little to follow up its conclusion that the Russian state, headed by Mr Putin, was responsible for his murder.
There are many things to note about the timing. It allowed Mrs May to restate what she used to describe as her strong and stable leadership. It distracted to some degree from the announcement, on the same day, that the government was making a concession (albeit a questionable one) on the EU withdrawal bill that MPs began debating in detail on Tuesday. It sets a potential dividing line with Jeremy Corbyn who, if prime minister, might be less willing to mount a political attack on Russia, and might come under pressure from pro-Russian supporters not to do so. It is a reminder of how Syria has largely disappeared from the charge sheet against Moscow. It also set some firm constraints for Boris Johnson’s expected visit to Russia in the coming weeks, a trip that has the potential to become a circus.
The speech also marks a significant contrast with Mr Trump’s absurd remarks after a meeting with the Russian leader in Vietnam at the weekend. Mr Trump said Mr Putin had assured him that Russia did not meddle in the US presidential election, adding that he believed the assurances and that Mr Putin felt very insulted by the charges. Mrs May, by refreshing contrast, simply said that this is what Russia does. It is a reminder that, in the real as opposed to the Trump world, it is now just two months before the US is required by its own laws to introduce tougher sanctions against those who cooperate with the oligarchs and companies surrounding Mr Putin. Those sanctions may affect individuals and companies with business in Britain.
In the end, though, these are all secondary issues. The important justification for Mrs May’s speech is simply that it has become increasingly likely that the charges are not paranoid but true, and she is likely to have been briefed to that effect. The evidence has grown of Russia’s sustained efforts to use social media to sway opinion and spread disinformation, and to channel funds to groups and campaigns that cooperated with those aims in elections in France and Germany as well as the US. Russia is not alone among the world’s authoritarian regimes in using these tactics domestically, as a new Freedom House report points out, but it is a global leader in doing so internationally. Mrs May’s claims that Russia seeks to “weaponise information” and plant “fake stories” makes her the latest western leader to highlight the issue, not the first. It is inconceivable that Britain was not a target. Investigations ranging from the Mueller probe in the US to the modest beginnings of an inquiry into the EU referendum campaign in the UK are the first stages in a process of pouring sunshine into a dark world.
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Russia used 419 fake accounts to tweet about Brexit, data shows
Researchers find that accounts run from a St Petersburg troll farm tried to sow discord between Britons over the referendum
14 November 2017
Concern about Russian influence in British politics has intensified as it emerged that more than 400 fake Twitter accounts believed to be run from St Petersburg published posts about Brexit.
Researchers at the University of Edinburgh identified 419 accounts operating from the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) attempting to influence UK politics out of 2,752 accounts suspended by Twitter in the US.
One of the accounts run from the Kremlin-linked operation attempted to stir anti-Islamic sentiment during the Westminster Bridge terror attack in March in a bogus post claiming a Muslim woman ignored victims – a claim that was highlighted by mainstream media outlets including Mail Online and the Sun.
For days after, the tweeter was gleefully sharing press clippings. “Wow … I’m on the Daily Mail front page! Thank you British libs! You’re making me famous,” he said, referring to an article that appeared on Mail Online and which still bore the tweet at the time of writing.
A day later, he tweeted: “I’m on The Sun! Thank you again, British libs! Now I’m even more famous!”
Damian Collins, the chairman of the Commons culture, media and sport select committee – which is investigating fake news – said the Russian agency appeared to be attempting to divide society and destabilise politics.
The Conservative MP wants Twitter to tell the committee how it believes Russia has been attempting to influence UK politics.
“What is at stake is whether Russia has constructed an architecture which means they have thousands of accounts with which they can bombard [us] with fake news and hyper-partisan content,” he said.
“We need to understand how widespread it is and what the impact is on the democratic process.”
Collins has demanded that Twitter’s chief executive, Jack Dorsey, supply examples of posts from the Internet Research Agency about British politics – citing concern at possible “interference by foreign actors in the democratic process” of the UK.
“This is information they hold and I can’t see any reason they should be delaying supplying it,” he said.
The developments come after the US Congress intelligence committee investigated Russian troll campaigning in the US election of November 2016.
Twitter told the House committee that it had suspended 2,752 accounts which were tweeting about the US election because it believed they were controlled from Russia. The committee said it “may well be just the tip of the iceberg”.
Hundreds of paid bloggers work round the clock at the IRA to flood Russian internet forums, social networks and the comments sections of western publications – sowing disinformation, praising the country’s president, Vladimir Putin, and raging at the west.
The agency has been linked to a businessmen who was once Putin’s favourite chef.
Prof Laura Cram, director of neuropolitics research at the University of Edinburgh, told the Guardian that at least 419 of those accounts tweeted about Brexit a total of 3,468 times – mostly after the referendum had taken place.
Archives of the now deleted Russian accounts show they included people purporting to be a US Navy veteran, a Tennessee Republican and a Texan patriot – all tweeting in favour of Brexit.
Labour deputy leader Tom Watson urged Theresa May to “bring political pressure to bear on tech giants to reveal the extent to which their platforms have been hijacked, and to take action against agents of the Russian state who use their platforms to disseminate misinformation and untruths”.
He said tech companies including Twitter and Facebook “haven’t done enough to identify and weed out the fake profiles and automated content that pose a direct threat to our democracy”.
On Monday, May gave a speech in which she said Russia’s actions were “threatening the international order on which we all depend”.
She accused Russia of meddling in elections and planting fake stories in the media to “weaponise information” and sow discord in the west.
Concerns about Russia’s cyber-operations have also been raised elsewhere in Europe.
Spain’s prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, claimed on Monday that half of the Twitter accounts that amplified the issue of Catalan independence were registered in Russia and 30% in Venezuela.
Others have voiced concerns that Russian social media accounts also sought to influence this year’s French and German elections.
A spokesperson for Twitter said the company “recognises that the integrity of the election process itself is integral to the health of a democracy. As such, we will continue to support formal investigations by government authorities into election interference as required.”
The Russian tweets identified by Twitter as coming from the IRA included one by an account holder using the name @SouthLoneStar.
He reportedly said: “I hope UK after #BrexitVote will start to clean their land from muslim invasion!” and “UK voted to leave future European Caliphate! #BrexitVote.”
The same account posted a widely shared tweet at the time of the March terror attack on Westminster Bridge in London.
It posted a photograph of a woman in a headscarf passing the scene of the attack with the caption: “Muslim woman pays no mind to the terror attack, casually walks by a dying man while checking phone #PrayForLondon #Westminster #BanIslam.”
The woman said later: “Not only have I been devastated by witnessing the aftermath of a shocking and numbing terror attack, I’ve also had to deal with the shock of finding my picture plastered all over social media by those who could not look beyond my attire, who draw conclusions based on hate and xenophobia.”
Another suspended account appeared to be a Republican from Tennessee. @TEN_GOP quoted Nigel Farage telling Fox News about Brexit and Donald Trump: “What you’ve seen this year is just ordinary, decent people, the little people, who’ve said ‘We’ve had enough. We want change.’”
@WadeHarriot, purporting to be a former member of the US Navy, retweeted criticisms of “leftists” for “trying to subvert #Brexit” and predictions of “#Brexit #Frexit #Grexit”.
Cram said the content of the Brexit tweets overall was “quite chaotic and it seems to be aimed at wider disruption. There’s not an absolutely clear thrust. We pick up a lot on refugees and immigration.”
She stressed that more research is needed to establish the extent of the tweets’ influence, and urged caution about drawing conclusions from the relatively small number of troll accounts so far identified. About 78% of the tweets came after the Brexit vote on 23 June 2016, she added.
Russia has been adamant it did not interfere in any way in the EU referendum. “We closely followed the voting but never interfered or sought to influence it,” Putin said the day after the poll.
However, there is no doubt that many in Moscow welcomed the outcome. An EU without Britain would be less united on sanctions against Russia, many Russian officials hoped, because it would lose one of its stronger foreign policy voices and would be too consumed with its own internal problems to prioritise Russia policy.
At the time, the former US ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, said the vote to leave the EU was “a giant victory for Putin’s foreign policy objectives”.
The fresh evidence pointing towards Russian involvement in social media campaigning around Brexit came after May on Monday accused Russia of meddling in elections and planting fake stories in the media to “weaponise information” and sow discord in the west.
The US Congressional investigation into Russian meddling through social media also gathered evidence from Facebook that between June 2015-August 2017 there were 470 accounts on the platform associated with the IRA and that 126 million Americans are likely to have seen content from an IRA page.
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Obama tried to give Zuckerberg a wake-up call over fake news on Facebook
24 September 2017
Nine days after Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg dismissed as “crazy” the idea that fake news on his company’s social network played a key role in the U.S. election, President Barack Obama pulled the youthful tech billionaire aside and delivered what he hoped would be a wake-up call.
For months leading up to the vote, Obama and his top aides quietly agonized over how to respond to Russia’s brazen intervention on behalf of the Donald Trump campaign without making matters worse. Weeks after Trump’s surprise victory, some of Obama’s aides looked back with regret and wished they had done more.
Now huddled in a private room on the sidelines of a meeting of world leaders in Lima, Peru, two months before Trump’s inauguration, Obama made a personal appeal to Zuckerberg to take the threat of fake news and political disinformation seriously, although Facebook representatives say the president did not single out Russia specifically. Unless Facebook and the government did more to address the threat, Obama warned, it would only get worse in the next presidential race.
Zuckerberg acknowledged the problem posed by fake news. But he told Obama that those messages weren’t widespread on Facebook and that there was no easy remedy, according to people briefed on the exchange, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details of a private conversation.
The conversation on Nov. 19 was a flashpoint in a tumultuous year in which Zuckerberg came to recognize the magnitude of a new threat — a coordinated assault on a U.S. election by a shadowy foreign force that exploited the social network he created.
Like the U.S. government, Facebook didn’t foresee the wave of disinformation that was coming and the political pressure that followed. The company then grappled with a series of hard choices designed to shore up its own systems without impinging on free discourse for its users around the world.
One outcome of those efforts was Zuckerberg’s admission on Thursday that Facebook had indeed been manipulated and that the company would now turn over to Congress more than 3,000 politically themed advertisements that were bought by suspected Russian operatives.
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Russia is meddling in western politics as it has nothing to lose
Putin knows Russia is no longer a superpower, but he can bolster his standing at home by destabilising the west
15 November 2017
From the Brexit referendum to the American and French presidential elections, Russia has been causing serious mischief in the western democracies. Just yesterday it emerged that hundreds of fake Twitter accounts believed to be linked to the Kremlin had been used to influence British politics. The pattern is too uniform and widespread to be an accident. So what’s going on?
Russian leaders have taken a cool look at the world and decided that they have nothing to lose. In their eyes, the west has consistently sought to humble Russia. In June, Vladimir Putin described the economic sanctions in place since the Crimean annexation of 2014 as merely the latest phase in the west’s aggressive activity, going back to the Soviet decades and even to the days of the tsars. Trouble, he declared, comes in a rush whenever “Russia has begun to stand on its own feet”.
He is not the only one to think this way. His close associates voice still more rancid variations on Russian victimhood. Sergei Naryshkin, director of the Foreign Intelligence Service, argues that the sanctions are not only punitive but illegal. Security Council secretary Nikolai Patrushev accuses the west of taking control of Chechnya in the 1990s and having the ultimate ambition of breaking up the Russian Federation.
These madhouse ideas are born out of resentment at Russia’s tumble down the slopes from superpowerdom. Less unhinged are the complaints about how the Nato countries behaved in the years of Russian frailty. Russian ministers continually dwell on the west’s aerial bombardment of Belgrade in 1999 and its subsequent recognition of the breakaway state of Kosovo. Russia accepts that it is no longer a world power but asks, if the Americans can meddle violently in European affairs, why can’t the Russians?
Except that Putin never admits to meddling. When Donald Trump asked him at last week’s Asian summit whether his agencies had interfered in the American presidential election, Putin sulkily denied the charge. He is like a schoolboy moaning that all the teachers are against him. Having gone through KGB training, Putin knows how to tell a barefaced lie, and Trump refuses to act the grumpy headmaster.
It is doubtful that the Russian authorities in 2016 genuinely banked on getting Trump elected. But the disruption and discrediting of American politics were definite objectives. The Russians succeeded too well for their own good. The role they played in helping Trump’s ascent to power was so sensational that members of both Republican and Democratic parties have found common cause in looking for signs of treachery by Vladimir’s best friend Donald.
Although the American campaign might have been a foray too far, the offensives in Europe have achieved much that the Kremlin desired. In 2014 Russian finance made a friend of Viktor Orbán in Hungary with a generous long-term loan to build a nuclear power station. Orbán stood by Putin’s side in Moscow to celebrate the contract, and Putin could take satisfaction from the success in weaning a European leader off the breast of EU unity.
Putin already counted Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi among his boon companions, a friendship interrupted only by the Italian premier’s fall from grace in 2013. But prime ministers are not the Russian’s only quarries. The aim of dissolving Europe’s already shaky concord was pursued this year by assisting Marine Le Pen’s presidential bid after French banks refused to lend their money to the Front National. Le Pen didn’t win. But her loud protests against both the EU and its treatment of Russia would have made any financial assistance by the Kremlin worthwhile.
Stories have grown in credibility that Russian funding also helped the Brexit side in the 2016 UK referendum. Though the May government has ignored Labour MP Ben Bradshaw’s demand for a public inquiry, Theresa May’s speech at London’s Guildhall this Monday included a general rebuke about Russia’s persistent political meddling.
If recent Russian opinion polls are anything to go by, Putin will gain from being censured by foreigners. There’s a directness about him that many Russians revere. What he has, he intends to hold, and that includes Crimea. What he hasn’t got, however, is a vibrant economy. His long years in the highest offices of states have been wasted on armaments and wars, instead of being devoted to achieving the overdue diversification of the Russian economy.
Putin has come to view world politics as a zero-sum contest. He delights in seeing the EU crippled by internal disagreements. He takes equal pleasure in what he claims to be the unity of Russian public life. Rejecting international criticism of his authoritarianism, he depicts the Russian people as content with the benefits he has brought them.
With or without Brexit, he is probing weak spots in Europe on the basic principle of making them weaker. He no longer makes a secret of what he is up to. A month ago he talked openly about the need for “creative destruction” as his prerequisite for the building of a new world order.
Destroying the links that bind and strengthen Europe’s many nations individually and collectively is the Kremlin’s tried-and-tested strategy. The Russian leadership seeks to do what it accuses the Americans of wanting to do in Russia. The west has yet to show it has a plan to counteract the solvents that the Russians have injected into its democratic processes.
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How Trump walked into Putin’s web
The inside story of how a former British spy was hired to investigate Russia’s influence on Trump – and uncovered explosive evidence that Moscow had been cultivating Trump for years
15 November 2017
Moscow, summer 1991. Mikhail Gorbachev is in power. Official relations with the west have softened, but the KGB still assumes all western embassy workers are spooks. The KGB agents assigned to them are easy to spot. They have a method. Sometimes they pursue targets on foot, sometimes in cars. The officers charged with keeping tabs on western diplomats are never subtle.
One of their specialities is breaking into Moscow apartments. The owners are always away, of course. The KGB leave a series of clues – stolen shoes, women’s tights knotted together, cigarette butts stomped out and left demonstratively on the floor. Or a surprise turd in the toilet, waiting in grim ambush. The message, crudely put, is this: we are the masters here! We can do what the fuck we please!
Back then, the KGB kept watch on all foreigners, especially American and British ones. The UK mission in Moscow was under close observation. The British embassy was a magnificent mansion built in the 1890s by a rich sugar merchant, on the south bank of the Moskva river. It looked directly across to the Kremlin. The view was dreamy: a grand palace, golden church domes and medieval spires topped with revolutionary red stars.
One of those the KGB routinely surveilled was a 27-year-old diplomat, newly married to his wife, Laura, on his first foreign posting, and working as a second secretary in the chancery division. In this case, their suspicions were right.
The “diplomat” was a British intelligence officer. His workplace was a grand affair: chandeliers, mahogany-panelled reception rooms, gilt-framed portraits of the Queen and other royals hanging from the walls. His desk was in the embassy library, surrounded by ancient books. The young officer’s true employer was an invisible entity back in London – SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service, commonly known as MI6.
His name was Christopher Steele. Years later, he would be commissioned to undertake an astonishing secret investigation. It was an explosive assignment: to uncover the Kremlin’s innermost secrets with relation to Donald Trump. Steele’s findings, and the resulting dossier, would shake the American intelligence community and cause a political earthquake not seen since the dark days of Richard Nixon and Watergate.
Steele had arrived in Moscow via the usual establishment route for upwardly mobile British spies: the University of Cambridge. Cambridge had produced some of MI6’s most talented cold war officials. A few of them, it turned out – to great embarrassment – had secret second jobs with the KGB. The joke inside MI6 was that only those who had never visited the Soviet Union would wish to defect.
Steele had studied social and political sciences at Girton College. His views were centre-left; he and his elder sister were the first members of his family to go to university. (Steele’s paternal grandfather was a coal miner from Pontypridd in south Wales; his great-uncle died in a pit accident.) Steele wrote for the student newspaper, Varsity. He became president of the Cambridge Union, a debating society dominated by well-heeled and well-connected young men and women.
It’s unclear who recruited Steele. Traditionally, certain Cambridge tutors were rumoured to identify promising MI6 candidates. Whatever the route, Steele’s timing was good. After three years at MI6, he was sent to the Soviet Union in April 1990, soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the communist bloc across eastern Europe.
It was a tumultuous time. Seventy years after the Bolshevik revolution, the red empire was crumbling. The Baltic states had revolted against Soviet power; their own national authorities were governing in parallel with Moscow. In June 1991, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic elected a democratic president, Boris Yeltsin. Food shortages were not uncommon.
There was still much to enjoy. Like other expatriates, the Steeles visited the Izmailovsky craft market, next to an imperial park where Peter the Great’s father, Tsar Alexei, had established a model farm. Here you could buy lacquered boxes, patchwork quilts, furry hats and Soviet kitsch. Steele acquired samovars, carpets from central Asia, a papier-mache Stalin mask and a hand-painted Tolstoy doll set.
Much of the Soviet Union was off-limits to diplomats. Steele was the embassy’s “internal traveller”. He visited newly accessible cities. One of them was Samara, a wartime Soviet capital. There, he became the first foreigner to see Stalin’s underground bunker. Instead of Lenin, he found dusty portraits of Peter the Great and the imperial commander Mikhail Kutuzov – proof, seemingly, that Stalin was more nationalist than Marxist. Another city was Kazan, in Tatarstan. There a local correspondent, Anatoly Andronov, took a black-and-white photo of Steele chatting with newspaper editors. At weekends, Steele took part in soccer matches with a group of expats in a Russian league. In one game, he played against the legendary Soviet Union striker Oleh Blokhin, who scored from the halfway line.
The atmosphere was optimistic. It seemed to Steele that the country was shifting markedly in the right direction. Citizens once terrified of interacting with outsiders were ready to talk. The KGB, however, found nothing to celebrate in the USSR’s tilt towards freedom and reform. In August 1991, seven apparatchiks staged a coup while Gorbachev was vacationing in Crimea. Most of the British embassy was away. Steele was home at his second-floor apartment in Gruzinsky Pereulok. He left the apartment block and walked for 10 minutes into town. Crowds had gathered outside the White House, the seat of government; thus far the army hadn’t moved against them.
From 50 yards away, Steele watched as a snowy-haired man in a suit climbed on a tank and – reading from notes brushed by the wind – denounced the coup as cynical and illegal. This was a defiant Yeltsin. Steele listened as Yeltsin urged a general strike and, fist clenched, told his supporters to remain strong.
The coup failed, and a weakened Gorbachev survived. The putschists – the leading group in all the main Soviet state and party institutions – were arrested. In the west, and in the US in particular, many concluded that Washington had won the cold war, and that, after decades of ideological struggle, liberal democracy had triumphed.
Steele knew better. Three days after the coup, surveillance on him resumed. His MI6 colleagues in Hungary and Czechoslovakia reported that after revolutions there the secret police vanished, never to come back. But here were the same KGB guys, with the same familiar faces. They went back to their old routines of bugging, break-ins and harassment.
The regime changed. The system didn’t.
By the time Steele left Moscow in April 1993, the Soviet Union had gone. A new country, led by Yeltsin, had replaced it: the Russian Federation. The KGB had been dissolved, but its officers hadn’t exactly disappeared. They still loathed the US and were merely biding their time.
One mid-ranking former KGB spy who was unhappy about this state of affairs was Vladimir Putin. Putin had been posted to Dresden in provincial East Germany in the mid-80s, and had missed perestroika and glasnost, Gorbachev’s reformist ideas. He had now returned to the newly renamed St Petersburg and was carving out a political career. He mourned the end of the USSR, and once called its disappearance “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”.
A post-communist spy agency, the Federal Security Service, or FSB, had taken over the KGB’s main functions. Back in the UK, Steele would soon move into MI6’s purpose-built new office – a large, striking, postmodern pile of a building overlooking the River Thames in London. Staff called it Vauxhall Cross. This gaudy Babylonian temple was hard to miss; in 1994, the government officially acknowledged the existence of MI6 for the first time. The FSB would become its bitter adversary.
From London, Steele continued to work on the new Russia. He was ambitious, keen to succeed, and keen to be seen to succeed. He was also, perhaps, less posh than some of his upper-class peers. Steele’s father, Perris, and his mother, Janet, both from London, met when they worked together at the UK Met Office. Perris was a forecaster for the armed services. The family had lived on army bases in Aden, where Steele was born, on the Shetland Islands (where he found an interest in bird-watching) and – twice – in Cyprus.
Steele’s education had been varied. He went to a British forces school in Cyprus. He did sixth form at a college in Berkshire. He then spent a “seventh” or additional term at Wellington College, an elite private boarding school. There he sat the entrance exam for Cambridge.
At MI6, Steele moved in a small world of Kremlin specialists. There were conferences and seminars in university towns like Oxford; contacts to be made; émigrés to be met, lunched and charmed. In 1998 he got another posting, to the British embassy in Paris. He had a family: two sons and a daughter, born in France, where Steele was officially First Secretary Financial.
At this point, his career hit a bump. In 1999, a list of MI6 officers was leaked online. Steele was one of them. He appeared as “Christopher David Steele, 90 Moscow; dob 1964”.
The breach wasn’t Steele’s fault, but it had unfortunate consequences. As an exposed British officer, he couldn’t go back to Russia.
In Moscow, the spies were staging a comeback. In 1998 Putin became FSB chief, then prime minister, and in 2000, president. By 2002, when Steele left Paris, Putin had consolidated his grip. Most of Russia’s genuine political opposition had been wiped out, from parliament as well as from public life and the evening news. The idea that Russia might slowly turn into a democracy had proved a late-century fantasy. Rather, the US’s traditional nuclear-armed adversary was moving in an authoritarian direction.
At first, George W Bush and Tony Blair viewed Putin as a respectable ally in the war against terror. But he remained an enigma. As Steele knew better than most, obtaining information from inside the presidential administration in Moscow was tough. One former member of the US National Security Council described Putin as a “black box”. “The Brits had slightly better assets than us. We had nothing. No human intelligence,” the source said. And, with the focus on fighting Islamists, Russia was downgraded on the list of US-UK intelligence priorities.
By 2006, Steele held a senior post at MI6’s Russia desk in London. There were ominous signs that Putin was taking Russia in an aggressive direction. The number of hostile Russian agents in the UK grew, surpassing cold war levels. Steele tracked a new campaign of subversion and covert influence.
And then two FSB assassins put a radioactive poison into the tea of Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB officer turned London-based dissident. It was an audacious operation, and a sign of things to come. MI6 picked Steele to investigate. One reason for this was that he wasn’t emotionally involved with the case, unlike some of his colleagues who had known the victim. He quickly concluded the Russian state had staged the execution.
Steele’s gloomy view of Russia – that under Putin it was not only domestically repressive but also internationally reckless and revisionist – looked about right. Steele briefed government ministers. Some got it. Others could scarcely believe Russian spies would carry out murder and mayhem on the streets of London.
All told, Steele spent 22 years as a British intelligence officer. There were some high points – he saw his years in Moscow as formative – and some low ones. Two of the diplomats with whom he shared an office in the embassy library, Tim Barrow and David Manning, went on to become UK ambassadors to the EU and the US respectively.
Steele didn’t quite rise to the top, in what was a highly competitive service. Espionage might sound exciting, but the salary of a civil servant was ordinary. And in 2009 he had faced a personal tragedy, when his wife died at the age of 43 after a period of illness.
That same year, Steele left MI6 and set up his own business intelligence firm, Orbis, in partnership with another former British spy, Christopher Burrows. The transition from government to the private sector wasn’t easy. Steele and Burrows were pursuing the same intelligence matters as before, but without the support and peer review they had in their previous jobs. MI6’s security branch would often ask an officer to go back to a source, or redraft a report, or remark: “We think it’s interesting. We’d like to have more on this.” This kept up quality and objectivity.
Steele and Burrows, by contrast, were out on their own, where success depended more on one’s own wits. There was no more internal challenge. The people they had to please were corporate clients. The pay was considerably better.
The shabby environs of Orbis’s office in London’s Victoria, where I first met Christopher Steele, were a long way away from Washington DC and the bitterly contested 2016 US presidential election. So how did Steele come to be commissioned to research Donald J Trump and produce his devastating dossier?
At the same moment Steele said goodbye to official spying, another figure was embarking on a new career in the crowded field of private business intelligence. His name was Glenn Simpson. He was a former journalist. Simpson was an alluring figure: a large, tall, angular, bear-like man who slotted himself easily on to a bar stool and enjoyed a beer or two. He was a good-humoured social companion who spoke in a nasal drawl. Behind small, oval glasses was a twinkling intelligence. He excelled at what he did.
Simpson had been an illustrious Wall Street Journal correspondent. Based in Washington and Brussels, he had specialised in post-Soviet murk. He didn’t speak Russian or visit the Russian Federation. This was deemed too dangerous. Instead, from outside the country, he examined the dark intersection between organised crime and the Russian state.
By 2009, Simpson decided to quit journalism, at a time when the media industry was in all sorts of financial trouble. He co-founded his own commercial research and political intelligence firm, based in Washington DC. Its name was Fusion GPS. Its website gave little away. It didn’t even list an address.
Simpson then met Steele. They knew some of the same FBI people and shared expertise on Russia. Fusion and Orbis began a professional partnership. The Washington- and London-based firms worked for oligarchs litigating against other oligarchs. This might involve asset tracing – identifying large sums concealed behind layers of offshore companies.
Later that year, Steele embarked on a separate, sensitive new assignment that drew on his knowledge of covert Russian techniques – and of football. (In Moscow he had played at full-back.) The client was the English Football Association, the FA. England was bidding to host the 2018 soccer World Cup. Its main rival was Russia. There were joint bids, too, from Spain and Portugal, and the Netherlands and Belgium. His brief was to investigate the eight other bidding nations, with a particular focus on Russia. It was rumoured that the FSB had carried out a major influence operation, ahead of a vote in Zurich by the executive committee of Fifa, soccer’s international governing body.
Steele discovered that Fifa corruption was global. It was a stunning conspiracy. He took the unusual step of briefing an American contact in Rome, the head of the FBI’s Eurasian serious crime division. This “lit the fuse”, as one friend put it, and led to a probe by US federal prosecutors. And to the arrest in 2015 of seven Fifa officials, allegedly connected to $150m (£114m) in kickbacks, paid on TV deals stretching from Latin America to the Caribbean. The US indicted 14 individuals.
The episode burnished Steele’s reputation inside the US intelligence community and the FBI. Here was a pro, a well-connected Brit, who understood Russian espionage and its subterranean tricks. Steele was regarded as credible. Between 2014 and 2016, Steele authored more than 100 reports on Russia and Ukraine. These were written for a private client but shared widely within the US state department, and sent up to secretary of state John Kerry and assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland, who was in charge of the US response to Putin’s annexation of Crimea and covert invasion of eastern Ukraine. Many of Steele’s secret sources were the same people who would later supply information on Trump.
One former state department envoy during the Obama administration said he read dozens of Steele’s reports. On Russia, the envoy said, Steele was “as good as the CIA or anyone”.
Steele’s professional reputation inside US agencies would prove important the next time he discovered alarming material.
Trump’s political rise in the autumn of 2015 and the early months of 2016 was swift and irresistible. The candidate was a human wrecking ball who flattened everything in his path, including the Republican party’s aghast, frozen-to-the-spot establishment. Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz – all were batted aside, taunted, crushed. Scandals that would have killed off a normal presidential candidate made Trump stronger. The media loved it. Increasingly, so did the voters. Might anything stop him?
In mid-2015, the Republican front-runner had been Jeb Bush, son of one US president and brother of another. But as the campaign got under way, Bush struggled. Trump dubbed the former Florida governor “low-energy”. During the primaries, a website funded by one of Trump’s wealthy Republican critics, Paul Singer, commissioned Fusion to investigate Trump.
After Trump became the presumptive nominee in May 2016, Singer’s involvement ended and senior Democrats seeking to elect Hillary Clinton took over the Trump contract. The new client was the Democratic National Committee. A lawyer working for Clinton’s campaign, Marc E Elias, retained Fusion and received its reports. The world of private investigation was a morally ambiguous one – a sort of open market in dirt. Information on Trump was of no further use to Republicans, but it could be of value to Democrats, Trump’s next set of opponents.
Before this, in early spring 2016, Simpson approached Steele, his friend and colleague. Steele began to scrutinise Paul Manafort, who would soon become Trump’s new campaign manager. From April, Steele investigated Trump on behalf of the DNC, Fusion’s anonymous client. All Steele knew at first was that the client was a law firm. He had no idea what he would find. He later told David Corn, Washington editor of the magazine Mother Jones: “It started off as a fairly general inquiry.” Trump’s organisation owned luxury hotels around the world. Trump had, as far back as 1987, sought to do real estate deals in Moscow. One obvious question for him, Steele said, was: “Are there business ties to Russia?”
Over time, Steele had built up a network of sources. He was protective of them: who they were he would never say. It could be someone well-known – a foreign government official or diplomat with access to secret material. Or it could be someone obscure – a lowly chambermaid cleaning the penthouse suite and emptying the bins in a five-star hotel.
Normally an intelligence officer would debrief sources directly, but since Steele could no longer visit Russia, this had to be done by others, or in third countries. There were intermediaries, subsources, operators – a sensitive chain. Only one of Steele’s sources on Trump knew of Steele. Steele put out his Trump-Russia query and waited for answers. His sources started reporting back. The information was astonishing; “hair-raising”. As he told friends: “For anyone who reads it, this is a life-changing experience.”
Steele had stumbled upon a well-advanced conspiracy that went beyond anything he had discovered with Litvinenko or Fifa. It was the boldest plot yet. It involved the Kremlin and Trump. Their relationship, Steele’s sources claimed, went back a long way. For at least the past five years, Russian intelligence had been secretly cultivating Trump. This operation had succeeded beyond Moscow’s wildest expectations. Not only had Trump upended political debate in the US – raining chaos wherever he went and winning the nomination – but it was just possible that he might become the next president. This opened all sorts of intriguing options for Putin.
In June 2016, Steele typed up his first memo. He sent it to Fusion. It arrived via enciphered mail. The headline read: US Presidential Election: Republican Candidate Donald Trump’s Activities in Russia and Compromising Relationship with the Kremlin. Its text began: “Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years. Aim, endorsed by PUTIN, has been to encourage splits and divisions in the western alliance.”
“So far TRUMP has declined various sweetener real estate business deals, offered him in Russia to further the Kremlin’s cultivation of him. However he and his inner circle have accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his Democratic and other political rivals.
“Former top Russian intelligence officer claims FSB has compromised TRUMP through his activities in Moscow sufficiently to be able to blackmail him. According to several knowledgeable sources, his conduct in Moscow has included perverted sexual acts which have been arranged/monitored by the FSB.
“A dossier of compromising material on Hillary CLINTON has been collated by the Russian Intelligence Services over many years and mainly comprises bugged conversations she had on various visits to Russia and intercepted phone calls rather than any embarrassing conduct. The dossier is controlled by Kremlin spokesman, PESKOV, directly on Putin’s orders. However, it has not yet been distributed abroad, including to TRUMP. Russian intentions for its deployment still unclear.”
The memo was sensational. There would be others, 16 in all, sent to Fusion between June and early November 2016. At first, obtaining intelligence from Moscow went well. For around six months – during the first half of the year – Steele was able to make inquiries in Russia with relative ease. It got harder from late July, as Trump’s ties to Russia came under scrutiny. Finally, the lights went out. Amid a Kremlin cover-up, the sources went silent and information channels shut down.
If Steele’s reporting was to be believed, Trump had been colluding with Russia. This arrangement was transactional, with both sides trading favours. The report said Trump had turned down “various lucrative real estate development business deals in Russia”, especially in connection with the 2018 World Cup, hosted by Moscow. But he had been happy to accept a flow of Kremlin-sourced intelligence material, apparently delivered to him by his inner circle. That didn’t necessarily mean the candidate was a Russian agent. But it did signify that Russia’s leading spy agency had expended considerable effort in getting close to Trump – and, by extension, to his family, friends, close associates and business partners, not to mention his campaign manager and personal lawyer.
On the eve of the most consequential US election for generations, one of the two candidates was compromised, Steele’s sources claimed. The memo alleged that Trump had unusual sexual proclivities, and that the FSB had a tape. If true, this meant he could indeed be blackmailed.
When I met Steele in December 2016, he gave no hint he had been involved in what was the single most important investigation in decades.
Steele’s collaborators offered salacious details. The memo said that Russian intelligence had sought to exploit “TRUMP’s personal obsessions and sexual perversion” during his 2013 stay at Moscow’s Ritz-Carlton hotel for the Miss Universe beauty pageant. The operation had allegedly worked. The tycoon had booked the presidential suite of the Ritz-Carlton hotel “where he knew President and Mrs OBAMA (whom he hated) had stayed on one of their official trips to Russia”.
There, the memo said, Trump had deliberately “defiled” the Obamas’ bed. A number of prostitutes “had performed a ‘golden showers’ (urination) show in front of him”. The memo also alleged: “The hotel was known to be under FSB control with microphones and concealed cameras in all the main rooms to record anything they wanted to.”
As well as sex, there was another fascinating dimension to this alleged plot, categorically denied by Trump. According to Steele’s sources, associates of Trump had held a series of clandestine meetings in central Europe, Moscow and elsewhere with Russian spies. The Russians were very good at tradecraft. Nonetheless, could this be a trail that others might later detect?
Steele’s sources offered one final devastating piece of information. They alleged that Trump’s team had co-ordinated with Russia on the hacking operation against Clinton. And that the Americans had secretly co-paid for it.
Steele wrote up his findings in MI6 house style. The memos read like CX reports – classified MI6 intelligence documents. They were marked “confidential/sensitive source”. The names of prominent individuals were in caps – TRUMP, PUTIN, CLINTON. The reports began with a summary. They offered supporting detail. Sources were anonymous. They were introduced in generic terms: “a senior Russian foreign ministry figure” or “a former top level Russian intelligence officer still active inside the Kremlin”. They were given letters, starting with A and proceeding down the alphabet.
How certain was Steele that his sources had got it right and that he wasn’t being fed disinformation? The matter was so serious, so important, so explosive, so far-reaching, that this was an essential question.
As spies and former spies knew, the world of intelligence was non-binary. There were degrees of veracity. A typical CX report would include phrases such as “to a high degree of probability”. Intelligence could be flawed, because humans were inherently unreliable. They forgot things. They got things wrong.
One of Steele’s former Vauxhall Cross colleagues likened intelligence work to delicate shading. This twilight world wasn’t black and white; it was a muted palette of greys, off-whites and sepia tones, he told me. He said you could shade in one direction – more optimistically – or in another direction – less optimistically. Steele was generally in the first category.
Steele was adamant that his reporting was credible. One associate described him as sober, cautious, highly regarded, professional and conservative. “He’s not the sort of person who will pass on gossip. If he puts something in a report, he believes there is sufficient credibility in it,” the associate said. The idea that Steele’s work was fake or a cowboy operation or born of political malice was completely wrong, he added.
The dossier, Steele told friends, was a thoroughly professional job, based on sources who had proven themselves in other areas. Evaluating sources depended on a critical box of tools: what was a source’s reporting record, was he or she credible, what was the motivation?
Steele recognised that no piece of intelligence was 100% right. According to friends, he assessed that his work on the Trump dossier was 70-90% accurate. Over eight years, Orbis had produced scores of reports on Russia for private clients. A lot of this content was verified or “proven up”. As Steele told friends: “I’ve been dealing with this country for 30 years. Why would I invent this stuff?”
In late 2015 the British eavesdropping agency, GCHQ, was carrying out standard “collection” against Moscow targets. These were known Kremlin operatives already on the grid. Nothing unusual here – except that the Russians were talking to people associated with Trump. The precise nature of these exchanges has not been made public, but according to sources in the US and the UK, they formed a suspicious pattern. They continued through the first half of 2016. The intelligence was handed to the US as part of a routine sharing of information.
The FBI and the CIA were slow to appreciate the extensive nature of these contacts between Trump’s team and Moscow. This was in part due to institutional squeamishness – the law prohibits US agencies from examining the private communications of US citizens without a warrant.
But the electronic intelligence suggested Steele was right. According to one account, the US agencies looked as if they were asleep. “‘Wake up! There’s something not right here!’ – the BND [German intelligence], the Dutch, the French and SIS were all saying this,” one Washington-based source told me.
That summer, GCHQ’s then head, Robert Hannigan, flew to the US to personally brief CIA chief John Brennan. The matter was deemed so important that it was handled at “director level”, face-to-face between the two agency chiefs. James Clapper, director of national intelligence, later confirmed the “sensitive” stream of intelligence from Europe. After a slow start, Brennan used the GCHQ information and other tip-offs to launch a major inter-agency investigation. Meanwhile, the FBI was receiving disturbing warnings from Steele.
At this point, Steele’s Fusion material was unpublished. Whatever the outcome of the election, it raised grave questions about Russian interference and the US democratic process. There was, Steele felt, overwhelming public interest in passing his findings to US investigators. The US’s multiple intelligence agencies had the resources to prove or disprove his discoveries. He realised that these allegations were, as he put it to a friend, a “radioactive hot potato”. He anticipated a hesitant response, at least at first.
In June, Steele flew to Rome to brief the FBI contact with whom he had co-operated over Fifa. His information started to reach the bureau in Washington. It had certainly arrived by the time of the Democratic National Convention in late July, when WikiLeaks first began releasing hacked Democratic emails. It was at this moment that FBI director James Comey opened a formal investigation into Trump-Russia.
In September, Steele went back to Rome. There he met with an FBI team. Their response was one of “shock and horror,” Steele said. The bureau asked him to explain how he had compiled his reports, and to give background on his sources. It asked him to send future copies.
Steele had hoped for a thorough and decisive FBI investigation. Instead, it moved cautiously. The agency told him that it couldn’t intervene or go public with material involving a presidential candidate. Then it went silent. Steele’s frustrations grew.
Later that month, Steele had a series of off-the-record meetings with a small number of US journalists. They included the New York Times, the Washington Post, Yahoo! News, the New Yorker and CNN. In mid-October he visited New York and met with reporters again.
Comey then announced he was reopening an investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server. At this point, Steele’s relationship with the FBI broke down. The excuse given by the bureau for saying nothing about Trump looked bogus. In late October, Steele spoke to the Mother Jones editor David Corn via Skype.
The story was of “huge significance, way above party politics”, Steele said. He believed Trump’s Republican colleagues “should be aware of this stuff as well”. Of his own reputation, Steele said: “My track record as a professional is second to no one.” Steele acknowledged that his memos were works in progress, and was genuinely worried about the implications of the allegations. “The story has to come out,” he told Corn.
At this point Steele was still anonymous, a ghost. But the ghost’s message was rapidly circulating on Capitol Hill and inside Washington’s spy agencies, as well as among certain journalists and thinktanks. Democratic senators now apprised of Steele’s work were growing exasperated. The FBI seemed unduly keen to trash Clinton’s reputation while sitting on explosive material concerning Trump.
One of those who was aware of the dossier’s broad allegations was the Senate minority leader, Harry Reid, a Democrat. In August Reid, had written to Comey and asked for an inquiry into the “connections between the Russian government and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign”. In October, Reid wrote to Comey again. This time he framed his inquiry in scathing terms. In a clear reference to Steele, Reid wrote: “In my communications with you and other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors and the Russian government … The public has a right to know this information.”
But all this frantic activity came to nought. Just as Nixon was re-elected during the early stages of Watergate, Trump won the presidential election, to general dismay, at a time when the Russia scandal was small but growing. Steele had found prima facie evidence of a conspiracy, but by and large the US public knew nothing about it. In November, his dossier began circulating in the top national security echelons of the Obama administration. But it was too late.
The same month a group of international experts gathered in Halifax on Canada’s eastern seaboard. Their task: to make sense of the world in the aftermath of Trump’s stunning victory. One of the delegates attending the Halifax International Security Forum was Senator John McCain. Another was Sir Andrew Wood, the UK’s former ambassador to Russia. Wood was a friend of Steele’s and an Orbis associate. Before the election, Steele had gone to Wood and shown him the dossier. He wanted the ambassador’s advice. What should he do, or not do, with it? Of the dossier, Wood told me: “I took it seriously.”
On the margins of the Halifax conference, Wood briefed McCain about Steele’s dossier – its contents, if true, had profound and obvious implications for the incoming Trump administration, for the Republican party, and for US democracy. The implications were alarming enough to lead McCain to dispatch a former senior US official to meet Steele and find out more.
The emissary was David Kramer, a former assistant secretary of state in the Bush administration. He was sufficiently troubled to get on a flight to London. Steele agreed to meet him at Heathrow airport. The rendezvous involved some old-fashioned spycraft. Kramer didn’t know what Steele looked like. He was told to look for a man with a copy of the Financial Times. After meeting Kramer, Steele drove him to his home in Surrey. They talked through the dossier: how Steele compiled it, what it said. Less than 24 hours later, Kramer returned to Washington. Glenn Simpson then shared a copy of the dossier confidentially with McCain, along with a final Steele memo on the Russian hacking operation, written in December.
McCain believed it was impossible to verify Steele’s claims without a proper investigation. He made a call and arranged a meeting with Comey. Their encounter on 8 December 2016 lasted five minutes. Not much was said. McCain gave Comey the dossier.
McCain’s intervention now made some kind of bureaucratic response inevitable. This was no longer just an FBI affair; it required co-ordination across the top levels of US intelligence. A highly classified two-page summary of Steele’s dossier was compiled. It was attached to a longer, restricted briefing note on Russian cyber interference in the 2016 election. The US’s most senior intelligence chiefs mulled what to do.
Their next task was an unenviable one. As former CIA director Michael Hayden put it to me, the situation was “off the map in terms of what intelligence is asked to do. I didn’t envy them”. Of the dossier, Hayden said: “My gestalt idea, when I saw it, was that this looks like our stuff.”
The dossier was on its way to the desk of the man who was still, for now, the world’s most powerful person: President Barack Obama.
It was also going to his successor, the next guy in the Oval Office. He wasn’t going to like it much.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/nov/15/how-trump-walked-into-putins-web-luke
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“Ever since his election, Trump has been involved in scandals so big that they would have drowned out any other administration. The fact that he has somehow managed to survive testifies to the extent of his power grab, and to the fragility of American democracy.”
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It’s true: Conservative governments really do kill people
The claim is not hysterical: from health to disability benefits to prisons, it’s clear that Tory policies cost lives
13 November 2017
There was a splenetic exchange on BBC Question Time last week, between an audience member and my colleague, Aditya Chakrabortty, who had pointed out that disabled people had died as a result of cuts to social security. You’re like “Donald Trump”, said a guy in the audience: the parallel was, Aditya had made a statement that was stirring, powerful, emotive and trenchant – so I guess, if we leave aside the fact that it was also true, it was pretty Trumpian.
Just as it’s verboten to call someone a liar in parliament, so there is a curious and ancient disapproval around pointing out that a state has been the direct cause of any deaths, whether of its own citizens or abroad. It is taken as hysterical overstatement (something that should only be levelled at an authoritarian regime, which takes its people out and shoots them) and pitiful naivety (a wilful misunderstanding of the business of government, to trace its policies crudely back to the lives of those who are affected by them).
Since “hysterical” and “naive” are two of the deadliest charges in political discourse, one always checks oneself before going full-pelt: we know that 90 people a month die after being declared fit for work, but can we really lay those deaths at the government’s feet? Plainly, they might have died anyway. All we can say about the Conservatives is that they instituted a disability assessment system that makes bad decisions, repeatedly, and causes untold trauma and desperation to people who are on the brink of death.
So let’s refine it: we know of the existence of 49 Department for Work and Pension reports – called peer reviews – that are triggered when someone dies following a cut to their benefits, 40 of which were suicides. They are heavily redacted, and what we can read of them does not amount to a straight causal link between a cut or sanction and a suicide.
The government – which will casually spend hundreds of thousands of pounds fighting a freedom of information request to release these peer reviews, and yet cannot afford to support a terminally ill cancer patient – has upended priorities when it comes to discussing the deaths of its citizens. It ploughs all its energy into denying a link between destitution and desperation, and apparently no energy at all into asking why these suicides occurred.
A much more striking example of that came in 2015, when there were 30,000 “excess deaths” in England and Wales, the greatest rise in mortality for 50 years, according to a study published this year. The researchers – from Oxford University, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and two borough councils – examined possible explanations and, having rejected environmental collapse, natural disaster and war, concluded that “the evidence points to a major failure of the health system, possibly exacerbated by failings in social care”, adding for clarity: “The impact of cuts resulting from the imposition of austerity on the NHS has been profound.”
An unnamed Department of Health spokesman rejected the claim, citing “personal bias” of the authors (the truth has a liberal bias, as the saying goes), but strikingly, took no further interest in the matter. You would think that, even if someone vigorously denied responsibility for 30,000 excess deaths, they would at least ask where, then, responsibility lay.
Last year, meanwhile, the suicide rate within prisons in England and Wales reached an all-time high: 119 deaths, or one every three days. The background is a 40% drop in the number of prison officers, which had an obvious practical impact, pinpointed by Prof Pamela Taylor of the Royal College of Psychiatrists: there simply weren’t enough staff to accompany mentally ill patients to clinics and appointments.
But understaffing in prisons has much more profound atmospheric affects: it erodes officers’ capability to observe prisoners closely; to support those suffering a decline; to control bullies and legal highs; and to perform the subtle, invaluable, life-changing business of jail craft. Only a government with no insight at all into the prison estate would think you could shred its staff by nearly half and suffer no catastrophic effects.
Going right back to 2010, this is the enduring picture of Conservative government, which the Liberal Democrats still claim to have cushioned us from the worst of: not the parsimony, the defensiveness, the lack of curiosity when disasters occur, not the callousness or myopia, but the sheer indolence.
Decisions are made as if the consequences belonged to someone else. Judicial process is treated like long-grass. Ernest Ryder, senior president of tribunals, said last week that the DWP habitually provided evidence whose quality was so poor it would be “wholly inadmissible” in any other court. People die having had their support system ripped from them and the response is a shrugging “whatever”, plus maybe a blast of noise about bias and the last Labour government, like ducks flapping pointlessly on a pond. Every tactic is diversionary; the overarching strategy is, break it and see what happens.
Consensus now is that the Tories were governing, sometimes controversially but broadly effectively, when Brexit came along and capsized everything. This is mistaken: the referendum could only have been called, and the leave campaign only fought, by politicians with a fundamental lack of seriousness, a puerile indifference to the outcome of their decisions.
Long before it gambled with our future prosperity and place in the world, the Conservative party was shooting craps with the lives of its own people.
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“It is discrimination, not same-sex parents, that harms children.”
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Kids raised by same-sex parents do as well as their peers, major study shows
24 October 2017
Discrimination, not same-sex parents, is harming children, a major new study has shown.
The comprehensive report, published in the Medical Journal of Australia, disproves the notion that children require a mother and father to succeed – one of the main arguments used by opponents of same-sex marriage and adoption.
Three decades of peer-reviewed research by Melbourne Children’s, a group of four child health organisations, found that children raised by same-sex couples performed just as well socially, educationally and emotionally as their peers.
Titled The Kids Are OK: It Is Discrimination Not Same-Sex Parents That Harms Children, the report has been released as Australia enters the final days of its non-binding marriage equality postal vote.
The report’s authors hope that the findings will help dispel myths and harmful misconceptions about same-sex parenting.
Related: Legalisation of same-sex marriage linked to drop in teen suicide attempts
“It is family processes – parenting quality, parental wellbeing, the quality of and satisfaction with relationships within the family – rather than family structures that make a more meaningful difference to children’s wellbeing and positive development,” they said.
Unsurprisingly, the study also found that discrimination from other people (such as homophobic backlash to same-sex marriage and adoption) is what causes harm to children, not having two parents of the same gender.
“The negative and discriminatory rhetoric of the current marriage equality debate is damaging the most vulnerable members of our community – children and adolescents,” the study’s senior author Professor Frank Oberklaid said.
“It’s essential that we recognise the potential for the debate about marriage equality to cause harm for our children and young people.”
Additionally, the study found that young people who themselves express diversity in sexual orientation or gender identity experience some of the highest levels of physiological distress in Australia.
“Young LGBTIQ+ people are much more likely to experience poor mental health, self-harm and suicide than other young people,” Oberklaid said.
“Sadly, this is largely attributed to the harassment, stigma and discrimination they and other LGBTIQ+ individuals and communities face in our society.”
http://www.gaytimes.co.uk/news/90855/kids-raised-gay-parents-well-peers-major-study-shows/
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‘More pigs will be revealed’: Asia Argento on life after accusing Weinstein of rape
Italian actor welcomes the sexual misconduct exposés since, but laments the slow awakening in her country
19 November 2017
It has been six weeks since Asia Argento helped set off an avalanche that knocked down the most powerful man in Hollywood.
Since her public accusation of rape against Harvey Weinstein – Argento was among the first to make the allegation in an exposé published by the New Yorker – hundreds of women and some men have come forward with their own stories of workplace harassment and assault, from newsrooms in Washington to the corridors of power in Westminster.
The accusations have upended careers and broken taboos that once protected powerful and allegedly predatory men; Argento, an Italian actor and director, is keeping close track of all of them.
“The consciences are waking,” she told the Guardian. “Every time one of these pigs fall, it’s a badge of honour.”
But the awakening has been slow in the country Argento calls home, a place where she says she has always felt oppressed. Far from being hailed as brave, Argento’s allegations were initially treated in some Italian media outlets with a mix of scepticism and scorn.
Nowhere does the divergence in public response to the scandals seem more stark than in the country’s political life.
In the UK, members of parliament have been suspended by their parties in the wake of allegations of sexually inappropriate behaviour. But in Italy, Silvio Berlusconi, the 81-year-old former prime minister who was known to enjoy sex parties with young women while he was in office and regularly makes sexist comments, is staging a political comeback that has been free of any serious discussion of his record on women.
Earlier this month, Berlusconi was back on the campaign trail in Sicily, where he was applauded by adoring crowds and helped his rightist bloc coalition cruise to victory in regional elections.
Sitting in her apartment in the outskirts of Rome, the city she fled for weeks after the public attacks became too much to bear, Argento says Italians “just don’t get it”.
“We have been so lobotomised by the objectification of women that we, as women, don’t even know that we are being harassed and treated the wrong way,” she said.
“Here people don’t understand. They’ll say, ‘oh it’s just touching tits’. Well yeah, and this is a very grave thing for me. It is not normal. You can’t touch me, I am not an object.”
After Argento alleged that Weinstein forcibly performed oral sex on her in 1997 – a charge Weinstein strongly denies – Vittorio Feltri, the editor of a rightwing newspaper, Libero, dismissed the notion that what allegedly occurred could even be considered an assault.
“That’s a little lick … and a little lick is always pleasurable,” he said in a radio interview. The encounter was the price Argento had paid for wanting to become a “big actress”, he said, while women who “refused” settled into their lives as cashiers or shop assistants.
Argento, who says she plans to leave Italy for good next summer, said Italians’ “archaic” attitude can be traced to many things, including a legal system that, until 1981, ruled that a wife’s extramarital affair could be considered an extenuating circumstance if she was murdered by her husband.
But she links the Italian “aesthetic” of women as sex objects to the rise of Berlusconi. His return to political life, despite a conviction on tax fraud, is a sign of Italians’ short memory and love of “machoism”.
“Everyone loves a man who is virile and who likes to show his masculinity. They think it is charming. It’s not like, hey, this is disgusting,” she said.
Italian television was serious before the rise of Berlusconi, who owned TV networks and other media properties before he entered politics – but his influence made the image of “showgirls” ubiquitous, which the actor said fed Italians a steady diet of women as sexual objects.
Argento, who has worked as an actor since she was a child and whose father, Dario Argento, is a well known director of horror films, can track her own objectification in the entertainment industry to her role in Miramax’s B. Monkey, which set the stage for her encounter with Weinstein.
“The movie required me to be naked and do sex scenes. I turned 21 on the shoot. I had to research my femininity for that movie. I was not someone who put on high heels, it was not my thing,” she said.
After the film, she was mostly offered roles as sex workers or women who were mentally ill, and always scantily dressed. For a time, she says she accepted the persona because she had to work and raise a family, even though she did not like it.
Eventually, she found she did not want to act anymore.
“I understood that my false self could not live anymore with my true self and that this persona that I helped to create – this sexual persona – was hard to make fit with my real self, so much so that I lived in great isolation in Italy,” she said.
“I don’t have many friends in the Italian film industry because I feel like they cannot see me for who I am,” she said. An old scene in which she played a sex worker and in which a dog licked her face, was still used “to vilify me, to say that I am a whore,” Argento said. “Well, I am not a whore. I am a mother. I am a daughter. I am a woman.”
She says she lives in fear in Italy. Her wariness has been justified, Argento says, by another report in the New Yorker, which detailed the alleged lengths Weinstein and his legal team went to in order to keep track of actors who had been subjected to the producer’s abuse, including hiring a firm that used ex-Mossad agents to secretly investigate his alleged victims.
Argento describes with fierce pride the moment earlier this month when she called Ronan Farrow, the journalist who wrote the New Yorker story, and told him that he could use her name, and to tell other women that she was going public.
“I had this thought, how can I live with this truth I know? How would I feel about myself if I don’t come out? All it took for me was talking to my conscience, and it was really screaming,” she said.
Now, talking to other alleged victims has given her a new purpose. One that she hopes – and predicts – will awaken others in Italy.
For now, not a single fellow female actor who is well known has spoken out in support of her, even though the Italian film industry is rife with abuse.
“In France, people stopped me on the street and thanked me. In Italy, they look at me badly. Not one person says ‘brava’, and I swear it is not paranoia. I don’t know if I should hold my head high or hide it in a scarf,” she said.
But Argento has been bolstered by the decision of 10 women who have come forward and accused Italian film-maker Fausto Brizzi of sexual misconduct, ranging from unsolicited messages to the use of force. A lawyer for Brizzi denied that he ever engaged in non-consensual sex.
“More pigs will be revealed,” Argento said.
“What I see is that this is like an avalanche, where the first stone falls and it is so big,” she added. “It is destroying something, it is changing the landscape, where women can work, where women can live, where women in every industry don’t have to fear men. I’m sure the men are now very afraid of us, and before they do anything will think 10 times.”
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Don’t just teach kids to code – teach them to question Facebook and Google
It’s shameful that our children are still so computer illiterate. Let’s give them the skills to take on the tech giants, and create a more democratic internet
20 November 2017
Three years ago, before the Brexit dreams of renewed imperial glory and Vimto for all took wing, England took an uncharacteristically bold step into the future. Michael Gove was in charge of the Department for Education, and he appeared to make good his promise to revolutionise the teaching of computing in schools. He damned the subject known as information and communication technology (or ICT), which its detractors – with a good deal of justification – said was too often reducible to showing kids how to use PowerPoint. “About as much use as teaching children to send a telex or travel in a zeppelin,” said Gove. The new thing, he enthused, was computer science, and a drive to ensure that schools would now show their pupils “not just how to work a computer; but how a computer works, and how to make it work for you”.
Five-year-olds were to be shown how to code; those aged seven to 11 would be introduced to “sequence, selection, and repetition in programs”. In 2015, after a long period of groundwork, it was announced that a new GCSE in computer science was to be introduced. At last, there seemed to be an institutional recognition that the future – or, in reality, the present – could not just be based around such Gove-ite articles of faith as the 12 times table, the ability to spot “fronted adverbials” and old-fashioned classroom discipline, but HTML and JavaScript.
And so to reality, and a country increasingly hit by schools cuts, with a decaying government so consumed by leaving the EU that it seems not to hear any complaints, let alone listen to them. Ten days ago, the reality of the teaching of computing in schools was laid bare by a report from the Royal Society, and it was not pretty. More than half of England’s schools are still not offering computer science GCSEs. At the last count, the proportion of the country’s pupils who actually sat the exam was a miserable 11%. There is a pronounced gap between rural and urban areas. To cap it all, there is still a lack of girls studying computer science: only 20% of GCSE candidates in the past year were female, and only 10% of female students decided to carry the subject on at A-level.
Thanks to long years of education being kicked around by politicians, the pressures wrought by targets and inspections and the effects of the public sector pay cap, there is an on-going recruitment crisis in teaching as a whole, with computing among the most obvious casualties. England is meeting only 68% of its computer science teacher recruitment targets, partly because of the handsome career prospects available in the private sector (the same picture applies in Scotland, where the number of computing teachers has fallen by 25% since 2005). In the absence of even half-decent training, existing teachers say they do not have the right support to get on top of the new subjects: according to a YouGov survey published last month, 67% of primary and secondary school teachers believe they cannot teach coding because of a lack of “skills and teaching tools”, and just under 40% say they do not have access to the right hardware and software.
Earlier this year, one teacher summed up the essential problem: “I’m learning as I go along with the kids.” You cannot teach maths, Spanish, physics or basic grammar on that basis. Why should a subject as exacting as computing be any different?
Largely to education’s detriment, the parts of the Gove revolution that were more easily accomplished are in place, but this one is foundering, and the upshot seems to suit our state of national disrepair to a T: by the time your child is 11, he or she might be studying the second world war for the third time, but coding will too often remain neglected. It’s good to know about the blitz, for sure, but it will not make you better suited to the future, either as a country or an individual.
So it is that a tragedy unfolds. Outside the classroom, a deep cultural change is afoot. If you have the money and inclination, you can acquaint your kids with programming skills via such inspired inventions as the Kano computer kit, a crowdfunded wonder that snaps together like Lego, and allows its users to start to master the basic processes of coding. Across the country, there is a growing network of Code Clubs largely built on the goodwill of volunteers.
Two weeks ago, I took my eight-year-old daughter to one, run on Saturday mornings. She has since built her first elementary website, variously focused on Stig of the Dump and the computer game and entertainment franchise Five Nights at Freddy’s. For the two hours we were there, a thought glued itself to my mind: why isn’t school more like this?
Just to make this clear: this is not fundamentally about creating an army of professional programmers, any more than teaching people Spanish or Mandarin is reducible to encouraging people to be full-time linguists. A grasp of coding is a classic generalisable skill: it fosters an understanding of logic, advanced problem-solving, and the processes needed to turn ideas into functioning systems. As automation and AI gain pace and threaten whole chunks of the labour force, the people who possess such talents increasingly stick out. They work in manufacturing, financial services, retail, the media and more – and in the midst of the most challenging economic environment this country has probably ever faced, they seem to be among the few people who might hold the key to some kind of viable future. And at the moment, the fact they exist feels more like a matter of accident than design.
The importance of computing education also cuts straight to what is arguably the biggest cultural issue of our time: our increasingly lamentable collective relationship with the internet, and what that means for our lives. The idea that Facebook and Google are coming close to killing the internet’s last residue of anarchic democracy by colonising the online world is a cliche, but only because it’s true. Their dominance depends on the way that most people now blindly obey their diktats in the same way that my generation gawped at the TV – not least the young people who are immersed in the social media world, and often find themselves vulnerable to its worst excesses. The only way you can even start to reverse all that is by prising off the digital facade and encouraging people to remake the online world as they want.
And then there is the gender issue. It rather pains me to say this, but for as long as computing remains largely outside the classroom, its take-up will be vulnerable to the crass cultural pressures that too often make it a male preserve. Fund it properly, make a point of bringing in women computing experts to illustrate the fact that their specialism is for everybody, and you might just achieve miracles – starting, perhaps, with the upending of the tech world’s current addiction to testosterone.
The Royal Society report recommends £60m of new spending over the next five years, and the recruitment of 8,000 new computing teachers in English secondary schools. The aims are laudable enough, but they sound like only the start. Averting our eyes from the future is in danger of becoming a deep national trait. Before it’s far too late, we need a new generation that can hack, code, and find out what might lie beyond the Facebook era. Without them, we will sink.
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Republicans’ beliefs are bending to Trump. Here’s why they might not even notice.
We don’t often remember when we change our minds.
17 November 2017
If you look at polling data, there are a few issues on which Republican voters seem to have changed their beliefs since Donald Trump began his campaign for the presidency.
In 2015, just 12 percent of Republicans held a favorable view of Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to Gallup. Now 32 percent of Republicans like him, the firm found in a February poll.
Or take the issue of free trade: Historically, conservatives have been in favor of it. But from 2015 to 2017, Republican support of free trade dropped from 56 percent in 2015 to just 36 percent in 2017, according to Pew.
It’s easy to look at these changing poll numbers and see something blatantly hypocritical — that these Americans are knowingly giving in to Trump rhetoric praising Putin and belittling free trade, betraying their former ideals.
But new research from psychology suggests something else is probably going on: Many political beliefs are fickle, and people probably don’t realize it when they change their minds.
Michael Wolfe, a memory and learning researcher at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, recently published an experiment in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology that found when people change their mind on a subject, they have a hard time recalling that they ever felt another way.
It’s an intriguing finding in part because it affirms that people think their beliefs are more stable than they actually are. Which means they may be less open to information that conflicts with their belief.
It’s also further evidence that despite what we may think, we don’t hold consistent ideological views. We tend to agree with whatever our leaders agree with, which is particularly worrying with Donald Trump as president, as I described in a recent story about how conservatives are realigning their views with his.
Why we don’t remember when we change our minds
Wolfe ran the study on a sample of a few hundred college students, using as a topic the effectiveness of spanking as a disciplinary measure. This subject was chosen for a few reasons: It’s one that many people have an opinion on, but it’s not so partisan or political that people would be totally unwilling to change their beliefs. It’s also a topic on which it’s relativity easy to find evidence both for and against.
First, Wolfe and his co-author asked the participants if they believed spanking is effective on a scale of 1 to 9. A few months later, they brought the participants into the lab to read arguments for or against spanking. After the prompt, the students were asked to again rate their feelings about spanking. But here’s the key: They were also asked to recall what they first thought about spanking, several months back.
On average, the students changed their minds when they read an argument that was counter to their initial belief. But most didn’t remember. It was just easier to remember the text they’d just read than to think back on their past opinions.
“We don’t go in and grab a memory like opening up a word file or reading it off a tape,” Wolfe explains. “But rather, if you ask a person at a particular time to report their belief, they construct their belief at that moment based on a combination of things that are easily available to them at that time.”
Memories aren’t retrieved; they’re constructed with cognitive shortcuts. And when memories are constructed, we can’t easily see the seams. We don’t notice that they’ve changed.
“When people try to remember a previous belief, information that’s available at a moment biases their ability to remember this old information,” Wolfe says. “They end up thinking their current belief is very similar to their previous belief.”
Here’s the key chart from the study. On the right, it shows that when a participant reads a text that counters what they initially believed, they’re around 2 points more likely on a 9-point scale to endorse it. Then look at the “recollection” scores. That’s their guess for what their original answer was. It’s much more similar to their post-reading answer than it is to the initial response.
Other studies show we have a bias to believe that our past selves are more similar to our current selves than they actually are. People in romantic relationships that have gone sour tend to misremember the fact that they were ever happy with their partners. Our memories of the past are constructed with information available in our immediate present — and we often confuse immediacy and familiarity with truth. Just repeating a lie once can make it more accepted as truth.
There’s also this fun study, published in PLOS One in 2013. In it, researchers gave participants an opinion poll to fill out, and then sneakily changed their answers. When they gave back the polls, the participants didn’t realize their answers had been changed. “A full 92 percent of the participants accepted and endorsed our altered political survey score,” the researchers concluded.
This has huge implications for how we interpret public opinion polls
There are some caveats to Wolfe’s experiment. First is that it was conducted on college students, who don’t necessarily generalize to the rest of the population. Second, this topic — meta-awareness of belief change — isn’t studied all that often, so some follow-up is needed.
And third is that college students may not care all that much about spanking, can be easily swayed, and don’t care enough to recall anything else. We’d have better awareness if we changed our minds on a topic that is more deeply connected to our identity — like access to abortion or belief in climate change.
But that third point isn’t all that much of a caveat, if you consider how we generally think about wonky issues in politics — which is not all that often or all that deeply. As political scientist Gabriel Lenz finds in a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Politics, only about 20 to 40 percent of the public holds stable views on policy. Many of us just take cues from leaders, and our parties, in forming our opinions.
In this light, it’s not super surprising that so many more Republicans are now against the concept of free trade.
“A lot of people don’t know how the parties describe themselves,” Lenz says. “And when they learn my party’s conservative [or is against free trade, etc.], they start saying they’re conservative too. … It’s very hard to find instances where prior policy views seem to drive later voting or decisions.”
The revelation of this, that our memories are tinged by how we feel in the present, paints public opinion polls in a new light.
Recently, I reported on a public opinion poll that found 59 percent of respondents said we’re currently living through the lowest point in US history that they could remember. In the article, I didn’t consider the possibility that the participants were misremembering, that their immediate displeasure about the state of the country masked over any memory of worse times.
The lesson here: When people answer public opinion polls, they rely on mental shortcuts. They may replace a hard question (“How do I feel about international trade taxes?”) with an easy question (“What team am I on, and how would they answer this question?”).
“These shortcuts can be political ideology; it could be religiosity, deference to scientific authority,” says Dominique Brossard, a psychologist who studies public opinion at the University of Wisconsin. “People don’t see themselves as being irrational doing this.”
So that big public opinion shift in Republicans I mentioned at the top of this piece? It’s both meaningful and not. It’s not meaningful because the participants in the survey, to some extent, are just mirroring Trump’s priorities as a leader. But it is meaningful because politicians like Trump can use the public opinion poll as proof that there’s a groundswell of support for these issues. Likewise, it’s provocative to say now that it’s the lowest point in recent US history, according to a majority of Americans. But without a recording of how these people actually felt decades ago, we can’t know.
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/11/17/16585982/psychology-memory-polls-trump
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‘Working-class children get less of everything in education – including respect’
Interview Diane Reay grew up on a council estate, the eldest of eight, and became a Cambridge professor. Now she wants to talk about inequality in education
21 November 2017
When Diane Reay, Cambridge University professor of education, started researching her book about working class children’s experiences of education, she had no idea just how much inequality she would uncover in state schools today. “The most important thing I found out was that we are still educating different social classes for different functions in society.”
She expected to find the English state system was providing roughly the same education for all. “But it doesn’t. Even within a comprehensive school, when they’re all in the same building, the working classes are still getting less education than the middle classes, just as they had when my dad was at school at the beginning of the 20th century.”
Reay’s background informs her book and her opinions. The daughter of a coalminer, and the eldest of eight, she grew up on a council estate and received free school meals. She then spent 20 years working as a teacher in London primary schools before moving into academia and ending up at Cambridge.
“My parents had a strong sense that the educational system hadn’t been fair to them and they had missed out. I learned as a small child I had to work at least twice as hard as the middle class children to achieve the same result. When I did show ambition – to go to LSE [the London School of Economics and Political Science] to be a political researcher – I was told it wasn’t appropriate.”
How much has changed? “This government is making inequality in education worse, not better,” she says.
Reay carried out more than 500 interviews and identified most with the children who were difficult and out of place: the “fighters”, she calls them. “That was the sort of child I was in school.”
Now she hopes to open up a national debate about what a socially just education would look like. “There’s this incessant babble from the government about social mobility. But the academy and free school movement has made things worse for working class children, with more segregation and polarisation.” In spite of free schools and academies receiving more funding per pupil than state comprehensive schools, they typically educate fewer children in receipt of free school meals, she found. “Free schools and academies have a more advantaged intake than the comprehensive schools do.”
England does not have an education system that is serious about realising the potential of all children, she argues, with those on free school meals and receiving pupil premium 27% less likely to achieve five or more GCSEs at grades A*-C including English and maths. Four-fifths of children from working-class minority ethnic families are taught in schools with high concentrations of other immigrant or disadvantaged students – the highest proportion in the developed world, according to a report by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. Half of all free school meal children are educated in just a fifth of all schools.
“There are predominantly middle class comprehensives and predominantly working class and ethnically mixed comprehensives – and despite all the rhetoric around pupil premiums, pupils in the more working class comprehensives get less money per head. They get less qualified teachers. They get higher levels of teacher turnover and more supply teachers. Even if they are in the same schools as middle class children, they are in lower sets and yet again they get less experienced teachers.”
All the children she interviewed had a powerful sense of their position in the academic hierarchy. “Right from reception now some children are in sets aged four and they can tell they’re only in ‘the monkeys’ and that’s not a very good group to be in. That means they’re not very clever.” She was shocked by the anxiety displayed by very young children, who, she says, blame themselves if they are put in the lower sets.
Research suggests it is the wealth and inclination of parents, rather than the ability and efforts of the child, that have the most bearing on a child’s educational success today. “If you’re a working class child, you’re starting the race halfway round the track behind the middle class child. Middle class parents do a lot via extra resources and activities.”
Less affluent children also get a more restrictive educational offer, she discovered. “It wasn’t until I talked to young people about their experiences that I realised how different and unequal their educations were. Because the schools that working class children mostly go to are not doing well in the league tables, there’s a lot of pressure on their teachers and heads to increase their league table position. That means they focus ruthlessly on reading, writing and arithmetic.”
Some children in these schools talked wistfully about hardly ever doing art, drama or dance: “These children come from families where their parents can’t afford to pay for them to do those activities out of school. It almost feels criminal. It feels very unfair.”
The difference between amounts spent on educating children privately or in the state sector is stark. She cites research from University College London that found £12,200 a year is the average spending on a privately educated primary pupil, compared with £4,800 on a state pupil. For secondary, it’s £15,000 compared with £6,200.
“Society has got more unfair, and the gap between the rich and poor is a lot greater than it was even 30 years ago. We’ve got to move back instead of going further in the direction of austerity, which seems to be punishing the poor.”
She believes the government’s support for academies and free schools is powerfully ideological. “It’s about opening up education to the markets. I found it particularly shocking – and I had to read some quite boring parliamentary reports to get the information – that masses of money has gone into the academy and free school programme, and it’s been taken out of the comprehensive school system.”
Reay found that free schools receive 60% more funding per pupil than local authority primaries and secondaries, and that £96m originally intended for improving underperforming schools was redistributed to academies.
To make things worse, an analysis of Department for Education data reveals that schools with the highest numbers of pupils on free school meals are facing the deepest funding cuts: in secondary schools with more than 40% of children on free school meals, the average loss per pupil will be £803. That’s £326 more than the average for secondary schools as a whole. And primary schools with high numbers of working class pupils are expected to lose £578 per pupil.
Another blow being inflicted on working class children is through the way they are treated in some super-strict schools, argues Reay. She says some academies operate on the principle that working class families are chaotic and children need school to impose control. “There’s lots of lining up in silence, standing to attention when an adult comes into the room, and mantras. I think it’s about disrespecting working class young people and their families.
“There’s one academy where the children have to say: I aspire, he aspires, she aspires, we all aspire.”
Another issue is widespread setting and streaming. “There’s masses of research that shows it doesn’t work – that, actually, if you put children in mixed ability groups, the majority make greater progress.
“Plus, research on wellbeing shows that you need to decrease the social distance between people. There’s mistrust, wariness and anxiety about people who are different from us. That obviously came out in the Brexit vote. If you put children together in their classroom, they start to learn that what they share is much greater than the differences between them.”
After her own schooling at Ashby grammar school, Leicestershire, Reay went to Newcastle University to study politics and economics before getting a job as a primary teacher in Islington. She took her master’s in 1985 at the Institute of Education then went back to teaching. She was he main breadwinner in her family, and managed to get funding to do a sociology PhD at South Bank University when she was in her mid-40s.
She took up her first research post at King’s College London a few years later and in 2001 was given a chair at the Institute for Policy Studies in Education at London Met. After collaborating on a research project on school inclusivity with academics at Cambridge, she was asked to apply for her current job in the faculty of education in 2004. “If I hadn’t worked with colleagues at Cambridge already, I don’t think I’d have dared.”
As a Cambridge professor, she is also highly critical of Oxbridge’s failure to attract students from working class backgrounds and ethnic minorities. But lowering entry requirements is not the solution, she believes. “Focus just at the admissions level isn’t really going to change very much. We’re never going to have a critical mass of those students who are non-traditional to make a difference.”
Instead of blaming non-traditional students for not applying, which she finds hypocritical, she’d like the elite universities to look at their whole culture and ethos. “Maybe they need to ask: how can we make ourselves more attractive to non-traditional applicants? The courses, for example, need to be brought into the 21st century, instead of staying in the 17th.”
She was feeling positive that a debate about the diversity of Cambridge University reading lists was opening up – until the Telegraph ran its inaccurate front page story claiming a black student, Lola Olufemi, was forcing the university to drop white authors from its syllabus. “That poor woman was subject to so much negative feedback. The attitude of the Telegraph was: who does she think she is?”
Reay says she felt compelled to write this book because she believes things cannot go on as they are. “There needs to be a sea change in public opinion, for us to say this is too inequitable and unfair. There needs to be a new collective effort to make things fairer.”
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/nov/21/english-class-system-shaped-in-schools
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“We still educate the different social classes in fundamentally different ways.”
Miseducation: Inequality, education and the working classes, by Diane Reay
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Is the British education system designed to polarise people?
Young people need to learn to control the richest 1% who dominate Britain, argues Professor Danny Dorling
4 February 2014
I grew up in Oxford, but left my hometown to study and then worked at universities in Newcastle, Bristol, Leeds and Sheffield. People who read my words but didn’t hear my accent often assumed I was from the north. But now I’ve come full circle, and have taken up a chair in geography at Oxford University.
It is geography that reveals just how divided we have become as a society in this country. There are places from which it appears almost impossible to succeed educationally and others where it seems very hard to fail. On any given day, a fifth of children in Britain qualify for free school meals. Just one in 100 of those children get to go to either Oxford or Cambridge University. Four private schools and one highly selective state sixth-form college send more children to Oxbridge than do 2,000 other secondary schools. The most prestigious 100 schools secure 30% of all Oxbridge places. And 84 of them are private schools.
People often complain that the national debate on higher education is unfairly dominated by interest in entry to these two universities. But it matters. The richest 1% (people with a pre-tax household income of at least £160,000) dominate decision-making in this country. How they behave is a weathervane for social mobility in Britain.
Income inequality has now reached a new maximum and, for the first time in a century, even those just below the richest 1% are beginning to suffer, to see their disposable income drop. When you exclude the top 1%, income inequality within the rest of the population, within the 99%, is now lower than at any time since Margaret Thatcher was prime minister. Or, as put in economist-speak by the Institute for Fiscal Studies last year: “Over the past two decades … inequality among the bottom 99% has fallen: the Gini coefficient for the bottom 99% was 5% lower in 2011–12, at 0.30, than in 1991.”
We now know that economic inequality changes how we think and is linked to biases in self-perception. When university students from 16 countries around the globe were asked to rate how they individually compared to other students in terms of the big five personality traits (agreeableness, conscientiousness, extroversion, open-mindedness and emotionality) it was those in the more economically unequal countries, such as the US, who were most likely to frequently say that they were superior to their peers. Fortunately, perhaps, the UK was not included in that particular study. When it is, we may find that we are not as self-deprecating when tested in private as we are in public.
Being more prone to be elitist and trumpet our own talents, both actual and imagined, is not necessarily unwise in a more unequal society. In such a society, to prosper may well require individuals to be more upbeat about their individual abilities, to think they are better than others. How else do you justify your position if you are paid much more than the average in a very inequitable society?
However, the tendency to self-aggrandisement has many downsides. As acclaimed author, academic and working-class child Marshall Berman said of his student days: “The experience of studying at Columbia, Oxford and Harvard was intellectually exciting but socially lonely. They all catered to the rich, to the current and wannabe ruling class, and I felt I didn’t fit in.” When clever upstarts get into the ranks of the super-paid they often find they do not fit in easily there, just as highly paid women often also discover.
Today in education the thinking and attitudes of a few of our elite have come to be presented as common sense. Some of the members of the 1% like to portray state schools as the problem, and they suggest that those schools are the reason why others are paid so little and why incomes have dropped. To be able to do this they sometimes suggest that there was once a golden age of state schooling when the grammar schools gave working-class children a chance. Some may believe this was true, but grammar schools were a relic of an older, even more unequal age. Some of the new top 1% would prefer to see the privatisation of all schools.
It is almost 20 years since Milton Friedman explained to the Washington Post how state education could be privatised in the US. He said: “I believe that the only way to make a major improvement in our educational system is through privatisation … Vouchers are not an end in themselves; they are a means to make a transition from a government to a market system.” Now in the UK we have vouchers, in the form of the pupil premium, that follow poorer children to whichever school they attend. We have academies that are “managed by trusts, companies limited by guarantee”, as my old comprehensive school in Oxford is now tagged. We are currently travelling on Friedman’s road map. Geographical comparisons show that it is not a good route to take.
Stefan Collini, professor of English literature and intellectual history at the University of Cambridge, when commenting on the latest international education statistics last year, explained that “countries committed to high-quality comprehensives, such as Finland, yet again come out on top. A stratified and class-segregated school system is not the answer: it’s the problem.” There is way too much hierarchy and stratification among UK schools. Across the European mainland, children are far more used to almost all going to local state schools. That may be because almost every other European country is more economically equal than the UK.
The UK’s education system is beginning to look more like that of the US than other countries in Europe. Many American private universities now spend just a sixth of their fee income on teaching. These private providers take more than a fifth of fees in profit and spend even more on marketing to cover up the poor quality of what they are offering – subprime degrees not worth the paper they are printed on being sold to very young, very gullible consumers.
Since 2010-11 in Britain the new fully private universities have had access to taxpayers’ monies and can make a profit. Pundits now talk of “the subprime student loan” because often what is being bought through borrowing is not worth the initial fee, let alone the interest on that fee. Yet not all privatisation in education is on an upward trend.
For four of the last five years the numbers of children enrolled in fee-paying schools in the UK have fallen to just over 500,000. Part of the reason for the fall is that the average annual private school fee is now £14,000, and one of the reasons it is so high is because the numbers are dropping. Average annual fees for boarding schools are £27,612 – but almost £29,000 for boarding sixth-formers. The number of pupils in those schools dropped by 1.4% recently, to 66,605. At the most elite boarding schools, once the price of school trips is factored in, costs can be £50,000 a year, per child.
At exactly the same time that fewer children at or near the top of British society are able to aspire to what the children of the top 1% can afford, millions of children at the bottom of the 99% are falling into poverty or seeing their poverty deepen. In 2013 the Children’s Commissioner explained what is happening in the UK due to the nature of cuts and austerity: “Families with children will lose more of their income than families without children. However, lone parents will lose the most out of everyone.” Within the 99% there is still rising inequality for the children.
Social mobility is lowest where local “choice” in education superficially appears to be highest. Another study last year named Trafford in Greater Manchester as having the highest level of educational social segregation. This is due to secondary moderns and grammar schools being retained there as well as private school provision being high. When confronted with the evidence that government education policy was reducing social mobility in such areas, a spokesman for the education department said it did not wish to comment on the report.
For schooling, the country to which utopians look is Finland, where 99.2% of school education is state-funded. In Finland, there is no inspection of teachers, no league tables; pupils are not set or streamed, and, as Diane Reay, professor of education at Cambridge, explains: “In four international surveys, all since 2000, Finnish comprehensive school students have scored above students in all the other participating countries in science and problem-solving skills, and came either first or second in reading and mathematics. These results were achieved despite the amount of homework assigned in Finnish schools being relatively low, and an absence of private tuition.”
We have an educational system that is designed to polarise people, one that creates an elite who can easily come to have little respect for the majority of the population, who think that they should earn extraordinarily more than everyone else, and defines the jobs of others as so low-skilled that it apparently justifies many living in relative poverty.
The elite is shrinking. It really is now only 1% of the population who are maintaining their very high standard of living. The majority of graduates, even from a university like Oxford, cannot expect to fit within that 1% even if they all wished to only do the kinds of jobs that pay so much. The majority of all our young people should expect to see their standard of living fall in future, or they need to learn how to better control the richest people in our society. The 1% are disproportionately made up not of people who are most able, but of those who are most greedy and least concerned about the rights, feelings and welfare of other people.
Recently released findings from psychology suggest that many of them may be naturally inclined to be more selfish. It is not so much their fault that they find it hard to understand others’ feelings. It is our fault for not controlling the greed of a few and for so long swallowing their shallow arguments as to why they deserve so much.
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Do we really want Mark Zuckerberg to run the world?
The Facebook chief executive doesn’t need to become US president. He is already way too powerful for that
27 November 2017
The question is almost a year old, and not currently being asked in quite the feverish way it was over the summer. But let’s try it again: could Mark Zuckerberg run for US president? The founder, chairman and CEO of Facebook began 2017 by announcing his latest “challenge”: a pledge to visit the 30 US states he had never spent time in before, which has now been achieved. Along the way, he has made a point of meeting Trump voters, sampling the mood in post-industrial backwaters, and seeing at first hand evidence of his country’s opioid crisis. He now talks about the importance of community, and the need for his generation to find a collective sense of purpose, rather suggesting the leading actor in a school play about Bobby Kennedy.
“Some of you have asked if this challenge means I’m running for public office,” he wrote back in May. The previous month, he had dinner with a Trump-supporting family in Newton Falls, Ohio, who didn’t seem to mind that he brought his own food and a retinue of aides, and were reportedly told: “If there are any news reporters that call you, just make sure you tell them I’m not running for president.” There again, we also know that close associates have spoken to him about “the gov’t service thing” and how his embrace of it might play with Facebook’s shareholders; that his charity has hired a handful of Washington insiders, including David Plouffe, Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign manager; and that he has taken the strange step of publicly renouncing his atheism.
For the time being, though, Zuckerberg’s possible political ambitions are not really the issue. Far more important is what we know already: that his power is titanic, and Facebook is shaping millions of people’s understanding of who they are and their place in the world, often in grim ways
To be more specific, Facebook’s promotion of “fake news” remains a huge issue. The story of its manipulation by geopolitical forces – Russia, chiefly – that see it as an effective means of shaping the world has only started to be exposed. Facebook’s weakening of the traditional fourth estate continues apace, with profound consequences for how power is held to account, not least in Facebook’s own case.
Meanwhile, nothing appears to have shaken Zuckerberg and his close associates’ dream of a communication platform that will collect such a huge volume of personal information that it will become a kind of ever-expanding global brain – and, as an added bonus, the only reliable means of marketing things to people.
Staring at a face whose expression somehow seems to combine deep awkwardness with an unquenchable optimism, presumably traceable to the fact that Zuckerberg is now rich beyond the dreams of avarice, I have often wondered: how does he understand all this?
For all that his company is a byword for the future, Zuckerberg is something of a throwback to the political past. It’s often said that fame freezes people’s development at the age they first become well known; as with many of the stars of Silicon Valley, there is something of the same syndrome with him. When Facebook launched, in 2004, the global crash was four years away, and wealthy and successful liberals could still cling with confidence to the credo that had defined much of the preceding decade: a mixture of the fuzzy philanthropy decisively introduced to the culture by Live Aid, mixed with the closely related politics pioneered by Tony Blair and Bill Clinton.
In this vision, boosted by digital utopianism, globalisation was great, liberalised capitalism was a given, and just about everything difficult – from the power of finance capital, through deindustrialisation to global warming and the stubborn persistence of racism – could be either overcome by simple goodwill, or safely ignored. Notwithstanding 9/11 and the start of the Iraq war, all of this would have sat comfortably with a 19-year-old about to make his fortune and change the world. Thirteen years on, it evidently still does. (To instantly grasp Facebook’s ties to the failed liberal politics of the 1990s, always remember that its chief operating officer is Sheryl Sandberg, who was a high-up in Bill Clinton’s administration and remains a good friend of Hillary, once tipped as her running mate.)
Zuckerberg’s new sense of mission was laid out in the commencement address this Harvard dropout delivered at his alma mater in May. He wants to stop climate change. He intends to be part of a generation “that ends poverty, that ends disease”. He talks about “a level of wealth inequality that hurts everyone”, and says he “wants a society that measures progress not just by economic metrics like GDP, but by how many of us have a role we find meaningful”. He talks about being on the side of “freedom, openness and global community” against “authoritarianism, isolationism and nationalism”. But every word highlights the same absence. The ends seem nice. What of the means?
In Zuckerberg’s case, the sense of liberal cant is made even more glaring by the contradictions that swirl around him. As he sketches out his nebulous utopia, he says: “People like me should pay for it.” But he makes no mention of his company’s questionable record on tax, instead emphasising his belief in charity. He affects to worry about social and political polarisation while the very algorithms that power his platform encourage it. He superficially sets himself against the global forces of reaction while they make merry on his servers.
And though Facebook’s continuing travails have evidently rattled him, he inevitably has no sense that its ethos and operations need any reining-in. Quite the reverse, in fact. Judging from his recent pronouncements in response to the way that society and politics have become more divided and fractious, Zuckerberg wants Facebook “to develop the social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that works for all of us”.
He thinks there is a small subset of Facebook’s 2 billion users who make up “meaningful communities” on the platform, and that via a reinvention of Facebook’s Groups, more of us should follow their example. All this is as vague as everything else, but it boils down to something captured in a headline from Wired magazine: “Mark Zuckerberg’s answer to a world divided by Facebook is more Facebook”.
If his rhetoric were merely a front for the cynical pursuit of profit, Zuckerberg and his minions might sooner or later recognise its essential absurdity and back off. But it’s much worse than that, for reasons beautifully captured in Chaos Monkeys, a recently published memoir by a former insider called Antonio García Martínez. “Facebook is full of true believers who really, really, really are not doing it for the money,” he writes, “and really, really will not stop until every man, woman and child on earth is staring into a blue-framed window with a Facebook logo … The greedy man can always be bought at some price or another, and his behaviour is predictable. The true zealot? He can’t be had at any price, and there’s no telling what his mad visions will have him and his followers do.”
Two thoughts arise from that. First, why would Zuckerberg bother with a parochial distraction such as the presidency when he has the power to make his hubristic dreams a global reality? Second, given that the liberal delusions of the recent past are a big part of the reason the world finds itself in such a mess, have any grownups recently sat him down and reminded him that, as we used to say in the 20th century, the road to hell is paved with good intentions?
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Facebook to hand over details of Russian-backed Brexit posts
Commons media watchdog to receive information on Russian-backed activity on social network within next few weeks
28 November 2017
Facebook has agreed to hand over information showing the reach of Russian-backed postings during the Brexit referendum by early December, according to the House of Commons media watchdog.
Damian Collins, the chair of parliament’s culture, media and sport committee, said he believed the figures would give the UK a better idea of whether Russia tried to influence the vote on leaving the EU.
Facebook handed over similar information in the US showing that during the presidential campaign about 123 million people were reached by false news generated by a single troll factory, the Internet Research Agency, in St Petersburg.
Collins, who has demanded the information from both Facebook and Twitter, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme he was concerned by the “systematic distribution of false news by particularly Russian-backed organisations”.
He said the UK and US knew only about the operation of one agency in St Petersburg but there would “probably be others and we may find other countries doing it too”.
Researchers at the University of Edinburgh have identified 419 accounts operating from the Internet Research Agency (IRA) attempting to influence UK politics out of 2,752 accounts suspended by Twitter in the US. Those accounts tweeted about Brexit a total of 3,468 times – mostly after the referendum had taken place.
Asked about whether he had suspicions the EU referendum was influenced by Russia, Collins said: “I think we have a right to know what was going on. Some of the activity took place directly before the referendum and certainly during the campaign. That’s why I wrote to Mark Zuckerberg asking for Facebook to give us the information about Russian-backed activity on their platform.
“They have given similar information to the US senate. For our parliamentary inquiry, I want that information too. I have had a response from Facebook which the select committee will be publishing today which says they will give us that information in the second week of December. I hope then we will have a better chance to understand the scale of Russian-backed operations during the referendum.”
Collins has asked senior representatives of Twitter and Facebook to give evidence to his committee’s inquiry on the reach of fake news at the British embassy in Washington in February.
Theresa May has accused Russia of meddling in elections and planting fake stories, criticising its attempts to “weaponise information” in order to sow discord in the west. But she has stopped short of saying Russia had an impact on the UK’s EU referendum or other elections.
Russian-backed organisations are known to have bought adverts on Facebook and generated campaign content before Donald Trump won last year’s US presidential election. Authorities in France and Germany have also said their elections were targeted.
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BBC News / Psychology / Careers
Why you sometimes have to quit to win
There’s a downside in hanging on to your job or goals for too long – but most people don’t see it.
28 November 2017
I quit my first ‘real’ job after university. It seemed to be a mistake: it was in my industry of choice, it was the start of the recession, I had just been promoted, and I didn’t have another 9-to-5 lined up… or any real financial assets to fall back on.
It turned out to be the best career decision I ever made. Only by giving up my job as a political reporter in Washington DC could I move to Italy and pursue my dream of becoming a travel journalist. One of the publications I began writing for was the BBC, which led to a full-time job across two continents.
Of course, I didn’t know it would work out that way. And leaving my job wasn’t the only reason for everything that followed. But quitting was a terrifying – and necessary – starting point.
For most of us, the important role quitting can play in success runs counter to deeply-held beliefs. In previous generations, the usual narrative was that success (and financial stability) followed the workhorse who stuck with their job, or career path, no matter what. As promises of job security have dwindled, that role model of a company lifer has been replaced by the entrepreneur who never gives up.
Both narratives share one lesson above all others: ‘winners never quit and quitters never win’. Whether in a job, a relationship or a dream, we’re taught that giving up is synonymous with failure.
“What nobody talks about is that, sometimes, quitting is really good. It’s really important,” says Eric Barker, author of Barking Up the Wrong Tree. “There are only 24 hours in a day. If you never quit anything, you’re going to have less time for the things that really matter.”
Of course, persistence is important. If you abandon a marathon at the 5km mark, you’ll never succeed. But rather than thinking of quitting as the absolute last resort, we may want to reconsider its value, say experts. Research suggests that, when done for the right reasons, walking away from a workplace, relationship or even an ambition can make you happier, healthier and more successful.
For one, people often are working towards the wrong goals to begin with. Even if a goal was once a good fit, it might not be so appropriate a few years later. “If I never quit anything, I’d still be playing tee-ball [a children’s version of baseball] and playing with Transformers,” Barker jokes.
But once we have realised we want to take a different direction, most of us still find it difficult to abandon our current path.
This reflects a particularly human tendency: our excruciating aversion to loss. What we have already invested, whether time or money or something else, reflects our sunk cost. That investment is hard to abandon. Would you rather lose $5, or turn down the opportunity to earn $5? Most of us find the latter easier, even though the result is the same.
It’s the same reason that someone with an expensive, time-intensive law or medical degree may be less likely to leave their career path, no matter how unhappy they might be.
But as Stephen Dubner points out in the Freakonomics podcast The Upside of Quitting, we’re so loss-averse that we favour sunk cost over an equally important consideration: opportunity cost. “For every hour or dollar that you spend on one thing, you’re giving up the opportunity to spend that hour or dollar on something else. Something that might make your life better – if only you weren’t so worried about the sunk cost,” he says.
Exacerbating our dilemma is our fear of the unknown. We don’t know what will happen if we quit to take a different path. But we do know what we’d lose by leaving.
What we forget is that just because we have more information about our present situation doesn’t mean those facts will stay the same in the future. (Just ask the employees of once-thriving chains like Blockbuster, Borders or Woolworths) And not knowing what will happen after a big change doesn’t mean that path is worse.
Meanwhile, a job you hate can leave you prone to depression, anxiety and physical illness – so much so that when it comes to mental health, no job at all may be better than a thankless one.
Quitting one job after another may not be a bad thing either: despite commonly-held belief, frequently job-hopping can actually make you more successful. Economist Henry Siu found that young people who switched jobs more often earned higher salaries in later life. Of course, job-hoppers may just be more proactive overall – and switching jobs can be a better way to secure a higher salary than staying put and begging for a raise. But Siu also posits another theory: by trying out different career paths, people may find their ‘true calling’ and therefore become more skilled and valuable, he says.
Job-hopping also may help you climb the career ladder. In one survey of 12,500 alumni of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, respondents who had fewer than two roles in 15 years had a 1 in 50 chance of becoming a top-level leader. Those who held five or more positions were nine times more likely to reach senior management. Head researcher Edward Lazear suggests that, to be a top leader, you may need a wide range of skills best provided (and proven) by a variety of roles.
Not all research has borne out the same result. One study of 15,000 employees found that the more years an executive stayed with their company, the faster they got to the top. But the same research also found that switching industries or careers often proved to be a good move for respondents.
What about leaving to start your own company? Quit with caution, experts say. As we all know, a minority of new businesses make it. And despite the idea that you have to quit your day job and devote yourself 100% to ensure your endeavour succeeds, recent research has found that people who hustle on the side first ultimately have better-performing companies than people who jumped in feet-first.
They were all ‘quitters’: the study’s more cautious ‘hybrid entrepreneurs’ eventually walked away from their day jobs, too. But their patience paid off.
Abandoning one job or path for another may bring greater rewards. Far from failure, pivoting can lead to success. Twitter started as a podcasting platform, YouTube as a dating website and Android as a camera operating system. Had they all stuck with their original vision, they likely wouldn’t be household names today.
Meanwhile, numerous studies have found that people are best off when they not only abandon an unattainable goal, but choose another. Some of the world’s most successful people have proved that. Fashion designer Vera Wang began her career as a figure skater, then became an editor at Vogue. Alibaba founder Jack Ma applied unsuccessfully for dozens of jobs before he began designing websites. And Charles Darwin first studied to become a doctor, then a parson.
Ending toxic relationships
Meanwhile, the importance of interpersonal relationships for our health and happiness has been widely researched. But quality is key. And here, too, we often hang onto dissatisfying situations for too long.
Numerous studies have found that negative interactions with a loved one like conflict, criticism or feeling ‘let down’ increase the risk of developing a depressive episode (or depression), heart disease and even dementia. Meanwhile, unhappy marriages can lead to depression, a lower sense of well-being and even the onset of chronic health problems and physical disability.
Of course, walking away from a relationship can be difficult, too. Studies have found that divorced women experience more physical illness and heart attacks long-term than their married counterparts. But, researchers point out, many of those studies haven’t controlled for various factors, such as someone’s social connections overall. In other words, it may not be divorce itself that is damaging. It’s the loss of the central relationship most people rely on for support. The more other connections someone has, the more they’re protected against the physiological and emotional downsides of divorce.
“When you do the studies that way, what you find is, guess what: what really matters is the extent to which you have supportive relationships where you feel connected and you feel safe, and that you have a good amount of social connection and social capital. Those are the things that matter,” says Heather Helms, a human development and family studies professor who studies marital relationships at the University of North Carolina.
In fact, other research suggests that people who stick with a dissatisfying relationship may be the worst off. One study found that unhappily-married people had worse health and lower levels of life satisfaction than those who chose to leave. Another study found that along with middle-aged women in a satisfied partnership, their single and divorced peers were far less likely to have metabolic syndrome, a significant risk factor of heart disease, than unhappily-attached women.
But new relationships are the easiest to end. So if it’s not working well from the start, leave, says Helms. “If there’s toxic stuff going on in the development of the relationship, get out. Don’t stick around,” she says. “It’s time to cut it.”
Exit strategy
Walking out of a thankless job or a bad relationship is one thing. Giving up on a dream is harder. But there, too, quitting can be good for you – at least when the goal you’re striving for is unattainable.
Numerous studies have found that people who let go of something they haven’t been able to achieve benefit from better health and well-being. But those who keep battling towards a goal that remains stubbornly out of reach experience more distress and depression.
The idea that we might be better off letting go of dreams can be hard to swallow. After all, we’ve all heard how JK Rowling was rejected by 12 different publishers before finding a publisher for the Harry Potter books or how Walt Disney was fired from his job as a cartoonist for not being creative enough. Their experiences show ‘grit’ – the ability to stick to something and see it through. We’ve all experienced its importance. If I had quit freelancing after my first, or even fifth, pitch to an editor was rejected, I’d never be a journalist today.
So how do you know when to persevere and when to quit?
“This is the quandary of life. We just don’t know,” says life coach and consultant Stever Robbins. “But what you read about are the stories about the people who were persistent and it worked. Nobody’s going around talking about people who were persistent and died alone in a gutter because they stuck to being persistent for way too long. I think way more people fit the latter category than the former.”
To decide when a goal should be left behind, Barker recommends thinking through the WOOP framework (wish, outcome, obstacle, plan). If you’ve gone through each step and the idea of following the plan depletes your energy and enthusiasm, maybe it’s time to give up and turn to something else, he says.
Remember that persistence and quitting don’t have to be polar opposites. As Barker points out, “If you quit the stuff you know isn’t working for you, you free up time for things that might.”
It seems the old adage may be wrong. Winners do quit. But rather than seeing their quitting as failure, they turn their energy to the next venture… and the next, and the next. That, in fact, may be their secret to what we never associate with quitting: success.
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20171128-why-you-sometimes-have-to-quit-to-win
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Trump Twitter account retweets British far-right group’s videos
29 November 2017
Donald Trump’s Twitter account has retweeted three inflammatory videos from a British far-right group.
The first tweet from Jayda Fransen, the deputy leader of Britain First, claims to show a Muslim migrant attacking a man on crutches.
This was followed by two more videos of people Ms Fransen claims to be Muslim.
Britain First was founded in 2011 by former members of the far-right British National Party (BNP).
The group has grabbed attention on social media with controversial posts about what they deem “the Islamification of the UK”.
It has put up members to run in European elections and by-elections on anti-immigration and anti-abortion policies, but has yet to secure any seats.
They also contested the most recent London mayoral election, receiving 1.2% of the vote.
The original video was shared by US conservative commentator Ann Coulter who Mr Trump follows.
Ms Fransen has more than 52,000 followers on Twitter.
She responded enthusiastically to Mr Trump sharing her tweets. She posted on her account: “Donald Trump himself has retweeted these videos and has around 44 million followers!”
“God bless you Trump! God bless America!” she added. The message was also shared on Britain First’s Twitter account.
Earlier this month, Ms Fransen was charged with using “threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour” during speeches she made in Belfast.
She will appear at Belfast Magistrates’ Court on Thursday 14 December.
Mr Trumps’ decision to retweet the videos met dismay on social media.
TV presenter and journalist Piers Morgan, who has called himself a “friend” of the president, tweeted: “What the hell are you doing?”
“Please STOP this madness & undo your retweets”, he said.
The Muslim Council for Britain called on the UK government to “distance” itself from the comments.
“This is the clearest endorsement yet from the US President of the far-right and their vile anti-Muslim propaganda,” a spokeswoman said.
“We hope our prime minister and home secretary will distance the UK from Mr Trump and his comments, and will reiterate the government’s abhorrence to all forms of extremism.”
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42166663
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‘Hostile environment’: the hardline Home Office policy tearing families apart
Theresa May has relentlessly pledged to make life as difficult as possible for illegal immigrants, but the harsh measures are also wrecking the lives of people who have a right to be here
28 November 2017
It is a boast that Theresa May has been repeating for the past five years. “The aim is to create, here in Britain, a really hostile environment for illegal immigrants,” she said in 2012 when, as home secretary, she was challenged on why annual net immigration, then running at about 250,000, was stubbornly above the Conservatives’ controversial “tens of thousands” target.
It was, the Telegraph noted, a rare moment when a politician who otherwise chose her language with “feline delicacy”, avoiding “a few stray words or a rash promise”, allowed it to become “uncharacteristically vivid”.
Despite her “safety-first” approach to public statements, May obviously liked that vividness. She has taken to repeating the phrase on demand. In August, it was chosen as one of her most powerful quotes. Perhaps she feels it deflects the reality of the situation: despite the recent 84,000 fall in annual net migration to 248,000 – much of it due to the return home of highly skilled EU nationals insecure about their post-Brexit status in the UK – her target is still nowhere in sight. This is not due to any lack of effort on May’s part: during her six years as home secretary, she presided over seven immigration bills and 45,000 changes to the immigration rules.
Since the EU referendum, detentions and enforced removals of all foreign nationals, including EU citizens, have risen sharply. Analysis of government data shows deportations of EU citizens are at their highest since records began, with 5,301 EU nationals removed during the year ending June 2017, an increase of 20% on the previous 12 months. More broadly, the number of EU citizens detained has increased sixfold since 2009. Critics believe that Brexit has, in effect, given the Home Office the green light to target Europeans in the UK.
Relentlessly, inexorably, any British citizen who has simply had the temerity to fall in love with a foreigner and wishes to live in the country of their birth with their family is finding themselves at the wrong end of an uncaring bureaucracy. As is anyone living in the UK without the right paperwork, even if that paperwork was given to them when they moved here as children. As is any foreign national who finds themselves accused of wrongdoing, even if they dispute the accusations and have been living an organised, tax-paying life here in the UK for many years. Or any EU national who, thanks to legislation last year, is found sleeping rough.
“The Conservatives seem hellbent on creating a hostile environment for anyone not from the UK,” says the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Ed Davey. “These scare tactics should be beneath any civilised government.”
The tactics, however, are multiplying: landlords are now required to carry out checks on tenants’ immigration status. Hospitals, community interest companies and charities receiving NHS funds must conduct ID checks on patients before treatment in order to bill them if they are found not eligible for NHS care. From January, banks and building societies will be compelled to carry out immigration checks on the owners of 70m current accounts.
In a post-Brexit Britain, the picture is set to get even harsher. The right under which EU nationals can bring family members, including spouses, to live with them in the UK is already a flashpoint in the Brexit talks on citizens’ rights. But in October, a leaked Home Office document suggested the government wants to go further in weakening family reunion rights for EU nationals in Britain, turning thousands more into so-called “Skype families”.
But May’s “hostile environment” is already wrecking lives – as the following stories show.
Four-year-old Samuel has a subtype of glycosylation, PGM1, one of the rarest congenital disorders in the world. He is at constant risk of seizures, cannot control his own body temperature and must receive nightly feeds through a tube inserted into his stomach. There is no cure and no effective treatment. But his parents – both NHS medics – want to keep their boy at home. It is, they say, the best thing both for Samuel and the cash-strapped NHS.
“Sammy’s health is only optimal when Nancileigh, a critical care nurse, and I care for him,” says James, Sammy’s father, an intensive care consultant. “Nancileigh is Sammy’s registered carer. I maintain our income.”
James is British, and Nancileigh Australian. The family – including the couple’s two older children, aged 10 and 7 – moved to the UK from Australia in June 2014. In February this year, Nancileigh applied to extend her spouse visa, due to run out in April. “The Home Office refused,” she says, her voice trembling. “We were devastated. I don’t like to be more than 15 minutes away from Samuel and here was the Home Office, without talking to my son’s doctors, telling me my son would be fine if I flew to the other side of the world for at least six months while I applied again.
“They told me there were no ‘exceptional circumstances’ preventing me from doing this,” she says. “The exact words they used were that ‘there was no compelling evidence to show that your son [can’t] avail himself of the services of his local social services or his NHS team’. I was beside myself.”
The family got a lawyer and appealed. But the prognosis wasn’t good: “Our lawyer said my appeal would take 18 months, by which time my visa would have run out and I’d have had to leave the country anyway – which would automatically cause my appeal to be revoked.”
The lawyer told Nancileigh that her only real choice was to take the family on “holiday” to Australia for six months, the minimum amount of time it takes the Home Office to process a spousal visa, and reapply. “But my daughter was applying for secondary schools and leaving the country would have jeopardised that. And what about James’s job? He can’t just walk away from it for six months. I can’t describe the desperation I felt.”
Nancileigh told some mothers at the school gate about her plight, and they organised a campaign, persuading at least 50 people to email their local MP – who happens to be health secretary Jeremy Hunt. Hunt rang the family and promised to personally take up their battle. Two weeks later – on 13 November – Nancileigh’s visa was in her hand.
“I’m still deeply shocked by the experience,” she says. “The Home Office rang and apologised to us, but didn’t explain what had gone wrong. The thing is, it’s turned out fine for us, but what about people who don’t have any friends, or an engaged, influential MP? Or, frankly, who aren’t middle class and vocal? It’s a terrible system. It’s really unfair”
The family is far from alone. Unable to get answers from the Home Office, thousands of divided families are seeking support online over their stalled and blocked applications for spouse visas. Social media groups are proliferating: I Love My Foreign Spouse, with 11,830 members, and UK Spouse Visa, with 5,504 members, are the two most popular. Other sites, including British Expats have threads of more than a hundred of pages where families share their anguish and beg for advice.
Earlier this year, Hugh Evans, a contract software engineer and British-Australian dual national, decided to move to the UK with his Japanese wife and three-year-old son, Alfred, an Australian national. “I realised that I needed to prove that I was settled in the UK before applying for a settlement visa for my wife, so I moved here in February while my wife and son returned to Japan. It took me four months to achieve what the Home Office required and we made the application in June.”
A settlement visa should take 12 weeks to process. It wasn’t, however, until five months later that Evans finally got an answer: the visa for his wife and son had been rejected. The Home Office said he hadn’t submitted his marriage certificate and proof of income. Evans insists that the missing marriage certificate must be a clerical error on the part of UK Visas and Immigration (UKVI), the directorate within the Home Office responsible for processing visa applications for anyone who is not a resident of the EU, EEA or Switzerland and wishes to visit the UK for longer than six months. “It was scanned in with the rest of application,” he says. “I don’t know exactly which document I missed for the proof of income, but being self-employed made it extraordinarily complex and I provided my bank statements. We’re devastated. The psychological toll is affecting my work and I’ve fallen into a state of depression. My son’s English has deteriorated during his time in Japan, and it breaks my heart that I can’t even talk to him on Skype any more. Over four months of separation and £3,000 later, and we’re back to square one. We can appeal the decision and enter a whole new realm of uncertainty, or we can pony up and re-apply. Neither of these will get my wife and son back before Christmas.”
It is hard to get up-to-date information out of the Home Office about applications for settlement visas. A Freedom of Information request remains unanswered and the latest complete figures are from 2015, when the home affairs committee published a highly critical report about UKVI. The committee cited a growing backlog in processing applications and criticised the way UKVI “shifts the goalposts” without consultation or explanation. It also expressed disquiet about a lack of transparency – vast numbers of “non-straightforward” cases are excluded from its performance benchmarks. While its standards plummet, the Home Office continues to make profits of up to 800% on immigration applications from families, many of whom are eligible to live in the UK but are turned down on technicalities and forced to reapply – and pay again.
Analysis of Home Office figures on the fees for applications shows a vast discrepancy between how much it costs the government to process each immigration application and the fee it charges applicants. The department charges £2,297 for an application for indefinite leave to enter or remain (per person for the main applicant and every dependant), a rise of 22.5% on 2016-17. It costs £252 to process each application.
Immigration minister Damian Green announced in 2011 that the government would charge high fees as part of a deliberate attempt to offset cuts to the funding of the immigration system. The Home Office claims the approach is correct and says it is a step to reduce the burden on the taxpayer. But as the atmosphere over immigration has soured, the size of the margins raises concerns that the department, which has had 24.9% cuts to its £10.6bn annual budget, has substantial incentives to turn down applicants over minor details, forcing them to pay a second time when reapplying.
The Home Office has also been criticised over a new charge of £5.48 for anyone contacting UKVI from overseas by email. Jan Doerfel, an immigration lawyer, says: “In the light of the immense existing visa costs, the introduction of email fees is adding insult to injury and constitutes a dangerous precedent for charging for customer services more broadly.”
A Home Office spokesman says its approach is only right and ensures that “those who benefit directly from it contribute appropriately”. The spokesman says fee levels aim to “strike a balance between generating income and maintaining global competitiveness”.
In the absence of up-to-date statistics, those who fear the mission creep of May’s “really hostile environment” can only look at anecdotes, such as those recorded on an explosion of social media sites. Numerous families fighting to live together in the UK tell me their applications have been judged “not straighforward” or “complex” and so can’t be processed to UKVI’s published deadlines. These include families applying to renew existing visas who insist their situation is exactly the same as when their visas were first granted. Other families have had their cases shunted into immigration limbo because of missed documentation: information they and their solicitors insist was submitted, or that they didn’t submit because the Home Office’s own website didn’t say – or didn’t say clearly – that it was mandatory.
These families try everything to get answers from UKVI about delays: paying for Priority Service, escalating complaints, spending hours fruitlessly trying to get answers from costly UKVI helplines and contacting their MPs. These families can spend months separated on opposite sides of the world, watching their children grow up over Skype.
Some families are giving up. Dean is a British primary school teacher who married Bruno, a Brazilian banker, in South America last year. Dean regulated his own status in Brazil in one week at minimal cost. By comparison, it took Bruno 16 months and £5,000 to get his spousal visa to the UK. “The Home Office turned us down twice on technicalities that were overturned by a judge at a 15-minute tribunal,” says Dean. “This whole process has been terrible and has had a huge impact on our relationship. It’s been so traumatic that, even though Bruno now has his visa, we’re considering leaving the UK.
“Male primary teachers are desperately needed in the UK and Bruno has a lot to offer this county, too, but I no longer really care what this country needs: it tried its hardest to shun my husband and shun me, too. Why do I owe it anything any more?”
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Sembra chiaro che c’è chi usa strumentalmente il tema delle fake news per attaccare gli avversari politici, questo però non significa che le fake news non siano un problema o che non esistano. E anche l’argomento benaltrista regge poco: non ci si difende meglio da mafia e neofascismo se si trascurano i pericoli della disinformazione. Sembra anzi che i legami fra fake news, ultranazionalismo e crimine organizzato siano molteplici, e disegnino un’unica costellazione. Tutte le parti politiche conducono la loro battaglia mediatica con le armi che hanno a disposizione. Alcune abbiamo ormai imparato a conoscerle bene: ci sono le logiche della lottizzazione, l’onnipresenza televisiva, l’ottimismo coatto… Poi ci sono i pennivendoli, le finte interviste, il metodo Boffo… Ma ci sono anche le fake news, e queste le conosciamo molto meno. Qualcuno ha provato a spiegarcele. Dovremmo guardare alla sostanza dei documenti che produce, piuttosto che alla strumentalizzazione politica a cui si prestano. Anche la mafia viene strumentalizzata da chi vuol far credere che i problemi di collusione esistano solo nel campo avversario. Ogni parte politica dovrebbe invece fare attenzione alle proprie zone di intrasparenza, perché è molto meglio che le illumini da sola, prima che lo facciano gli altri.
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Berlusconi massacra la sua stessa radio. Legge le risposte preparate ignaro della diretta video: fan di Radio 105 in rivolta
L’esordio ironico dell’ex Cavaliere: “Gli argomenti, siete in casa vostra e avete il diritto di sceglierli voi”, si è trasformato in un ciclone contro la sua stessa emittente. Perché lui, probabilmente ignaro della radiovisione, leggeva tutte le risposte preparate. E sui social si scatenano le accuse all’emittente
21 Dicembre 2017
Trenta minuti di intervista di cui più della metà con la testa china per leggere le risposte a domande evidentemente concordate ben prima di entrare in studio. Silvio Berlusconi ospite di Radio 105 ha provocato l’insurrezione degli ascoltatori che non hanno gradito la cortesia accordata dai conduttori del talk 105friends, Rosario Pellecchia e Tony Severo, nei confronti del loro datore di lavoro. Mentre i neo dipendenti Mediaset ascoltavano in religioso silenzio il discorso elettorale del leader di Forza Italia, sulla pagina Facebook della radio è andata in scena la rivolta.
Un’indignazione, quella degli ascoltatori di 105, paragonabile a quella di Mike Bongiorno quando scoprì la signora Livoli, concorrente di TeleMike, che leggeva le risposte alle domande del conduttore su un bigliettino nascosto nel reggiseno. Alla povera donna però, diversamente dall’ex Cavaliere, toccò il pubblico ludibrio di Mike che la derise e rimbrottò fino a portarla allo svenimento, mentre Berlusconi per qualche minuto deve aver pensato di averla fatta franca grazie alla quasi comica complicità dei due dj. Il potente staff che accompagnava l’ex Cavaliere ha potuto controllare fino all’ultima virgola il discorso, ma non ha fatto i conti con la radiovisione, l’intervista era infatti ritrasmessa in video sui canali social e sul sito della radio. Gli ascoltatori hanno potuto così vedere in diretta i retroscena della trasmissione. La quasi totalità dei commenti si è trasformata, almeno nella prima parte dell’intervista, in un unico atto d’accusa nei confronti della radio e dei conduttori, colpevoli a detta dei fan di 105 di essersi “venduti” concordando una scaletta che ha consentito a Berlusconi di evitare, in parte, gli scivoloni che nelle sue numerose apparizioni pubbliche sta collezionando senza sosta, anche quando si trova davanti a intervistatori preparati. Qualche giorno fa, sempre ospite in casa propria, davanti a una sbalordita Federica Panicucci, al pubblico di Mattino Cinque ha regalato una perla dietro l’altra: “Un euro vale mille euro, massimo. In Sicilia faremo costruire lo stretto. Malta è 87 volte più piccola della sinistra e ha 14 milioni di dipendenti” (Nel 2016 contava su 436 abitanti).
In radio l’esordio ironico di Berlusconi: “Gli argomenti, siete in casa vostra e avete il diritto di sceglierli voi”, si è trasformato in un ciclone contro la sua stessa emittente. Oltre alla “cortesia” delle domande e risposte scritte, l’emittente ha accordato al vero padrone di casa un trattamento di favore in tutto e per tutto. Uno stravolgimento del format della radio e della trasmissione con una sola interruzione pubblicitaria e la cancellazione di tutti i pezzi musicali generalmente programmati in quella fascia, anche in presenza di ospiti ben più importanti per il loro pubblico. La pubblicità è da sempre la fortuna del magnate di Arcore, così l’unica interruzione del discorso fiume cadenzato dalle domande sul programma di Forza Italia, ha evidentemente spinto lo staff a cambiare strategia abbandonando nella seconda parte dell’intervista le risposte scritte. Il tono dei commenti però non è migliorato e le prestazioni dell’intervistato sono rimaste sostanzialmente invariate, compresi gli scivoloni su vocali e inglesismi. Non è bastata nemmeno la promessa di abbattere le tasse con la “flas tas” (flat tax), a risollevare il tenore dei commenti che fioccavano a ogni scivolone.
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Facebook disables ethnicity advert targeting system
30 November 2017
Facebook has temporarily turned off a system that let advertisers choose which ethnic and minority groups saw their ads.
It said it would investigate how the feature was being used by advertisers.
News organisation ProPublica discovered that the system could be abused by posting discriminatory ads on the social network.
Facebook said it would look for a way to change the system so it could not be used “inappropriately”.
Legal action
Last year, ProPublica first discovered the ethnic discrimination via advertising was possible.
US laws prohibit discrimination in the way ProPublica demonstrated – in adverts relating to housing, for example – was possible.
Last week, ProPublica tried again to post discriminatory ads that were not shown to people who were:
– African-American
– Jewish
– Hispanic
– interested in Islam
– part of other ethnic or minority groups
All the ads it submitted were approved.
Facebook does not explicitly ask its users to declare their ethnicity, but it typically infers someone’s ethnic group from their activity on the social network.
When the targeting was first uncovered, Facebook said it would find a way to spot and block attempts to post discriminatory ads.
Facebook’s failure to do this raised questions about “its ability and commitment to police discriminatory advertising”, said ProPublica.
On Thursday, Facebook boss Sheryl Sandberg said it had now turned off the tools that let advertisers choose which “multicultural affinity segments” they wanted to reach.
Ms Sandberg said it would also look into how these tools were used especially in respect of “potentially sensitive segments” such as those with disabilities.
But she also defended ads that were targeted on the basis of ethnicity or culture – saying the practice was common and legitimate in the industry.
In an earlier statement, Facebook said the ads placed by ProPublica had been approved because of a “technical failure” in its enforcement system.
“We’re disappointed that we fell short of our commitments,” Ami Vora, vice-president of product management, told the news organisation.
Ms Vora said the discrimination-spotting system Facebook had created after ProPublica’s first investigation had managed to spot millions of other ads that had broken its guidelines.
“Our systems continue to improve, but we can do better,” she said.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42180493
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Bowing to Pressure, Facebook Backtracks on Racial Profiling in Ads
12 November 2017
Facebook announced Friday that it would be disabling the controversial “Ethnic Affinity” tool that allowed advertisers to exclude certain ethnic groups from target audiences.
“We will disable the use of ethnic affinity marketing for ads that we identify as offering housing, employment or credit,” wrote Facebook’s chief privacy officer, Erin Egan, in a post.
Facebook said it had worked with civil rights organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union and would update the language in its advertising policies to make it more explicit that discrimination by advertisers will not be tolerated, Egan said.
Facebook came under harsh scrutiny on earlier this month after a report emerged that showed the social network was offering advertisers ways of excluding specific races by checking a category it called “Ethnic Affinity.” Advertisers could choose to exclude African Americans, Asian Americans and Hispanic Americans on the self-service advertising portal, as investigated by Pro Publica.
The Congressional Black Caucus immediately reacted and wrote a letter to Facebook Founder, Mark Zuckerberg, “This is in direct violation of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, and it is our strong desire to see Facebook address this issue immediately.”
The Fair Housing Act prohibits the printing and publication of “notices, statements and advertisements” that indicate “discrimination or limitation” to races, and the U.S. Department of Justice increased the maximum violation fine to $150,000 in 2014.
“To the extent that Facebook has created a filter that enables advertisers who use its platform to exclude users from seeing, reading, or hearing about offers of housing on the basis of race… it is operating in violation of the federal Fair Housing Act,” civil rights lawyer John Relman confirmed to NBC News.
Relman advised Facebook to re-think the tool immediately to avoid lawsuits from potential Facebook users who could realize they were “injured” by the tool.
However, Facebook denied the illegal practice and said people were misconstruing the meaning of “Ethnic Affinity.”
“For example, some audiences might click on Spanish-language ads for a World Cup sponsorship, versus other audiences that might click more on the same ads in English,” a spokesperson said. “So the sponsor might run one campaign in English that excludes the Hispanic affinity group to see how well the campaign performs against running that ad campaign in Spanish. This is a common practice in the industry.”
However, “What makes the exclude feature seem provocative in Facebook’s ad options is that there are only options to exclude certain ‘ethnic affinities,’” said Niklas Myhr, assistant professor of marketing at Chapman University. ”Nowhere can you specifically exclude the Caucasian ethnic affinity,” he noted.
Ultimately, it’s the price we pay for handing over our data to Facebook in the first place, suggested Myhr.
“Some people are still caught by surprise and are upset that Facebook is categorizing you as a potential ad target based on your “likes” or demographic information that you volunteered when signing up — but as long as you don’t pay for using Facebook, you basically should consider yourself part of the product that Facebook is selling to advertisers.”
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Why is Britain First big online?
29 November 2017
The far-right group whose deputy leader was retweeted by Donald Trump has a specific social media strategy that has made it much more successful online than at the ballot box.
From the outset, Britain First’s aim has been to make noise on Facebook and other networks rather than to get people elected. The group has nearly 2m likes – far outpacing the Labour Party (1m) and the Conservatives (650,000).
But the UK’s most popular political organisation on Facebook has been a washout when it comes to electoral politics. Britain First has no elected representatives and rarely even runs candidates for office.
When they do, they attract a small amount of the vote. Party leader Paul Golding garnered 1.2% in the 2016 London mayoral election. It was recently deregistered as a political party by the Electoral Commission.
So what explains Britain First’s outsized social media following?
For one thing, it uses paid advertising and a core group of dedicated followers to spread its message.
Britain First has also used less controversial posts – for instance messages encouraging people to support the armed forces or the royal family – and other tactics to drive up the numbers of likes.
A report released Wednesday by the campaign organisation Hope Not Hate said that the number of people following the social media accounts of Britain First leaders spikes in the wake of terror attacks.
The social media strategy has turned the party’s Facebook page into an international hub for people attracted to anti-Islam messages – and despite the party’s name, its fan base isn’t particularly British at all.
According to an analysis carried out by Trending in July, fewer than half (44%) of the group’s Facebook likes came from accounts based inside the UK, with large numbers of likes from the US, Australia and Canada.
By way of comparison, 87% of the Labour Party’s likes at the time came from UK accounts, and the figure for the Conservative Party was 78%.
At the time, the party was also in the midst of a campaign to recruit Polish immigrants to its side, despite its stated goal to end nearly all inward immigration into the UK.
The party’s deputy leader, Jayda Fransen, told BBC Trending that party operatives were focusing on “relentless” direct action.
Fransen, who earlier this month was charged with using “threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour” during speeches she made in Belfast, originally posted the three videos that President Trump’s account retweeted.
She will appear at Belfast Magistrates’ Court on Thursday 14 December.
Fiyaz Mughal, director of the group Faith Matters and founder of Tell Mama, an anti-hate crime organisation, says Trump’s retweets “re-energised far right groups by simply pressing three clicks of a button.”
“They have effectively felt that their work is bleeding into the White House and so there is serious damage over what has happened today and there will be repercussions felt sadly over the next few months,” he says.
“And for those Muslims who think there is a clash of civilisations taking place it confirms their warped view.
“So what the President has done today is to actually strengthen the hand of extremists.”
http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-42170543
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With teen mental health deteriorating over five years, there’s a likely culprit
14 November 2017
Around 2012, something started going wrong in the lives of teens.
In just the five years between 2010 and 2015, the number of U.S. teens who felt useless and joyless – classic symptoms of depression – surged 33 percent in large national surveys. Teen suicide attempts increased 23 percent. Even more troubling, the number of 13- to 18-year-olds who committed suicide jumped 31 percent.
In a new paper published in Clinical Psychological Science, my colleagues and I found that the increases in depression, suicide attempts and suicide appeared among teens from every background – more privileged and less privileged, across all races and ethnicities and in every region of the country. All told, our analysis found that the generation of teens I call “iGen” – those born after 1995 – is much more likely to experience mental health issues than their millennial predecessors.
What happened so that so many more teens, in such a short period of time, would feel depressed, attempt suicide and commit suicide? After scouring several large surveys of teens for clues, I found that all of the possibilities traced back to a major change in teens’ lives: the sudden ascendance of the smartphone.
All signs point to the screen
Because the years between 2010 to 2015 were a period of steady economic growth and falling unemployment, it’s unlikely that economic malaise was a factor. Income inequality was (and still is) an issue, but it didn’t suddenly appear in the early 2010s: This gap between the rich and poor had been widening for decades. We found that the time teens spent on homework barely budged between 2010 and 2015, effectively ruling out academic pressure as a cause.
However, according to the Pew Research Center, smartphone ownership crossed the 50 percent threshold in late 2012 – right when teen depression and suicide began to increase. By 2015, 73 percent of teens had access to a smartphone.
Not only did smartphone use and depression increase in tandem, but time spent online was linked to mental health issues across two different data sets. We found that teens who spent five or more hours a day online were 71 percent more likely than those who spent less than an hour a day to have at least one suicide risk factor (depression, thinking about suicide, making a suicide plan or attempting suicide). Overall, suicide risk factors rose significantly after two or more hours a day of time online.
Of course, it’s possible that instead of time online causing depression, depression causes more time online. But three other studies show that is unlikely (at least, when viewed through social media use).
Two followed people over time, with both studies finding that spending more time on social media led to unhappiness, while unhappiness did not lead to more social media use. A third randomly assigned participants to give up Facebook for a week versus continuing their usual use. Those who avoided Facebook reported feeling less depressed at the end of the week.
The argument that depression might cause people to spend more time online doesn’t also explain why depression increased so suddenly after 2012. Under that scenario, more teens became depressed for an unknown reason and then started buying smartphones, which doesn’t seem too logical.
What’s lost when we’re plugged in
Even if online time doesn’t directly harm mental health, it could still adversely affect it in indirect ways, especially if time online crowds out time for other activities.
For example, while conducting research for my book on iGen, I found that teens now spend much less time interacting with their friends in person. Interacting with people face to face is one of the deepest wellsprings of human happiness; without it, our moods start to suffer and depression often follows. Feeling socially isolated is also one of the major risk factors for suicide. We found that teens who spent more time than average online and less time than average with friends in person were the most likely to be depressed. Since 2012, that’s what has occurred en masse: Teens have spent less time on activities known to benefit mental health (in-person social interaction) and more time on activities that may harm it (time online).
Teens are also sleeping less, and teens who spend more time on their phones are more likely to not be getting enough sleep. Not sleeping enough is a major risk factor for depression, so if smartphones are causing less sleep, that alone could explain why depression and suicide increased so suddenly.
Depression and suicide have many causes: Genetic predisposition, family environments, bullying and trauma can all play a role. Some teens would experience mental health problems no matter what era they lived in.
But some vulnerable teens who would otherwise not have had mental health issues may have slipped into depression due to too much screen time, not enough face-to-face social interaction, inadequate sleep or a combination of all three.
It might be argued that it’s too soon to recommend less screen time, given that the research isn’t completely definitive. However, the downside to limiting screen time – say, to two hours a day or less – is minimal. In contrast, the downside to doing nothing – given the possible consequences of depression and suicide – seems, to me, quite high.
It’s not too early to think about limiting screen time; let’s hope it’s not too late.
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Mitigating the Russian challenge
30 November 2017
“It is time”, the USSR leader Mikhail Gorbachev said in a 1989 speech, “to consign to oblivion the Cold War postulates when Europe was viewed as an arena of confrontation divided into ‘spheres of influence’.”
In place of old rivalries, Gorbachev laid out his vision of a “common European home”. Russia and Europe, he declared optimistically, should work together “to transform international relations in the spirit of humanism, equality and justice”.
Fast forward to 2017, and it is clear that things have not quite gone according to plan.
Gorbachev is defending Russia’s takeover of Crimea. For the first time since the Cold War, Nato is opening new command centres in Europe.
The stakes involved in the EU-Russia relationship are still high.
The EU is the most important investor in Russia, as well as its largest trading partner. Moscow, for its part, remains a crucial energy and security player for Europe.
Yet at the core of the Russia-EU confrontation lies the fundamental disagreement over values and geopolitical zones of influence. Those differences are unlikely to be bridged soon.
The EU, built on the values of interdependence and liberal norms, is willing to engage with Moscow, but with strings attached. To access the community’s perks – closer economic links, visa-free travel – the Kremlin is expected to abide by international laws and embrace liberalisation at home.
To Russia’s leadership, those conditions are unacceptable. It sees its neighbourhood as the bulwark against Nato expansion and the wave of ‘colour’ revolutions. As for domestic liberalisation, it would destroy Vladimir Putin’s regime, or, at least, seriously undermine it.
It is against this context that Russia’s attempts to stoke troubles in Europe should be considered.
Carrot vs Stick
To deter Russia, the EU global strategy recommends, member-states, above all, must “strengthen the EU and enhance the resilience of our eastern neighbours”.
The conspicuity of this observation doesn’t render it any less relevant. Russian leadership values strength and preys on weakness.
Show the Kremlin that you cannot use a stick, and it will wrestle the carrot out of your hands.
Thus, the most obvious thing the EU can do is to enhance its defensive capabilities. That means protecting eastern flunk, while also improving military mobility. Boosting cyber defence, too, is crucial, given recent attacks on Europe’s infrastructure.
Response to Russian meddling in European politics, though, is a more nuanced challenge. Concerns over Moscow’s malignant campaign – via TV, social media and financing of populist parties – are valid.
Yet it is also crucial to keep cool when confronting Russian propaganda.
The Kremlin’s aim, as the US example showed, is to sow discord within Western politics, not necessarily to achieve a concrete electoral outcome.
That is why media panic – and attaching the ‘Putin’s stooge’ label to any anti-establishment cause – only plays into Moscow’s hands.
The best way to deal with the Kremlin’s meddling, therefore, is treating it more as a security issue than a political one.
Western agencies have learned about Russia’s web campaign, so they can tackle it with considerable success in future. Reforms to increase transparency in party financing, likewise, is a useful step.
To bring Russia around to the idea of a common future on European terms requires demonstrating calm resolve. Moscow must understand that, despite its tricks, the EU’s institutions will continue to work as normal.
Making cooperation pay
But while Europe must demonstrate firmness, it is equally important to show what Moscow can gain by cooperating.
A deterrence-only approach to the Kremlin will only amplify its exuberance, leading to an endless ‘action-response’ cycle.
So, how can Russia be induced to cooperate?
Firstly, the EU should retain clear conditions for lifting economic sanctions on Russia. As the economist Vladislav Inozemtsev observed, wherever economic sanctions worked – like South Africa or Yugoslavia – they came with clear instructions of their relaxation or removal.
Heeding that, any comprehensive plan to resolve the Ukraine crisis should include the roadmap for sanctions relief.
The economic card is the strongest ace in the EU’s deck. It must play it wisely.
Secondly, there is a need to communicate with Russia in the way that brings maximum utility. Putin’s regime is here to stay. Nonetheless, it can still be affected, even if incrementally.
To facilitate change, it may be worth raising commercial and human rights concerns with Moscow on diplomatic level rather than just in the media. This approach will assure the Kremlin that Western concerns are genuine, and not an attempt to embarrass it.
Before any progress is achieved with Russia, things may get even more muddled. To succeed, Europe must demonstrate strategic patience.
https://euobserver.com/opinion/140080
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Keeping score of ‘friends’ on Facebook and Instagram may be harmful to your health
28 November 2017
Ever felt like your peers have more pals than you do?
These days, with the rise of social media apps like Facebook and Instagram, it is easier than ever to benchmark the number of “friends” you have against your peers.
So, if you find yourself wondering how your social networks compare with other people’s, our latest research, published in Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin, suggests that you are far from alone. Furthermore, we found that believing that your peers have more pals than you do – even if demonstrably false – can be harmful to your health.
‘Tis human to compare
Decades of research in psychology suggest that social comparisons are a fundamental human tendency. We compare ourselves with others to evaluate and understand our abilities, our social standing and even our own feelings.
When making social comparisons, people generally see themselves coming out on top – or at least above average. That is, they are often overconfident about their abilities, rating themselves above average in health, attractiveness and intelligence.
Yet, there is at least one domain where people tend to think that they are doing worse than their peers: emotional experiences.
Previous research by one of our colleagues, Alex Jordan at the Harvard Medical School, found that people underestimate how often their peers experience negative emotions, like depression or stress, and overestimate how often they experience positive ones, like happiness, pride and hope.
One reason for the latter tendency is that people also generally overestimate how socially connected others are. After all, being socially connected is one of the most important predictors of happiness. It is therefore important to understand whether beliefs about doing worse than our peers extend to social belonging and to understand how these beliefs arise.
The rise of social media
Social media is making it a lot harder to avoid comparing our own connectedness with that of our peers.
Since the inception of Facebook in 2004, more than a billion people have created Facebook accounts, and today, its website is the most visited in the world. Americans spend about 56 billion minutes on Facebook each month.
While some of this time is spent actively messaging other people, the typical user uses the majority of his or her time on Facebook observing other people without posting – sometimes called “lurking.” Stated differently, people spend most of their time on social media gathering information about their peers’ lives.
And, social media posts are predominately focused on projecting the most positive versions of ourselves. Given the popularity of Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and LinkedIn, it is nearly impossible to avoid learning about our peers’ accomplishments. As a result, it is also nearly impossible to avoid using this information as a benchmark to compare our lives with those of our peers.
We believe others have more friends
To examine the beliefs that people have about their peers’ social lives and how they affect well-being, we surveyed first-year students during their transition to college life at the University of British Columbia, a large public institution in Vancouver, Canada.
Across two similar studies with a total of 1,488 participants, we asked two key questions: How many friends do you have at university? And how many friends do you think other first-year students have? We also asked them to estimate the percentage of time that both themselves and their peers had spent socializing with new friends at the university in the past seven days.
A surprising share of students believed that their peers had more friends and spent more time socializing than they themselves did.
In our first study, 48 percent of first-year students believed their peers had more friends, whereas only 31 percent believed the reverse.
In our second study, the gap was even more pronounced: More than twice as many students believed that other first-years had more friends than they did rather than the other way around – 55 percent to 26 percent. Students also believed that their peers spent 24 percent of their time socializing with new friends at university as compared with the 20 percent for their personal estimate.
How this undermines happiness
In our second study, students also reported on their happiness and loneliness. To assess happiness and loneliness, students indicated their agreement with statements like “the conditions of my life are excellent” and “I see myself as a loner,” respectively.
Students who believed that their peers were doing better socially reported lower levels of life satisfaction and greater loneliness than students who thought that they had more friends.
Importantly, these results were stable even after we accounted for the number of friends that students had. In other words, even when students had an above-average number of friends, thinking their peers had more friends than they did undermined their well-being.
So why do we think this way?
Our research suggests that the public nature of social activities can lead people to think that their peers are doing better socially than they are.
Since social activities like eating or studying with friends often happen in public where they are easily seen, students likely overestimate how often these activities occur in their peers’ lives.
Social media also plays a role. In research that we published earlier this year, first-year students were more likely to feel like they didn’t belong at university after viewing highly social photos of their peers on Facebook.
We have not yet collected data to see how common these feelings and beliefs are outside of college. However, given how common feelings of loneliness are when people move to a new city or start a new job, it is possible that these social misperceptions could occur anytime people move to a new social environment.
A silver lining
Our study found evidence that these perceptions can shift over time. When we followed up with a subset of students and asked them identical questions four to five months later, we observed two key findings:
Later in the academic year, fewer students believed that other students had more friends than they did. These findings suggest that the tendency to see others as more social can change over time, potentially as people get to know their peers better and realize that those peers do not actually have more friends than they do.
We also found evidence that these beliefs – in moderation – might not be uniformly bad. Students who initially believed that other students had a few more friends than they did had themselves made more friends when we checked in with them down the road. This suggests that people who feel slightly, but not hopelessly, behind their peers might be more motivated to seek out new friendships. After making more friends, people are less likely to believe that others have more friends than they do.
If you have ever felt like everyone else is more connected than you are, there is a good chance you are not alone. Yet, if you use these feelings as motivation to reach out to a new colleague or grab lunch with a friend you haven’t seen in a while, this belief doesn’t always have to undermine happiness. In fact, it could help you become more connected.
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Don’t use antivirus firms linked to Russia, cyber security chief tells Whitehall
The Kremlin uses cyberspace for ‘espionage, disruption and influence’, says Ciaran Martin in letter to government departments
2 december 2017
Government departments have been warned against using antivirus software made by technology firms with links to Russia amid concerns over national security.
Ciaran Martin, head of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), said Russia has the intent “to target UK central government and the UK’s critical national infrastructure” and there are “obvious risks around foreign ownership” of companies that produce anti-virus (AV) software.
In a letter to senior Whitehall civil servants, he described Russia as a “highly capable cyber threat actor” which uses cyberspace for “espionage, disruption and influence operations”.
The NCSC is in discussion with the largest Russian player in the UK, Kaspersky Lab, in order to develop checks to prevent “transfer of UK data to the Russian state”, Martin said.
Russia stands accused of meddling in the 2016 US election, while MPs have questioned if Moscow has sought to interfere in UK elections and the Brexit referendum.
Theresa May used a November speech to tell Russian president Vladimir Putin that the international community was aware of his country’s efforts to spread fake news in an attempt to “sow discord in the west”.
Martin, who approved his letter with MI5, has previously warned that Russian hackers have targeted the UK energy network, telecoms and the media in the past year.
However, his letter said most people and companies in the UK were not under threat of state-backed cyber attacks, but rather from criminal gangs.
He said: “The NCSC advises that Russia is a highly capable cyber threat actor which uses cyber as a tool of statecraft.
“This includes espionage, disruption and influence operations. Russia has the intent to target UK central government and the UK’s critical national infrastructure.
“However, the overwhelming majority of UK individuals and organisations are not being actively targeted by the Russian state, and are far more likely to be targeted by cyber criminals.
“In drawing this guidance to (department heads’) attention today, it is our aim to enable departments to make informed, risk-based decisions on (their) choice of AV provider.
“To that end, we advise that where it is assessed that access to the information by the Russian state would be a risk to national security, a Russia-based AV company should not be chosen.”
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Sneering at miners reflects a deeper malaise in our universities
As a graduate of Durham, I know cultural elitism is rampant on campus, where largely overprivileged students face few challenges to their world view
3 December 2017
Last week, Durham University’s Trevelyan College rugby team cancelled a miners’ strike-themed party after receiving almost universal condemnation. The event, which encouraged students to don “flat caps [and] filth” in an attempt to depict the Thatcher government’s confrontation in 1984, was derided by the Durham Miners’ Association for trivialising the strike and referring to the miners in derogatory terms.
The university, to its credit, joined in, promptly condemning the rugby team. Yet, as a recent graduate of Durham, I can tell you it isn’t the first, and certainly won’t be the last, instance of cultural elitism on campus. One of the great aspects of Durham University is its student-led approach. Students are encouraged to organise everything, from freshers’ week to university balls to college finance. However, this laissez-faire attitude has its downsides. The university allows plenty of appalling behaviour to go unchecked. The underlying problems are not just about flippant students; they go much deeper and reflect a wider issue of the social background of the student body.
Typically for an elite university, Durham has a low intake of students from state schools. This October, only 42.8% of new UK arrivals were from state schools. The collegiate system, for all its obvious benefits, mirrors a boarding school, where you live and eat among your peers, sing tribal college songs and have inter-college rivalry.
Within its walls, Durham’s colleges are palaces of decadence: grade-listed accommodation, black tie formal dinners, balls and annual skiing trips. All of this helps to foster an exclusive culture. For the socially privileged, it is business as usual. They have no problem settling in to a culture they are already familiar with. Poorer students, by contrast, are often struck by the difference to their own experience. Additionally, even if they wanted to embrace much of what’s on offer, they couldn’t necessarily afford to do so. For example, balls can cost around £100 a ticket; the skiing trip is at least £399; a compulsory gown to wear at formals costs £53. Of course, students can choose not to go to these events, but this simply means that only those from wealthy backgrounds can participate in the popular social events and networking opportunities.
The university also has a habit of raising accommodation fees. In 2011, the university increased accommodation fees by 13.4%. Although it has since agreed to only raise accommodation in line with inflation, the recent 3.5% increase for 2018 means that a term-time catered room is now £7,422 a year. (Many of the colleges are exclusively catered and freshers are required to live in college in their first year.)
At the same time, involvement with the community is limited to outreach programmes and the occasional interaction with the catering staff (who are, incidentally, not paid the living wage). This is not a problem confined to Durham, but is so much more obvious when the disconnect between the student body and local people is acute.
Universities are supposed to be melting pots of ideas and disciplines, bringing together people from all backgrounds in the shared pursuit of intellect and progress. They offer a chance for people to widen their perspective and learn about others. Instead, Durham creates a bubble where the student body is monolithic, reflecting that of its most privileged students. Consequently, the privileged move seamlessly from one echo chamber to the next, never having their world view truly challenged.
Young people make mistakes and everyone deserves a second chance. However, while ill-informed events such as Trevelyan’s rugby social might appear trivial now, they are a worrying sign for the future. People from privileged backgrounds continue to dominate top professions disproportionately, from business to the judiciary to the government, and they have often attended top institutions such as Durham.
Yet these people are surrounded only by others like themselves for their entire lives, leading to a lack of sensitivity towards those outside their social clique and, perhaps more alarmingly, a narrower intellectual perspective. Until our top universities commit to diversity in education, another generation of privileged graduates will continue to live and rule according to own limited world view.
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Portugal’s radical drugs policy is working. Why hasn’t the world copied it?
Since it decriminalised all drugs in 2001, Portugal has seen dramatic drops in overdoses, HIV infection and drug-related crime.
5 December 2017
When the drugs came, they hit all at once. It was the 80s, and by the time one in 10 people had slipped into the depths of heroin use – bankers, university students, carpenters, socialites, miners – Portugal was in a state of panic.
Álvaro Pereira was working as a family doctor in Olhão in southern Portugal. “People were injecting themselves in the street, in public squares, in gardens,” he told me. “At that time, not a day passed when there wasn’t a robbery at a local business, or a mugging.”
The crisis began in the south. The 80s were a prosperous time in Olhão, a fishing town 31 miles west of the Spanish border. Coastal waters filled fishermen’s nets from the Gulf of Cádiz to Morocco, tourism was growing, and currency flowed throughout the southern Algarve region. But by the end of the decade, heroin began washing up on Olhão’s shores. Overnight, Pereira’s beloved slice of the Algarve coast became one of the drug capitals of Europe: one in every 100 Portuguese was battling a problematic heroin addiction at that time, but the number was even higher in the south. Headlines in the local press raised the alarm about overdose deaths and rising crime. The rate of HIV infection in Portugal became the highest in the European Union. Pereira recalled desperate patients and families beating a path to his door, terrified, bewildered, begging for help. “I got involved,” he said, “only because I was ignorant.”
In truth, there was a lot of ignorance back then. Forty years of authoritarian rule under the regime established by António Salazar in 1933 had suppressed education, weakened institutions and lowered the school-leaving age, in a strategy intended to keep the population docile. The country was closed to the outside world; people missed out on the experimentation and mind-expanding culture of the 1960s. When the regime ended abruptly in a military coup in 1974, Portugal was suddenly opened to new markets and influences. Under the old regime, Coca-Cola was banned and owning a cigarette lighter required a licence. When marijuana and then heroin began flooding in, the country was utterly unprepared.
Pereira tackled the growing wave of addiction the only way he knew how: one patient at a time. A student in her 20s who still lived with her parents might have her family involved in her recovery; a middle-aged man, estranged from his wife and living on the street, faced different risks and needed a different kind of support. Pereira improvised, calling on institutions and individuals in the community to lend a hand.
In 2001, nearly two decades into Pereira’s accidental specialisation in addiction, Portugal became the first country to decriminalise the possession and consumption of all illicit substances. Rather than being arrested, those caught with a personal supply might be given a warning, a small fine, or told to appear before a local commission – a doctor, a lawyer and a social worker – about treatment, harm reduction, and the support services that were available to them.
The opioid crisis soon stabilised, and the ensuing years saw dramatic drops in problematic drug use, HIV and hepatitis infection rates, overdose deaths, drug-related crime and incarceration rates. HIV infection plummeted from an all-time high in 2000 of 104.2 new cases per million to 4.2 cases per million in 2015. The data behind these changes has been studied and cited as evidence by harm-reduction movements around the globe. It’s misleading, however, to credit these positive results entirely to a change in law.
Portugal’s remarkable recovery, and the fact that it has held steady through several changes in government – including conservative leaders who would have preferred to return to the US-style war on drugs – could not have happened without an enormous cultural shift, and a change in how the country viewed drugs, addiction – and itself. In many ways, the law was merely a reflection of transformations that were already happening in clinics, in pharmacies and around kitchen tables across the country. The official policy of decriminalisation made it far easier for a broad range of services (health, psychiatry, employment, housing etc) that had been struggling to pool their resources and expertise, to work together more effectively to serve their communities.
The language began to shift, too. Those who had been referred to sneeringly as drogados (junkies) – became known more broadly, more sympathetically, and more accurately, as “people who use drugs” or “people with addiction disorders”. This, too, was crucial.
It is important to note that Portugal stabilised its opioid crisis, but it didn’t make it disappear. While drug-related death, incarceration and infection rates plummeted, the country still had to deal with the health complications of long-term problematic drug use. Diseases including hepatitis C, cirrhosis and liver cancer are a burden on a health system that is still struggling to recover from recession and cutbacks. In this way, Portugal’s story serves as a warning of challenges yet to come.
Despite enthusiastic international reactions to Portugal’s success, local harm-reduction advocates have been frustrated by what they see as stagnation and inaction since decriminalisation came into effect. They criticise the state for dragging its feet on establishing supervised injection sites and drug consumption facilities; for failing to make the anti-overdose medication naloxone more readily available; for not implementing needle-exchange programmes in prisons. Where, they ask, is the courageous spirit and bold leadership that pushed the country to decriminalise drugs in the first place?
In the early days of Portugal’s panic, when Pereira’s beloved Olhão began falling apart in front of him, the state’s first instinct was to attack. Drugs were denounced as evil, drug users were demonised, and proximity to either was criminally and spiritually punishable. The Portuguese government launched a series of national anti-drug campaigns that were less “Just Say No” and more “Drugs Are Satan”.
Informal treatment approaches and experiments were rushed into use throughout the country, as doctors, psychiatrists, and pharmacists worked independently to deal with the flood of drug-dependency disorders at their doors, sometimes risking ostracism or arrest to do what they believed was best for their patients.
In 1977, in the north of the country, psychiatrist Eduíno Lopes pioneered a methadone programme at the Centro da Boavista in Porto. Lopes was the first doctor in continental Europe to experiment with substitution therapy, flying in methadone powder from Boston, under the auspices of the Ministry of Justice, rather than the Ministry of Health. His efforts met with a vicious public backlash and the disapproval of his peers, who considered methadone therapy nothing more than state-sponsored drug addiction.
In Lisbon, Odette Ferreira, an experienced pharmacist and pioneering HIV researcher, started an unofficial needle-exchange programme to address the growing Aids crisis. She received death threats from drug dealers, and legal threats from politicians. Ferreira – who is now in her 90s, and still has enough swagger to carry off long fake eyelashes and red leather at a midday meeting – started giving away clean syringes in the middle of Europe’s biggest open-air drug market, in the Casal Ventoso neighbourhood of Lisbon. She collected donations of clothing, soap, razors, condoms, fruit and sandwiches, and distributed them to users. When dealers reacted with hostility, she snapped back: “Don’t mess with me. You do your job, and I’ll do mine.” She then bullied the Portuguese Association of Pharmacies into running the country’s – and indeed the world’s – first national needle-exchange programme.
A flurry of expensive private clinics and free, faith-based facilities emerged, promising detoxes and miracle cures, but the first public drug-treatment centre run by the Ministry of Health – the Centro das Taipas in Lisbon – did not begin operating until 1987. Strapped for resources in Olhão, Pereira sent a few patients for treatment, although he did not agree with the abstinence-based approach used at Taipas. “First you take away the drug, and then, with psychotherapy, you plug up the crack,” said Pereira. There was no scientific evidence to show that this would work – and it didn’t.
He also sent patients to Lopes’s methadone programme in Porto, and found that some responded well. But Porto was at the other end of the country. He wanted to try methadone for his patients, but the Ministry of Health hadn’t yet approved it for use. To get around that, Pereira sometimes asked a nurse to sneak methadone to him in the boot of his car.
Pereira’s work treating patients for addiction eventually caught the attention of the Ministry of Health. “They heard there was a crazy man in the Algarve who was working on his own,” he said, with a slow smile. Now 68, he is sprightly and charming, with an athletic build, thick and wavy white hair that bounces when he walks, a gravelly drawl and a bottomless reserve of warmth. “They came down to find me at the clinic and proposed that I open a treatment centre,” he said. He invited a colleague from at a family practice in the next town over to join him – a young local doctor named João Goulão.
Goulão was a 20-year-old medical student when he was offered his first hit of heroin. He declined because he didn’t know what it was. By the time he finished school, got his licence and began practising medicine at a health centre in the southern city of Faro, it was everywhere. Like Pereira, he accidentally ended up specialising in treating drug addiction.
The two young colleagues joined forces to open southern Portugal’s first CAT in 1988. (These kinds of centres have used different names and acronyms over the years, but are still commonly referred to as Centros de Atendimento a Toxicodependentes, or CATs.) Local residents were vehemently opposed, and the doctors were improvising treatments as they went along. The following month, Pereira and Goulão opened a second CAT in Olhão, and other family doctors opened more in the north and central regions, forming a loose network. It had become clear to a growing number of practitioners that the most effective response to addiction had to be personal, and rooted in communities. Treatment was still small-scale, local and largely ad hoc.
The first official call to change Portugal’s drug laws came from Rui Pereira, a former constitutional court judge who undertook an overhaul of the penal code in 1996. He found the practice of jailing people for taking drugs to be counterproductive and unethical. “My thought right off the bat was that it wasn’t legitimate for the state to punish users,” he told me in his office at the University of Lisbon’s school of law. At that time, about half of the people in prison were there for drug-related reasons, and the epidemic, he said, was thought to be “an irresolvable problem”. He recommended that drug use be discouraged without imposing penalties, or further alienating users. His proposals weren’t immediately adopted, but they did not go unnoticed.
In 1997, after 10 years of running the CAT in Faro, Goulão was invited to help design and lead a national drug strategy. He assembled a team of experts to study potential solutions to Portugal’s drug problem. The resulting recommendations, including the full decriminalisation of drug use, were presented in 1999, approved by the council of ministers in 2000, and a new national plan of action came into effect in 2001.
Today, Goulão is Portugal’s drug czar. He has been the lodestar throughout eight alternating conservative and progressive administrations; through heated standoffs with lawmakers and lobbyists; through shifts in scientific understanding of addiction and in cultural tolerance for drug use; through austerity cuts, and through a global policy climate that only very recently became slightly less hostile. Goulão is also decriminalisation’s busiest global ambassador. He travels almost non-stop, invited again and again to present the successes of Portugal’s harm-reduction experiment to authorities around the world, from Norway to Brazil, which are dealing with desperate situations in their own countries.
“These social movements take time,” Goulão told me. “The fact that this happened across the board in a conservative society such as ours had some impact.” If the heroin epidemic had affected only Portugal’s lower classes or racialised minorities, and not the middle or upper classes, he doubts the conversation around drugs, addiction and harm reduction would have taken shape in the same way. “There was a point whenyou could not find a single Portuguese family that wasn’t affected. Every family had their addict, or addicts. This was universal in a way that the society felt: ‘We have to do something.’”
Portugal’s policy rests on three pillars: one, that there’s no such thing as a soft or hard drug, only healthy and unhealthy relationships with drugs; two, that an individual’s unhealthy relationship with drugs often conceals frayed relationships with loved ones, with the world around them, and with themselves; and three, that the eradication of all drugs is an impossible goal.
“The national policy is to treat each individual differently,” Goulão told me. “The secret is for us to be present.”
A drop-in centre called IN-Mouraria sits unobtrusively in a lively, rapidly gentrifying neighbourhood of Lisbon, a longtime enclave of marginalised communities. From 2pm to 4pm, the centre provides services to undocumented migrants and refugees; from 5pm to 8pm, they open their doors to drug users. A staff of psychologists, doctors and peer support workers (themselves former drug users) offer clean needles, pre-cut squares of foil, crack kits, sandwiches, coffee, clean clothing, toiletries, rapid HIV testing, and consultations – all free and anonymous.
On the day I visited, young people stood around waiting for HIV test results while others played cards, complained about police harassment, tried on outfits, traded advice on living situations, watched movies and gave pep talks to one another. They varied in age, religion, ethnicity and gender identity, and came from all over the country and all over the world. When a slender, older man emerged from the bathroom, unrecognisable after having shaved his beard off, an energetic young man who had been flipping through magazines threw up his arms and cheered. He then turned to a quiet man sitting on my other side, his beard lush and dark hair curling from under his cap, and said: “What about you? Why don’t you go shave off that beard? You can’t give up on yourself, man. That’s when it’s all over.” The bearded man cracked a smile.
During my visits over the course of a month, I got to know some of the peer support workers, including João, a compact man with blue eyes who was rigorous in going over the details and nuances of what I was learning. João wanted to be sure I understood their role at the drop-in centre was not to force anyone to stop using, but to help minimise the risks users were exposed to.
“Our objective is not to steer people to treatment – they have to want it,” he told me. But even when they do want to stop using, he continued, having support workers accompany them to appointments and treatment facilities can feel like a burden on the user – and if the treatment doesn’t go well, there is the risk that that person will feel too ashamed to return to the drop-in centre. “Then we lose them, and that’s not what we want to do,” João said. “I want them to come back when they relapse.” Failure was part of the treatment process, he told me. And he would know.
João is a marijuana-legalisation activist, open about being HIV-positive, and after being absent for part of his son’s youth, he is delighting in his new role as a grandfather. He had stopped doing speedballs (mixtures of cocaine and opiates) after several painful, failed treatment attempts, each more destructive than the last. He long used cannabis as a form of therapy – methadone did not work for him, nor did any of the inpatient treatment programmes he tried – but the cruel hypocrisy of decriminalisation meant that although smoking weed was not a criminal offence, purchasing it was. His last and worst relapse came when he went to buy marijuana from his usual dealer and was told: “I don’t have that right now, but I do have some good cocaine.” João said no thanks and drove away, but soon found himself heading to a cash machine, and then back to the dealer. After this relapse, he embarked on a new relationship, and started his own business. At one point he had more than 30 employees. Then the financial crisis hit. “Clients weren’t paying, and creditors started knocking on my door,” he told me. “Within six months I had burned through everything I had built up over four or five years.”
In the mornings, I followed the centre’s street teams out to the fringes of Lisbon. I met Raquel and Sareia – their slim forms swimming in the large hi-vis vests they wear on their shifts – who worked with Crescer na Maior, a harm-reduction NGO. Six times a week, they loaded up a large white van with drinking water, wet wipes, gloves, boxes of tinfoil and piles of state-issued drug kits: green plastic pouches with single-use servings of filtered water, citric acid, a small metal tray for cooking, gauze, filter and a clean syringe. Portugal does not yet have any supervised injection sites (although there is legislation to allow them, several attempts to open one have come to nothing), so, Raquel and Sareia told me, they go out to the open-air sites where they know people go to buy and use. Both are trained psychologists, but out in the streets they are known simply as the “needle girls”.
“Good afternoon!” Raquel called out cheerily, as we walked across a seemingly abandoned lot in an area called Cruz Vermelha. “Street team!” People materialised from their hiding places like some strange version of whack-a-mole, poking their heads out from the holes in the wall where they had gone to smoke or shoot up. “My needle girls,” one woman cooed to them tenderly. “How are you, my loves?” Most made polite conversation, updating the workers on their health struggles, love lives, immigration woes or housing needs. One woman told them she would be going back to Angola to deal with her mother’s estate, that she was looking forward to the change of scenery. Another man told them he had managed to get his online girlfriend’s visa approved for a visit. “Does she know you’re still using?” Sareia asked. The man looked sheepish.
“I start methadone tomorrow,” another man said proudly. He was accompanied by his beaming girlfriend, and waved a warm goodbye to the girls as they handed him a square of foil.
In the foggy northern city of Porto, peer support workers from Caso – an association run by and for drug users and former users, the only one of its kind in Portugal – meet every week at a noisy cafe. They come here every Tuesday morning to down espressos, fresh pastries and toasted sandwiches, and to talk out the challenges, debate drug policy (which, a decade and a half after the law came into effect, was still confusing for many) and argue, with the warm rowdiness that is characteristic of people in the northern region. When I asked them what they thought of Portugal’s move to treat drug users as sick people in need of help, rather than as criminals, they scoffed. “Sick? We don’t say ‘sick’ up here. We’re not sick.”
I was told this again and again in the north: thinking of drug addiction simply in terms of health and disease was too reductive. Some people are able to use drugs for years without any major disruption to their personal or professional relationships. It only became a problem, they told me, when it became a problem.
Caso was supported by Apdes, a development NGO with a focus on harm reduction and empowerment, including programmes geared toward recreational users. Their award-winning Check!n project has for years set up shop at festivals, bars and parties to test substances for dangers. I was told more than once that if drugs were legalised, not just decriminalised, then these substances would be held to the same rigorous quality and safety standards as food, drink and medication.
In spite of Portugal’s tangible results, other countries have been reluctant to follow. The Portuguese began seriously considering decriminalisation in 1998, immediately following the first UN General Assembly Special Session on the Global Drug Problem (UNgass). High-level UNgass meetings are convened every 10 years to set drug policy for all member states, addressing trends in addiction, infection, money laundering, trafficking and cartel violence. At the first session – for which the slogan was “A drug-free world: we can do it” – Latin American member states pressed for a radical rethinking of the war on drugs, but every effort to examine alternative models (such as decriminalisation) was blocked. By the time of the next session, in 2008, worldwide drug use and violence related to the drug trade had vastly increased. An extraordinary session was held last year, but it was largely a disappointment – the outcome document didn’t mention “harm reduction” once.
Despite that letdown, 2016 produced a number of promising other developments: Chile and Australia opened their first medical cannabis clubs; following the lead of several others, four more US states introduced medical cannabis, and four more legalised recreational cannabis; Denmark opened the world’s largest drug consumption facility, and France opened its first; South Africa proposed legalising medical cannabis; Canada outlined a plan to legalise recreational cannabis nationally and to open more supervised injection sites; and Ghana announced it would decriminalise all personal drug use.
The biggest change in global attitudes and policy has been the momentum behind cannabis legalisation. Local activists have pressed Goulão to take a stance on regulating cannabis and legalising its sale in Portugal; for years, he has responded that the time wasn’t right. Legalising a single substance would call into question the foundation of Portugal’s drug and harm-reduction philosophy. If the drugs aren’t the problem, if the problem is the relationship with drugs, if there’s no such thing as a hard or a soft drug, and if all illicit substances are to be treated equally, he argued, then shouldn’t all drugs be legalised and regulated?
Massive international cultural shifts in thinking about drugs and addiction are needed to make way for decriminalisation and legalisation globally. In the US, the White House has remained reluctant to address what drug policy reform advocates have termed an “addiction to punishment”. But if conservative, isolationist, Catholic Portugal could transform into a country where same-sex marriage and abortion are legal, and where drug use is decriminalised, a broader shift in attitudes seems possible elsewhere. But, as the harm-reduction adage goes: one has to want the change in order to make it.
When Pereira first opened the CAT in Olhão, he faced vociferous opposition from residents; they worried that with more drogados would come more crime. But the opposite happened. Months later, one neighbour came to ask Pereira’s forgiveness. She hadn’t realised it at the time, but there had been three drug dealers on her street; when their local clientele stopped buying, they packed up and left.
The CAT building itself is a drab, brown two-storey block, with offices upstairs and an open waiting area, bathrooms, storage and clinics down below. The doors open at 8.30am, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Patients wander in throughout the day for appointments, to chat, to kill time, to wash, or to pick up their weekly supply of methadone doses. They tried to close the CAT for Christmas Day one year, but patients asked that it stay open. For some, estranged from loved ones and adrift from any version of home, this is the closest thing they’ve got to community and normality.
“It’s not just about administering methadone,” Pereira told me. “You have to maintain a relationship.”
In a back room, rows of little canisters with banana-flavoured methadone doses were lined up, each labelled with a patient’s name and information. The Olhão CAT regularly services about 400 people, but that number can double during the summer months, when seasonal workers and tourists come to town. Anyone receiving treatment elsewhere in the country, or even outside Portugal, can have their prescription sent over to the CAT, making the Algarve an ideal harm-reduction holiday destination.
After lunch at a restaurant owned by a former CAT employee, the doctor took me to visit another of his projects – a particular favourite. His decades of working with addiction disorders had taught him some lessons, and he poured his accumulated knowledge into designing a special treatment facility on the outskirts of Olhão: the Unidade de Desabituação, or Dishabituation Centre. Several such UDs, as they are known, have opened in other regions of the country, but this centre was developed to cater to the particular circumstances and needs of the south.
Pereira stepped down as director some years ago, but his replacement asked him to stay on to help with day-to-day operations. Pereira should be retired by now – indeed, he tried to – but Portugal is suffering from an overall shortage of health professionals in the public system, and not enough young doctors are stepping into this specialisation. As his colleagues elsewhere in the country grow closer to their own retirements, there’s a growing sense of dread that there is no one to replace them.
“Those of us from the Algarve always had a bit of a different attitude from our colleagues up north,” Pereira told me. “I don’t treat patients. They treat themselves. My function is to help them to make the changes they need to make.”
And thank goodness there is only one change to make, he deadpanned as we pulled into the centre’s parking lot: “You need to change almost everything.” He cackled at his own joke and stepped out of his car.
The glass doors at the entrance slid open to a facility that was bright and clean without feeling overwhelmingly institutional. Doctors’ and administrators’ offices were up a sweeping staircase ahead. Women at the front desk nodded their hellos, and Pereira greeted them warmly: “Good afternoon, my darlings.”
The Olhão centre was built for just under €3m (£2.6m), publicly funded, and opened to its first patients nine years ago. This facility, like the others, is connected to a web of health and social rehabilitation services. It can house up to 14 people at once: treatments are free, available on referral from a doctor or therapist, and normally last between eight and 14 days. When people first arrive, they put all of their personal belongings – photos, mobile phones, everything – into storage, retrievable on departure.
“We believe in the old maxim: ‘No news is good news,’” explained Pereira. “We don’t do this to punish them but to protect them.” Memories can be triggering, and sometimes families, friends and toxic relationships can be enabling.
To the left there were intake rooms and a padded isolation room, with clunky security cameras propped up in every corner. Patients each had their own suites – simple, comfortable and private. To the right, there was a “colour” room, with a pottery wheel, recycled plastic bottles, paints, egg cartons, glitter and other craft supplies. In another room, coloured pencils and easels for drawing. A kiln, and next to it a collection of excellent handmade ashtrays. Many patients remained heavy smokers.
Patients were always occupied, always using their hands or their bodies or their senses, doing exercise or making art, always filling their time with something. “We’d often hear our patients use the expression ‘me and my body’,” Pereira said. “As though there was a dissociation between the ‘me’ and ‘my flesh’.”
To help bring the body back, there was a small gym, exercise classes, physiotherapy and a jacuzzi. And after so much destructive behaviour – messing up their bodies, their relationships, their lives and communities – learning that they could create good and beautiful things was sometimes transformational.
“You know those lines on a running track?” Pereira asked me. He believed that everyone – however imperfect – was capable of finding their own way, given the right support. “Our love is like those lines.”
He was firm, he said, but never punished or judged his patients for their relapses or failures. Patients were free to leave at any time, and they were welcome to return if they needed, even if it was more than a dozen times.
He offered no magic wand or one-size-fits-all solution, just this daily search for balance: getting up, having breakfast, making art, taking meds, doing exercise, going to work, going to school, going into the world, going forward. Being alive, he said to me more than once, can be very complicated.
“My darling,” he told me, “it’s like I always say: I may be a doctor, but nobody’s perfect.”
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Don’t let the alt-right hijack #MeToo for their agenda
Feminism is now being weaponized for right-wing agendas. We must not allow that to happen
10 December 2017
That was fast. In this #MeToo moment, feminism has been coopted by both people who don’t understand it and by people who oppose it. Worse: it’s now being used against people who are feminists and allies.
The most recent example comes from Mike Cernovich, the alt-right conspiracy theorist who led the way on the Pizzagate hoax that claimed senior Democrats were involved in a child abuse ring in the basement of a Washington DC restaurant. That whole ruckus should’ve given MSNBC pause when he went after one of their regulars.
Cernovich recently orchestrated a campaign to pressure MSNBC to fire contributor Sam Seder over a joke he made in a 2009 tweet. The network did fire him – only to then rehire him after a backlash against their decision.
If you have ever been exposed to jokes before, you’d know the tweet was sarcastic. It mocked people whose defense of Roman Polanski from child rape accusations rested on the fact that he was a ‘great artist’. It was an anti-rapist rape joke, like the kind that Amy Poehler, Tina Fey, Amy Schumer and even Jay Leno later told about Bill Cosby.
We’re now at the point where people are being canned for jokes, by people who don’t get the jokes, don’t get feminism, don’t get that maybe there should be some proportion in this thing, and don’t get that right-wing men with a public record of misogyny might not be your best guides through all this.
Even if Seder’s joke was bad and made in the wrong spirit (which, just to be clear, it wasn’t), if we’re going to fire everyone who has made a non-feminist remark we’re pretty much going to clear all the offices everywhere of almost every man and quite a few women.
That’s why people who’ve been thinking about gender politics and women’s rights should be in charge of this moment. We need to be led through this by people who’ve experienced harassment and denigration and discrediting. People who’ve spent years listening to others and who have been thinking about the dynamics, ethics and consequences of these things before.
This should be a moment when powerful men and the women who’ve protected them say: ‘hey, when we were in charge it didn’t go that well, maybe we should learn to doubt ourselves, and our judgment, maybe we shouldn’t make snap decisions based on our brand-new interest in women as human beings possessed of inalienable rights.’
But instead they’re just finding new grounds to be in charge and to adjudicate all this.
Consider the experience of writer Ijeoma Oluo, who last week said that USA Today asked her to write a piece arguing a feminist position against due process.
She says an editor there told her, “[…] They want a piece that says that you don’t believe in due process and that if a few innocent men lose their jobs it’s worth it to protect women. Is that something you can do?”
They were asking her to say feminists are happy to harm individual men for the good of the cause, and not interested in distinguishing innocence from guilt. She refused. That’s not who she is and not who feminists are.
The slogan “believe women” arose because women have often been assumed from the outset to be crazy, mendacious, manipulative and anything but honest when they charge men of sexual crimes. That’s why their claims are often dismissed out of hand rather than investigated.
The slogan doesn’t mean don’t investigate the claims. An accusation pits two claimants against each other, an accuser and, usually, a person who claims they’re not guilty of what they’re accused of. Both deserve due process.
Project Veritas, the right-wing organization that went after Planned Parenthood in a sting operation over abortion a few years ago, bet that the Washington Post was also uninterested in distinguishing truth from falsehood, innocence from guilt.
They sent an undercover operator to pretend she had been sexually involved with Roy Moore as a minor. The Post demonstrated beautifully what due process looks like in journalism.
They interviewed the claimant and understood that she was trying to set them up and exposed her—a counter-sting they reported on in a November 27 article.
It was apparent that, like Cernovich’s attack on Seder, Project Veritas’s attack on the Post was meant to discredit the #MeToo movement. Feminism is now being weaponized for right-wing agendas. At which point it’s not feminism: it’s misogyny using feminism as a cover.
I was disconcerted that, when Leeanne Tweeden put out a story about her encounters with Al Franken, the alt-right site Infowars and right-wing Trump ally and Infowars associate Roger Stone apparently had advance knowledge of her story.
“Infowars Called It! Correctly Predicts Al Franken Sex Scandal!” said a headline on November 16. Tweeden is a Fox employee and a friend of Hannity’s. I would have liked to know more about the situation, especially why right-wing operatives had advance knowledge of it.
A friend who was once a congressional aide remarked to me that when it comes to men in the legislative branch, they’re nearly all guilty of some form of sexual harassment, inappropriate behavior, insensitive remarks, and so forth. I suspect a high percentage of powerful heterosexual men in general are guilty of at least Franken’s degree of denigration of individual women, and if such things are grounds for dismissal, fairness would demand we dismiss them all.
But we are not going to find out about all of them. We are going to find out about some of them not because they are the most egregious, but because of other factors—because someone has good documentation to share, because a former victim is not afraid, or because something matters more than that fear, or because it fits a larger political agenda.
We have heard from a great many women and some men in this Weinstein season. There is no reason to believe that we’ve heard from more than a small minority with stories of abuse to tell.
John Conyers is accused by multiple women, some of whom were his employees, of sexual harassment. He rightly resigned. Still, I’m curious why Conyers’s accusations surfaced when they did and if they’re supposed to somehow neutralize Moore’s.
There’s a man in elected office who’s been publicly accused more than a year ago of harassment, verbal denigration, groping, and sexual assault, including a credible case of attempted rape. I’d like to see any purge start with the predator in the White House.
In this moment, we need to ask better questions. Whose agenda is being served in each case? Who decides? How do we weigh degrees of gravity? This is not about men who violated the norms but about the fact that misogyny has long been the norm. Misogynists have been protected and promoted for not decades but centuries. What are we to do about that?
Moving forward, we need to figure out who decides not just these individual cases but how we move past this era of impunity—and who “we” is going to be, because justice for women sure doesn’t include Project Veritas and Mike Cernovich.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/10/dont-let-alt-right-coopt-metoo-agenda
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In Italia, notoriamente, i conti non tornano mai, nemmeno il semplicissimo uno più uno. Il bizantinismo della nostra politica sfugge agli schemi più comuni e non ammette semplificazioni. C’è il cerchiobottismo del “ma anche”: un po’ di sinistra ma anche un po’ di destra, alfieri della questione morale ma anche un po’ corrotti, con Washington ma anche un po’ con Mosca, europeisti ma anche no… Poi, ovviamente, ci sono i grandi partiti trasversali delle lobby, dei poteri forti (o quasi forti) e del malaffare. Berlusconi non è stato l’unico amico di Mosca. Più dei letti king size hanno contato i viadotti del gas naturale. Anche Prodi ha partecipato alla grande festa del club Gazprom e, più di recente, è persino arrivato a elogiare l’interventismo di Putin in medioriente, criticando le politiche dell’Europa nel rapporto con Mosca. Renzi, non da meno, ha più volte criticato la scelta di imporre sanzioni alla Russia, con una serie di dichiarazioni ad hoc molto simili a quelle di Salvini. Lega, Fratelli D’Italia e M5S sono solo una parte del grande coro filorusso che unisce praticamente l’intero arco parlamentare italiano. La differenza non è tanto fra chi sia amico di Mosca e chi no, quanto fra chi lo sia da lungo tempo e chi solo da poco. Del resto, la strategia di disinformazione delle “fake news” non mira tanto a decretare la vittoria di una parte, quanto a creare confusione e tensioni sociali che facciano apparire UE e USA più in crisi di quanto non lo sia la Russia. Il gioco, evidentemente, sta riuscendo e l’intramontabile Putin si può ancora candidare alla guida del suo paese, con il plauso generale di tanti amici internazionali dei più vari colori politici. Negare l’esistenza delle strategie propagandistiche è un po’ come negare l’esistenza della mafia e, in effetti, disinformazione e crimine organizzato sono fenomeni strettamente legati, con molteplici ramificazioni nei più vari settori della politica.
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Gay and lesbian couples are happier than straight couples, new study reveals
December 15 2017
Gay and lesbian couples are happier than people in straight relationships.
Maybe you’ve already suspected it, while looking at your straight friends and their relationships.
That hint of sadness in their eyes, compared to the joyous glint in yours and your partner’s.
Well, now an extensive study has provided some much-needed evidence.
After questioning more than 25,000 people in the UK and over 9,000 in Australia, researchers found that gay and lesbian couples are better off.
However, bisexual people suffered from worse relationships, on average, than straight or homosexual people.
Francisco Perales and Janeen Baxter from the University of Queensland conducted the study.
In their findings, they wrote: “Relationship quality in same-sex couples was as high as in heterosexual couples in the United Kingdom, and higher in Australia.
“The lowest relationship quality in both countries was reported by bisexual individuals.”
The researchers suggested that gay and lesbian couples might have better relationships because they are less concerned about sticking to stereotypical gender roles.
They wrote that “individuals in same-sex couples (particularly lesbian women) generally are more equitable in the ways in which they allocate domestic work, including childcare”.
Straight couples often reaffirm their gender roles in relationships, which, the authors state, can lead to an unfair division of labour.
“Unequal household burdens are associated with poor relationship outcomes, including marital conflict and divorce,” they explained.
“If gender display is not as salient in same-sex couples and these relationships are more egalitarian than heterosexual couples, higher levels of relationship quality might be expected.”
The two added that same-sex couples might feel more connected to a community of similar couples, which may increase their happiness.
They also suggested that “individuals in same-sex relationships may be more likely than those in different-sex relationships to have high relationship investment.”
Perales and Baxter argued that their findings supported giving more rights to same-sex couples, and refuted arguments that children of same-sex parents suffer.
“Our results provide robust evidence to combat deep-rooted and erroneous social perceptions of same-sex relationships being conflictual, unhappy, and dysfunctional,” they said.
“Our findings support policies that seek to legalise same-sex marriage and parenting rights.”
The authors also emphasised that their results “highlight the need to give further attention to bisexual individuals as a distinct group because their outcomes are comparatively poor.”
Bisexual people have consistently been found to have the lowest life satisfaction among LGBT people.
They also feel less worthwhile and happy – and much more anxious – than other people, according to a study from earlier this year.
And just this week, it was revealed that bisexual people sleep worse than everyone else, with bi women being especially affected.
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Russia meddled on Twitter after UK terror attacks, study says
18 December 2017
Suspected Russia-linked Twitter accounts were used to “extend the impact and harm” of four 2017 terrorist attacks in the UK, a study says.
Cardiff University researchers have found hundreds of related messages in 47 accounts previously tied to Russia.
Some posts were anti-Muslim in nature, while others were critical of those who held such views, they report.
Moscow has not commented but has denied past claims it sought to meddle in Western democracies via social media.
Even so, one influential MP has condemned the activity.
“It is wrong that any organisation should spread disinformation following a terrorist attack, with the purpose of spreading hatred and making worse an already desperate and confusing situation,” Damian Collins, chair of the digital, culture, media and sport select committee, told the BBC.
“At a time when victims are still lying on the ground and loved ones are in need of clear and accurate information about the situation, the deliberate spreading of disinformation is unforgivable.
“The methods of organisations such as the Russian-backed Internet Research Agency are becoming increasingly clear. Through our inquiry into fake news, I am determined that they should be exposed.”
The BBC understands that the researchers did not share details of the accounts with Twitter.
“In each of the attacks, the Tweets identified in this research represent less than 0.01% of the total tweets sent in the 24-hour period following the attack,” said a spokesman for the US firm.
Terror attacks
Cardiff University’s Crime and Security Research Institute analysed millions of posts and comments gathered from various social media platforms, before honing in on 70 suspected “sock puppet” Twitter accounts.
Forty-seven of these had previously been tied to Russia by US Congressional investigators, the Russian magazine RBK and others. It was these on which the inquiry then focused.
The researchers then determined that after:
– March’s attack at Westminster Bridge, 35 relevant original messages had been posted by the accounts
– May’s pop concert attack in Manchester, 293 messages had been posted
– June’s London Bridge attack, 140 messages had been posted
– June’s Finsbury Park attack, seven messages had been posted
This tally of 475 messages were reposted more than 153,000 times in total by others, the researchers determined.
Examples included: “Another day, another Muslim terrorist attack. Retweet if you think that Islam needs to be banned!”
In one case, an account named @TEN_GOP – which presented itself as belonging to a Tennessee-based American – took issue with a photo of a woman in a hijab supposedly ignoring victims of the Westminster Bridge attack.
“She is being judged for her own actions & lack of sympathy. Would you just walk by? Or offer help?” said the tweet.
But another Russian-linked account, @Crystal1Johnson – which appeared to belong to a civil rights advocate – took an opposing stance.
“So this is how a world with glasses of hate look like [sic] – poor woman, being judged only by her clothes,” it posted.
The researchers highlighted that the accounts sometimes tweeted the messages directly at celebrities, including the author JK Rowling, in an attempt to get their posts noticed by their followers.
In addition, they note that several messages were directed at the English Defence League founder Tommy Robinson and UKIP’s ex-leader Nigel Farage.
“The evidence suggests a systematic strategic political communications campaign being directed at the UK designed to amplify the public harms of terrorist attacks,” concluded the authors.
“The implication is that we… should focus upon rapidly establishing what counter-measures are effective in offsetting the impact of ‘soft facts’ propagated by overseas interests as they seek to do the work of terrorist organisations by amplifying the capacity and capability of violent acts.”
The researchers acknowledged that it was difficult to prove the activity had indeed been backed by the Russian authorities, but they added that they believed there were likely additional accounts they had not spotted.
Another independent researcher who has also investigated suspected Russian social media posts said more work needed to be done.
“Using fragmented datasets we have observed unusual activities on Twitter – eg an increase in the number of fake accounts spreading biased information,” commented Prof Sasha Talavera from Swansea University.
“But we cannot comment definitively about their scale and influence without a large-scale investigation.”
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42393540
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If we’re serious about social mobility, we need demographic quotas for our universities
14 December 2017
Top universities aren’t doing enough to break down the social segregation that puts off poorer students, leaving it easy to portray these establishments as ‘bastions of privilege’.
Social mobility and universities have rarely been out of the news in recent months. Today it was reported that wealthy students are tightening their grip on university places. Back in October, Labour MP David Lammy published data on the rising proportion of Oxbridge offers made to those in the top two classes of society. A couple of weeks ago the government came under fire for its failure to act on social mobility. And the outrage has been steadily growing about the gulf between university vice-chancellors’ pay and that of rank-and-file university staff.
We’re left with an image of an elite higher education system which can easily be portrayed as “bastions of privilege” – and with a government powerless or unwilling to tackle entrenched inequality and worsening social mobility. The stories of elite academic pay and top universities inaccessible to ordinary people have never quite overlapped, but they are manifestations of the same problem – systemic segregation of class, wealth and privilege in our society. This week, Justine Greening announced an upcoming social mobility action-plan. If the government is serious, getting more disadvantaged students into Oxbridge and the Russell Group universities must be part of the effort to break down the cycle of social segregation.
So what needs to happen?
Firstly, Oxford and Cambridge and their ilk need to stop asking for straight A* grades. Grades are a crude and homogenising measure of academic ability which ignore the dramatic impact circumstances have on a child’s educational attainment, and the huge discrepancies of privilege between students. How many students slip through the net simply because they miss out on grades they would have achieved had they attended a different school?
Oxford and Cambridge say they adjust for applicants’ background, but the notes on Cambridge’s admissions pages state that “we don’t use contextual data to systematically make conditional offers at lower grades”, and no mention is made of contextual data in the prospectus. They also offer an “extenuating circumstances form”; again, the notes imply that it’s only there for the most extreme cases. This isn’t good enough. Oxbridge must routinely and systematically take account of students’ circumstances and how this might impact their grades, and pro-actively promote this approach so that students and teachers know about it.
Grades are one hurdle, a compounding one is culture. I was the first student from my school, a comprehensive in an ex-mining town in Warwickshire, to go to Oxbridge for several years. At least two teachers questioned why I was applying, basically implying that Oxbridge wasn’t for people like me. I wasn’t the brightest student in my year – at a private school, plenty of my year group would have been natural Oxbridge fodder. But Oxbridge wasn’t even discussed. Even getting into Warwick was a bit unusual. Virtually everybody I studied A-levels with went to university – but they went to universities for “people like us”. This is a pattern. It’s estimated that around 2,800 state-school students get the grades to get into a Russell Group university but don’t go to one. Cambridge and Oxford both run widening participation programmes, but with the proportion of Oxbridge entrants from the top two classes of society rising, they are clearly not effective enough.
That teachers in schools like mine often fail to encourage students to apply to top universities, is largely down to ignorance born of social segregation itself. Generally Oxbridge isn’t within their own experience, and teachers are just as likely to believe the stereotypes as anyone else.
As institutions which receive a considerable amount of their income from the taxpayer, this segregation-derived ignorance is a problem Oxford, Cambridge and other Russell Group universities should be addressing. As well as adopting more flexible entry requirements, they should be routinely engaging with secondary schools of all descriptions to educate students and staff about what it’s really like at their institutions, that plenty of state schools students attend, and that their applications would be welcomed. They could also support students with their applications and familiarise them with the interview process – the kind of extra help that gives independent-school students yet another edge. Just as importantly, they should be working with primary schools to reach disadvantaged students at an early age, when it might make a different to their educational attainment.
All of this could serve a wider social purpose as well, breaking down social barriers by giving students the opportunity to work with new ideas and new people, and fostering interaction between worlds which too often remain separate. Ofsted reported this week that 190 schools have not seen improvement for 10 years – this is an opportunity for universities to support schools to raise academic attainment across the board.
So how do we make all this happen? Given that the universities simply aren’t making enough progress on their own, the introduction of demographic quotas is the only way to stimulate real and rapid change. It’s an idea that’s beginning to attract support from figures within universities themselves, like Tim Blackman, Vice Chancellor of Middlesex University. Quotas would force universities to act to maintain their academic standards. In the short term, this would mean reconsidering entry requirements; over the long term, they would work creatively with primary and secondary schools so that children have the chance to develop into “Oxbridge material”.
The outcome would be hugely beneficial for universities too, enriching their academic work by accommodating a greater diversity of perspectives. The government’s social mobility action-plan is the perfect place to propose a radical plan to transform the social makeup of our elite universities. It’s time to stop talking, stop tinkering, and act.
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FBI investigates Russian-linked Cyprus bank accused of money laundering
Request for financial information may be connected to inquiries into possible conspiracy between Trump and Kremlin
24 December 2017
The FBI has asked officials in Cyprus for financial information about a defunct bank that was used by wealthy Russians with political connections and has been accused by the US government of money laundering, two sources have told the Guardian.
The request for information about FBME Bank comes as Cyprus has emerged as a key area of interest for Robert Mueller, the US special counsel who is investigating a possible conspiracy between Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Kremlin.
People familiar with the FBI request told the Guardian that federal investigators and the US Treasury approached the Central Bank of Cyprus in November seeking detailed information about FBME, which was shut down this year.
One person familiar with the FBI request said it appeared to be connected to Mueller’s ongoing examination of Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign manager who was indicted in October, and money that flowed between former Soviet states and the US through Cypriot banks.
The Central Bank of Cyprus, which in 2014 placed FBME under administration in a direct response to US action and obtained full access to the bank’s data, declined to comment. The US special counsel’s office also declined to comment.
FBME has vigorously denied accusations that it has been a conduit for money laundering and other criminal activity.
The owners, Lebanese brothers Ayoub-Farid Saab and Fadi Michel Saab, issued a statement following a series of recent critical articles about the bank and denied all wrongdoing.
Bloomberg reported last week that FBME was the subject of two US investigations: one into the bank’s credit card unit, and another into alleged laundering of money from Russia. Bloomberg said the Russia-related investigation, which is being led by the US attorney’s office in New York, was connected to a flow of illegal Russian funds into the New York real estate market.
FBME, previously known as the Federal Bank of the Middle East, was based in Tanzania but about 90% of its banking was conducted in Cyprus. A report by the US Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) in 2014 said the bank was an institution of “primary money laundering concern”.
The report found that the bank was evading efforts by the Central Bank of Cyprus to supervise its activities, and that FBME was facilitating money laundering, terrorist financing, transnational organised crime, fraud, sanctions evasion, weapons trading and political corruption.
A 2014 internal report by the Central Bank of Cyprus about FBME that was obtained by the Guardian found that FBME had banking relationships with several Russians who were considered to be politically sensitive clients and that about half of the bank’s clients were Russian nationals, including Vladimir Smirnov, who is close to Putin, and Aleksandr Shishkin, a member of Putin’s political party.
FBME was subjected in 2016 to what is known as a “fifth special measure”, a hard-hitting US regulatory tool that was established after the 9/11 attacks to address law enforcement concerns in the banking sector. The move prohibited the bank from doing business in the US or using US dollars, and barred US banks from opening or using any bank accounts on FBME’s behalf. In effect, it shut the bank down. FBME has challenged the decision but US courts have so far upheld the move.
It is not clear why Mueller and his team of investigators appear to be interested in FBME’s financial data. But it indicates that the special counsel is continuing to examine money flows from Cyprus.
Manafort has pleaded not guilty to charges that he laundered millions of dollars through foreign banks as part of a scheme to hide his work for political parties in Ukraine. He is accused of funnelling the funds through foreign shell companies, including many that were based in Cyprus.
Manafort’s attorney, Kevin Downing, has called the charges, including those related to his use of offshore accounts, “ridiculous”.
A spokesman for FBME bank told the Guardian that Manafort was never a client of FBME.
Mueller’s team has separately issued a subpoena for information from Deutsche Bank. According to a person close to the bank, the subpoena was issued in the autumn. The German bank is Trump’s biggest lender.
Deutsche also worked as a correspondent bank for FBME. Internal emails seen by the Guardian show that executives from both banks were in contact in 2014 discussing accounts that were “on the radar” of US law enforcement.
Deutsche Bank said in a statement: “We severed our relationship with FBME in 2014 and have added more than 1,000 anti-financial crime staff in recent years to make our business safer and increase our controls.”
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‘Russia’s Paris Hilton’ is running for president — But is she a Kremlin decoy?
21 December 2017
Russian it girl Ksenia Sobchak has caused a lot of anxiety among Russian liberals ever since announcing plans to run against the inevitable President Vladimir Putin in an election set for March.
Not because the former reality TV-show star, known as “Russia’s Paris Hilton,” has been on the cover of Playboy. And not because her Instagram feed features a parade of designer handbags, black caviar, premium vodka, private yachts and glitzy hotel rooms — in a country where the liberal opposition she aims to represent is trying to rally voters against the flagrant wealth of Russia’s corrupt ruling elite.
Nope. Instead, a lot of Russian liberals worry she’s a Kremlin puppet — and playing a part, whether she’s aware of it or not, in a scheme dreamed up by Putin’s political wizards to co-opt, divide and discredit Russia’s pro-democracy youth vote, and help push Putin’s regime into its third decade.
Even the lion of the anti-Putin underground, Alexei Navalny, himself barred from running due to a criminal conviction he claims was trumped up to silence him, dismisses Sobchak’s campaign.
“The Kremlin’s idea is very simple,” Alexei Navalny told his followers on YouTube as Sobchak’s campaign kicked into gear in the fall. “They need a caricature liberal candidate.”
Sobchak, 36, vehemently denies she’s a caricature — or that she’s colluding with the Kremlin. While she admits that no one, including herself, has much hope of defeating Putin in Russia’s current political climate, she’s positioning herself as the best option Russia’s beaten-down liberals currently have — and someone who, unlike Navalny, can actually run.
In a bid to burnish her credentials, she’s hired a veteran of Bernie Sanders’ and Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns as political strategist and advisor: Vitali Shkliarov.
Shkliarov, who was born in the Soviet Union and speaks accented but fluent English, doesn’t deny the Kremlin may have welcomed her campaign — at first.
“I think they said, ‘This is cool, it’s going to be more fun, and this campaign will drive attention, blah blah blah,’” Shkliarov told VICE News. “But I think they completely underestimate her. She’s like a Frankenstein. They won’t want her anymore.”
Even Shkliarov, when first interviewing for the job as Sobchak’s campaign strategist, says he asked the candidate about any possible back-channel to Putin’s administration.
“I said, ‘Is there any connection to Kremlin? Is it sponsored by the Kremlin?,” Shkliarov said. “She promised me: ‘It isn’t.’”
Close Family Ties
Any casual observer of Russian politics, of course, could hardly fail to notice Sobchak’s family ties to the sitting Russian President: Sobchak’s dad gave Putin his first job in politics.
Ksenia’s father, Anatoly Sobchak, was the first democratically-elected mayor of Putin’s home town of St. Petersburg in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Then a professor, the elder Sobchak mentored Putin on economic law in the 1970s as Russia’s future president was preparing for a career in the KGB. When the Berlin Wall fell, Putin returned from East Germany with the rank of KGB lieutenant colonel, and was soon hired as one of Mayor Sobchak’s deputies.
From then on, Putin and Anatoly Sobchak were seen as close. Legend has it that Putin secreted the elder Sobchak, suffering from heart problems, out of the country for medical care in the face of an tightening corruption investigation against Anatoly Sobchak at home, thought to have been concocted by Boris Yeltsin’s Kremlin.
Sobchak literally dropped dead of a heart attack while out campaigning for Putin in the city of Kaliningrad, just a month before Putin was elected president in 2000.
Ksenia has even been rumored to be Putin’s goddaughter, a claim she has consistently denied. (Though, to be sure, the identities of Putin’s two real daughters are tightly held like national security secrets.)
Ksenia Sobchak went on to become a massive home-grown celebrity on the reality show Dom-2, while doing things like posing for the cover of Brit-pop band Pulp’s 1998 album, This is Hardcore. But she later started getting involved in politics, becoming a television journalist and taking part in anti-Kremlin protests in 2011-2012. Soon after joining those demonstrations, her apartment was raided by police.
Ksenia has said she won’t insult Putin personally, calling him the man who “saved” her father’s life, but she’s promised her supporters she’ll stand against the closed political system he created. And more recently she’s said she may drop out of the race in favor of a unity candidate on the liberal side, especially Navalny, should he be allowed to run.
If she does eventually fall in line behind another liberal candidate, the notion that she’s the Kremlin’s “useful idiot” would become harder to maintain. For now, however, her critics maintain that official tolerance of her campaign — while Navalny has been subjected to multiple arrests, show trials and brief stints in jail this year alone — speaks volumes.
Although Putin’s victory in the March 2018 election is assured, he wants to legitimize his rule with an electoral victory seen as genuine, political analysts said, and he needs strong voter turnout to support that view. Running against a colorful, famous, glamorous young woman will help garner national attention and boost participation, said David Szakonyi, an expert on Russian politics at George Washington University.
“She’s the second-most-well-known person in Russia,” Szakonyi told VICE News. “And how do you get people excited? One way is to give people a choice. The semblance of a choice will get people out of the house to vote.”
And if Sobchak succeeds too well, Szakonyi said, she’ll likely prove much easier to manage than Navalny.
“If she ever starts to build a real Bernie Sanders-type insurgency, those inside the Kremlin know they have levers to pull to keep her from getting out of hand,” Szakonyi said. “I don’t think they feel they can trust her, but they do feel they can manage her in ways they can’t with other candidates.”
By granting Sobchak minor blessings, like air-time on national state-run television — something an opposition figure like Navalny claims would enable him to beat Putin — the Kremlin itself is quietly fostering the impression that it’s behind her campaign in a bid to sew chaos among the country’s liberal forces, Shkliarov said.
“Right after she announced, she got air-time on TV,” Shkliarov said. “Right away, the whole liberal circle started to complain and gossip.”
Fostering the very idea that Sobchak may be the favored liberal candidate could well be part of the Kremlin’s game, Shkliarov said, working as a sort of goad for Russian liberal infighting.
“And let’s be honest,” Shkliarov said, “In this sense, the Kremlin is damn good.”
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Poland: Brexit will worsen the EU’s dilemmas
British scepticism has been an irritant to more integrationist tendencies
21 December 2017
There are no easy choices for European leaders in dismay at the Polish government’s turn away from liberal democracy. To ignore the ruling Law and Justice party’s incursions on judicial independence, signed into effect by President Andrzej Duda on Wednesday, would be to tolerate sabotage of fundamental treaty principles that member states signed up to when joining the bloc. But the sight of western states – above all Germany – berating Poland risks stoking a nationalist backlash that is cultivated by Law and Justice to advance their goal of monopolising power.
Amid this tricky transcontinental row, Theresa May flew to Warsaw with senior cabinet ministers, seeking to develop a strategic alliance with Poland ahead of the second phase of Brexit talks. Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki obligingly signalled that Poland would back the UK on a bespoke deal, including services. Mrs May offered a security partnership with a country anxious about an ever more assertive Russia. This bilateral bargain is complicated by the European commission’s deep suspicion of UK efforts to negotiate behind its back. It fears that London’s divide-and-rule strategy will work better in the second phase of Brexit talks than in the first, when it hit a wall of pan-EU solidarity. The Tories have made common cause with Law and Justice before. Many European leaders wanted Mrs May to signal her goodwill to them by transmitting in Warsaw their view that Poland has crossed a line. Instead, she described constitutional issues as “primarily a matter for the country concerned, not the EU”.
The EU’s response to Poland has so far been gestural. The activation of an “article 7” admonishment does pave the way for material punishments, including the suspension of voting rights; but in practice those measures would be blocked by Hungary. There is a geographical and historical component to these tensions. Former Warsaw pact countries that joined the EU in 2004 feel patronised by longer-standing western members and see double standards. Silvio Berlusconi’s cavalier contempt for media plurality went unpunished. Only this week, Austria formed a government that includes a far-right party with roots in that country’s neo-Nazi movement. Yet the new administration is warmly treated in Brussels because it sounds enthusiastic about the European project. Also, Austria has the euro.
The possibility of a premier league of EU states, based around single-currency membership, is much enhanced by Brexit. It leaves Poland as the biggest non-eurozone member. The UK was also a leading advocate of EU enlargement, partly because it wanted a wide and shallow union. Eastern expansion was partly intended as a brake on western-centred integration.
Hardly anyone in Brussels welcomes the UK’s departure, but as talks get tough it might increasingly be seen as a blessed relief – the amputation of an infected limb, permitting less inhibited forward movement. British Euroscepticism has been an irritant to EU officials over the years, but it has also been a valuable component in the mix. Brexit is, by definition, a uniquely British phenomenon. But nationalist politicians blaming the EU for domestic woes is not. The Polish government’s undemocratic lurch deserves criticism. The unsolved riddle for Brussels is how to uphold the values on which the EU was founded, using methods that do not cultivate resentment and so further undermine those values.
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LGBTQ+ activists in former Soviet countries facing ‘rise in hostility’
22 December 2017
Experts have warned that LGBTQ+ activists living in former Soviet republic countries are facing a “rise in hostility” in their fight against discrimination.
A report published by Amnesty International said that discrimination in Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan had rocketed.
The human rights watchdog stressed that LGBT activists and groups were facing an “increasingly discriminatory environment”.
The report said that the discrimination was being fuelled by Russia’s crusade against “nontraditional sexual relationships”.
Denis Krivoshev, the deputy director for Europe and Central Asia at Amnesty International said that the discrimination in the four countries had worsened because of “Russian influence” which calls LGBTQ+ rights “Western Values”.
Krivoshev explained that the idea that LGBTQ+ equality is “a threat to national security” comes from “a climate of ignorance and hate that’s being fostered by national governments and is even infecting the human rights community in the region.”
“The idea, promoted by Russia, that LGBTI rights are ‘Western values’ that somehow constitute a threat to national security is entrenching elsewhere,” he added.
Each of the four countries have followed Russia in homophobic legislation in recent years.
Distribution of “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relationships” was outlawed in 2016 by Belarus.
LGBTQ+ groups said the move encouraged discrimination and violence against the community.
It also de-facto outlawed Pride events.
The report explained that there were very few exceptions to Pride marches being permitted and when they had been held they were targetted with violence.
The homophobic groups were then not condemned and police often did little to intervene or investigate hate crimes.
It’s a law that Armenia, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan tried to adopt in 2013 but failed to do so.
However, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan explicitly banned same-sex marriage in their constitution.
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Reciprocal rage: why Islamist extremists and the far right need each other
How two complementary extremisms are defining global politics.
19 December 2017
Global politics in the early 21st century is being defined by two complementary extremisms: Islamist extremism and the far right.
This is the argument that Julia Ebner, a research fellow at the London-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue, makes in her new book The Rage: The Vicious Circle of Islamist and Far Right Extremism. Islamist extremists like ISIS and al-Qaeda claim that the West is at war with Islam, and far-right groups like the English Defence League and Generation Identity claim that Muslims are at war with the West. This makes Islamist extremists and the far right rhetorical allies, Ebner argues, as they desperately need each other in order to push their narratives.
I spoke to Ebner about the book and why she worries that these two ideologies are trapping us all in a spiral of mutually reinforcing hatreds.
A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
Sean Illing
What’s the thesis of your book?
Julia Ebner
The main argument is that far-right extremism and Islamist extremism feed off one another, and that if we don’t combat both of them, the situation will deteriorate because they create a vicious circle of escalating divisions.
So what we have is the far right depicting Islamist extremists as representative of the whole Muslim community, while Islamist extremists depict the far right as representative of the entire West. As the extremes creep more and more into the political center, these ideas become mainstream, and the result is a clash-of-civilizations narrative turning into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Sean Illing
The concern, then, is that these narratives are mutually reinforcing and therefore hard to escape?
Julia Ebner
That’s exactly right. There is an interdependency between the two; neither can fully exist without the other. And the louder both sides get, the more they do, the more extreme they become, the more we get trapped in this dynamic of action and reaction.
Sean Illing
Both sides, in other words, are invested in the success of other?
Julia Ebner
I actually think this is the goal. Both the far right and Islamist extremists benefit when their professed enemies engage in a terror attack or do anything that confirms their narratives. They want to see more rifts and more chaos in society. When communities are scared, when they’re driven apart, they’re vulnerable to the extremist narratives.
So in a really fundamental way, each side has good reasons to celebrate when something horrible happens. If ISIS blows up a shopping center in some Western town, the far right points to that and says, “You see, we were right all along. Muslims are at war with the West.” Likewise, right-wing terrorism or rhetoric gives Islamist extremists more fodder to sell their narrative about the West being hostile to all of Islam.
Sean Illing
Do you see these competing narratives as morally or politically equivalent in any way?
Julia Ebner
Yes, I’d say they are very similar both in terms of the nature of their ideologies, their moral deductions, and their potential political impact. Both are based on the victimization of an in-group and the demonization of an out-group; both blame the “corrupt political establishment” and “rigged mainstream media” for all that is going wrong and aim to bring about radical societal change by creating countercultures.
On both sides, you find groups that embrace violent solutions — including terrorism and hate crimes — to reach this goal, and others who resort to strategies such as hate preaching, information warfare, vigilantism, or street activism. Ultimately, both tend to encourage apocalyptic thinking and conspiracy theories, which can incite violence and in some cases inspire terrorism.
Jihadist attacks have claimed many innocent lives in recent years and attracted much media attention because of their sensationalist nature. Far-right attacks against minority communities, refugee camps, and political opponents have been more frequent but less spectacular — as a result, they were often not labeled as terrorism.
The inconsistency we apply when talking about and reacting to different forms of extremism is understandable but can be harmful. Unfortunately, it seems to be much easier to denounce something that is as alien as jihadism as evil, whereas condemning something that is born out of our culture — and worse, claims to defend “our” people, nation, or culture — takes much more courage and self-criticism.
Sean Illing
How did we get here? How did these two extremisms come to define our politics?
Julia Ebner
That’s a difficult question. One of the major problems is that both have been able to tap into rising grievances in the aftermath of the [2008] financial crisis. But I think some of the grievances precede the financial crisis and were latent since the war on terror started post-9/11. We’ve had these creeping divisions between communities, and those divisions have been expertly exploited by extremists on all sides.
Sean Illing
You call this the “age of rage,” but is it really that unique? Haven’t there always been dueling extremisms of one sort or another?
Julia Ebner
We’ve always had this dynamic of reciprocal radicalization, and there have always been competing ideologies. But I think it has never been on such a transnational level. What I find most distressing about this current dynamic is how easily and how widely people can spread their victimization narratives online. The speed of communication today has really changed the way politics works. People can form broader coalitions across borders in a way they couldn’t before.
Sean Illing
Information technology has no doubt evolved, but there’s nothing new about the transnational dynamic, right? The entire Cold War was defined by a global bipolar conflict between conflicting ideologies.
Julia Ebner
What’s different from the Cold War era is how civil society has been transformed by online networks. People can create their own narratives, their own alternative news networks, their own realities. We didn’t have anything like that during the Cold War, and it’s given extremists an extraordinarily powerful tool.
The far right and Islamist extremists have been early adopters of new technologies, and they’ve taken it to a whole new dimension. The propaganda being pumped out there every day is stunning, and it’s impossible to measure its full impact. But the impact is real and growing every day.
Sean Illing
Do these ideologies mirror each other in terms of how they radicalize people?
Julia Ebner
In many ways, they do. In fact, you can see far-right organizations copying the tactics and communication strategies that ISIS uses. The National Action Network, for example, which is the first far-right group to be banned in the UK, basically imitated ISIS propaganda by posting pictures and videos that look almost exactly like the propaganda ISIS creates. The only difference is that it reads “White Jihad” instead of “Jihad.” And some of their recruiting strategies and even their training camps have been modeled after those that were organized by ISIS.
You see overlapping strategies on social media as well. The far right and Islamist extremists have learned a lot from each other in terms of using Twitter and fake accounts to make their propaganda trend. They both hide behind anonymous accounts to push their ideas into the mainstream and to lure people, especially young people, into their camps.
Sean Illing
You spent a lot of time interviewing people on both sides of this divide. I’m curious what you learned from sitting down with these people that you could not have learned any other way.
Julia Ebner
One of the things I learned is that in the end, these people are extremely vulnerable. I sometimes caught myself feeling sorry for them, for what they had gone through, because some of their stories are truly heartbreaking. To be clear, I’m not sympathetic toward terrorists or extremists, but you have to try to understand these people if you want to make any sense of what led them to this place.
Again, I don’t mean to justify the violent actions of anyone, but it was quite striking to sit down with these people and hear how they were radicalized, how their narratives are built on compelling half-truths mixed with conspiracy theories that clearly appeal to a certain type of person.
My main goal was to understand how these extremisms relate to each other, how they interact with each other, and ultimately how they benefit each other. And actually talking to these people was a great way to do that.
Sean Illing
The irony is that these are really the same kinds of people, only they’re on opposite sides of a cultural divide.
Julia Ebner
Exactly. They’re also telling the same story, only from the opposite perspective. You talk to these people and you’ll hear the same themes, the same ideas, the same stories — only the heroes and the villains change.
Sean Illing
Can you tell me a bit more about those stories and how Islamist extremists and far-right extremists describe each other in their own narratives?
Julia Ebner
Both the far right and Islamist extremists use narratives that victimize their in-group and demonize the defined out-group, resulting in a worldview that frames everything through the lens of two inherently opposed homogenous blocs — in both cases, “the West” and “Islam,” or “Muslims” and “non-Muslims.” Their stories amplify each other because they use the same plot of an imminent or ongoing war between those two fronts as well as the same oversimplified depictions of its protagonists.
Sean Illing
Who did you actually talk to on both sides of this? What kinds of things did you hear?
Julia Ebner
In my undercover conversations with members of the global Islamist organization Hizb ut-Tahrir, ISIS sympathizers, and members of the extreme-right organizations English Defense League and Generation Identity, I noticed many parallels in their rhetoric. The way they spoke about each other was similar in that they both dehumanized each other.
For example, representatives on both sides spoke of “monsters” and “cockroaches” who are raping “their women,” taking over “their land,” or conspiring to wipe out “their civilization” — and sometimes they also mentioned the need to fight back preemptively to save their in-group.
Sean Illing
Despite all that, you said you began to empathize with these people after sitting down with them?
Julia Ebner
I honestly did, and that’s the hardest part of it, because I disagree so much with everything they stand for and everything they say. But at the same time, when talking to them, there is this basic level of empathy that I would not have felt if I had not made the effort to talk to them.
One of our deepest problems right now is that the middle ground is vanishing and the extremes are rising. I think we have to talk to each other. Even if it’s sitting down with extremists, I think that’s necessary in order to prevent them from further isolating themselves and from going further down the radicalization path. This is especially true for those people who are sitting on the fence, who are vulnerable to these fringe elements. We have to engage with them or we will lose them.
Sean Illing
When I think about how these fundamentalisms feed on one another, it’s hard to see how this loop gets closed. Are you similarly pessimistic?
Julia Ebner
On the night Trump was elected, I saw all the rejoicing from ISIS enthusiasts and from the far right — both saw it as a victory for their team, for their narrative. I’ve never been more pessimistic than I was that night.
But there are reasons to be optimistic. I think people are waking up to what’s happening and pushing back against the extremes. My hope is that this will lead to a stronger civil society that reengages in a way we haven’t seen in a long time. But I’m aware that the challenges ahead are immense.
In the end, the only thing that will defeat extremism is a groundswell of activism from everyday people who decide that they won’t let their societies be hijacked.
https://www.vox.com/world/2017/12/19/16764046/islam-terrorism-far-right-extremism-isis
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The ‘internet of things’ is sending us back to the Middle Ages
6 September 2017
Internet-enabled devices are so common, and so vulnerable, that hackers recently broke into a casino through its fish tank. The tank had internet-connected sensors measuring its temperature and cleanliness. The hackers got into the fish tank’s sensors and then to the computer used to control them, and from there to other parts of the casino’s network. The intruders were able to copy 10 gigabytes of data to somewhere in Finland.
By gazing into this fish tank, we can see the problem with “internet of things” devices: We don’t really control them. And it’s not always clear who does – though often software designers and advertisers are involved.
In my recent book, “Owned: Property, Privacy and the New Digital Serfdom,” I discuss what it means that our environment is seeded with more sensors than ever before. Our fish tanks, smart televisions, internet-enabled home thermostats, Fitbits and smartphones constantly gather information about us and our environment. That information is valuable not just for us but for people who want to sell us things. They ensure that internet-enabled devices are programmed to be quite eager to share information.
Take, for example, Roomba, the adorable robotic vacuum cleaner. Since 2015, the high-end models have created maps of its users’ homes, to more efficiently navigate through them while cleaning. But as Reuters and Gizmodo reported recently, Roomba’s manufacturer, iRobot, may plan to share those maps of the layouts of people’s private homes with its commercial partners.
Security and privacy breaches are built in
Like the Roomba, other smart devices can be programmed to share our private information with advertisers over back-channels of which we are not aware. In a case even more intimate than the Roomba business plan, a smartphone-controllable erotic massage device, called WeVibe, gathered information about how often, with what settings and at what times of day it was used. The WeVibe app sent that data back to its manufacturer – which agreed to pay a multi-million-dollar legal settlement when customers found out and objected to the invasion of privacy.
Those back-channels are also a serious security weakness. The computer manufacturer Lenovo, for instance, used to sell its computers with a program called “Superfish” preinstalled. The program was intended to allow Lenovo – or companies that paid it – to secretly insert targeted advertisements into the results of users’ web searches. The way it did so was downright dangerous: It hijacked web browsers’ traffic without the user’s knowledge – including web communications users thought were securely encrypted, like connections to banks and online stores for financial transactions.
The underlying problem is ownership
One key reason we don’t control our devices is that the companies that make them seem to think – and definitely act like – they still own them, even after we’ve bought them. A person may purchase a nice-looking box full of electronics that can function as a smartphone, the corporate argument goes, but they buy a license only to use the software inside. The companies say they still own the software, and because they own it, they can control it. It’s as if a car dealer sold a car, but claimed ownership of the motor.
This sort of arrangement is destroying the concept of basic property ownership. John Deere has already told farmers that they don’t really own their tractors but just license the software – so they can’t fix their own farm equipment or even take it to an independent repair shop. The farmers are objecting, but maybe some people are willing to let things slide when it comes to smartphones, which are often bought on a payment installment plan and traded in as soon as possible.
How long will it be before we realize they’re trying to apply the same rules to our smart homes, smart televisions in our living rooms and bedrooms, smart toilets and internet-enabled cars?
A return to feudalism?
The issue of who gets to control property has a long history. In the feudal system of medieval Europe, the king owned almost everything, and everyone else’s property rights depended on their relationship with the king. Peasants lived on land granted by the king to a local lord, and workers didn’t always even own the tools they used for farming or other trades like carpentry and blacksmithing.
Over the centuries, Western economies and legal systems evolved into our modern commercial arrangement: People and private companies often buy and sell items themselves and own land, tools and other objects outright. Apart from a few basic government rules like environmental protection and public health, ownership comes with no trailing strings attached.
This system means that a car company can’t stop me from painting my car a shocking shade of pink or from getting the oil changed at whatever repair shop I choose. I can even try to modify or fix my car myself. The same is true for my television, my farm equipment and my refrigerator.
Yet the expansion of the internet of things seems to be bringing us back to something like that old feudal model, where people didn’t own the items they used every day. In this 21st-century version, companies are using intellectual property law – intended to protect ideas – to control physical objects consumers think they own.
Intellectual property control
My phone is a Samsung Galaxy. Google controls the operating system and the Google Apps that make an Android smartphone work well. Google licenses them to Samsung, which makes its own modification to the Android interface, and sublicenses the right to use my own phone to me – or at least that is the argument that Google and Samsung make. Samsung cuts deals with lots of software providers which want to take my data for their own use.
But this model is flawed, in my view. We need the right to fix our own property. We need the right to kick invasive advertisers out of our devices. We need the ability to shut down the information back-channels to advertisers, not merely because we don’t love being spied on, but because those back doors are security risks, as the stories of Superfish and the hacked fish tank show. If we don’t have the right to control our own property, we don’t really own it. We are just digital peasants, using the things that we have bought and paid for at the whim of our digital lord.
Even though things look grim right now, there is hope. These problems quickly become public relations nightmares for the companies involved. And there is serious bipartisan support for right-to-repair bills that restore some powers of ownership to consumers.
Recent years have seen progress in reclaiming ownership from would-be digital barons. What is important is that we recognize and reject what these companies are trying to do, buy accordingly, vigorously exercise our rights to use, repair and modify our smart property, and support efforts to strengthen those rights. The idea of property is still powerful in our cultural imagination, and it won’t die easily. That gives us a window of opportunity. I hope we will take it.
https://theconversation.com/the-internet-of-things-is-sending-us-back-to-the-middle-ages-81435
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How cool is that, post-Brexit Britain can aspire to be in the same league as Turkey and the Ukraine. The crippling political debate, the social unrest, the economic meltdown… all to reach this historical milestone.
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Brexit: German minister sees model for Turkey and Ukraine
A “smart” Brexit deal could serve as a model for the EU’s future relations with other non-EU states, German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel says.
26 December 2017
Turkey and Ukraine were two states that could benefit from the template, he told Germany’s Funke media group.
He did not see either joining the EU any time soon, so alternative forms of closer co-operation were needed.
The UK’s future relationship with the EU, which it is due to leave on 29 March 2019, is still being negotiated.
The two sides agreed this month on the three “divorce” issues that took up the first phase of negotiations: how much the UK owes the EU, what happens to the Northern Ireland border and what happens to UK citizens living elsewhere in the EU and EU citizens living in the UK.
In June 2016, the UK voted in a referendum to leave the EU after more than four decades of membership.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-42482873
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Brexit is a ‘nationalist spasm’: Adonis resigns as infrastructure tsar
Labour peer urges his party to support second referendum as he steps down as chair of national commission
30 December 2017
Brexit has caused a “nervous breakdown” in Whitehall, the former Labour minister Andrew Adonis has said following his resignation as chair of the government-backed National Infrastructure Commission.
Lord Adonis resigned on Friday in protest at Theresa May’s management of Britain’s departure from the EU, describing the process as “a dangerous populist and nationalist spasm worthy of Donald Trump”.
He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Saturday morning: “Almost the entire government machine is spending its time seeking to wrench us out of the key economic and political institutions of the EU. Everything else is going by the board.”
Adonis said there should be a second referendum on the terms of the Brexit deal and that people like him who are in leadership positions should be “arguing passionately with the British people as to why staying in the EU is the right thing to do”.
He said those who voted to leave were “not stupid” but argued that Brexit was not defined before the referendum and people should be given “a new say” on the choice between May’s deal and staying in the EU.
“I hope we can bring the common sense of the British people to bear when they realise what the consequences are,” he said.
The former transport secretary headed the body that makes recommendations to the government on projects such as the high-speed rail link HS2. Most recently he recommended that 1m new homes be built in the “brain belt” spanning Oxford, Cambridge and Milton Keynes.
Adonis has become increasingly outspoken on a series of policy issues in recent months, including tuition fees and vice-chancellors’ pay.
He told BBC Breakfast earlier on Saturday: “My differences with the government had become too great, not only on Brexit, which I think is being handled very badly … but increasingly Brexit is infecting the whole conduct of Whitehall. We’re seeing that including in infrastructure itself.”
His strongly worded resignation letter accuses the prime minister of becoming the voice of Ukip and pursuing policies that would leave Britain in splendid isolation.
“I am afraid I must now step down because of fundamental differences, on infrastructure and beyond, which simply can’t be bridged,” he wrote.
Adonis said he was duty bound to oppose the government’s flagship EU withdrawal bill, which will reach the House of Lords in the new year. He described the it as “the worst legislation of my lifetime”.
He said Britain could have abided by the result of the 2016 referendum and left the EU “without rupturing our essential European trade and political relations”. Instead, the prime minister had “become the voice of Ukip and the extreme nationalist rightwing” of her party.
Adonis said he would have felt compelled to step down anyway over the transport secretary’s decision to bail out Stagecoach and Virgin on the East Coast rail franchise. “It is increasingly clear that the bailout is a nakedly political manoeuvre by Chris Grayling,” he said. He described the move as extraordinary and indefensible, saying that it would cost taxpayers “hundreds of millions of pounds, possibly billions”.
Grayling announced that a new partnership would take on responsibility for intercity trains and track operations on the route in 2020. Virgin Trains East Coast, involving Stagecoach and Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin, had previously agreed to pay the government £3.3bn to run the service until 2023.
Adonis said he had tried to warn the government of the cost to the taxpayer of the bailout, but that a senior official had tried to stop him. He is said to have text messages from a senior official at the Department for Transport, warning it may be more difficult to cooperate with him if he attacked the decision, and that it could be awkward for him to attend its annual party.
He is also said to have sent a direct text message warning to Philip Hammond, the chancellor, which went unanswered.
Adonis’s departure, which was confirmed by commission officials,makes him the second senior Labour figure to resign from a government-backed role, following Alan Milburn’s decision to step down as chair of the social mobility commission, citing May’s failure to make progress on the issue.
It is unclear why Adonis, who was appointed to the role in April, chose now to resign, when May made clear in her conference speech in 2016 that she planned to take Britain out of the single market and the customs union.
Before the official announcement of his resignation, an early version of Adonis’s letter to May was leaked to the media. When asked how this happened, Adonis told Today that “dirty tricks” had been played but that he would be speaking “unmuzzled” from now on.
Nick Timothy, May’s former chief of staff, tweeted that the recent behaviour of Labour appointees was “making it harder to pick people from different party backgrounds”.
Adonis has also been highly critical of his own party’s stance on Brexit, urging the shadow Brexit secretary Keir Starmer’s team to advocate remaining in the single market, and suggesting Labour would eventually end up backing a second referendum.
A Labour spokesperson said: “Theresa May’s weak and divided government can’t even command the confidence of its own advisers. With each resignation, the stench of decay around the government grows stronger and stronger. The Tories are in office, but not in power.”
Vince Cable, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, expressed sadness about Adonis’s departure. “Lord Adonis is one of the most thoughtful politicians around. This is why he has so many friends and political admirers beyond the Labour party,” he said.
“It is, then, a great shame that he is no longer leading Britain’s infrastructure programme. Yet he felt there was no other option but to resign because of the way Brexit has been so badly mishandled.
“Notably, he is deeply concerned by how the Conservative leadership has pandered to its right wing over the single market and customs union, leaving which will badly – and needlessly – damage our trade.”
Senior government sources played down the significance of his departure, claiming his position had been under threat over his recent habit of engaging in vehement Twitter spats.
They also cited his criticism of government policy. “He’s been moving closer to the exit door with each new onslaught he makes against Brexit,” they said.
The former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith said: “Lord Adonis’s departure is long overdue.
“It’s a bit rich for him to pontificate on what he calls populism, but what most would refer to as democracy, when he himself has never been elected by a public vote. He has instead relied on preferment from others.”
Adonis was an adviser to Tony Blair and a key driver of the decision to impose tuition fees on university students, but he has been strongly critical of recent changes to the scheme.
The large-scale infrastructure projects he championed are likely to go ahead without his chairmanship, because his approach is shared by the chancellor, who is keen to boost investment to offset the impact of Brexit on the economy.
Full text of Adonis’s letter:
Dear prime minister,
The hardest thing in politics is to bring about lasting change for the better, and I believe in cooperation across parties to achieve it.
In this spirit I was glad to accept reappointment last year as chair of the independent National Infrastructure Commission, when you also reaffirmed your support for HS2, which will help overcome England’s north-south divide when it opens in just eight years’ time. I would like to thank you for your courtesy in our personal dealings.
The commission has done good work in the past 27 months, thanks to dedicated public servants and commissioners. Sir John Armitt, my deputy chair, and Phil Graham, chief executive, have been brilliant throughout. I am particularly proud of our plans for equipping the UK with world-class 4G and 5G mobile systems; for Crossrail 2 in London and HS3 to link the northern cities; and for transformational housing growth in the Oxford-Milton Keynes-Cambridge corridor.
I hope these plans are implemented without delay. However, my work at the commission has become increasingly clouded by disagreement with the government, and after much consideration I am writing to resign because of fundamental differences which simply cannot be bridged.
The European Union withdrawal bill is the worst legislation of my lifetime. It arrives soon in the House of Lords and I feel duty bound to oppose it relentlessly from the Labour benches.
Brexit is a populist and nationalist spasm worthy of Donald Trump. After the narrow referendum vote, a form of associate membership of the EU might have been attempted without rupturing Britain’s key trading and political alliances. Instead, by allying with Ukip and the Tory hard right to wrench Britain out of the key economic and political institutions of modern Europe, you are pursuing a course fraught with danger.
Even within Ireland, there are set to be barriers between people and trade. If Brexit happens, taking us back into Europe will become the mission of our children’s generation, who will marvel at your acts of destruction.
A responsible government would be leading the British people to stay in Europe while also tackling, with massive vigour, the social and economic problems within Britain which contributed to the Brexit vote. Unfortunately, your policy is the reverse.
The government is hurtling towards the EU’s emergency exit with no credible plan for the future of British trade and European cooperation, all the while ignoring – beyond soundbites and inadequate programmes – the crises of housing, education, the NHS and social and regional inequality which are undermining the fabric of our nation and feeding a populist surge.
What Britain needs in 2018 is a radically reforming government in the tradition of [Clement] Attlee, working tirelessly to eradicate social problems while strengthening Britain’s international alliances. This is a cause I have long advocated, and acted upon in government, and I intend to pursue it with all the energy I can muster.
Britain must be deeply engaged, responsible and consistent as a European power. When in times past we have isolated ourselves from the continent in the name of “empire” or “sovereignty”, we were soon sucked back in. This will inevitably happen again, given our power, trade, democratic values and sheer geography.
Putin and the rise of authoritarian nationalism in Poland and Hungary are flashing red lights. As Edmund Burke so wisely wrote, “people will not look forwards to posterity who do not look backwards to their ancestors”.
However, I would have been obliged to resign from the commission at this point anyway because of the transport secretary’s indefensible decision to bail out the Stagecoach/Virgin East Coast rail franchise. The bailout will cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of pounds, possibly billions if other loss-making rail companies demand equal treatment. It benefits only the billionaire owners of these companies and their shareholders, while pushing rail fares still higher and threatening national infrastructure investment. It is even more inexcusable given the Brexit squeeze on public spending.
The only rationale I can discern for the bailout is as a cynical political manoeuvre by Chris Grayling, a hard-right Brexiteer, to avoid following my 2009 precedent when National Express defaulted on its obligations to the state for the same East Coast franchise because it too had overbid for the contract. I set up a successful public operator to take over East Coast services and banned National Express from bidding for new contracts. The same should have been done in this case. Yet, astonishingly, Stagecoach has not only been bailed out, it remains on the shortlist for the next three rail franchises.
The East Coast affair will inevitably come under close scrutiny by the National Audit Office and the public accounts committee, and I need to be free to set out serious public interest concerns. I hope the PAC calls Sir Richard Branson and Sir Brian Souter to give evidence. I am ready to share troubling evidence with the PAC and other parliamentary committees investigating the bailout.
As you know, I raised these concerns with the chancellor and the transport secretary as soon as the bailout became apparent from the small print of an odd policy statement on 29 November majoring on reversing Beeching rail closures of the 1960s. I received no response from either minister beyond inappropriate requests to desist.
Brexit is causing a nervous breakdown across Whitehall and conduct unworthy of Her Majesty’s government. I am told, by those of longer experience, that it resembles Suez and the bitter industrial strife of the 1970s, both of which endangered not only national integrity but the authority of the state itself.
You occupy one of the most powerful offices in the history of the world, the heir of Churchill, Attlee and Gladstone. Whatever our differences, I wish you well in guiding our national destiny at this critical time.
Yours sincerely,
Andrew Adonis
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McMafia makes chilling TV. But the reality is even worse
The BBC’s caviar knives and hired killers reflect a less glamorous truth: Russian organised crime is all too at home in the UK
3 January 2018
There are many gripping moments in McMafia, the BBC’s lavish new television drama featuring Russian oligarchs and organised crime. Who knew that a caviar knife could be so deadly? Or that hired killers could run amok in the Home Counties, leaving a bloody message from Moscow all over the tasteful furnishings?
For Russia purists, there are a few quibbles. Would Alex Godman – the British-educated son of a Russian gangster, played by James Norton – really talk to Dad in accent-free English? And where exactly are the bodyguards? They are an obligatory feature of life for any self-respecting Moscow businessman but strangely missing here when their tough-guy skills might come in handy. But the ideas underlying McMafia – taken from the nonfiction book by the journalist Misha Glenny – are surely right. International crime syndicates are able to shift huge sums of money around the world, still. This is thanks to a financial and banking system that allows them to hide behind anonymous company structures, and asks few questions.
Investigative journalists have been busy peeling back these layers of offshore secrecy. In 2016, the Guardian and media partners published the Panama Papers, based on records from the offshore law firm Mossack Fonseca. Mossack specialised in setting up opaque shell companies. As Bastian Obermayer, the German reporter who got the leaked data, put it, its clients were frequently “scumbags”. We found drug dealers who might have sprung from McMafia. And arms smugglers, oligarchs, defence contractors, gambling fraudsters and kleptocrats. Plus politicians, sports stars and prime ministers. Vladimir Putin’s old friend – a St Petersburg cellist called Sergei Roldugin – was linked to the flow of billions of dollars from offshore accounts. The cash went from Russia, to Panama, the British Virgin Islands, and back to Russia again.
In one telling scene from Monday’s opening McMafia episode, Alex Godman discusses how he might magic funds to Mumbai “without leaving a trace”. His answer: by setting up an elaborate chain of companies in different tax havens. A “special purpose vehicle” in the Caymans would lend money to another similar vehicle in the Bahamas. And so on. This is classic money laundering. It may sound like fiction. Depressingly enough, it’s real.
Not everyone who uses offshore vehicles is a crook. But the main takeaway from the Panama and the Paradise Papers, published again by the Guardian and media partners in November, is that the offshore industry is not a minor, shadowy part of our economic system: it is the system. The burden of taxation has moved away from multinational corporations and the rich to ordinary people. Offshore has made this happen. We – those of us who pay our taxes – are the dupes.
Glenny is right about something else: the central role of the UK, and London, in facilitating the flow of money. We flatter ourselves by thinking that this takes place somewhere far away. Much of it happens on our doorstep, among the manicured terraces of Belgravia and Kensington, where much of McMafia is lusciously shot. British law firms, estate agents and company formation agents are the chief enablers.
Take one micro-example. The London solicitors’ firm of Child & Child looks respectable enough: an office overlooking Buckingham Palace gardens, a website featuring neoclassical Georgian mansions and a lot of fluted columns. In 2015, Child & Child set up a secretive offshore company in the British Virgin Islands, a leading UK tax haven. The firm’s beneficiaries were Leyla and Arzu Aliyeva, the daughters of the president of Azerbaijan.
Like children from other ruling post-Soviet dynasties, the Aliyevas own extensive property in London, worth many millions of pounds. The new offshore company, Exaltation Ltd, was set up to hold their real estate assets. Child & Child was supposed to identify the Aliyevas as “politically exposed” individuals. This would have triggered extra banking checks into the family’s wealth. It didn’t. Nothing happened to the firm. It wouldn’t comment.
Meanwhile, international money launderers have a distinct preference for the kind of companies they like to use: UK ones, with posh-sounding names. Between 2010 and 2014, Russian insiders moved at least $20bn of dirty money from Moscow into the western financial system. The scheme was ingenious. It involved Moldovan judges, a Latvian bank and a series of hub-companies, incorporated at Companies House in London. These were “managed” by firms sitting in remote tax havens.
Before writing our first report on this, I posted letters to the Marshall Islands, a sunny atoll nation in the Pacific. I never received a reply. This wasn’t a surprise: these “managers” were brass-plate entities, with no meaningful existence. (I could, I reflected, have put my right to reply letters in a bottle and chucked them into the sea.) The UK National Crime Agency expressed interest in our findings but said there was little it could do. The perpetrators were far away. It was all a bit difficult.
Banks too shrugged their shoulders. High-street banks and foreign subsidiaries with offices in London processed $738m in transactions from what was called the Global Laundromat. All of them had sophisticated units dedicated to rooting out financial crime. The problem was volume: billions worth of payments each day. “If you are on the back end, you are kind of playing whack-a-mole trying to pick this up,” one bank source told me.
What then can be done about the McMafia culture, thrillingly brought to life on our TV screens, and doubtless featuring more violence and gore in the episodes to come? In May 2016, David Cameron promised a new public register that would for the first time identify the “significant” person behind a UK company. It was a start. Two months later Cameron exited as prime minister.
Theresa May’s government has shown no interest in taking these modest reforms further. One measure would be a game-changer: for the UK to compel its overseas territories to bring in similar public registers, which would disclose who owned what. More than half of all companies from the Panama Papers were set up in the British Virgin Islands.
True, Russian oligarchs like McMafia’s Dimitri Godman might get round this by using nephews, friends or chauffeurs as proxies. Or by simply lying. Nevertheless, the reform would bring new transparency. It would curtail the culture of anonymous ownership that has blighted London’s property market. It might show that the UK is serious about tackling organised crime. The consequences of McMafia are all around us: a divided society, and a capital that has become a playground for the internationally dodgy. They steal at home and enjoy legal protections here.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/03/mcmafia-tv-bbc-russian-organised-crime-uk
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Children should be made aware of their value outside of ‘likes’, says charity worker Grace Barrett
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Schools ‘should help children with social media risk’
January 4, 2017
Schools should play a bigger role in preparing children for social media’s emotional demands as they move from primary to secondary school, England’s children’s commissioner says.
Anne Longfield said she was worried many pupils at that stage became anxious about their identity and craved likes and comments for validation.
Her study said children aged eight to 12 found it hard to manage the impact.
The government said it was working with schools on online safety education.
The report into the effects of social media on eight to 12-year-olds claimed many children were over-dependent on “likes” and comments for social validation.
It said children approach a “cliff-edge” as they move from primary to secondary school, when social media becomes more important in their lives.
The report spoke to 32 children in eight focus groups, aged eight to 12, and found some saying:
– “If I got 150 likes, I’d be like, ‘that’s pretty cool, it means they like you'” – Aaron, 11
– “I just edit my photos to make sure I look nice” – Annie, 11
– “My mum takes pictures of me on Snapchat… I don’t like it when your friends and family take a picture of you when you don’t want them to” – Hassan, eight
– “I saw a pretty girl and everything she has I want, my aim is to be like her” – Bridie, 11
Ms Longfield called on schools and parents to prepare children emotionally for the “significant risks” of social media as they move schools and meet new classmates – many of whom have their own phones.
“It’s really when they hit secondary school that all of these things come together,” she told BBC News.
“They find themselves chasing likes, chasing validation, being very anxious about their appearance online and offline and feeling that they can’t disconnect – because that will be seen as socially damaging.”
Although most social media platforms have a minimum age limit of 13, the report said three-quarters of children aged 10 to 12 already had accounts.
Ms Longfield said social media provided “great benefits” to children but was also exposing them to “significant risks emotionally”.
She suggested compulsory digital literacy and online resilience lessons for year six and seven pupils, so that they learn about the “emotional side of social media”.
Parents should also prepare their children, she said, by helping them “navigate the emotional rollercoaster” of the negative aspects of social media.
What parents and pupils say
Ella Brookbanks, mother to nine-year-old Sophie and 15-year-old Bradley, said her teenage son is “expected” to be on social media.
“He seems to want to buy things in order to take pictures of it to send to his friends to show that he has these type of things,” she told BBC News.
“It’s a recognition thing – ‘look what I have, look what I can get, like me’.”
She says her daughter “doesn’t see that side of it just yet” but worries Sophie will experience the negative side to social media when she starts secondary school.
Parent Trevor said his 12-year-old twin daughters had moved schools as a result of the pressure from social media, but admits they “can’t walk away” from it.
He told BBC Radio 5 Live: “I can’t say to them ‘you can’t use that’, when I use it”.
He said teachers lacked the skills to educate children and said the approach by politicians was “disappointing”.
What can parents do?
Matthew Reed, chief executive of the Children’s Society, urged parents to have “open conversations” with their children about the sites and apps they use.
“This can include looking through their ‘friends’ lists together and finding out how their child knows different people,” he said.
“Check their privacy settings and get children to think about what information and photos they are comfortable with others having access to.
“By encouraging these open conversations, if your child is worried about something online they are more likely to tell you about it,” he added.
Grace Barrett, co-founder of children’s mental health charity the Self-Esteem Team, said it largely fell to parents to teach their children about social media.
“Teachers can’t be equipped to do everything,” she said.
“We should be helping young people understand that their value lies outside of ‘likes’ and outside of what they look like.”
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-42563173
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“It is a stigmatising insult to the mentally ill (who are mostly well behaved and well meaning) to be lumped with Mr Trump (who is neither).”
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Trump’s mental health and why people are discussing it
5 December 2018
It’s a discussion that Donald Trump’s opponents have had before – is the president mentally fit for office?
And it’s filling Twitter and the news sites again, reignited by the release of a new book by a New York journalist.
The president’s idiosyncrasy, strong personality and a speaking style unfettered by years in Washington may have changed politics in the year since he took office. But those characteristics have also contributed to a climate in which his critics have gone further and further questioning his fitness for office, even citing mental health issues as evidence.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42580762
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“I am a genius” is just the kind of thing that only a madman would say. True genius, like true beauty, is humble and unaware. #stablegenius
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Margaret Atwood faces feminist backlash on social media over #MeToo
The Canadian author’s defence of due process for those accused of sexual misconduct sparked online ire
15 January 2018
Canadian author Margaret Atwood is facing a social media backlash after voicing concerns about the #MeToo movement and calling for due process in the case of a former university professor accused of sexual misconduct.
Writing in the Globe and Mail, Atwood said the #MeToo movement, which emerged in the wake of sexual assault allegations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, was the symptom of a broken legal system and had been “seen as a massive wake up call”.
However, she wondered where North American society would go from here. “If the legal system is bypassed because it is seen as ineffectual, what will take its place? Who will be the new power brokers?” Atwood asked.
She raised the possibility that the answer could leave women divided. “In times of extremes, extremists win. Their ideology becomes a religion, anyone who doesn’t puppet their views is seen as an apostate, a heretic or a traitor, and moderates in the middle are annihilated.”
The 78-year-old author of The Handmaid’s Tale drew a parallel between these concerns and those who accused her of being a “bad feminist” after she signed an open letter last year calling for due process for a University of British Columbia professor facing allegations of sexual misconduct.
The university’s administration released few details on the case against Steven Galloway, the former chair of the creative writing program, saying only that he was facing “serious allegations”. After a months-long investigation he was fired, but the official findings were never released. The faculty association said in a statement that all but one of the allegations, including the most serious allegation, were not substantiated.
In her piece, Atwood pointed to the university’s lack of transparency around the allegations and noted that Galloway had been asked to sign a confidentiality agreement.
“The public – including me – was left with the impression that this man was a violent serial rapist, and everyone was free to attack him publicly, since under the agreement he had signed, he couldn’t say anything to defend himself,” she wrote. “A fair-minded person would now withhold judgment as to guilt until the report and the evidence are available for us to see.”
She likened the affair to the Salem witch trials, in that guilt was assumed of those who were accused. This idea of guilt by accusation had at times been used to usher in a better world or justify new forms of oppression, she wrote. “But understandable and temporary vigilante justice can morph into a culturally solidified lynch-mob habit, in which the available mode of justice is thrown out the window, and extralegal power structures are put into place and maintained.”
Many online took issue with her view. “If @MargaretAtwood would like to stop warring amongst women, she should stop declaring war against younger, less powerful women and start listening,” wrote one person on Twitter. “In today’s dystopian news: One of the most important feminist voices of our time shits on less powerful women to uphold the power of her powerful male friend,” wrote another.
Some accused Atwood of using her position of power to silence those who had come forward with allegations against Galloway. “‘Unsubstantiated’ does not mean innocent. It means there was not enough evidence to convict,” read one tweet.
Others defended Atwood. “Genuinely upsetting to see Margaret Atwood attacked for pointing out that ‘innocent until proven guilty’ is the key to a civilised society. That has to still be a thing, yes? How can that suddenly be a bad thing?”
In a statement to the Guardian, Atwood pointed to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, echoing an earlier tweet in which she defended her view by noting that endorsing basic human rights for everyone was not equivalent to warring against women.
Her opinion piece, she said, was meant to highlight the choice we now face; fix the system, bypass it or “burn the system down and replace it with, presumably, another system”.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/15/margaret-atwood-feminist-backlash-metoo
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@elainecorden
Margaret Atwood has been told—repeatedly, in person, with compassion and without rancour—the painful & chilling effect of her involvement with UBC Accountable. She has been told of specific instances of pain, and given additional details wrt the case. She knows. She doesn’t care.
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Margaret Atwood’s controversial stance on #MeToo suggests that power and social status matter more than gender. Sexual predators are individuals who have the power to do what they want and get away with it. They just happen to be men, more often than women, because men are more often in positions of power. The members of certain elites (regardless of gender) defend themselves and their circle, showing little sympathy for less privileged people. The “war of the sexes” doesn’t quite describe certain situations as accurately as the class struggle.
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Margaret Atwood faces feminist backlash for #MeToo op-ed
16 January 2018
Author Margaret Atwood has sparked a Twitter storm after a provocative column on the Me Too anti-sexual harassment movement.
Her op-ed published in the Globe and Mail newspaper questioned the impact of the movement against inappropriate sexual behaviour.
Ms Atwood called the movement a “symptom” of a broken legal system.
She also defended her support for due process in the case of a male writer accused of sexual harassment.
Ms Atwood, the Canadian author of the dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, is the latest in a number of celebrities to face a backlash after weighing in on the movement sparked by the Harvey Weinstein scandal.
French actress Catherine Deneuve recently apologised to sexual assault victims after signing on to a letter that argued the campaign against sexual harassment had gone too far.
In the column, Ms Atwood says the Me Too movement “has been very effective and has been seen as a massive wake-up call. But what next?”
She says she is concerned the University of British Columbia denied due process to professor and fellow author Steven Galloway, who first faced accusations of bullying and sexual harassment in 2015.
In 2016, members of Canada’s literary community, including Ms Atwood, rallied behind Mr Galloway.
They penned an open letter to Mr Galloway’s employer defending his right to due process following his suspension over undefined “serious allegations”.
Media later reported accusations of bullying, sexual harassment and sexual assault.
A number of authors have since removed their names from the controversial letter.
Mr Galloway was dismissed by the university and is fighting his termination. He faces no criminal charges.
Of the criticism for adding her name to the letter, Ms Atwood wrote: “And now, it seems, I am conducting a War on Women, like the misogynistic, rape-enabling Bad Feminist that I am”.
She added: “In times of extremes, extremists win. Their ideology becomes a religion, anyone who doesn’t puppet their views is seen as an apostate, a heretic or a traitor, and moderates in the middle are annihilated.”
Ms Atwood also offers misgivings about the movement going too far, warning of the dangers of “vigilante justice”, which she says “begins as a response to a lack of justice”.
The column polarised debate on social media, with supporters praising her for challenging convention and for thoughtful criticism.
But she faced a fierce reaction against the piece.
Detractors criticised her likening of the Me Too movement to the Salem witchcraft trials and accused her of failing women by supporting a powerful male friend.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42708522
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“Facebook cutting media from newsfeeds to fight fake news? Actually, there is a real danger the changes will exacerbate that problem.”
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Facebook cuts back on news to give you more time with advertisers
16 january 2018
“Dear friends, it’s not us, it’s you. You are the problem. You’ve stopped sharing every intimate detail of your lives and we can’t monetise you as well as we’d like. So we’re changing our relationship to convince you to share more, so we can show you more ads.”
Not an exact quote from Mark Zuckerberg, of course, but a rough translation. In a statement released on January 12, the company’s founder announced new changes to the platform’s news feed that would prioritise posts from friends and family over content posted by news organisations and businesses.
News and other content will appear less in people’s newsfeeds, unless it is shared by users and widely commented on. The company also said it would amend its rankings to only show “quality news” – though it did not give details of what that might mean.
Advertising will not be affected – you will still be bombarded with ads whether you want them or not – and whether they are relevant to you or not.
Zuckerberg said the new changes were designed to make the platform better. “By focusing on bringing people closer together – whether it’s with family and friends, or around important moments in the world – we can help make sure that Facebook is time well spent,” he said in a post to the Facebook site.
But let’s be clear, the tech giant’s latest move to change its algorithm to encourage more personal interaction is not about us – it’s about money.
Facebook has been worried for months about its “context collapse” problem. Users have become much more wary about posting personal details online and, as people’s newsfeeds fill with content produced by publishers and other influencers, audiences have become passive consumers rather than sharers.
Research from the US shows that adults spend about 50 minutes a day on the social networking giant – though reports suggest that this is decreasing. Facebook’s audience is also ageing, as – for some time now – younger users are turning to rivals such as Snapchat to share their lives.
Monetising audiences
Facebook’s business model is built around selling vast amounts of our data – highly sophisticated representations of our digital selves and our emotions – to advertisers. But increasingly Facebook users are posting links to third party websites – such as news and infotainment – and less about their personal lives.
The company has been working for some time to try to encourage more personal sharing. The “On this Day” feature, for example, was an effort to encourage users to share sentimental updates about themselves. There is no accounting for sentiment, though, as On That Day you might have lost a loved one or been sacked from your job.
Audiences have been seeing more reminders in their newsfeeds to reach out to friends on birthdays and special occasions, and more suggested posts prompting users to share their lives online. By accessing content on users’ phones, Facebook has also been trying to convince you to share more. Images you may have taken on your phone are included as suggested posts, for example. Facebook Live, similarly, has been heavily pushed to encourage personal sharing.
For nervous news publishers, this is ulcer territory. Many are worried they will see their traffic fall off a cliff in the coming weeks as Facebook effectively turns off the tap and all but removes their content from audience newsfeeds.
Chasing eyeballs
A small number of niche news brands that are making a significant return on investment from digital platforms have gone behind a paywall and, as a result, have kept an arms-length relationship with social media. Content is available to share, some content is free to read, but they are not as reliant on ad revenue from social media traffic.
But most of the rest of the news media has invested heavily in building up a Facebook presence – and in staffing and technology to support that social strategy. Desperate editors have been chasing audiences on social media, feeling secure in the hope that the millions of hits they were getting online from social media traffic would somehow translate into a viable business model. It hasn’t.
Instead it has strengthened Facebook’s position as gatekeeper, while adding hugely to the tech giant’s bottom line. Facebook, along with Google, enjoys a near monopoly position in the digital sphere, with an estimated 84% of the total online ad spending in 2017 going to the two companies.
Facebook operates with near impunity, highly protective of its all-important rankings algorithm. It has become the world’s biggest information sharing site, but can control at an individual level what two billion people see on their newsfeeds on a daily basis.
Democratic deficit
There is an overriding democratic concern here: Facebook effectively has the power to shut down news it doesn’t like. There is no suggestion it is doing so, but we should all be worried that this level of power is vested in one company.
Facebook’s latest move effectively means that if publishers want their content seen by audiences, they will have to pay Facebook via advertising – or negotiate new deals that will further erode their editorial independence, and enhance Facebook’s market dominance
It does nothing to stop the spread of so-called “fake news” – in fact it ingrains the problem. While there is no silver bullet, Facebook’s efforts to date on fake news have so far been lamentable – as I have written here before. There is a real danger that the new ranking changes will exacerbate that problem.
Highly sharable content that attracts lots of debate and commentary – the kind that Facebook wants to encourage – may not be true, fair, balanced or accurate, and certainly may not be verified.
This is dangerous territory for news publishers. The “filter bubble” phenomenon, whereby audiences only ever see content that matches their preferences, will grow.
Worst of all, opposing views and important debates – the very serendipity of the newspaper itself – may be lost forever in the new social media world.
https://theconversation.com/facebook-cuts-back-on-news-to-give-you-more-time-with-advertisers-90053
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The American far right is crashing after its Trump victory high
While radical-right discourse dominates US politics, far-right leaders haven’t seized this moment
17 January 2018
When I assessed Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office for my book The Far Right in America, I concluded that “the Trump administration is a chaotic beehive of various factions, which are isolated from and opposed to each other, and all vie for the attention of the president”. In essence, little has changed, even if many of the personalities have since moved on. And the reason is simple: this is how Trump likes it!
Within the White House, the far right has been practically decimated. With Steve Bannon’s departure, and recent excommunication, the Breitbart faction has become marginalized. Clowns like “Dr” Sebastian Gorka have been kicked out, while others, including his wife, Katharine Gorka, work under the shadow of being purged, too. The attorney general, Jeff Sessions, has fallen out of Trump’s favor, but remains influential within the Department of Justice and a continuing threat to the rights and protections of minorities.
The only one to (so far) survive the president’s ire, despite being close to both Bannon and Sessions, has been Stephen Miller, who almost effortlessly transformed from Sessions’ communications director into Trump’s senior policy adviser. His CNN interview earlier this month might have jeopardized his strong position, however, bringing not just more scrutiny from liberals like the former Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe, but also from the “audience of one” that Jake Tapper referred to. Because while Trump loves people who go out in the trenches of the (liberal) media to defend him, he does not tolerate “losers”, however he defines that term, as an unprecedented list of political has-beens evidences – anyone still remember “the Mooch”?
Outside the White House, the situation of the far-right movement is not much better. The extreme right, hiding behind the term “alt-right”, of racists like David Duke and Richard Spencer has expressed great political ambitions, but has been unable to bring together more than 100 people since the deadly demonstration in Charlottesville in August. They remain an online troll army, which mainly survives because of the disproportionate attention of the (mostly liberal) media. They have no political relevance outside of their violent potential.
At first sight, the situation of the radical right seems the exact opposite, with authoritarianism and nativism dominating the political debate and presidential tweets. But while radical right discourse dominates US politics, and radical right policies have become mainstream within broad sections of the “conservative” movement, radical right leaders and organizations are struggling to adapt to the changed environment.
Within the Republican party, longstanding radical right politicians like Dana Rohrabacher of California and Steve King of Iowa might have become even more open about their nativism and support for Vladimir Putin, but they remain fairly marginal within both Congress and the White House. At the same time, at the local and state level, many establishment Republicans now run radical right campaigns, hoping to profit from the illustrious Trump effect, but it is doubtful they will actually vote as radical rightists (if they get elected). And even if they do, it is doubtful it will be enough for the still radicalizing base, who in 2016 considered former “Tea Party warriors” as “establishment Republicans”.
Outside of the party, the radical right movement is going through withdrawal after its 2016 Trump high. Stalwarts like Breitbart have not just lost their man in the White House but also their distinct voice within the rightwing media landscape. As Nicole Hemmer has persuasively argued, with the conservative media now fully embracing the president, Breitbart has become “just another right-wing Trump cheerleader”. Rather than setting the agenda for Trump directly, radical right media like Breitbart and the Daily Caller can at best hope to influence Fox News anchors like Tucker Carlson and shows like Fox and Friends, who have the most direct line to the president: his television set.
Even after one year in office, it remains difficult to determine the state of the far right in Trump’s America. There is no doubt that the president himself has strong far-right instincts, as his many authoritarian, nativist, and even racist statements show over and over. But Trump is neither an ideologue nor a politician. His instincts tend to lead to shoddy executive orders, which are shot down later, rather than effective policies that survive judicial scrutiny. Hence, his administration’s policies have been mostly conservative (on steroids) rather than radical-right.
At the same time, his personality and power have transformed both the mainstream and radical right from relatively strong, independent movements into increasingly loose collections of individuals and organizations who chase the president’s favor at whatever price, including ideological consistency and organizational independence. This has led to a situation where the differences between the old right (eg Fox News) and the new right (eg Breitbart) have become negligible, marginalizing the latter rather than the former. And that is just how Trump likes it.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/17/us-far-right-trump-politics
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massalao 