USA
False claims, new rules: Election Day arrives in the US
Elections Tuesday were testing new voting restrictions in some Republican-controlled states as officials got a chance to counter a year’s worth of misinformation about voting security.
Officials said demonstrating secure, consistent and fair practices could help reassure those who still have doubts about last year’s presidential election as they begin preparations for next year’s midterms.
“It is a great dress rehearsal for 2022,” Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon said.
Much of the attention will be on Virginia and New Jersey, where voters are casting ballots for governor and other statewide races. In the rest of the country, voters were making selections on a variety of local races, ranging from mayor and city council to school board and bond measures. Voters in Maine, New York, Texas and a few other few states were considering ballot initiatives on a wide array of topics.
For some, the voting experience will be different from last year, when officials implemented pandemic-related changes to make it easier for voters to avoid crowded polling places. Some states have made those changes permanent, while others have rolled some of them back.
In Virginia, lawmakers last year expanded absentee voting permanently by no longer requiring an excuse. But a requirement for a witness signature on absentee ballots that was waived last year is back, and officials have been working to contact voters who have been turning in ballots without them. Those voters will have until Friday to fix the issue or their ballots will not be counted.
In a few states, voters were encountering tighter voting rules because of laws enacted in states controlled politically by Republicans. Among them are Florida and Georgia, where voters face new ID requirements for using mail ballots.
Georgia Republicans are also keeping a close eye on heavily Democratic Fulton County, which includes most of Atlanta, for any voting problems that could justify a state takeover using a sweeping new election law. Fulton County elections director Rick Barron said polling places opened on time Tuesday morning and voting was going smoothly. There have been a couple minor equipment issues but technicians have been able to address those, he said.
Republicans have said their changes were needed to improve security and public confidence after the 2020 presidential election. They acted as former President Donald Trump continued his false claims that the election was stolen despite no evidence of widespread fraud.
These claims were rejected by judges and election officials of both parties who certified the results and Trump’s own attorney general, who said federal law enforcement had not seen fraud “on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”
Voting rights groups said various hotlines would be available to assist voters who have questions or encounter problems at the polls or with their mail ballots. Damon Hewitt, whose group the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law leads the effort, said Tuesday presented an important test.
“It’s a test of voters to run the gauntlet, to figure out these new rules and restrictions,” Hewitt said. “And frankly, it’s also a test of our democracy: How strong can it be, and are we willing to tolerate these efforts to make it harder for people to vote?”
Tuesday also will be an opportunity for election officials to educate voters about how the system works and counter the misinformation that still surrounds the 2020 presidential vote. False claims have led to harassment and even death threats against state and local election officials.
“We have to do more to combat it, get in front of it and frankly educate the public about the voting process,” said Amber McReynolds, former Denver elections clerk and CEO of the National Vote at Home Institute. “Because part of the reason that there is disinformation and it has been able to flow as it has, is that the vast majority of Americans don’t understand how the election process works.”
G-20 endorses global corporate minimum tax at Rome summit
Leaders of the world’s biggest economies on Saturday endorsed a global minimum tax on corporations, a linchpin of new international tax rules aimed at blunting the edge of fiscal paradises amid skyrocketing profits of some multinational businesses.
The move by the Group of 20 summit in Rome was hailed by U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen as benefiting American businesses and workers.
G-20 finance ministers in July had already agreed on a 15% minimum tax. It awaited formal endorsement at the summit Saturday in Rome of the world’s economic powerhouses.
Yellen predicted in a statement that the deal on new international tax rules, with a minimum global tax, “will end the damaging race to the bottom on corporate taxation.”
The deal did fall short of U.S. President Joe Biden’s original call for a 21% minimum tax. Still, Biden tweeted his satisfaction.
“Here at the G20, leaders representing 80% of the world’s GDP — allies and competitors alike — made clear their support for a strong global minimum tax,” the president said in the tweet. “This is more than just a tax deal — it’s diplomacy reshaping our global economy and delivering for our people.”
Also read: COP26: Dickson says Bangladesh has particular role in 3 areas
The agreement aims to discourage multinationals from stashing profits in countries where they pay little or no taxes. These days, multinationals can earn big profits from things like trademarks and intellectual property. These companies can then assign earnings to a subsidiary in a tax haven country.
Briefing reporters midway through the summit, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said: “There are good things to report here. The world community has agreed on a minimum taxation of companies. That is a clear signal of justice in times of digitalization.”
Mathias Cormann, secretary-general of the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, said that the deal clinched in Rome “will make our international tax arrangements fairer and work better in a digitalized and globalized economy.”
The minimum rate “completely eliminates the incentive for businesses around the world to restructure their affairs to avoid tax,” Cormann contended.
On other issues crucial to fairness across the globe — including access to COVID-19 vaccines — the summit on the first of its two days heard pleas to boost the percentage of those in poor countries being vaccinated.
Also read: COP26 president-designate visited Bangladesh to see climate crisis firsthand
Italian Premier Mario Draghi made a sharp call to pick up the pace in getting vaccines to poor countries.
Draghi, the summit host, said Saturday that only 3% of people in the world’s poorest countries are vaccinated, while 70% in rich countries have had at least one shot.
“These differences are morally unacceptable and undermine the global recovery,” said Draghi, an economist and former chief of the European Central Bank.
French President Emmanuel Macron has pledged to use the summit to press fellow European Union leaders to be more generous in donating vaccines to low-income countries.
But advocates of civil society which have held discussions with G-20 officials said suspension of vaccine patents was crucial to increasing access in poor countries.
Canada noted it was both sharing vaccines as well as donating money to develop production in South Africa, which is a G-20 country. Chrystia Freeland, deputy prime minister, said Canada was increasing its commitment to international vaccine sharing through the COVAX program by donating 200 million doses.
The summit is also confronting two-track global recovery in which rich countries are bouncing back faster.
Rich countries have used vaccines and stimulus spending to restart economic activity, leaving the risk that developing countries that account for much of global growth will remain behind due to low vaccinations and financing difficulties.
Macron has told reporters he expects the G-20 to confirm an additional $100 billion to support Africa’s economies.
On the urgent problem of climate change, Italy is hoping the G-20 will secure crucial commitments from countries responsible for about 80% of global carbon emissions — ahead of the U.N. climate conference that begins Sunday in Glasgow, Scotland, just as the Rome summit winds down.
Most of the G-20 leaders will head to Glasgow.
Presidents Vladimir Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping of China, whose efforts to reduce emissions are paramount to combating climate change, were participating remotely in the Rome summit.
But midway through the summit it was the corporate tax rate rule that dominated.
White House officials say the new tax rate would create at least $60 billion in new revenue a year in the U.S. — a stream of cash that could help partially pay for a nearly $3 trillion social services and infrastructure package that Biden is seeking. U.S. adoption is key because so many multinational companies are headquartered there.
But Civil 20, which represents some 560 organizations from more than 100 countries in a network making recommendations to the G-20, was less enthusiastic. The 15% rate is “a little more than those (rates) we’d consider fiscal paradises,” Civil 20 official Riccardo Moro told reporters following the summit.
US set to appeal UK refusal to extradite WikiLeaks' Assange
The U.S. government is scheduled to ask Britain’s High Court on Wednesday to overturn a judge’s decision that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should not be sent to the United States to face espionage charges.
In January, a lower court judge refused an American request to extradite Assange on spying charges over WikiLeaks’ publication of secret military documents a decade ago.
District Judge Vanessa Baraitser denied extradition on health grounds, saying Assange was likely to kill himself if held under harsh U.S. prison conditions. But she rejected defense arguments that Assange faces a politically motivated American prosecution that would override free-speech protections, and she said the U.S. judicial system would give him a fair trial.
READ: UK judge to rule on US extradition for WikiLeaks' Assange
Lawyers for U.S. authorities have been granted permission to appeal. At an earlier hearing they questioned the psychiatric evidence in the case and argued that Assange does not meet the threshold of being “so ill” that he cannot resist harming himself.
Assange, who is being held at London’s high-security Belmarsh Prison, is expected to attend the two-day hearing by video link. The two justices hearing the appeal — who include England’s most senior judge, Lord Chief Justice Ian Burnett — are not expected to give their ruling for several weeks.
Even that will likely not end the epic legal saga, since the losing side can seek to appeal to the U.K. Supreme Court.
U.S. prosecutors have indicted Assange on 17 espionage charges and one charge of computer misuse over WikiLeaks’ publication of thousands of leaked military and diplomatic documents. The charges carry a maximum sentence of 175 years in prison.
The prosecutors say Assange unlawfully helped U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning steal classified diplomatic cables and military files that WikiLeaks later published. Lawyers for Assange argue that he was acting as a journalist and is entitled to First Amendment freedom of speech protections for publishing documents that exposed U.S. military wrongdoing in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Assange, 50, has been in prison since he was arrested in April 2019 for skipping bail during a separate legal battle. Before that he spent seven years holed up inside Ecuador’s London embassy, where he fled in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden to face allegations of rape and sexual assault.
READ: UK judge rejects bid to delay Assange extradition hearing
Sweden dropped the sex crimes investigations in November 2019 because so much time had elapsed, but Assange remains in prison. The judge who blocked extradition in January ordered that he must stay in custody during any U.S. appeal, ruling that the Australian citizen “has an incentive to abscond” if he is freed.
WikiLeaks supporters say testimony from witnesses during the extradition hearing that Assange was spied on while in the embassy by a Spanish security firm at the behest of the CIA — and that there was even talk of abducting or killing him — undermines U.S. claims he will be treated fairly.
Journalism organizations and human rights groups have urged President Joe Biden to drop the prosecution launched under his predecessor, Donald Trump.
Amnesty International Secretary-General Agnes Callamard said the charges were politically motivated and should be dropped.
“It is a damning indictment that nearly 20 years on, virtually no one responsible for alleged U.S. war crimes committed in the course of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars has been held accountable, let alone prosecuted, and yet a publisher who exposed such crimes is potentially facing a lifetime in jail,” she said.
Half its original size, Biden's big plan in race to finish
Half its original size, President Joe Biden's big domestic policy plan is being pulled apart and reconfigured as Democrats edge closer to satisfying their most reluctant colleagues and finishing what's now about a $1.75 trillion package.
How to pay for it all remained deeply in flux Tuesday, with a proposed billionaires’ tax running into criticism as cumbersome or worse. That’s forcing difficult reductions, if not the outright elimination, of policy priorities — from paid family leave to child care to dental, vision and hearing aid benefits for seniors.
READ: Biden to meet Kenya president as war roils nearby Ethiopia
The once hefty climate change strategies are losing some punch, too, focusing away from punitive measures on polluters in a shift toward instead rewarding clean energy incentives.
Pressure mounting, Biden met Tuesday evening with two holdout Democrats — Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, according to a person who requested anonymity to discuss the private meeting. The president is pushing for an agreement before he departs for global summits later this week.
All told, Biden’s package remains a substantial undertaking — and could still top $2 trillion in perhaps the largest effort of its kind from Congress in decades. But it’s far slimmer than the president and his party first envisioned.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told lawmakers they were on the verge of “something major, transformative, historic and bigger than anything else” ever attempted in Congress, according to another person who requested anonymity to share her private remarks to the caucus.
“We know that we are close,” said Rep. Joyce Beatty, D-Ohio, the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, after a meeting with Biden at the White House. “And let me be explicitly clear: Our footprints and fingerprints are on this.”
However, vast differences among Democrats remain over basic contours of the sweeping proposal and the tax revenue to pay for it.
From the White House, press secretary Jen Psaki said Biden still hoped to have a deal in hand to show foreign leaders the U.S. government was performing effectively on climate change and other major issues. But she acknowledged that might not happen, forcing him to keep working on the package from afar.
She warned about failure as opposed to compromise
“The alternative to what is being negotiated is not the original package,” she said. "It is nothing.”
More lawmakers journeyed to the White House for negotiations on Tuesday and emerged upbeat that the end product would be substantial, despite the changes and reductions being forced on them by Manchin and Sinema.
READ: Refugee admissions hit record low, despite Biden's reversal
Together the two senators have packed a one-two punch — Manchin forcing supporters to pare back health care, child care and other spending and Sinema causing Democrats to reconsider their plans to reverse the Trump-era tax cuts on corporations and the wealthy.
Resolving the revenue side is key as Biden insists all the new spending will be fully paid for and not piled onto the national debt. He vows any new taxes will hit only the wealthy, those earning more than $400,000 a year, or $450,000 for couples, and corporations he says must quit skipping out on taxes and start paying their “fair share.”
But the White House had to rethink its tax strategy after Sinema objected to her party's initial proposal to raise tax rates on corporations and the wealthy, With a 50-50 Senate, Biden has no votes to spare in his party.
Instead, to win over Sinema and others, the Democrats were poised to unveil a new plan for taxing the assets of billionaires. And on Tuesday they unveiled a proposal to require corporations with more than $1 billion in income to pay a 15% minimum tax, winning Sinema's backing.
“Here’s the heart of it: Americans read over the last few months that billionaires were paying little or no taxes for years on end,” said Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, helming the effort.
Under Wyden’s emerging plan, the billionaires’ tax would hit the wealthiest of Americans, fewer than 1,000 people. It would require those with assets of more than $1 billion, or three-years consecutive income of $100 million, to pay taxes on the gains of stocks and other tradeable assets, rather than waiting until holdings are sold.
A similar billionaire’s tax would be applied to non-tradeable assets, including real estate, but it would be deferred with the tax not assessed until the asset was sold.
Overall, the billionaires’ tax rate had not been set, but it was expected to be at least the 20% capital gains rate. Democrats have said it could raise $200 billion in revenue that could help fund Biden’s package over 10 years.
Republicans deride the billionaires' tax and some have suggested it would face a legal challenge.
And key fellow Democrats were also raising concerns about the billionaires' tax, saying the idea of simply undoing the 2017 tax cuts by hiking top rates was more straightforward and transparent.
Rep. Richard Neal, D-Mass., the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, said, “Our plan looks better every day.”
Under the bill approved by Neal's panel, the top individual income tax rate would rise from 37% to 39.6%, on those earning more than $400,000, or $450,000 for couples. The corporate rate would increase from 21% to 26.5%. The bill also proposes a 3% surtax on the wealthiest Americans with adjusted income beyond $5 million a year.
Less concerned about the new taxes, Manchin is forcing his party to reconsider the expansion of health, child care and climate change programs he views as costly or unnecessary government entitlements.
Still being debated: plans to expand Medicare coverage with dental, vision and hearing aid benefits for seniors; child care assistance; free pre-kindergarten; a new program of four-weeks paid family leave, and a more limited plan than envisioned to lower prescription drug costs.
On climate change, coal-state Sen. Manchin rejected Biden's earlier clean energy strategy as too punitive on providers that rely on fossil fuels. Instead, the White House floated an idea to beef up grants and loans to incentive clean energy sources.
Manchin’s resistance may scuttle one other tax idea — a plan to give the IRS more resources to go after tax scofflaws. He said he told Biden during their weekend meeting at the president's home in Delaware that that plan was “messed up” and would allow the government to monitor bank accounts.
Democrats are hoping to reach an agreement by week's end, paving the way for a House vote on a related $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill before routine transportation funds expire Sunday. That separate roads-and-bridges bill stalled when progressive lawmakers refused to support it until deliberations on the broader Biden bill were complete.
Brazil senators recommend Bolsonaro face charges over COVID
A Brazilian Senate committee recommended on Tuesday that President Jair Bolsonaro face a series of criminal indictments for actions and omissions related to the world’s second highest COVID-19 death toll.
The 7-to-4 vote was the culmination of a six-month committee investigation of the government’s handling of the pandemic. It formally approved a report calling for prosecutors to try Bolsonaro on charges ranging from charlatanism and inciting crime to misuse of public funds and crimes against humanity, and in doing so hold him responsible for many of Brazil’s more than 600,000 COVID-19 deaths.
The president has denied wrongdoing, and the decision on whether to file most of the charges will be up to Prosecutor-General Augusto Aras, a Bolsonaro appointee who is widely viewed as protecting him. The allegation of crimes against humanity would need to be pursued by the International Criminal Court.
Sen. Omar Aziz, the chairman of the inquiry, said he would deliver the recommendation to the prosecutor-general Wednesday morning. Aras' office said the report would be carefully reviewed as soon as it is received.
Regardless of whether charges are filed, the report is expected to fuel criticism of the divisive president, whose approval ratings have slumped ahead of his 2022 reelection campaign — in large part because of Brazil’s outsize COVID-19 death toll. The investigation itself has for months provided a drumbeat of damaging allegations.
Since the start of the pandemic, Bolsonaro has sabotaged local leaders' restrictions on activity aimed at stopping the virus' spread, saying the economy needed to keep humming so the poor did not suffer worse hardship. He also has insistently touted an anti-malaria drug long after broad testing showed it isn't effective against COVID-19, assembled crowds without wearing masks and sowed doubt about vaccines.
Bolsonaro has defended himself by saying he was among the few world leaders courageous enough to defy political correctness and global health recommendations, and that he hasn't erred in the slightest.
The report's author, Sen. Renan Calheiros, first presented the nearly 1,200-page document last week. It says that by insisting on treatment with the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine as “practically the only government policy to fight the pandemic, Jair Bolsonaro strongly collaborated for COVID-19's spread in Brazilian territory" and as a result is "the main person responsible for the errors committed by the federal government during the pandemic.”
Committee members in the so-called G7 group of senators who aren’t from Bolsonaro’s base agreed on most of the points in Calheiros' report. They met Monday to hammer out final adjustments to the text.
READ: BGMEA seeks duty-free access to Brazil for RMG products
Changes include recommending charges for 13 additional people, many of them current or former Health Ministry employees, as well as the governor of hard-hit Amazonas state. The final report recommends charges against two companies and 78 people in all, including Bolsonaro, administration officials, dozens of allies and the president’s three sons, who are politicians.
It also adds an additional violation for allegedly spreading false news following Bolsonaro's live broadcast on social media last week claiming incorrectly that people in the U.K. who received two vaccine doses are developing AIDS faster than expected.
The report also contains recommendations for two counts of "crime of responsibility,” which are grounds for impeachment. But Lower House Speaker Arthur Lira, a staunch Bolsonaro ally, would have to bring a vote on whether to open impeachment proceedings — something seen as highly unlikely considering Lira is currently sitting on more than 120 other impeachment requests, according to information from the legislative body.
Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro, one of the president's sons, called the report legally weak and politically motivated.
“The intent of some senators on the investigative committee is to cause the maximum amount of wear and tear on the president,” he told journalists.
Minutes after the inquiry was finished, former U.S. President Donald Trump said in a statement that he endorses the Brazilian leader.
“President Jair Bolsonaro and I have become great friends over the past few years. He fights hard for, and loves, the people of Brazil — just like I do for the people of the United States,” Trump said. “Brazil is lucky to have a man such as Jair Bolsonaro working for them. He is a great President and will never let the people of his great country down!”
READ: Military display rolls into Brazil capital before tense vote
An earlier draft had recommended the president also be indicted for homicide and genocide, but that was scrapped even before its presentation last week. Some committee members opposed such charges, while others expressed concern that bombastic claims could undermine the report’s credibility.
The Senate committee’s final hearing on the inquiry Tuesday ended with a moment of silence for victims of the virus in Brazil.
Facebook froze as anti-vaccine comments swarmed users
In March, as claims about the dangers and ineffectiveness of coronavirus vaccines spun across social media and undermined attempts to stop the spread of the virus, some Facebook employees thought they had found a way to help.
By altering how posts about vaccines are ranked in people’s newsfeeds, researchers at the company realized they could curtail the misleading information individuals saw about COVID-19 vaccines and offer users posts from legitimate sources like the World Health Organization.
“Given these results, I’m assuming we’re hoping to launch ASAP,” one Facebook employee wrote, responding to the internal memo about the study.
Instead, Facebook shelved some suggestions from the study. Other changes weren't made until April.
READ: Australia wants Facebook to seek parental consent for kids
When another Facebook researcher suggested disabling some comments on vaccine posts in March until the platform could do a better job of tackling anti-vaccine messages lurking in them, that proposal was ignored at the time.
Critics say the reason Facebook was slow to take action on the ideas is simple: The tech giant worried it might impact the company’s profits.
“Why would you not remove comments? Because engagement is the only thing that matters,” said Imran Ahmed, the CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, an internet watchdog group. “It drives attention and attention equals eyeballs and eyeballs equal ad revenue.”
In an emailed statement, Facebook said it has made “considerable progress” this year with downgrading vaccine misinformation in users' feeds.
Facebook’s internal discussions were revealed in disclosures made to the Securities and Exchange Commission and provided to Congress in redacted form by former Facebook employee-turned-whistleblower Frances Haugen’s legal counsel. The redacted versions received by Congress were obtained by a consortium of news organizations, including The Associated Press.
The trove of documents shows that in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Facebook carefully investigated how its platforms spread misinformation about life-saving vaccines. They also reveal rank-and-file employees regularly suggested solutions for countering anti-vaccine content on the site, to no avail. The Wall Street Journal reported on some of Facebook's efforts to deal with anti-vaccine comments last month.
Facebook's response raises questions about whether the company prioritized controversy and division over the health of its users.
“These people are selling fear and outrage,” said Roger McNamee, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and early investor in Facebook who is now a vocal critic. “It is not a fluke. It is a business model.”
Typically, Facebook ranks posts by engagement — the total number of likes, dislikes, comments, and reshares. That ranking scheme may work well for innocuous subjects like recipes, dog photos, or the latest viral singalong. But Facebook’s own documents show that when it comes to divisive public health issues like vaccines, engagement-based ranking only emphasizes polarization, disagreement, and doubt.
READ: Communal violence: Facebook cannot deny responsibility, says Hasan Mahmud
To study ways to reduce vaccine misinformation, Facebook researchers changed how posts are ranked for more than 6,000 users in the U.S., Mexico, Brazil, and the Philippines. Instead of seeing posts about vaccines that were chosen based on their popularity, these users saw posts selected for their trustworthiness.
The results were striking: a nearly 12% decrease in content that made claims debunked by fact-checkers and an 8% increase in content from authoritative public health organizations such as the WHO or U.S. Centers for Disease Control. Those users also had a 7% decrease in negative interactions on the site.
Employees at the company reacted to the study with exuberance, according to internal exchanges included in the whistleblower’s documents.
“Is there any reason we wouldn’t do this?” one Facebook employee wrote in response to an internal memo outlining how the platform could rein in anti-vaccine content.
Facebook said it did implement many of the study’s findings — but not for another month, a delay that came at a pivotal stage of the global vaccine rollout.
In a statement, company spokeswoman Dani Lever said the internal documents “don’t represent the considerable progress we have made since that time in promoting reliable information about COVID-19 and expanding our policies to remove more harmful COVID and vaccine misinformation.”
The company also said it took time to consider and implement the changes.
Yet the need to act urgently couldn't have been clearer: At that time, states across the U.S. were rolling out vaccines to their most vulnerable — the elderly and sick. And public health officials were worried. Only 10% of the population had received their first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. And a third of Americans were thinking about skipping the shot entirely, according to a poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
Despite this, Facebook employees acknowledged they had “no idea” just how bad anti-vaccine sentiment was in the comments sections on Facebook posts. But company research in February found that as much as 60% of the comments on vaccine posts were anti-vaccine or vaccine reluctant.
“That’s a huge problem and we need to fix it,” the presentation on March 9 read.
Even worse, company employees admitted they didn’t have a handle on catching those comments. And if they did, Facebook didn’t have a policy in place to take the comments down. The free-for-all was allowing users to swarm vaccine posts from news outlets or humanitarian organizations with negative comments about vaccines.
“Our ability to detect (vaccine hesitancy) in comments is bad in English — and basically non-existent elsewhere,” another internal memo posted on March 2 said.
Los Angeles resident Derek Beres, an author and fitness instructor, sees anti-vaccine content thrive in the comments every time he promotes immunizations on his accounts on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook. Last year, Beres began hosting a podcast with friends after they noticed conspiracy theories about COVID-19 and vaccines were swirling on the social media feeds of popular health and wellness influencers.
Earlier this year, when Beres posted a picture of himself receiving the COVID-19 shot, some on social media told him he would likely drop dead in six months’ time.
"The comments section is a dumpster fire for so many people,” Beres said.
Anti-vaccine comments on Facebook grew so bad that even as prominent public health agencies like UNICEF and the World Health Organization were urging people to take the vaccine, the organizations refused to use free advertising that Facebook had given them to promote inoculation, according to the documents.
Some Facebook employees had an idea. While the company worked to hammer out a plan to curb all the anti-vaccine sentiment in the comments, why not disable commenting on posts altogether?
“Very interested in your proposal to remove ALL in-line comments for vaccine posts as a stopgap solution until we can sufficiently detect vaccine hesitancy in comments to refine our removal,” one Facebook employee wrote on March 2.
The suggestion went nowhere until mid-April, when Lever said the company stopped showing previews of popular comments on vaccine posts.
Instead, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on March 15 that the company would start labeling posts about vaccines that described them as safe.
The move allowed Facebook to continue to get high engagement — and ultimately profit — off anti-vaccine comments, said Ahmed of the Center for Countering Digital Hate.
“They were trying to find ways to not reduce engagement but at the same time make it look like they were trying to make some moves toward cleaning up the problems that they caused,” he said.
It’s unrealistic to expect a multi-billion-dollar company like Facebook to voluntarily change a system that has proven to be so lucrative, said Dan Brahmy, CEO of Cyabra, an Israeli tech firm that analyzes social media networks and disinformation. Brahmy said government regulations may be the only thing that could force Facebook to act.
“The reason they didn’t do it is because they didn’t have to,” Brahmy said. “If it hurts the bottom line, it’s undoable.”
Bipartisan legislation in the U.S. Senate would require social media platforms to give users the option of turning off algorithms tech companies use to organize individuals' newsfeeds.
Sen. John Thune, R-South Dakota, a sponsor of the bill, asked Facebook whistleblower Haugen to describe the dangers of engagement-based ranking during her testimony before Congress earlier this month.
She said there are other ways of ranking content — for instance, by the quality of the source, or chronologically — that would serve users better. The reason Facebook won’t consider them, she said, is that they would reduce engagement.
“Facebook knows that when they pick out the content ... we spend more time on their platform, they make more money,” Haugen said.
Haugen’s leaked documents also reveal that a relatively small number of Facebook’s anti-vaccine users are rewarded with big pageviews under the tech platform’s current ranking system.
Internal Facebook research presented on March 24 warned that most of the “problematic vaccine content” was coming from a handful of areas on the platform. In Facebook communities where vaccine distrust was highest, the report pegged 50% of anti-vaccine pageviews on just 111 — or .016% — of Facebook accounts.
“Top producers are mostly users serially posting (vaccine hesitancy) content to feed,” the research found.
On that same day, the Center for Countering Digital Hate published an analysis of social media posts that estimated just a dozen Facebook users were responsible for 73% of anti-vaccine posts on the site between February and March. It was a study that Facebook’s leaders in August told the public was “faulty,” despite the internal research published months before that confirmed a small number of accounts drive anti-vaccine sentiment.
Earlier this month, an AP-NORC poll found that most Americans blame social media companies, like Facebook, and their users for misinformation.
But Ahmed said Facebook shouldn't just shoulder blame for that problem.
“Facebook has taken decisions which have led to people receiving misinformation which caused them to die,” Ahmed said. “At this point, there should be a murder investigation.”
US details new international COVID-19 travel requirements
Children under 18 and people from dozens of countries with a shortage of vaccines will be exempt from new rules that will require most travelers to the United States be vaccinated against COVID-19, the Biden administration announced.
The government said Monday it will require airlines to collect contact information on passengers regardless of whether they have been vaccinated to help with contact tracing, if that becomes necessary.
Beginning Nov. 8, foreign, non-immigrant adults traveling to the United States will need to be fully vaccinated, with only limited exceptions, and all travelers will need to be tested for the virus before boarding a plane to the U.S. There will be tightened restrictions for American and foreign citizens who are not fully vaccinated.
The new policy comes as the Biden administration moves away from restrictions that ban non-essential travel from several dozen countries — most of Europe, China, Brazil, South Africa, India and Iran — and instead focuses on classifying individuals by the risk they pose to others.
It also reflects the White House’s embrace of vaccination requirements as a tool to push more Americans to get the shots by making it inconvenient to remain unvaccinated.
Read:Nine countries to follow additional measures as India revises COVID-19 guidelines for international travellers
Under the policy, those who are vaccinated will need to show proof of a negative COVID-19 test within three days of travel, while the unvaccinated must present a test taken within one day of travel.
Children under 18 will not be required to be fully vaccinated because of delays in making them eligible for vaccines in many places. They will still need to take a COVID-19 test unless they are 2 or younger.
Others who will be exempt from the vaccination requirement include people who participated in COVID-19 clinical trials, who had severe allergic reactions to the vaccines, or are from a country where shots are not widely available.
That latter category will cover people from countries with vaccination rates below 10% of adults. They may be admitted to the U.S. with a government letter authorizing travel for a compelling reason and not just for tourism, a senior administration official said. The official estimated that there are about 50 such countries.
The U.S. will accept any vaccine approved for regular or emergency use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration or the World Health Organization. That includes Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca and China’s Sinopharm and Sinovac vaccines. Mixing-and-matching of approved shots will be permitted.
The Biden administration has been working with airlines, who will be required to enforce the new procedures. Airlines will be required to verify vaccine records and match them against identity information.
Quarantine officers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will spot-check passengers who arrive in the U.S. for compliance, according to an administration official. Airlines that don't enforce the requirements could be subject to penalties of up to nearly $35,000 per violation.
The new rules will replace restrictions that began in January 2020, when President Donald Trump banned most non-U.S. citizens coming from China. The Trump administration expanded that to cover Brazil, Iran, the United Kingdom, Ireland and most of continental Europe. President Joe Biden left those bans in place and expanded them to South Africa and India.
Read: Australia's Queensland state to open to vaccinated travelers
Biden came under pressure from European allies to drop the restrictions, particularly after many European countries eased limits on American visitors.
“The United States is open for business with all the promise and potential America has to offer,” Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said after Monday's announcement.
The main trade group for the U.S. airline industry praised the administration's decision.
“We have seen an increase in ticket sales for international travel over the past weeks, and are eager to begin safely reuniting the countless families, friends and colleagues who have not seen each other in nearly two years, if not longer,” Airlines for America said in a statement.
The pandemic and resulting travel restrictions have caused international travel to plunge. U.S. and foreign airlines plan to operate about 14,000 flights across the Atlantic this month, just over half the 29,000 flights they operated during October 2019, according to data from aviation-research firm Cirium.
Henry Harteveldt, a travel-industry analyst in San Francisco, said the lifting of country-specific restrictions will help, but it will be tempered by the vaccination and testing requirements.
“Anyone hoping for an explosion of international inbound visitors will be disappointed,” he said. “Nov. 8 will be the start of the international travel recovery in the U.S., but I don’t believe we see full recovery until 2023 at the earliest.”
The Biden administration has not proposed a vaccination requirement for domestic travel, which the airlines oppose fiercely, saying it would be impractical because of the large number of passengers who fly within the U.S. every day.
Record-breaking storm douses drought-stricken California
Across Northern California, crews worked Monday to clear streets of toppled trees and branches and to clean gutters clogged by debris carried by rainwater from a massive storm that caused flooding and rock slides, and knocked out power to hundreds of thousands.
Despite the problems, the rain and mountain snow were welcome in Northern California, which is so dry that nearly all of it is classified as either experiencing extreme or exceptional drought. The wet weather also greatly reduces the chances of additional wildfires in a region that has borne the brunt of another devastating year of blazes in the state.
When the storm arrived during the weekend, people joyfully dusted off rain boots and jackets and children stomped in puddles. Social media filled with pictures that showed windshields splattered with droplets of water and single-word posts: RAIN!!!
Read:Drought-stricken California doused by major storm
Earl Casaclang of San Francisco kept waiting for a break in the rain Sunday to go out and smoke a cigarette.
“It was crazy! I kept thinking it was going to stop, but it just kept going and going,” Casaclang said Monday as he headed to his job as a security guard in the Financial District. “We need it to keep raining, but hopefully not that hard.”
The National Weather Service called preliminary rainfall totals “staggering,” including 11 inches (28 centimeters) at the base of Marin County’s Mount Tamalpais and 4 inches (10 centimeters) in downtown San Francisco, the fourth-wettest day ever for the city.
“It’s been a memorable past 24 hours for the Bay Area as the long talked-about atmospheric river rolled through the region,” the local weather office said. “We literally have gone from fire/drought conditions to flooding in one storm cycle.”
Northeast of the San Francisco Bay Area, 5.44 inches (13.82 centimeters) fell on downtown Sacramento, shattering the one-day record for rainfall that had stood since 1880.
The storm was accompanied by strong winds that knocked down trees and even toppled two big rigs on the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge. Pacific Gas & Electric reported Sunday evening that 380,000 homes and businesses lost power, though most had it back Monday.
Water rose so quickly that two people and a dog needed rescuing from rising creeks in separate incidents early Monday in San Jose. San Jose Fire crews located one person clinging to a tree in the Guadalupe River at 3:30 a.m., but were unable to locate a second person. An hour later, crews rescued an individual and their dog stranded on an island in the middle of Coyote Creek.
As the storm headed south, precipitation levels fell, though a flood warning still was issued Monday afternoon for Los Angeles County.
Interstate 80, the major highway through the Sierra Nevada Mountains to Reno, Nevada, was shut down by heavy snow early Monday. In California’s Colusa and Yolo counties, state highways 16 and 20 were shut for several miles because of mudslides, the state Department of Transportation said.
The same storm system also slammed Oregon and Washington state, causing power outages that affected tens of thousands of people. Two people were killed when a tree fell on a vehicle in the greater Seattle area.
Read: Climate change makes drought recovery tougher in U.S. West
Lake Oroville, a major Northern California reservoir, saw its water levels rise 20 feet (6.10 meters) over the past week, according to the state's Department of Water Resource. Most of the increase came between Saturday and Monday, during the height of the storm, KHSL-TV reported.
Justin Mankin, a geography professor at Dartmouth College and co-lead of the Drought Task Force at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said the cycle of going from years-long drought to record-breaking downpours is something expected to continue due to climate change.
“While this rain is welcome, it comes with these hazards and it won't necessarily end the drought,” Mankin said. “California still needs more precipitation, and it really needs it in high elevations and spread out over a longer time so it’s not hazardous.”
Christy Brigham, chief of resource management and science at Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, said the rain was a huge relief after the Caldor Fire torched an unknown number of the giant trees in the park, along with thousands of pines and cedars.
“This amount of rainfall is what we call a season-ending event,” Brigham said. “It should end fire season and it should end our need -- to a large degree -- to fight this fire.”
The Caldor Fire has burned for more than two months and in early September it prompted the unprecedented evacuation of the entire city of South Lake Tahoe. Firefighters now consider it fully contained, a status that — thanks to the rain — also now applies to the Dixie Fire, the second-largest in state history at just under 1 million acres.
During the weekend, the California Highway Patrol closed a stretch of State Route 70 in Butte and Plumas counties because of multiple landslides within the massive Dixie Fire burn scar.
Cal Fire, the state firefighting agency, wasn't ready to declare the wildfire season over or to cut staffing to winter levels. “We’d like to see some more rain coming our way before we look at reducing staffing,” spokesman Isaac Sanchez said.
Mankin said the long-term forecast for California shows drier-than-normal conditions.
“To end different aspects of the drought, you are going to need a situation where parts of California get precipitation over the next three months that’s about 200% of normal,” he said, adding that “despite this really, really insane rainfall, the winter is probably going to be drier than average."
Drought-stricken California doused by major storm
A powerful storm barreled toward Southern California after flooding highways, toppling trees and causing mud flows in areas burned bare by recent fires across the northern part of the state.
Drenching showers and strong winds accompanied the weekend’s arrival of an atmospheric river — a long and wide plume of moisture pulled in from the Pacific Ocean. The National Weather Service’s Sacramento office warned of “potentially historic rain.”
Flooding was reported across the San Francisco Bay Area, closing streets in Berkeley, inundating Oakland’s Bay Bridge toll plaza and overflowing rivers in Napa and Sonoma counties. Power poles were downed and tens of thousands of people in the North Bay were without electricity.
By Sunday morning, Mount Tamalpais just north of San Francisco had recorded a half foot (15 centimeters) of rainfall during the previous 12 hours, the weather service said.
Read:Plane crash kills 2, burns homes in California neighborhood
“Some of our higher elevation locations could see 6, 7, 8 inches of rain before we’re all said and done,” weather service meteorologist Sean Miller said.
About 150 miles (241 kilometers) to the north, the California Highway Patrol closed a stretch of State Route 70 in Butte and Plumas counties because of multiple landslides within the massive Dixie Fire burn scar.
“We have already had several collisions this morning for vehicles hydroplaning, numerous trees falling, and several roadways that are experiencing flooding,” the highway patrol’s office in Oroville tweeted on Sunday. “If you can stay home and off the roads today, please do. If you are out on the roads, please use extreme caution.”
The same storm system also slammed Oregon and Washington state, causing power outages affecting tens of thousands of people. Two people were killed when a tree fell on a vehicle in the greater Seattle area. Eastside Fire & Rescue responded to the scene of the fatalaties near Preston, Washington, which is about 20 miles east of Seattle.
In California’s Colusa and Yolo counties, state highways 16 and 20 were shut for several miles due to mudslides, the state Department of Transportation said.
Burn areas remain a concern, as land devoid of vegetation can’t soak up heavy rainfall as quickly, increasing the likelihood of flash flooding.
“If you are in the vicinity of a recent burn scar and haven’t already, prepare now for likely debris flows,” the Sacramento weather service tweeted. “If you are told to evacuate by local officials, or you feel threatened, do not hesitate to do so. If it is too late to evacuate, get to higher ground.”
South of San Francisco, evacuation orders were in effect in the Santa Cruz Mountains over concerns that several inches of rain could trigger debris flows in the CZU Lightning Complex Fire burn scar when the storm moves through early Monday. Further south, parts of western Santa Barbara County saw evacuation warnings upgraded to orders in the area burned by this month’s Alisal Fire.
Read: California wildfire dangers may be spreading south
Strong winds were also expected, with gusts of up to 60 mph (97 kph) at the windiest spots in Northern California. Elevations above 9,000 feet (2,745 meters) in the Sierra Nevada could get 18 inches of snow or more from Sunday until Monday morning.
Recent storms have helped contain some of the nation’s largest wildfires this year. But it remains to be seen if the wet weather will make a dent in the drought that’s plaguing California and the western United States. California’s climate is hotter and drier now and that means the rain and snow that does fall is likely to evaporate or absorb into the soil.
California’s 2021 water year, which ended Sept. 30, was the second driest on record and last year’s was the fifth driest on record. Some of the state’s most important reservoirs are at record low levels.
Amid the Capitol riot, Facebook faced its own insurrection
As supporters of Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6th, battling police and forcing lawmakers into hiding, an insurrection of a different kind was taking place inside the world’s largest social media company.
Thousands of miles away, in California, Facebook engineers were racing to tweak internal controls to slow the spread of misinformation and inciteful content. Emergency actions — some of which were rolled back after the 2020 election — included banning Trump, freezing comments in groups with a record for hate speech, filtering out the “Stop the Steal” rallying cry and empowering content moderators to act more assertively by labeling the U.S. a “Temporary High Risk Location" for political violence.
At the same time, frustration inside Facebook erupted over what some saw as the company's halting and inconsistent response to rising extremism in the U.S.
“Haven’t we had enough time to figure out how to manage discourse without enabling violence?” one employee wrote on an internal message board at the height of the Jan. 6 turmoil. “We’ve been fueling this fire for a long time and we shouldn’t be surprised it’s now out of control.”
It’s a question that still hangs over the company today, as Congress and regulators investigate Facebook’s part in the Jan. 6 riots.
READ: Setting Up Facebook Business in Bangladesh: Detailed Guideline
New internal documents provided by former Facebook employee-turned-whistleblower Frances Haugen provide a rare glimpse into how the company appears to have simply stumbled into the Jan. 6 riot. It quickly became clear that even after years under the microscope for insufficiently policing its platform, the social network had missed how riot participants spent weeks vowing — on Facebook itself — to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s election victory.
The documents also appear to bolster Haugen’s claim that Facebook put its growth and profits ahead of public safety, opening the clearest window yet into how Facebook’s conflicting impulses — to safeguard its business and protect democracy — clashed in the days and weeks leading up to the attempted Jan. 6 coup.
This story is based in part on disclosures Haugen made to the Securities and Exchange Commission and provided to Congress in redacted form by Haugen’s legal counsel. The redacted versions received by Congress were obtained by a consortium of news organizations, including The Associated Press.
What Facebook called “Break the Glass” emergency measures put in place on Jan. 6 were essentially a toolkit of options designed to stem the spread of dangerous or violent content that the social network had first used in the run-up to the bitter 2020 election. As many as 22 of those measures were rolled back at some point after the election, according to an internal spreadsheet analyzing the company's response.
“As soon as the election was over, they turned them back off or they changed the settings back to what they were before, to prioritize growth over safety,” Haugen said in an interview with “60 Minutes.”
An internal Facebook report following Jan. 6, previously reported by BuzzFeed, faulted the company for having a “piecemeal” approach to the rapid growth of “Stop the Steal” pages, related misinformation sources, and violent and inciteful comments.
READ: Facebook unveils new controls for kids using its platforms
Facebook says the situation is more nuanced and that it carefully calibrates its controls to react quickly to spikes in hateful and violent content, as it did on Jan 6. The company said it’s not responsible for the actions of the rioters and that having stricter controls in place prior to that day wouldn’t have helped.
Facebook’s decisions to phase certain safety measures in or out took into account signals from the Facebook platform as well as information from law enforcement, said spokeswoman Dani Lever. “When those signals changed, so did the measures.”
Lever said some of the measures stayed in place well into February and others remain active today.
Some employees were unhappy with Facebook's managing of problematic content even before the Jan. 6 riots. One employee who departed the company in 2020 left a long note charging that promising new tools, backed by strong research, were being constrained by Facebook for “fears of public and policy stakeholder responses” (translation: concerns about negative reactions from Trump allies and investors).
“Similarly (though even more concerning), I’ve seen already built & functioning safeguards being rolled back for the same reasons,” wrote the employee, whose name is blacked out.
Research conducted by Facebook well before the 2020 campaign left little doubt that its algorithm could pose a serious danger of spreading misinformation and potentially radicalizing users.
One 2019 study, entitled “Carol’s Journey to QAnon—A Test User Study of Misinfo & Polarization Risks Encountered through Recommendation Systems,” described results of an experiment conducted with a test account established to reflect the views of a prototypical “strong conservative” — but not extremist — 41-year North Carolina woman. This test account, using the fake name Carol Smith, indicated a preference for mainstream news sources like Fox News, followed humor groups that mocked liberals, embraced Christianity and was a fan of Melania Trump.
Within a single day, page recommendations for this account generated by Facebook itself had evolved to a "quite troubling, polarizing state,” the study found. By day 2, the algorithm was recommending more extremist content, including a QAnon-linked group, which the fake user didn’t join because she wasn't innately drawn to conspiracy theories.
A week later the test subject's feed featured “a barrage of extreme, conspiratorial and graphic content,” including posts reviving the false Obama birther lie and linking the Clintons to the murder of a former Arkansas state senator. Much of the content was pushed by dubious groups run from abroad or by administrators with a track record for violating Facebook’s rules on bot activity.
Those results led the researcher, whose name was redacted by the whistleblower, to recommend safety measures running from removing content with known conspiracy references and disabling “top contributor” badges for misinformation commenters to lowering the threshold number of followers required before Facebook verifies a page administrator’s identity.
Among the other Facebook employees who read the research the response was almost universally supportive.
“Hey! This is such a thorough and well-outlined (and disturbing) study,” one user wrote, their name blacked out by the whistleblower. “Do you know of any concrete changes that came out of this?”
Facebook said the study was an one of many examples of its commitment to continually studying and improving its platform.
Another study turned over to congressional investigators, titled “Understanding the Dangers of Harmful Topic Communities,” discussed how like-minded individuals embracing a borderline topic or identity can form “echo chambers” for misinformation that normalizes harmful attitudes, spurs radicalization and can even provide a justification for violence.
Examples of such harmful communities include QAnon and, hate groups promoting theories of a race war.
“The risk of offline violence or harm becomes more likely when like-minded individuals come together and support one another to act,” the study concludes.
Charging documents filed by federal prosecutors against those alleged to have stormed the Capitol have examples of such like-minded people coming together.
Prosecutors say a reputed leader in the Oath Keepers militia group used Facebook to discuss forming an “alliance” and coordinating plans with another extremist group, the Proud Boys, ahead of the riot at the Capitol.
“We have decided to work together and shut this s—t down,” Kelly Meggs, described by authorities as the leader of the Florida chapter of the Oath Keepers, wrote on Facebook, according to court records.