Media

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    [post_content] => The balance between a commitment to free speech and a means of preventing online abuse is elusive.

A few weeks ago, while scrolling Twitter, I came across a brewing controversy about the Netflix film Cuties, about a young girl from a conservative Muslim family in a Parisian banlieue who becomes involved with a dance crew. While director Maïmouna Doucouré—who is French-Senagalese just like the film’s protagonist—has said that the film is “sounding an alarm” about the all-too-early sexualization of girls (partly) through social media, its critics—many of whom seemed not to have seen the film—immediately objected, essentially accusing Doucouré of creating softcore porn and petitioning for the film to be removed.

Janice Turner, a columnist for The Times who is known for her “gender critical” stance, wrote a particularly scathing review of the film. In it, she conflated Cuties with the work of a charity that had, weeks earlier, put out a call for queer black youth in the U.K. to respond to a survey asking about their age, sexuality, location, and vulnerability of housing. The call, claimed Turner, violated safeguards intended to protect children’s privacy.

Turner’s critics, myself included, saw the piece as an attempt to paint the charity as sexualizing children. The sub-hed of her column stated so plainly: “Attempts to sexualise minors are always wrong but a vocal minority of gay campaigners twist concern into prejudice.”

I tweeted at Turner, accusing her of seeing sexualization where it didn’t exist, but she refused to engage on that point, repeatedly deflecting and implying that I didn’t care about safeguarding. I gave up shortly thereafter, but her followers did not: For hours after our brief exchange, they attacked me from just about every angle you can imagine.

There was a handful of reasonable comments that brought up the issue of safeguarding, but most were overtly transphobic: My attackers denied the existence of trans individuals, stated that children have no conception of gender, and implied those who are trans are simply insane. One person called me “batshit crazy,” while another accused me of having told trans people that “suicide is their only alternative to life-limiting drugs.”

Later, when I tweeted about the controversy around Cuties, one of Turner’s lackeys assumed I was a trans woman (presumably because I include “she/her” pronouns in my bio, which is a simple reflection of my gender identity) and began harassing me, calling me a man. Then that person’s followers began harassing me, in public and in DMs. I closed my laptop and curled up with a book.

***

This was not my first experience with online harassment. I am, after all, a woman on the internet—and a public one at that. Public critique for my political views (most often fair) has sometimes resulted in brigading by the critic's followers; I’ve at times spent entire weekends offline, avoiding Twitter and waiting for the controversy to blow over, as it almost always does.

But this was different. For the first time, I experienced firsthand the kind of outrageous abuse that seems to follow transgender individuals wherever they go online. The next day, I logged back in and tweeted about my experience: “Someone on this hellsite mistook me for a trans woman last night and I got brigaded for a bit (thank you, block button), and holy shit I don't know how y'all deal with that all the time what the fuck.”

That tweet received nearly 2,500 likes and retweets and dozens of comments both public and private. Trans followers confirmed that my one-off experience was their daily reality. One person called it “living in hell.” Others shared their tactics (“block early, block often”) and their solidarity.

I was in the midst of finishing the final edits on a book that covers a number of issues related to free speech and social media, so the topic of harassment had been on my mind. But now I began to reflect more deeply on positions I had taken in the past, on my own experiences, and how those two things interacted.

I was raised in New England to be tough and stoic. I didn’t talk much about my emotions growing up, nor did I feel the need. Then, soon after arriving at a university where I knew no one, I went through a breakup that threw me into a major depressive episode, unable to get out of bed. I tried calling my close friends, who were at other universities, but eventually they got sick of my late-night crying jags. I saw the university psychiatrist, who sent me home with pills after talking to me for just five minutes. They didn’t help, but eventually I found my way out of that depression.

From there on out, I was Teflon: I didn’t let anything stick. My hard-won ability to slough off criticism gave me the confidence to work toward my goals but I still struggled, financially and otherwise. I decided that, in order to get ahead, I had to tuck my emotions away.

By the time I became well-known for my work, my belief in free expression was near-absolute. The experiences that had led me to take this position were noble: the state-sanctioned murder of a blogger I’d been emailing with in Iran; the arrest of a friend in Tunisia, then another in Egypt and one in Syria; and helping people I knew through the asylum process in the United States.

For a while, free expression was my religion. I studied government censorship and, later, the role of social media companies in governing our speech. I became one of the first experts on content moderation, and among the first to suggest that perhaps corporations aren’t the best arbiters of speech. For a long time, that stance felt unimpeachable. And then Gamergate happened.

Gamergate, for readers who may not be aware, was a 2014 online harassment campaign. At first it targeted women in the gaming industry who had spoken up about sexism and misogyny in their field, but later it broadened to target loads of other women. Many say that it was a precursor, or an early warning, of the alt-right brigading we see online every day now.

I ignored it at first. I was in Australia to give a series of talks; upon my return to San Francisco, I had two weeks to vacate my apartment and move to Berlin. It was not an easy time (there was plenty else going on beneath the surface that I’ll save for an eventual memoir). Since my colleagues were following Gamergate, I allowed myself to block out both the phenomenon and the feelings that the incident raised for me. Eventually, I was asked to comment and—still not having quite caught up on the details—I did, deflecting to talk about the importance of not allowing the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world to define acceptable speech. I argued that what we really needed were better tools that would enable users to control their own experiences.

Over time, I recognized that I hadn’t given the victims of Gamergate their due. I focused harder on looking for solutions that would both preserve free expression and ensure that harassers—and the pain and silencing they cause to those they target—wouldn’t be tolerated. But I did so quietly, behind the scenes, unsure of what to say. I knew that the tech companies’ failure to take action was partly due to my prior statements on free speech.

This latest incident over Cuties brought my previous missteps into clear focus. I still believe, as I write in my upcoming book, that corporations have far too much power over our speech, and that we, the people, should have the ultimate say in what is or is not acceptable expression. At the same time, I now understand that too many of us—on all sides—treat our perspectives as religion. We are dogmatic and inflexible.

What I realized from the brigading I experienced a few weeks ago, and the conversations that took place in its aftermath, is that we must always remember to be compassionate. This is important not just for others but for ourselves as well. I now realize that part of the reason I once found it so difficult to express compassion for victims of harassment was that I was burying my own feelings, and thus couldn’t empathize with people who lacked my ability to grow a thick skin. I could intellectualize the harm of harassment, which I most certainly recognized as harm, but I found it nearly impossible to put myself in others’ shoes.

Some of my well-known critics have themselves experienced intense harassment. And yet, they too have taken an approach that feels a lot like bullying—or at least punching down. To be sure, public figures should be criticized when they say something awful, particularly when they have the privilege of access to a massive platform like the New York Times Opinion page (I am thinking of the notoriously thin-skinned columnist Bret Stephens, but there are many like him). But we should also be careful to remember the humanity of others—especially when they’re willing to engage in discussion about or account for their mistakes.

When it comes to harassment online and what to do about it, I don’t have all the answers, but here’s what I do know: We need to listen to people when they are describing their lived experience. This is particularly true of queer and trans individuals, and people of color. We need to think about holistic solutions that start with education. We need to teach people how to stick up for victims, and how to help them fight back. And we must create better tools and architecture that pre-empt those who would engage in harassment and brigading.

I am fine with booting serial harassers off social media platforms, but we also need to be careful about any solutions that fail to consider free expression. In my experience, companies all too often come at harassment with a hammer, whacking not only those who are causing real harm, but also those who are engaging in counter-speech, or sharing their experiences while quoting their harassers. This is harmful too, and we should not accept it as a reasonable tradeoff.

There are many partial solutions, but we must be wary of anyone who claims to have a silver bullet; and while there are many worthy ideas out there, each has significant tradeoffs. Nor can we simply ignore harassment or wish it away. Our societies are increasingly divided, a fact that leads to more vitriol, more anger, and more hate. Social media is part of the problem, but it isn’t the whole problem. What we need is to take the holistic view, to see that social media, its architecture and design, maximize controversy for profit, and that there will never be a technological solution to stop online hate and harassment, because it is rooted not in code, but in human behavior. We cannot separate “real life” from “online." And so, whatever approach we take to combat that which ails us must be rooted in compassion.

 
    [post_title] => The struggle to combat cyber bullying begins with compassion
    [post_excerpt] => Corporations do have far too much power over our speech. At the same time, too many people—on all sides—present their perspective as religion. They are dogmatic and inflexible.
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The struggle to combat cyber bullying begins with compassion

by Jillian C. York

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    [post_content] => A bold defence of free speech, or a shout into the echo chamber? You be the judge.

It is a summer of justice, the summer of reckoning, the summer that the movement for Black lives went truly global, garnering massive support on the streets of Berlin, Toronto, and London —in addition to unprecedented numbers of protesters across the United States. And in the middle of this revolutionary summer, a group of elites from the worlds of media, publishing, and think tanks decided to publish a letter—not in support of the movement for justice (though they give a slight nod to it), but out of concern that perhaps the left has gone too far in pursuing it.

That letter, published by Harper’s Magazine, contends that censoriousness is “spreading more widely in our culture.” Expressing concern for the “intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty,” the letter further posits that these actions pose a great threat to freedom and, more specifically, to freedom of expression. Finally, the signatories argue for the preservation of the “possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences,” concluding that if we as a society cannot defend such efforts, “we shouldn’t expect the public or the state to defend it for us.”

As a strong believer in free expression with more than a decade of experience advocating for and writing about online censorship, my concern sits not with the content of the letter (some of which I agree with) but with its supporters—and more specifically, with their self-positioning as great crusaders for the cause of free speech.

Around the world, the greatest threat to free speech is not losing a job opportunity for having said something insipid, misunderstood, poorly timed, or hateful, but rather losing one’s livelihood—or worse, one’s life—for speaking truth to actual power, and often at the hands of the state.

If you’re from Saudi Arabia, speaking up might get you killed, as the world learned two years ago when members of the government murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi in their Istanbul consulate. Even when the consequences of expression aren’t deadly, they can be forever life-changing, as Lebanese journalist Ghada Oueiss recently learned when retribution for her criticism of the Saudi regime included the posting of her private photos to Twitter—more than 40,000 times.

In neighboring Egypt, COVID-19 has reportedly reached the country’s prisons, but dare speak of it on social media and you might end up in prison too. When activist Sanaa Seif—whose older brother Alaa Abd El Fattah has been imprisoned without charge for the better part of a year—questioned the situation on social media, she was abducted and later turned up at Cairo’s State Security, only to be charged with "disseminating false news” and "inciting terrorist crime," as well as “misuse of social media.” She was sentenced to 15 days in (renewable) pre-trial detention. The charges against Seif demonstrate that the Sisi government will go to great lengths to shut down even the mildest criticism, to set an example for the rest of its citizens.

Hong Kong’s new security law—imposed against the will of the people by China, one of the world’s worst and most effective censors—imposes new surveillance measures that have already begun to chill speech in the special administrative region, with reports of people deleting their social media accounts.

With few exceptions, hardly any of the people who signed the letter has any bona fides in free speech advocacy. Their thinking is deeply focused on perceived threats to elite American discourse at a time when there exists very real, tangible threats to the free expression of marginalized, vulnerable individuals and communities—and yet, those signatories have offered very little commentary about those threats, whether they are abroad or at home.

Take, for example, the impact of Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, or SESTA, passed in 2018 in the U.S. despite opposition from actual survivors of trafficking. The law purportedly aims to stop sex traffickers from using online platforms, but has had the deeply censorious side effect of all but erasing sex workers (including those whose work is perfectly legal) and others who engage in sexual expression from most online platforms, and preventing them from using most payment processors, even for non-work purpose. Not only have most signatories of the letter been entirely silent on this well-known threat to free expression, but at least one of them—Katha Pollitt—actively worked to support the bill.

The War on Terror and the Patriot Act that it spawned has caused a world of harm to Muslims in the United States and abroad—harm that includes widespread censorship on online platforms. For the past several years since the rise of the Islamic State, tech companies have worked systematically to “eradicate” terrorism from their platforms, an effort bolstered by state actors. That might sound like a noble goal, but the effect has been the systemic silencing of satire, anti-terrorist counterspeech, and the documentation of war crimes in Syria and elsewhere—all collateral acts of censorship that come from constant pressure on Big Tech to “do more,” and particularly to apply automated tactics to a problem that requires far more nuance. While there are certainly critics of the War on Terror amongst the letter’s signatories, I could only identify one (former ACLU boss Nadine Strossen) who has spoken about the societal threat posed to Muslim voices around the world by Silicon Valley firms.

And I would be remiss in failing to mention the suppression of voices both from and in support of Palestinian rights. For much of the last decade, anyone who dared to breach the Overton window on the topic could easily be subject to cancellation—as professor Steven Salaita was in 2014, when he found his job offer to teach at University of Illionis Urbana-Champaign rescinded—an act assisted by letter signatory Cary Nelson.

Bari Weiss, another signatory, has spent her tenure thus far at the New York Times spinning stories about alleged left intolerance on college campuses and conducting guilt-by-association attacks on prominent women activists. She allegedly made a name for herself at Columbia University doing exactly what she purports to despise: Trying to get someone fired for daring to give a platform to someone she opposes.

And so, it is simply odd to see this particular list of individuals looking down their noses at those fighting for social justice and tsk-tsking them for “censorious” behavior, when so few of them use their well-paid positions and prominent platforms to speak out against actual censorship.

No, rather than fight against real injustice, the letter’s anonymous author(s) took the time to speak aloud their own fears of becoming irrelevant, of being canceled, while refusing to name their perceived enemies or threats. The letter is not a bold defence of speech, but a shout into an echo chamber, or the death throes of a culture where centrist groupthink reigns supreme and defending to one’s death the right to say inane and sometimes hateful things is more important than actual peace, freedom, and justice.

There is, however, one line with which I particularly agree: “The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted.” The thing is, that constriction is coming not from Gen Z or from critics on Twitter, but from the states and corporations that hold the actual power to silence individuals.

 
    [post_title] => The people who signed the Harper's letter seem blinded to what censorship is in the real world
    [post_excerpt] => Around the world, the greatest threat to free speech is not losing a job opportunity for having said something insipid, misunderstood, poorly timed, or hateful, but rather losing one’s livelihood—or worse, one’s life—for speaking truth to actual power, and often at the hands of the state.
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The people who signed the Harper’s letter seem blinded to what censorship is in the real world

by Jillian C. York

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    [post_content] => “We built this country, and we can burn it down." — BLM protester in Washington D.C.

In my Black Lives (Don’t) Matter class, I teach students that the revolution BLM demands cannot be humanized. Rather, the movement asks us to burn down our ideologies as well as our structures—to burn them all the way down—in order to make a different society. Because the system isn’t broken; it was intentionally designed to exclude black persons from human recognitions and protections. And that system isn’t reducible to a nation-state built on slave labor and indigenous genocide.

It is a commonly accepted truth that black people built the infrastructures of what is now called the United States. Many also acknowledge that the exclusion of black people from our imagined community is what makes possible our superstructures—i.e., our culture, values, and power relations. We are less likely, however, to acknowledge that the entire enterprise of liberal humanism was built by black people, even or especially as they cannot participate in it.

Public officials in the Los Angeles judicial system routinely used the acronym NHI—short for “no humans involved”—to describe the black people who showed up to protest the Rodney King decision in 1992. The state’s response then, like its response to the BLM protests today, is to plow through what they perceive to be a black mass of flesh that is at once subhuman (like chattel) and superhuman—or, as ex-police officer Darren Wilson described Ferguson resident Michael Brown, like a “hulk.” Both messages serve to communicate that black persons are mindlessly and mercilessly aggressive and that the rest of us should fear for our lives.

The perception that black people are somehow bestial or not-quite-human serves but one purpose: to justify the innumerable ways in which nonblack people, including nonblack people of color like ex-NYPD officer Peter Liang, gratuitously police and kill back people—not just on the street, as George Floyd experienced, but also in the park, and even in their homes.

The American writer and activist Audre Lorde explained that “there is no rest” from anti-black violence. It “weaves through the daily tissues of [black] living—in the supermarket, in the classroom, in the elevator, in the clinic and the schoolyard, from the plumber, the baker, the saleswoman, the bus driver, the bank teller, the waitress who does not serve us.” Antiblackness, in other words, is atmospheric. It is the air that nonblack people need to breathe and which makes it impossible for black people to also breathe.

Rather than acknowledge the vulnerability that black people experience, nonblack people continue to treat them as an ongoing threat. According to this logic, black people must be taken out back and shot like a dog and then left on the street to die—in the case of Michael Brown, for four hours—like roadkill.

When Enlightenment thinkers like Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Immanuel Kant, and David Hume defined ‘the human,’ they could only ever arrive at a definition of what the human is not— i.e., the black African. They defined ‘the human’ as transcendent, of sound mind, in a state above nature, with the ability (and agility) to control the unruly instincts of his material body. In contrast, they imagined the black African as so irrational, so carnal—indeed, so bestial—that she could not pull herself out of a state of nature. She was unable to transcend the impulses of her flesh and climb the ladder of ‘the human,’ which is the ladder of whiteness. Hegel, Kant, and Hume suggest that this is also the ladder of civilization, modernity, progress, and history.

The racism expressed by these Enlightenment philosophers is not a thing of the past. Richard Spencer, the notorious alt-right spokesperson, argued in a November 2016 interview with African-American journalist Roland Martin that the black people who built the human world as we know it did not contribute to the making of human society—because they simply do not have access to the “genius” required to “create [human] systems.”

The fact that black lives don’t seem to matter is a problem not only for the settler colonial state in need of surplus labor—whether on the plantations of yore or the prison-industrial complex of today. It is also or primarily a problem for what the Jamaican critic and essayist Sylvia Wynter describes as the “genre of Man”—a racist and institutionalized standard of the human that (re)produces what feminist thinker bell hooks famously characterizes as “imperialist white supremacist capitalist (cis-hetero-) patriarchy.” The intersecting structures that hooks enumerates and which makes possible our modern world pivot on antiblackness.

The same genre of Man that denies the humanity of black people determines whether or how sex and gender minorities, persons with dis/abilities, and nonblack persons of color can access human recognitions and protections. Hooks’ inheritor, scholar Hortense Spillers argues that black lives are the “zero degree” of Man’s “social conceptualizations.” In other words, antiblackness is the foundation of the house of white, cis, able-bodied humans and makes possible everyone else’s exclusion from humanity. It is the genre of Man, Wynter and Spillers suggest, that we must burn down in order to make black lives—and thus all lives—matter.

It is no coincidence, then, that black people and those of us who stand with them take pleasure in the burning and looting of a human world that was built to ensure that black people die—for no other reason than, as Lorde painfully describes it, they are black. Those of us who are not black but who, indeed, embody difference know that we are next if we get too close to or approximate the non-human characteristics that white supremacist humanism has assigned to black people. Our pleasure is derived not from bloodlust for white or human death. This is about destroying the concept of whiteness as it informs the antiblack standard of human being.

The revolution espoused by Black Lives Matter cannot be humanized, because the white people who defined the human never intended to know black humanity, and because they can only ever contingently recognize the humanity of all of us other Others.

By excluding black people from human recognitions and protections, the prototypically white human produces other oppressions, too. The black person’s presumed sub-humanity locates them in a time before human time, as the furthest point away from the white, cis, able-bodied standard of the human that we inherit from the Enlightenment. If black people represent absolute difference—the “zero degree” or foundation of everyone else’s oppression—then the genre of Man that excludes them is also responsible for producing this world’s other “-isms”—e.g., sexism, misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, and ableism.

Stated another way, if humanism is a country, then antiblackness is the border that makes its other exclusions possible. BLM protestors who are burning it down know that the country they must dismantle is the world as it was defined by white men. If we are to make all lives matter, then we must question and, where necessary, destroy the structures and ideologies of the genre of Man. And we must remember, always, that the revolution we seek cannot be humanized.
    [post_title] => The revolution will not be humanized
    [post_excerpt] => “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.” — James Baldwin
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The revolution will not be humanized

by M. Shadee Malaklou

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    [post_content] => Americans are vulnerable to disinformation because they believe in their own exceptionalism.

The Trump-Russia scandal has created an entire cottage industry of disinformation experts in the United States and beyond, but not all of those purported experts are reputable. I know the pandemic is depleting much of our energy, but I am going to ask you to dig deep and find a bit more, because disinformation is a very serious problem; and if we are going to save our democracy, we need to understand how it works.

The definition of “disinformation” is false information that is deliberately introduced into the discourse in order to create doubt and chaos. This is different from misinformation, which refers to false information spread out of ignorance. But do these distinctions actually matter when the man sitting in the highest office in the land picks up and spreads false information? 

The president of the United States uses his very powerful position to disseminate information that is unverified at best—and deliberately false at worst. He recommends dangerously false “cures” for COVID-19, most notoriously when he suggested that people try injecting bleach. His goal is to calm the populace and shore up his base. His motive is to be re-elected in November. Whether he believes the lies he spins is beside the point. 

As CNN reported, Trump got the idea for injecting bleach from a Florida-based ultra-fringe church group, called the Genesis II Church of Health and Healing, which has for years advocated using potentially lethal chemical “sacraments” to cure illnesses. All Trump did was change the disinformation vector: he amplified a marginal idea advocated by a fringe group, and suddenly it was broadcast into the homes of millions of Americans. 

While we Americans think of ourselves as exceptional, the truth is that what Trump is doing to us is something that the Kremlin has been doing for years — except that Trump does it in a chaotic and uncontrolled manner. The Kremlin is much more strategic by comparison; that’s not a compliment to the Kremlin, but an expression of horror at just how badly Trump is bungling the disinformation game.

When I was working in Moscow, in 2014, I witnessed firsthand how false narratives about the shootdown of flight MH17 over Ukraine  were created and disseminated. I filed this article for the Guardian in the immediate aftermath of the shootdown, showing that there was no coherent narrative coming out of Moscow. Days later, the official propaganda machine deflecting blame from Russia was already in full swing, and as my colleagues over at the award-winning investigative platform Bellingcat note, it continues to churn to this day, even as we find more evidence linking Russian officials to the tragedy. Russian officials, of course, are not particularly happy with us.



If the tone seems familiar — it should. As should the disdainful little nickname that Russia’s second diplomat to the UN just made up for us at Bellingcat.

Trump loves making up little nicknames for his opponents— think “Sleepy Joe,” for Joe Biden, or “Crooked Hillary.”  The power of nicknames, as explained in this Columbia Journalism Review analysis, is derived from the linguistic trick in old fairy tales; they stick in your head and appeal to your inner child—and that child’s desire to see cartoonishly evil villains in the world. Trump has a predator’s instincts for wielding power, and they are working for him here. 

The idea of elite convergence, the idea that a society’s powerful people will come to resemble each other even if they hail from different political camps and or preach different ideologies, is not exclusive to American domestic politics. Trump ingratiates himself with so many foreign authoritarians, Putin included, because he sees them all as part of the same club he is in — the international club of rich, powerful, and ruthless (or, in the case of Trump, hysterically reactionary) men. 

Capitalism has made sure that these men all love the same luxury products and enjoy similar lifestyles, whether covertly or overtly. Trump’s overriding allegiance is to status, and authoritarians display their status unabashedly. You can’t shame someone like Trump into abandoning his tactics,because  they are part of a package he finds immensely attractive. 

Americans are vulnerable to disinformation because they believe in their own exceptionalism. They are no less vulnerable than Russians, who have been imbibing state-generated disinformation for more than a century. Russians swallow lies because they’re too busy surviving/navigating a treacherous political and social landscape to care, while Americans who are privileged enough to drive policy have largely been shielded and insulated from the effects of corrupt power. Think, for example, of which ethnic and racial subcultures of the U.S. population are more likely to be targeted by dirty cops — and then think about the people who actually lead us today. There is a gulf between these groups.

Trump and the pandemic are nevertheless tearing away the insulation that privileged middle class white people have taken for granted. Whether the president is babbling about fake “cures” or undermining Democratric governors with calls to reopen based on shoddy science—or, for that matter, having the feds simply snatch supplies and then staying mum about it, his lies and obfuscations, and the lies and obfuscations of all officials who enable him, have become a matter of life and death. 

The first step to fighting back is understanding that there is no such thing as “harmless” disinformation. Especially during a public health crisis. And if you think that Republican officials aren’t following Trump’s lead and spinning this disaster in whatever way is more beneficial to them — you are wrong. Trump’s shamelessness is infectious and destructive, but the bills will come due. After all, you can’t reason with a virus. Neither can you bully it into submission.
    [post_title] => If you care about saving democracy, you must learn how to deal with disinformation
    [post_excerpt] => Americans like to believe they are exceptional, but the truth is that the Kremlin has for years been doing to Russians what Trump is now doing to Americans.
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If you care about saving democracy, you must learn how to deal with disinformation

by Natalia Antonova

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    [post_content] => The tech executive turned data justice warrior is celebrated as a truth-telling hero, but there's something a bit too smooth about this narrative arc.

A few months ago, I was contacted by a senior executive who was about to leave a marketing firm. He got in touch because I’ve worked on the non-profit side of tech for a long time, with lots of volunteering on digital and human rights. He wanted to ‘give back’. Could I put him in touch with digital rights activists? Sure. We met for coffee and I made some introductions. It was a perfectly lovely interaction with a perfectly lovely man. Perhaps he will do some good, sharing his expertise with the people working to save democracy and our private lives from the surveillance capitalism machine of his former employers. The way I rationalized helping him was: firstly, it’s nice to be nice; and secondly, movements are made of people who start off far apart but converge on a destination. And isn’t it an unqualified good when an insider decides to do the right thing, however late?

The Prodigal Son is a New Testament parable about two sons. One stays home to work the farm. The other cashes in his inheritance and gambles it away. When the gambler comes home, his father slaughters the fattened calf to celebrate, leaving the virtuous, hard-working brother to complain that all these years he wasn’t even given a small goat to share with his friends. His father replies that the prodigal son ‘was dead, now he’s alive; lost, now he’s found’. Cue party streamers. It’s a touching story of redemption, with a massive payload of moral hazard. It’s about coming home, saying sorry, being joyfully forgiven and starting again. Most of us would love to star in it, but few of us will be given the chance.

The Prodigal Tech Bro is a similar story, about tech executives who experience a sort of religious awakening. They suddenly see their former employers as toxic, and reinvent themselves as experts on taming the tech giants. They were lost and are now found. They are warmly welcomed home to the center of our discourse with invitations to write opeds for major newspapers, for think tank funding, book deals and TED talks. These guys – and yes, they are all guys – are generally thoughtful and well-meaning, and I wish them well. But I question why they seize so much attention and are awarded scarce resources, and why they’re given not just a second chance, but also the mantle of moral and expert authority.

I’m glad that Roger McNamee, the early Facebook investor, has testified to the U.S. Congress about Facebook’s wildly self-interested near-silence about its amplification of Russian disinformation during the 2016 presidential election. I’m thrilled that Google’s ex-‘design ethicist’, Tristan Harris, “the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience,"(startlingly faint praise) now runs a Center for Humane Technology, exposing the mind-hacking tricks of his former employer. I even spoke —critically but, I hope, warmly—at the book launch of James Williams, another ex-Googler turned attention evangelist, who “co-founded the movement”of awareness of designed-in addiction. I wish all these guys well. I also wish that the many, exhausted activists who didn’t take money from Google or Facebook could have even a quarter of the attention, status and authority the Prodigal Techbro assumes is his birth-right.

Today, when the tide of public opinion on Big Tech is finally turning, the brothers (and sisters) who worked hard in the field all those years aren’t even invited to the party. No fattened calf for you, my all but unemployable tech activist. The moral hazard is clear; why would anyone do the right thing from the beginning when they can take the money, have their fun, and then, when the wind changes, convert their status and relative wealth into special pleading and a whole new career?

Just half an hour flipping through my contacts produced half a dozen friends and acquaintances who didn’t require a ‘road to Damascus’ conversion to see what was wrong with big tech or the ways governments abuse it. Nighat Dad runs the Digital Rights Foundation in Pakistan, defending online freedom of expression and privacy for women, minorities and dissidents. That’s real courage. Gus Hosein has worked in tech and human rights for over 20 years, runs Privacy International, the UK-based non-profit, and is the most visionary thinker I know on how to shake up our assumptions about why things are as they are.  Bianca Wylie founded the volunteer-run Open Data Institute Toronto, and works on open data, citizen privacy and civic engagement. The “Jane Jacobs of the Smart Cities Age,” she’s been a key figure in opening up and slowing down Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs juggernaut in Toronto. Aral Balkan runs Small Technology Foundation and works on both the tools and the policies to resist surveillance capitalism. Unafraid of being unpopular, even with other activists, Balkan freely hammers rights organizations or conferences for taking big tech’s sponsorship money while criticizing the companies’ practices. In the western Balkans, hvale vale works tirelessly and cheerfully on women's rights, sexual rights and the political and practical path to a feminist internet. Robin Gross,  a Californian intellectual property lawyer, could have put her persistence and sheer pizazz to work defending big entertainment companies, but instead she’s worked for decades against the copyright maximalism that strangles artists’ creativity and does nothing to increase their incomes. I would love to hear their voices amplified, not (just) the voices of those who took a decade and more to work out the rottenness at the core of big tech.

Ex-Google lobbyist Ross Lajeunesse left the company in 2019 over its censored search engine for China and also because of homophobic, sexist and racist work practices. He’s now running for a Democratic senate nomination, and recently wrote a classic of the ‘scales have fallen from my eyes’ genre, called “I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left.” Its lede is “The company’s motto used to be “Don’t be evil.” Things have changed.”

Really? Has Google really changed? Lajeunesse joined in 2008, years into Google’s multi-billion dollar tax avoidance, sexist labor practices and privacy hostility and continued to work there through the years of antitrust fines, misuse of personal health data, wage fixing, and financially pressuring think tanks. Google didn’t change. It just started treating some of its insiders like it already treated outsiders. That only looks like radical change if you’ve never thought too hard about what you are doing and to whom.

One hundred thousand people work for Google/Alphabet; some of them have much more power than others. The point isn’t whether Lajeunesse is or isn’t culpable for the many acts of the enormous company he represented—as its chief lobbyist in Asia for several years—it’s that of all the people who spent the decade of 2010-20 working thanklessly to expose and reduce the firm’s monopolistic abuse and assault on global privacy, it’s the ex-lobbyist who gets our attention now.

We all need second chances. Even if we don’t need those fresh starts ourselves, we want to live in a world where people have a reason to do better. But the prodigal tech bro’s redemption arc is so quick and smooth it’s barely a road bump. That’s because we keep skipping the most important part of the prodigal son story—where he hits rock bottom. In the original parable, the prodigal son wakes up in a pig sty, starving, and realizes his father’s servants now live better than he does. He resolves to go home to the people and place he did not value or respect before. He will beg to be one of his father’s servants. He accepts his complete loss of status. But instead of chastising and punishing his prodigal son, the rejoicing father greets him joyfully and heads off the apology with a huge party. It’s a great metaphor for how to run a religion, but a lousy way to run everything else.

Prodigal tech bro stories skip straight from the past, when they were part of something that—surprise!—turned out to be bad, to the present, where they are now a moral authority on how to do good, but without the transitional moments of revelation and remorse.  But the bit where you say you got things wrong and people were hurt? That’s the most important part. It’s why these corporatized reinventions feel so slick and tinny, and why so many of the comments on Lajeunesse’s train wreck post on Medium were critical. The journey feels fake. These ‘I was lost but now I’m found, please come to my TED talk’ accounts typically miss most of the actual journey, yet claim the moral authority of one who’s ‘been there’ but came back. It’s a teleportation machine, but for ethics.

(While we’re thinking about the neatly elided parts of the prodigal tech bro story, let’s dwell for one moment on the deletion of the entire stories of so many women and people of color barely given a first chance in Silicon Valley, let alone multiple reinventions.)

The only thing more fungible than cold, hard cash is privilege. The prodigal tech bro doesn’t so much take an off-ramp from the relatively high status and well-paid job he left when the scales fell from his eyes, as zoom up an on-ramp into a new sector that accepts the reputational currency he has accumulated. He’s not joining the resistance. He’s launching a new kind of start-up using his industry contacts for seed-funding in return for some reputation-laundering.

So what? Sure, it’s a little galling, but where’s the harm?

Allowing people who share responsibility for our tech dystopia to keep control of the narrative means we never get to the bottom of how and why we got here, and we artificially narrow the possibilities for where we go next. And centering people who were insiders before and claim to be leading the outsiders now doesn’t help the overall case for tech accountability. It just reinforces the industry’s toxic dynamic that some people are worth more than others, that power is its own justification.

The prodigal tech bro doesn’t want structural change. He is reassurance, not revolution. He’s invested in the status quo, if we can only restore the founders’ purity of intent. Sure, we got some things wrong, he says, but that’s because we were over-optimistic / moved too fast / have a growth mindset. Just put the engineers back in charge / refocus on the original mission / get marketing out of the c-suite. Government “needs to step up”, but just enough to level the playing field / tweak the incentives. Because the prodigal techbro is a moderate, centrist, regular guy. Dammit, he’s a Democrat. Those others who said years ago what he’s telling you right now? They’re troublemakers, disgruntled outsiders obsessed with scandal and grievance. He gets why you ignored them. Hey, he did, too. He knows you want to fix this stuff. But it’s complicated. It needs nuance. He knows you’ll listen to him. Dude, he’s just like you…

I’m re-assessing how often I help out well-established men suddenly interested in my insights and contact book. It’s ridiculous how many ‘and I truly mean them well’s I cut out of this piece, but I really do, while also realizing I help them because they ask, or because other people ask for them. And that coffee, those introductions, that talk I gave and so much more of my attention and care—it needs to go instead to activists I know and care about but who would never presume to ask. Sometimes the prodigal daughter has her regrets, too.

So, if you’re a prodigal tech bro, do us all a favour and, as Rebecca Solnit says, help “turn down the volume a little on the people who always got heard”:

    
 	
  • Do the reading and do the work. Familiarize yourself with the research and what we’ve already tried, on your own time. Go join the digital rights and inequality-focused organizations that have been working to limit the harms of your previous employers and – this is key – sit quietly at the back and listen.
    • 
 	
  • Use your privilege and status and the 80 percent of your network that’s still talking to you to big up activists who have been in the trenches for years already—especially women and people of colour. Say ‘thanks but no thanks’ to that invitation and pass it along to someone who’s done the work and paid the price.
    • 
 	
  • Understand that if you are doing this for the next phase of your career, you are doing it wrong. If you are doing this to explain away the increasingly toxic names on your resumé, you are doing it wrong. If you are doing it because you want to ‘give back,’ you are doing it wrong.
    • 


Do this only because you recognize and can say out loud that you are not ‘giving back’, you are making amends for having already taken far, far too much.

 
    [post_title] => The Prodigal Techbro
    [post_excerpt] => Prodigal tech bro stories skip straight from the past, when they were part of something that—surprise!—turned out to be bad, to the present, where they are now a moral authority on how to do good, but without the transitional moments of revelation and remorse.  
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The Prodigal Techbro

by Maria Farrell

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    [post_content] => We can't seem to quit social media, even though we know it's not good for us. Is there a way to take back control of the user experience? 

The good news is that we now know, thanks to investigative journalism, that bad faith actors are using social media to manipulate our emotions and, by extension, our political domain. The bad news is that despite rising awareness, nothing has changed. Facebook is still manipulating its algorithms so that we all live in our own information bubbles. Twitter is still full of fake accounts, often called bots, that dupe even sophisticated users —  like prominent journalists or well-known politicians — into sharing information that simply is not true. 

As Robert Mueller said while testifying to Congress last month, social media manipulators working for Russian intelligence continue to interfere in U.S. politics “right now.”

An addiction to social media goes well beyond craving the dopamine hit supplied by seeing one’s Tweet shared widely, or one’s Facebook post liked many times. These days, journalists need Twitter to follow the news and promote their own work, while Facebook has become an all-but essential tool for staying abreast of cultural events and keeping in touch with friends and family. But while we’re “liking” photos of our friends’ new babies and sharing important investigative journalism via Twitter, we are also inadvertently exposing ourselves to people whose job it is to manipulate our thoughts and emotions. And they are experts.

Now scholars and journalists are warning that YouTube has become a terribly dangerous radicalizing tool. Zeynep Tufekci, an expert in the sociology of technology, warned about YouTube last year in a column for The New York Times. Almost by accident, she writes, she discovered that the video platform was algorithmically programmed to direct users toward opinions more radical than the ones they seemed to hold. If a user searched for a Bernie Sanders video, for example, YouTube might recommend an Atifa video. On the other hand, search for a video by a mainstream conservative commentator and next thing you know the algorithm is suggesting videos by white nationalists. YouTube, concluded Tufekci, "[might be] one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century."

One year later, The New York Times published an investigative story that shows how bad faith actors manipulated YouTube videos in order to radicalize Brazilian society by upending long-held social norms. Teachers quoted in the article say, for example, that their students disrupted classes to quote conspiracy theories they had seen on YouTube videos. Meanwhile Bolsanoro staffers were uploading videos that propagated conspiracy theories about teachers manipulating their students to support communism. The result: voters chose Jair Bolsanor, the far right newly elected president of Brazil. Danah Boyd, the founder of Data & Society, told The New York Times that the YouTube-influenced results of Brazil’s elections are “a worrying indication of the platform’s growing impact on democracies worldwide.”

Similarly, Britain saw its democracy undermined in 2016 when bad actors who funded and led the Brexit campaign used Facebook to manipulate British public opinion. The result: a slight majority of Britons voted in favor of leaving the European Union.  

Read more about Brexit: How less-than-great men brought Britain to its worst hour

But given that few Britons had expressed any interest in the EU prior to the referendum, how did this result come about? We now know, as The Guardian’s Carole Cadwalladr reported in a bombshell investigative piece, that British public opinion had been manipulated by misinformation published on Facebook accounts set up by a now-notorious (but then unknown) company called Cambridge Analytica. The same company later acknowledged the role it had played in manipulating public opinion in the United States prior to the 2016 presidential election. 

Craig Silverman, the Canadian BuzzFeed journalist who coined the term “fake news” in 2015, warned the CBC that Canadians are not immune from the disease of social media manipulation, either. Facebook, he told the CBC, is publishing anti-Trudeau propaganda as well as attacks on members of Trudeau’s government who are people of color. Silverman added that “...people acting outside of Canada publishing, in some cases, completely false or unsupported stories that are having an effect on what Canadians think about the current government and politics in Canada in general.”

How are we to remain connected and informed and still deal with the crisis of disinformation? 

Taylor Owen, a prominent digital media scholar who holds the Beaverbrook Chair in Media, Ethics and Communications at McGill University, suggests that some self-awareness would help. We must stop and think carefully before responding to news and opinion that makes us feel an emotion, whether it be satisfaction or anger. “When people are supplied with a wide variety of information that confirms their biases,” he says, they are less willing to accept opinions that contradict them. 

But journalists also have an important role to play, he says in this interview. According to Owen's newly published research, people who consume a great deal of news are not better informed. The reason: they tend to consume and retain information that confirms their biases. The media, suggests Owen, would be doing a public service by reporting deeply on issues for which there is bipartisan agreement. In Canada, interestingly, one of those issues is the environment. 
    [post_title] => How can we stop social media from manipulating our emotions?
    [post_excerpt] => An addiction to social media that goes well beyond needing the dopamine hit supplied by seeing one’s Tweet shared widely, or one’s Facebook post liked many times. These days, journalists need social media to follow the news and promote their own work, while Facebook has become an all-but essential tool for staying abreast of cultural events and keeping in touch with friends and family.
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How can we stop social media from manipulating our emotions?

by Lisa Goldman

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    [post_content] => Can an authentic apology from a perpetrator heal the wounds caused by sexual assault? 

In her new book The Apology, Eve Ensler — best known for her groundbreaking play Vagina Monologues and for her activism in the movement to end violence against women — imagines her now-deceased father apologizing for having abused her sexually when she was a child. In a podcast conversation about the book with comedian and writer Marc Maron, Ensler observes that while the #MeToo movement has exposed the endemic abuse perpetrated by powerful men, we have yet to see many, or any, of those men make a serious commitment to accounting for their behavior. With this book, she tells Maron, “I thought to myself, maybe I could write what I want to hear, maybe I could write the words and what it would sound like and look, so it could be a possible blueprint.”



It seems that the #MeToo movement has reached a plateau. The consequences for the perpetrators are stuck in limbo as society searches for the means to effect necessary systemic change. As Ensler says to Maron, “We’ve broken the silence. But now men have to do their part of this or we’re not going to move forward.”

Almost none of the prominent men exposed and demoted by #MeToo has offered a real apology — let alone an act of contrition. Charlie Rose, Louis CK, Russell Simmons, James Toback, and Kevin Spacey all issued statements laced with puzzlement, self-pity — or, in Toback’s case, outright hostility. Others verged on the satirical: celebrity chef Mario Batali sent a mass e-mail apology that included the postscript: “In case you’re searching for a holiday-inspired breakfast, these Pizza Dough Cinnamon Rolls are a fan favorite.” The writer Geraldine DeRuiter won a James Beard Award for an article in which she frames her experience of following Batali’s failed recipe as a satirical allegory for his non-apology.



Quite a few of these men tried to fast track a comeback, circumventing both apology and expressions of contrition. Charlie Rose approached feminist editor Tina Brown with the idea that she produce a program with him interviewing prominent men who had been toppled by #MeToo (she declined). Louis CK received a standing ovation when he appeared unannounced to do a stand up set at New York’s famous Comedy Cellar, only a few months after he acknowledged that he had on several occasions stripped naked and masturbated in front of female comedians whose nascent careers were predicated on his goodwill. And last October The New York Review of Books published a 3,000-word, first person essay by Jian Ghomeshi, the disgraced Canadian former radio show host. The CBC fired Ghomeshi in 2014 after learning that the Toronto Star was about to publish an investigative report detailing credible accusations that he had for years battered women during sexual encounters, and had abused women who worked for him. Titled “Reflections from a Hashtag,” the essay is redolent of narcissism and self-pity. It begins:

Not so long ago, I spoke to hundreds of thousands of listeners across North America every day on a public radio show. These days, the closest I come to public performance is at a neighborhood karaoke bar in New York. Even that can have its perils.

Ghomeshi was oblivious to the rather obvious contradiction in having been granted the platform of one of the most prestigious publications in the English language from which to proclaim that he had been silenced.



Reaction to the essay was swift and negative, rising to a crescendo of outrage after Ian Buruma, then editor of the NYRB, made some egregiously tone deaf remarks in a follow-up interview conducted by Isaac Chotiner for Slate. One line in particular lit up the internet. In response to Chotiner’s observation that several women had credibly accused Ghomeshi of having punched them in the head during sexual encounters, Buruma responded:

The exact nature of his behavior — how much consent was involved — I have no idea, nor is it really my concern.

For Buruma, apparently, the fact that a Canadian court had declined to convict Ghomeshi of rape based on existing jurisprudence was the only relevant consideration. His response indicates that he is not at all interested in issues of morality, in the feelings of women. Nor does he address the question of whether or not jurisprudence is equipped to provide justice to women in cases of sexual assault that do not meet the legal definition of rape. Buruma seems not to know (or perhaps does not care) that Ghomeshi acknowledged, in a first-person essay published on his Facebook wall, that he committed many violent sexual acts on women. Ghomeshi claimed they were consensual “rough sex,” but his essay does not include the viewpoints of the women who accused him of assault.

Is being fired from their jobs and socially marginalized sufficient punishment for these men? There are those who say yes, and who further assert that women who demand punishment that goes beyond sanctions are indulging in gratuitous rage. In response, feminist journalist Rebecca Traister offers this observation in an essay published for New York magazine's The Cut:

Today, there’s quite a bit of blowback at these guys on social media. Which makes it crucial to point out that irritation — or flat-out rage — at the men attempting professional comebacks after having been credibly accused of sexual harassment and abuse isn’t necessarily about a punitive urge to see them forever in purgatory.

The goal, in other words, is not to seek eternal damnation for these men, but rather to see them doing the kind of work that would actually change the paradigm. So far, none have accepted this challenge.

There is, however, at least one recent example of a famous man who did offer a considered apology to the woman he had assaulted.

Late last year the journalist Zainab Salbi interviewed Devin Faraci, once an influential film critic who was editor in chief of birth.movies.death, for a PBS television series called #MeToo, Now What? Today, Faraci earns his living making coffee at a Starbucks; he resigned his editorship after a woman accused him of sexual assault. Separately but in the same episode, Salbi also interviewed Caroline Contillo, Faraci’s accuser. Caroline told The Conversationalist that PBS had informed her they would do a segment on Faraci with or without her involvement.

Faraci’s fall predated #MeToo by about one year, and he truly brought it on himself. A self-proclaimed feminist, he tweeted his disgust at the infamous Access Hollywood tape, in which Donald Trump boasted of having committed sexual assaults on multiple women, by “grabbing them by the pussy.” In response to Faraci’s comment, Caroline Contillo fired off a tweet, in which she accused him of having done the same thing to her. Within days of the ensuing Twitter storm, Faraci, who acknowledged a severe alcohol problem that causes him to black out and often precipitated bad behavior, apologized and resigned. But just one year later, he was quietly rehired. This premature attempt at reestablishing his career elicited a cascade of negative reaction, and Faraci resigned for a second and final time.

Here the story deviates from the script: rather than licking his wounds angrily as he searched for another way to make a professional comeback, Faraci entered a 12-step recovery program. He now seems committed to a process of transformation and to making an authentic apology.

[caption id="attachment_1275" align="alignnone" width="300"] Devin Faraci (screencap)[/caption]

While Salbi’s separate interviews with Caroline and Faraci are short and somewhat superficial, they do provide insight into the impact of sexual assault and the power of a sincere apology. A victim who receives an acknowledgement of wrongdoing and a heartfelt expression of contrition from the perpetrator can experience a powerful physical and emotional response. In the interview, Contillo tells Salbi that while the assault itself was terrible, a “larger psychological pain had lodged itself” in her body.

Caroline Contillo highlights one of the less understood effects of trauma — that it invades the body and stays there, long after the physical act. Ensler says the same thing to Maron: that when a victim receives an apology that carries empathetic recognition by the perpetrator, it causes a physical reaction. Contillo said that Faraci’s apology provided relief not only because she could let go of the pain, but because she now felt that she was “living in a culture that suddenly seemed to care about” women who had been sexually assaulted or preyed upon.

Faraci offered his considered apology as part of a 12-step program. He said he had been eager to offer it sooner but was counseled to wait for that stage of the recovery process (step nine of the 12 steps); he decided “to trust the process.” In Alcoholics Anonymous, as in other frameworks for personal transformation, an apology is valued for its sincerity. Absolution is a nice bonus, but it is not the motivating factor.

In an email to The Conversationalist, Contillo writes, “My acceptance of his apology was an indication that I believe he could change — not evidence that he has.” But she does seem to feel that PBS coerced her to participate in the #MeToo program by telling her that the interview with Faraci would be broadcast with or without her participation, and that Faraci overstepped by failing to inform her before publishing a blog post about his apology and her having accepted it. Contillo says that she is not “optimistic that any deep-seated transformation has taken place.” But perhaps she would feel differently if PBS had approached her with more compassion, and if Faraci had consulted her before publishing his blog post.

“Does a sincere apology hold the key to transformation?” Contillo wonders.

I totally believe so. I had hoped to talk on the PBS show more about that, and my work with the Zen Peacemakers, who do reconciliation work. But I quickly realized when I was on set that it wasn't really going to be about that. I do hope that story gets told: that when we can face a seemingly intractable situation of harm without turning away and without jumping in to fix it with a transaction, shifts can happen.

The power of Eve Ensler’s book is that it offers real insight into how to engage with what the perpetrator did while finding a way toward reconciliation and healing. The father she conjures is fully human, even as he speaks to her about his monstrous acts. Without excusing his behavior, Ensler draws from the depths of empathy to understand how a father could do such harm to his daughter. She shows the darkest interiors of human behavior, but also finds the source of the hurt and anger that cause it. In writing the book, Ensler experienced what she calls the “alchemy of the apology.” In her conversation with Maron she says that it “changes the chemistry of your own being.”

It starts to release things that have just been stuck there — and not knowing…and searching…why did this person do this to me?”

Maron’s own reaction to reading the book seems almost to be an incarnation of that alchemy, of exactly what Ensler intends the book to do. Throughout their podcast discussion he is clearly grappling in near-agony with toxic masculinity, as he experiences it and as he observes it in others. He is unpacking the issues in real time, with Ensler as his interlocutor-slash-therapist. For Ensler, the conversation with Maron is an opportunity to see the book’s effect on a male reader. That is why, although The Apology is a brutal account of what her father did to her when she was a child, it also offers, as Ensler describes it “a bridge.” She asks:

“Do we want to keep punching at each other or do we want to stop violence; to build a world where women feel equal and free and safe and men feel really good about that, [so that] they feel like we are all in the same story?”

While #MeToo raised awareness significantly of the pervasiveness of predatory male misbehavior and its corrosive effect on women, the road to change is paved with many obstacles. If we are to uproot this pervasive, toxic behavior from our society, we will have to embark on a painful but necessary transformative process that includes truly sincere, well-considered apologies from the perpetrators to their victims, with no strings attached. One of the positive effects of the heightened awareness that comes with #MeToo is that now we know what we need to do; the issue is finding the will to do it. Ensler’s The Apology provides the roadmap to change. Devin Faraci and Caroline Contilllo's experience shows the direction this process can take. Certainly, transformative justice is a tricky thing to achieve. Society does not usually reward those who undertake the painful process, while establishment forces like lawyers and public relations agents caution their clients against it. But if we are truly committed to changing the status quo, then we must also commit to the process — painful though it may be.
    [post_title] => When 'I'm sorry' is meaningful: seeking transformative justice in the age of #MeToo
    [post_excerpt] => As the #MeToo movement struggles to define adequate punishment for perpetrators of sexual violence, a new book explores the power of a sincere apology.
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When ‘I’m sorry’ is meaningful: seeking transformative justice in the age of #MeToo

by Yael Friedman

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    [post_date] => 2019-07-19 20:06:03
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    [post_content] => Is racist the new four-letter word?

On Wednesday night at a rally in North Carolina, President Trump falsely claimed that Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, a refugee from Somalia who became a U.S. citizen when she was a child, was a supporter of Al Qaeda. Then he stood and watched as his supporters chanted “Send her back! Send her back! Send her back..!” That rally capped several days of Trump’s well-publicized incitement against the four junior congresswomen known as the Squad — Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Presley, and Ilhan Omar — who have been vociferously critical of President Trump and his policies.

“If they don’t love [America],” said the president, “tell them to leave it.”

In their coverage of this story, legacy media outlets ranging from The New York Times to CNN finally embraced the term “racist” to describe the president’s words. Their use of this word became a story in itself, with Trump supporters denying the president’s words were racist. “It’s not racist to say love it or leave it,” said Senator Lindsey Graham. He added: “A Somali refugee embracing Trump would not have been asked to go back.”

 



Even if one were to agree with Graham that “send her back” was not necessarily racist, one would be hard-pressed to reconcile the core right to freedom of expression in a democracy with the idea that an immigrant who exercised that right by criticizing the president's policies should be deported.

Other Republican representatives were clearly uncomfortable with the “send her back” chant, but they didn’t want to label the president a racist, so they split the difference: The crowd was wrong, said Representative Tom Emmer (R-MN), but the president “didn’t have a racist bone in his body.” Emmer did not comment on the fact that the president stood silently for 13 seconds as the crowd he’d been working into a frenzy for the previous quarter of an hour chanted rhythmically.

Trump is, of course, notorious for his misogyny. But besides their gender, the four Democratic representatives he attacked are also all people of color. Bernie Sanders shares the same political views, but Trump did not single him out. Sanders is, of course, a white man. Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi — who has a testy relationship with the Squad — successfully pushed through a House resolution to condemn Trump for his racist comments, overriding Republican objections and a parliamentary ruling that deemed the term an insult and thus not allowed.

The partisan argument over what constitutes racism is the driving force behind the reluctance of legacy media outlets to use the term. Editors are afraid that if they label someone a racist, the media outlet will no longer be considered an objective source of information. There is a whole separate argument over whether or not objectivity is possible or desirable in these troubled times. When, for example, The New York Times published a controversial profile of a white supremacist that made him sound like an ordinary guy who loved his family but happened to hold some extremist views, critics charged that the paper had lent credibility to a Nazi by presenting a humanizing portrait in the pages of the country’s most prestigious newspaper.

One expert argued that using the term "racist" was counter-productive because it made the person accused of racism defensive, and that the ensuing argument over whether or not the term was appropriate deflected attention from meaningful and substantive policy discussions.

But as Trump engages increasingly in overt racist incitement, the legacy media are re-examining their editorial policy. Over the past two days, The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, and other prominent reporting platforms have all used the term “racist,” to describe the president’s comments. As Maria Bustillos explains in the Columbia Journalism Review: “The language of distance and delicacy is based in good faith; where good faith is absent, delicate language does little more than normalize things like racism and cruelty.” In other words, sometimes going high when others are going low can be counter-productive.
    [post_title] => Why editors are so reluctant to label Donald Trump a racist
    [post_excerpt] => The use of the term "racist" became a story in itself, with Trump supporters denying the president’s words were racist. “It’s not racist to say love it or leave it,” said Senator Lindsey Graham. He added: “A Somali refugee embracing Trump would not have been asked to go back.”
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Why editors are so reluctant to label Donald Trump a racist

by Lisa Goldman

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    [post_content] => An unlikely partnership between politically opposed billionaires raises questions about the role money plays in ...  everything.

Perhaps the most surprising news this week is the unlikely partnership between two billionaires who represent opposite sides of the political spectrum. George Soros, the billionaire known for his liberalism, is partnering with the far-right Charles Koch to fund a Washington think tank that will promote a non-interventionist foreign policy. 

Stephen Kinzer, a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, describes his reaction to the announcement in  an op-ed for the Boston Globe:

"The depth of this heresy can only be appreciated by recognizing the meretricious power that nourishes Washington’s think-tank ecosystem… In foreign policy, all major Washington think tanks promote interventionist dogma: the United States faces threats everywhere, it must therefore be present everywhere, and “present” includes maintaining more than 800 foreign military bases and spending trillions of dollars on endless confrontations with foreign countries.” 

The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, as it will be known, will be led by a number of critics of American foreign policy, including Trita Parsi, the former president of the National Iranian American Council. Parsi said:

“It shows how important ending endless war is if they’re willing to put aside their differences and get together on this project. We are going to challenge the basis of American foreign policy in a way that has not been done in at least the last quarter-century.”

One of the loudest critics of billionaires bearing liberal gifts is Anand Giridharadas. In his book Winners Take All: the elite charade of changing the world,  the former McKinsey consultant turned social critic attempts to answer the question: “What is the relationship between the extraordinary elite generosity of our time, which is real, and the extraordinary elite hoarding of our time?” Giridharadas’s conclusion: that elite generosity is a partner of elite hoarding.

The billionaires’ partnership raises the issue of the role of money in, well, just about everything, explains Kelsey Piper in an article for Vox. 

Institutional pushback against “endless war” feels like a relief and a welcome change in Washington, D.C., but one should temper one’s reaction with a healthy skepticism of billionaires who want to shape the world. 
    [post_title] => The problem with billionaires bearing liberal gifts
    [post_excerpt] => George Soros and Charles Koch would seem to be the most unlikely of partners, but the two billionaires have found synergy in their newly launched think tank.
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The problem with billionaires bearing liberal gifts

by Jessica McKenzie

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    [post_date] => 2019-06-26 16:59:51
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    [post_content] => We've changed our name and expanded our mission, but our ethos remains the same

In 2017 a group of journalists and academics with expertise in authoritarianism launched a Medium blog called The Anti-Nihilist Institute. Over the ensuing months they wrote sharp analysis about the historical and social context of anti-democratic forces, and published thought provoking interviews with experts in the field. With a rapidly growing readership of thoughtful people seeking new thinking about critical issues, the founders decided to migrate the Medium blog to its own, dedicated website.

We are delighted to announce that the launch of our new website comes with a new name — The Conversationalist.

The name reflects our expanded mission, which is to bring together thoughtful writers who are experts in a variety of fields to provide new insights into critical issues. Over the past half year we have published thought provoking articles on diverse topics that range from the role of art in times of political despair to a new way of thinking about how to treat opioid addicts. The thread that links these many ideas together is one of creative new approaches to the urgent issues of our times, from social inequality to the stale thinking that underlies political stagnation. We invite you, our readers, to contribute to this conversation: share our articles on social media, comment on our Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts, and send us your ideas for new topics to write about here.

We look forward to playing a role in supporting an ongoing conversation about how to make our society  more inclusive, healthy, environmentally sustainable, and thoughtful.
    [post_title] => The Conversationalist: a new name and an expanded mission
    [post_excerpt] => The thread that links these many ideas together is the intention to inspire creative new approaches to the urgent issues of our times, from social inequality to the stale thinking that underlies political stagnation. 
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The Conversationalist: a new name and an expanded mission

by Lisa Goldman

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    [post_date] => 2019-06-20 16:00:09
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    [post_content] => With leading publications having phased out their public editors, external watchdogs have stepped in, holding the media to account in an age of declining public trust.

The Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) has decided to fill the vacuum left by the near disappearance of public editors from major newspapers by appointing a few of its own: Gabriel Snyder will take on The New York Times; Ana Marie Cox will monitor The Washington Post; Maria Bustillos will keep an eye on MSNBC; and Emily Tamkin will oversee CNN. Whether or not the news organizations will engage with these outsiders much (if at all) remains to be seen, but the Columbia Journalism Review is counting on having enough organizational clout so their efforts are not in vain.

Emily Tamkin has already been on CJR's podcast to take CNN to task for filling the airwaves with “underqualified pundits.” An article in the Washingtonian provides more information on CJR’s project, reporting that staffers for various media platforms have already been in touch with editor Kyle Pope to suggest issues for the attention of the public editors.

Something those public editors should consider: Joshua Benton reports for Nieman Lab on the “new avoidance” phenomenon, which is unfortunately becoming more common globally, and especially in the United States. The report is dismaying, but also illuminating. Some of the comments from readers explaining why they sometimes or always avoid the news demonstrate real demand and hunger for more positive coverage of things that are working—problems that are being solved—which is part of our goal here at The Conversationalist.

In other news:

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has signed a new law that permits undocumented immigrants to apply for driver’s licenses. Read more.

An argument for targeting the world’s 2.4 billion gamers with messaging about environmental issues and sustainability. Learn more.

How is participatory budgeting enlivening democracy in New York? Read the op-ed.
    [post_title] => The important work of keeping the media honest
    [post_excerpt] => Journalists passionate about keeping the media relevant have taken on the job of shadow ombudsman

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The important work of keeping the media honest

by Jessica McKenzie

WP_Post Object
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    [post_date] => 2019-06-13 15:06:55
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    [post_content] => Social media platforms and authoritarian populists have a troubled, tangled, symbiotic relationship

Evgeny Morozov, a prominent culture critic and social media expert, argues in a recent opinion piece for The Guardian that the global right-wing populist movement is divided over Big Tech companies. Globally, populists see the platforms as a way to subvert mainstream media, but in the United States the right wing sees it as a target to attack.  Morozov's analysis overlooks, however, the fact that American extremists have been having it both ways: they capitalize off the opportunity to radicalize individuals on social media, while cynically complaining about “far-left” ideologues, as demonstrated by recent events.

Last week, YouTube initially declined to sanction the right-wing comedian Stephen Crowder for posting videos filled with racist and homophobic attacks against a Vox journalist. As HuffPo reporter Andy Campbell observes, this is a really bad sign for the company’s new anti-hate policy.

Then the company proceeded to prove, as Will Oremus describes it, “The One Rule of Content Moderation”: Namely, if a decision is too controversial, reverse it. YouTube’s decision to take away Crowder’s ability to make money off his videos is neither a “hard-won victory” nor “mob rule,” but merely more evidence that the tech companies have no idea what they’re doing.

As this story by New York Times reporter Kevin Roose demonstrates, the recommendation engines that power platforms like YouTube are as influential as content moderation — if less visible. Roose reports that a series of tweaks to the recommendation system on YouTube made it even easier for white supremacists and other right-wing populists to radicalize their audiences.

However, Roose also reports that some left-wing YouTubers are hacking the system by mimicking the video style, lingo, and subject matter of right-wing populists, and then debunking their messages. These activists are modeling their tactics on successful de-radicalization by co-opting the medium, meme by meme. While this community-driven strategy is promising, its creators are ultimately at the mercy of the same algorithms as their far-right colleagues: if YouTube switches things up again, who knows whether they can still get their videos in front of the people who need them.

In other news:

States race to ban styrofoam in the latest skirmish of the much-needed war on plastic. Read more.

How an “innovation team” is ending blight in Mobile, Alabama. Learn more.

The small Hawaiian island of Moloka‘i is modeling a post-carbon future for us all. Here’s how.
    [post_title] => How the far right games social media platforms
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How the far right games social media platforms

by Jessica McKenzie

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