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It's Live on the HomePage Now: Tulsi Gabbard Urges Trump to 'Please Consider' Pardons for Julian Assange and Edward Snowden  emocrat lawmaker, Representative Tulsi Gabbard, has urged Donald Trump to pardon the whistleblower Edward Snowden and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. |
Rep. Gabbard, representative for Hawaii's 2nd congressional and former presidential candidate, called on the president to reconsider the cases of the two men, both of whom have been charged under the Espionage Act.
Her call comes after Mr Trump pardoned his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, who twice admitted lying to the FBI.
Despite misleading prosecutors about his contacts with Russia, Flynn, 61, later retracted his guilty plea, claiming that he was set up by the federal agency.
Democrats widely condemned Mr Trump’s Thanksgiving Eve pardon, with House speaker Nancy Pelosi branding it a "brazen abuse of power".
The pardon did not go unnoticed by Rep Gabbard, who has previously called for the charges against Snowden and Assange to be dropped.
"Since you're giving pardons to people," she tweeted on Thursday, "Please consider pardoning those who, at great personal sacrifice, exposed the deception and criminality of those in the deep state".
Rep. Gabbard has previously campaigned for the release of Snowden and Assange. Last month, she put forward a bipartisan bill seeking to make changes to the Espionage Act, which was ushered in shortly after World War I.
"Brave whistleblowers exposing lies and illegal actions in our government must be protected," she said in a video to promote the legislation.
It remains to be seen whether Mr Trump will pardon either man.
Snowden, a former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor, is charged with two counts of violating the Espionage Act.
He fled the US for Russia in 2013 after leaking secret information about domestic and national surveillance programs carried out by the NSA.
Snowden, 37, earlier this month announced that he plans to apply for Russian citizenship while signalling his intention to hang onto his US nationality.
During his re-election campaign, the president said he would "take a look" at pardoning Snowden. Any such move is unlikely to go down well with defense and security hawks, who view people like Snowden as traitors rather than truth-seekers.
Meanwhile, Assange is charged with 17 violations of the Espionage Act, one of the most serious crimes in US law with penalties of up to 175 years in prison.
He has been accused of conspiring to commit computer intrusion in order to assist Chelsea Manning with the intention of getting access to classified military information and publishing it on his Wikileaks website.
A warrant for Assange's arrest was issued by the Swedish Prosecutor's office in 2010 accusing him of rape and molestation.
Assange, 49, fled to London where he was holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy before his arrest in May 2019. After his arrest, he was sentenced to 50 weeks in prison and is being held at Belmarsh’s high security prison in London.
"Associates" of the president are alleged to have offered Assange a pardon in return for the source of damaging emails about Hillary Clinton leaked on his website in the 2016 election campaign, claims denied by the White House.
Assange's girlfriend and lawyer, Stella Morris, called on the president to pardon him so he could come home in time for Christmas to see his children.
“These are Julian’s sons Max and Gabriel. They need their father. Our family needs to be whole again,” she wrote in a tweet on Thursday.
“I beg you, please bring him home for Christmas.”
Election workers in Milwaukee review ballots at the Wisconsin Center on Nov. 21, 2020. (photo: Tannen Maury/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
Wisconsin Recount Confirms Biden's Win Over Trump, Cementing the President's Failure to Change the Election Results
Rosalind S. Helderman, The Washington Post
Helderman writes: "The recount of presidential ballots in Wisconsin’s two largest counties finished Sunday, reconfirming that President-elect Joe Biden defeated President Trump in the key swing state by more than 20,000 votes."
After Milwaukee County completed its tally Friday and Dane County concluded its count Sunday, there was little change in the final breakdown of the more than 800,000 ballots that had been cast in the two jurisdictions. As a result of the recount, Biden’s lead over Trump in Wisconsin grew by 87 votes.
Under Wisconsin law, Trump was required to foot the bill for the partial recount — meaning his campaign paid $3 million only to see Biden’s lead expand.
The results of the Wisconsin recount cemented Trump’s failure to alter the results of the November election in a series of states where he has falsely alleged there was widespread fraud and irregularities.
His efforts to stop Michigan officials from certifying the vote there earlier this month ran aground. A hand recount of ballots in Georgia confirmed Biden’s win in that state. Two new court decisions in Pennsylvania late last week rejected the Trump campaign’s attempts to halt the vote count there, the latest in a series of forceful judicial opinions that have tossed out claims by the president and his allies around the country.
On Monday, Arizona — the fifth of the six states where Trump has tried to upend the vote certification process — is set to finalize its results.
The Wisconsin Election Commission is scheduled to meet on Tuesday, at which time state law says the election results will be certified by the chairwoman of the six-member panel, who is a Democrat.
Danielle Melfi, the Wisconsin state director of the Biden campaign, said in a statement Sunday that the recount “only served to reaffirm Joe Biden’s victory in Wisconsin.”
She said local boards of canvassers had “resoundingly rejected — often on a bipartisan basis — the Trump campaign’s baseless attempts to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of Wisconsinites who simply followed the law when they voted. And despite repeated incendiary accusations, there was no evidence of fraud whatsoever.”
The president and his legal advisers have said they still plan to fight in court in an attempt to prevent Wisconsin from moving forward. The three Republicans on the state’s six-member election commission could seek to delay certification while the process unfolds.
“The Wisconsin recount is not about finding mistakes in the count, it is about finding people who have voted illegally, and that case will be brought after the recount is over, on Monday or Tuesday,” Trump wrote in a tweet Saturday. “We have found many illegal votes. Stay tuned!”
Trump legal adviser Jenna Ellis claimed without evidence in a statement Sunday that the recounts had “revealed serious issues regarding the legality of ballots cast.”
“As we have said from the very beginning, we want every legal vote, and only legal votes to be counted, and we will continue to uphold our promise to the American people to fight for a free and fair election,” she said.
Even if the Trump campaign were to pull out a surprise courtroom win — which legal experts said is unlikely — it would do little to change the outcome of the White House race, which Biden won with 306 electoral votes. The electoral college will meet on Dec. 14 to formalize his victory.
In Wisconsin, the president’s campaign sought to use the recount process to invalidate tens of thousands of otherwise legal ballots. Among other things, Trump’s lawyers argued that a form signed by voters who cast a ballot during in-person voting before Election Day was insufficient under state law. They said all those ballots — totaling about 180,000 votes in the two counties — should be tossed out.
They also complained about a practice in place since 2016 that allows election officials to fix tiny errors on the certification envelopes of some mail-in ballots, as well as rules in place since 2011 that allow some people to declare themselves “indefinitely confined” due to age or disability and vote without showing a photo ID.
Local officials in each county rejected the Trump campaign arguments and included the ballots in the recount.
In announcing Dane County’s results Sunday, Clerk Scott McDonell told reporters that he saw Trump’s tweet as “a clear admission to the fact that there was no fraud found here,” but instead an acknowledgment that the Trump campaign’s concerns amounted to “objections to policies.”
He said the process should “reassure” the public about the accuracy of the count, but said he found it “disturbing” that the Trump campaign had targeted only two Democratic counties for practices in place across Wisconsin.
Two conservative groups filed lawsuits last week asking the Wisconsin Supreme Court to consider challenges to the recount process. The seven-member elected court has not yet said whether it will agree to hear the cases; Republicans have a 4-to-3 majority on the court. The Trump campaign is not so far a party to either suit.
Legal experts have said the arguments advanced by the Trump campaign during the recount were thin. They also said that even if judges were to conclude that some practices by Wisconsin clerks were technically flawed, they would be extremely unlikely to throw out tens of thousands of ballots cast by voters who did nothing wrong other than follow rules, as directed by election officials.
Further undermining the Trump campaign’s argument, experts said, is the fact that it raised only objections in two predominantly Democratic counties.
The practices that Trump lawyers criticized are in place statewide and have been in place for years, including before to the 2016 election — which Trump won and did not contest.
Their arguments would not invalidate only Biden votes. Documents prepared as part of the Dane County recount showed that the Trump campaign’s own lead attorney in Wisconsin, James Troupis, had voted early and in person. He essentially argued that his own vote was illegal and should not be counted. Troupis did not respond to requests for comment.
“This whole strategy is so shortsighted. It’s so self-destructive in the long term,” said James Wigderson, a conservative activist and editor of the website RightWisconsin, who did not vote for Trump.
He argued the GOP gambit sent a strong message to voters of color that the Republican Party believes their votes are less valid than those cast in White suburbs and rural areas. “Republicans should be outraged by this,” he said.
Under Wisconsin law, Trump was allowed to request the recount because Biden’s margin of victory — about 0.6 percent — was less than 1 percent. However, Trump’s campaign was required to pay for the recount because Biden’s margin was more than 0.25 percent. Trump could have requested a full statewide recount, at a cost of nearly $8 million. Instead, his campaign opted to pay less for a narrower recount in the state’s two most Democratic-leaning counties.
“This recount demonstrated what we already know: that elections in Milwaukee County are fair, transparent, accurate and secure,” County Clerk George Christenson said as the county election commission voted to certify its results Friday. “We have once again demonstrated good government in Wisconsin.”
The recounts required dozens of election employees to work for more than 12 hours a day since Nov. 20, taking off only Thanksgiving Day. Officials in both counties took over local convention centers to allow workers to spread out, erected plexiglass shields, and instructed workers and observers alike to wear masks.
Still, election officials worried employees could have been exposed to the coronavirus while conducting a process they had asserted from the start was exceptionally unlikely to change the state’s results, given Biden’s margin of victory.
“I'm very concerned,” Christenson said in an interview.
He noted that there among the 300 people who gathered at a convention center each day for the recount was a poll worker who was pregnant. A member of the local elections commission, who had to be on site full time to adjudicate challenges raised by the Trump campaign, is 73 years old and has a heart condition, he said.
Demonstrators protesting the fatal police shooting of Breonna Taylor display a flyer with photos of the Louisville Metro police officers accused of fatally wounding Taylor, at the Louis XVI statue on Aug. 1, 2020, in Louisville, Ky. (photo: Joshua Lott/The Washington Post/Getty Images)
Natasha Lennard | Beyond Breonna: Louisville Police Make the Case for Abolition
Natasha Lennard, The Intercept
Lennard writes: "The idea of defunding the police is roiling Democratic Party politics - but it’s not about that. It's about the horrors of policing."
n recent weeks, mainstream political discussions around the notion of “defunding the police” have taken a pernicious, if predictable turn. The so-called debate is no longer focused on the violent facts of U.S. policing. Instead, this ongoing news story has become, first and foremost, a narrative about the Democratic Party and its divisions. Such is the nature of the media-politics machine: A demand situated in a fight for life and liberation has been transmogrified into a realpolitik hot button — replete with polls, right-wing fearmongering, questions of electability, and calls for less “divisive” rhetoric.Pushed to the background, meanwhile, is the unending flood of reports and revelations that again and again show policing to be an institution worthy of abolition. Just this month, two such stories came from Louisville, Kentucky, where 26-year-old Breonna Taylor was killed by police in March during a botched raid. Louisville Metro Police, the same department to which Taylor’s killers belonged, was found to have hidden from the public a staggering 738,000 records documenting sexual abuse of minors by two officers — concealment that was aided by the Jefferson County Attorney’s Office. The records related to the abuse of youths in the “Explorer Scouts” program, created for young people interested in law enforcement careers.
And just two weeks ago, a woman filed a sexual assault lawsuit against former Louisville detective Brett Hankison, one of the cops directly involved in Taylor’s death. The lawsuit claims that Hankison has a history of using his authority as a police officer to prey on women.
The wanton killing of a young Black woman involving a cop with an alleged history of predation, alongside the coverup of a major case of child sexual abuse — all recent events from just one department in one U.S. city. As is typical, funding for the policing operations will constitute the largest expenditure of Louisville’s 2020 city budget: $190.6 million out of $613 million.
Highlighting recent abuses committed by this one police department, which takes nearly a third of a city’s budget, does not dispositively prove the need for police abolition, let alone defunding. Reformists could well respond that oversight and training, or more drastic reforms, are the appropriate solutions. Following Taylor’s killing, and the potent anti-racist uprisings it helped catalyze, a number of such reforms were instituted, including an end to no-knock warrants. And news of the sexual abuse records coverup has brought reliable calls for accountability from local politicians.
Yet the Louisville cases highlight the problems of a violent and unaccountable law enforcement apparatus; problems which are so widespread and historic that they point to an unreformable institution. As abolitionist organizer Mariame Kaba put it, “When you see a police officer pressing his knee into a black man’s neck until he dies, that’s the logical result of policing in America. When a police officer brutalizes a black person, he is doing what he sees as his job.” The Louisville examples might not make for an airtight case for abolition, but they makes a case nonetheless — a case that can be made almost anywhere police are found across the country.
Incident after incident might not convince a skittish liberal of the need to go beyond reform and toward abolition, but it should be sufficient to show that police defunding is a reasonable demand. The argument that police presence in communities is a source of harm should not be considered controversial.
Sexual assault committed by cops is not rare. A 2015 data investigation by the Buffalo News found that a police officer in the U.S. is accused of an act of sexual misconduct on average every five days. It’s an insult to survivors to suggest that police are a protection from rape and sexual violence.
Meanwhile, police lying in official reports and in court — perjury, that is — is so common that it has earned its own neologism: “testilying.”
It is an affront to Black and Indigenous lives, as well as the lives of other communities of color, to treat police racism as anomalous, or even endemic but curable within the existing justice system. A fantastical failure of empirical thinking is involved in claiming that an institution, which has always operated to uphold the hierarchies and brutalities of racial capitalism, can somehow be maintained while disentangled from that role.
There’s every reason for skepticism over claims that reform and oversight are ways to end the harm of policing; a century of attempted reforms have had no such effect. In another recent news story, newly released reports show that the New York Police Department consistently ignored and rejected recommendations from the Civilian Complaint Review Board on punishments for police misconduct. The board is an independent oversight agency, established in 1993 to address complaints about police impunity — which has continued apace regardless. “In about 71 percent of 6,900 serious misconduct charges, the Police Department reduced or rejected recommendations for stiff discipline of officers,” the New York Times reported, based on data from the last two decades.
In a related, and also recently reported, incident, four senior officials were fired from the Civilian Complaint Review Board. Fellow employees claimed that the officials were known for pushing a more aggressive stance toward the police.
The risk in drawing attention to cases of extreme police violence and duplicity is that police apologists can dismiss these brutalities as anomalous in the grand scheme of police work, even when they number in the thousands per year. But such abuses could only emerge within certain conditions: an impunity-drenched culture and history of dehumanizing Black life. These anti-abolitionist arguments tacitly treat as acceptable the normal activities of policing that have little to do with catching “bad guys” and everything to do with protecting capital while criminalizing poverty and Blackness.
It may be the case that campaigns to reduce or remove police funding do better with voters when “defund the police” rhetoric is avoided, in favor of calls to invest instead in other social services. Ballot Measure J in Los Angeles County, which requires 10 percent of the city’s unrestricted general funds be invested in social services and alternatives to incarceration, not prisons and policing, was successful on the election ballot, and commentators have credited the success in part to campaigners avoiding the word “defund.”
It is also the case that only a vanishingly small number of politicians, on both the local and national level, are seriously pushing for defunding within an abolitionist framework.
Yet these dynamics need not determine the terms of the debate. Indeed, calls to abolish the entire policing and carceral system should not be reduced to a Democratic Party “debate” at all. With new, vile chapters, like the latest from Louisville, added every week to policing’s unbroken history of racist, patriarchal violence, those calling for abolition should no longer have to demonstrate the basic grounds for this fight.
Congressman Mike Kelly. (photo: WP/Getty Images)
Pennsylvania Supreme Court Throws Out Republican Bid to Reject 2.5 Million Mail-In Votes
Guardian UK
Excerpt: "Pennsylvania's highest court has thrown out a lower court’s order that was preventing the state from certifying dozens of contests from the 3 November election."
Judge says plaintiff ‘failed to allege that even a single mail-in ballot was fraudulently cast or counted’
ennsylvania’s highest court has thrown out a lower court’s order that was preventing the state from certifying dozens of contests from the 3 November election.
In the latest Republican lawsuit attempting to thwart president-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the battleground state, the state supreme court unanimously threw out the three-day-old order, saying the underlying lawsuit was filed months after the law allowed for challenges to Pennsylvania’s year-old mail-in voting law.
Justices also remarked on the lawsuit’s staggering demand that an entire election be overturned retroactively. “They have failed to allege that even a single mail-in ballot was fraudulently cast or counted,” justice David Wecht wrote in a concurring opinion.
The state’s attorney general, Democrat Josh Shapiro, called the court’s decision “another win for democracy”.
The week-old lawsuit, led by Pennsylvania Republican congressman Mike Kelly, had challenged the state’s mail-in voting law as unconstitutional.
As a remedy, Kelly and other Republican plaintiffs had sought to either throw out the 2.5m mail-in ballots submitted under the law – most of them by Democrats – or to wipe out the election results and direct the state’s Republican-controlled legislature to pick Pennsylvania’s presidential electors.
The request for the state’s lawmakers to pick Pennsylvania’s presidential electors also flies in the face of a nearly century-old state law, which grants the power to pick electors to the state’s popular vote, Wecht wrote.
While the high court’s two Republicans joined the five Democrats in opposing those remedies, they split from Democrats in suggesting that the lawsuit’s underlying claims – that the state’s mail-in voting law might violate the constitution – are worth considering.
On Wednesday, commonwealth court judge Patricia McCullough, elected as a Republican in 2009, had issued the order to halt certification of any remaining contests, including apparently contests for Congress.
A day earlier, Democratic governor Tom Wolf said he had certified Joe Biden as the winner of the presidential election in Pennsylvania. Biden beat president Donald Trump by more than 80,000 votes in Pennsylvania, a state Trump had won in 2016.
Wolf had appealed McCullough’s decision to the state supreme court, saying there was no “conceivable justification” for it.
The defeat followed Friday’s decision by a federal appeals court to dismiss a separate challenge to the Pennsylvania result and back a district judge who likened the president’s evidence-free and error-strewn lawsuit to “Frankenstein’s monster”.
The three-member federal panel confirmed unanimously a lower court’s decision last week to rebuff the arguments made by Trump’s legal team, led by former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, that voting in Pennsylvania was marred by widespread fraud.
“Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy. Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here,” judge Stephanos Bibas wrote for the 3rd US circuit court of appeals.
The judge denounced as “breathtaking” a Republican request to reverse certification of the vote, adding: “Voters, not lawyers, choose the president. Ballots, not briefs, decide elections. [The] campaign’s claims have no merit.”
The ruling, which was the Trump team’s 38th court defeat in election lawsuits nationwide, reaffirmed US district judge Matthew Brann’s earlier view of Giuliani’s complaint, delivered after he listened to five hours of oral arguments last week. The lawsuit, Brann said, was: “like Frankenstein’s Monster … haphazardly stitched together.”
A copy of the Epoch Times, a free newspaper backed by the Chinese spiritual movement Falun Gong that tends to espouse anti-communist, pro-Trump views. (photo: Miguel Candela/SOPA Images/Lightrocket/Getty Images)
The Challenge of Combating Fake News in Asian American Communities
Terry Nguyen, Vox
Nguyen writes: "Less than a week after Election Day, a spreadsheet titled 'Battling Asian American Misinformation' began circulating in progressive Asian American social media circles, primarily among those of Vietnamese and Chinese descent."
Language diversity within the AAPI community means misinformation is difficult to track.
The most popular YouTube channels flagged on the spreadsheet accumulated hundreds of thousands of subscribers, in which pundits discussed misleading claims about election fraud, Hunter Biden’s relationship with China (a conspiracy disseminated by pro-Trump figures), and the Chinese Communist Party’s meddling in the presidential election. Below some of these clips, YouTube included a label informing viewers that the Associated Press had called the election for Joe Biden. But beyond that small disclaimer, most channels were still monetized and still easily discoverable. Flagging it to YouTube, as some soon realized, amounted to doing nothing.
The election might be over, but the uphill battle against online misinformation, notably within first-generation immigrant communities, wages on.
According to CNN’s exit polling, Biden won over the majority of Asian American and Pacific Islander voters this presidential election — 61 percent of AAPI voters supported Biden, while 34 percent backed President Donald Trump. But if Democrats want to maintain a sizable lead, especially within specific ethnic groups where Democratic support has waned, they must address the growing issue of native-language misinformation, according to grassroots organizers and community activists.
Because upon disaggregating voter data — something few non-Asian polling organizations and publications tend to do — the political tendencies of this demographic are more complex and less predictable than meets the eye. A quarter of AAPI voters identify as independent, and as more people become naturalized citizens each cycle, Democrats and Republicans have a fresh slate of voters they’re able to court.
Data from the 2020 Asian American Voter Survey showed that out of the six ethnic groups surveyed, Vietnamese Americans were the only ones to express more support for Trump (48 percent) than Biden (36 percent). When factoring in surveys that extend back to 2012, however, data suggests that Republican margins, while still in the minority, are increasing. While some Asian experts thought AAPI voters might be turned off by Trump’s harsh xenophobic language (which fed into anti-Asian sentiments), surveys suggest that a not-insignificant minority of the electorate are not just tolerating it but have bought into the rhetoric, in addition to the rampant conspiracy theories.
Progressive Asian American organizers say online misinformation, specifically regarding the Democrats and the president-elect, played a role in exposing Asian American voters to more radical right-wing views since 2016. First-generation immigrants who have a contentious history with China and communist governments — such as those from Cambodia, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Laos — are more susceptible to the false claims Trump has made about China and its supposed impact on the election and the Democratic Party’s “socialist” tendencies.
Nonpartisan organizations, like APIAVote, are also concerned about how voters with limited English proficiency are vulnerable to disinformation about the voting process. Some fretted over the reliability of mail-in ballots, voter safety at the polls, and if their ballot would be counted if they voted for certain candidates.
“This election cycle, we were involved with a larger network of community organizations to make sure we fought back on disinformation about the election process,” Christine Chen, executive of APIAVote, told Vox. “It appeared that certain communities were more vulnerable and targeted, with the information translated into their language and posted onto WeChat or Facebook.”
The organization and its community partners don’t expect the torrent of fake news to subside post-election; these campaigns can have a future impact on how Asian Americans participate and vote in upcoming elections, including the Georgia Senate runoff elections, which could determine whether Biden will be able to push through his agenda.
Misinformation campaigns can be hard to track, due to the language and platform diversity of the AAPI community
The AAPI community is the fastest-growing electorate in the US, according to the Pew Research Center, growing from 4.6 million in 2000 to 11.1 million in 2020. Yet the categorization of “Asian American and Pacific Islander” is broad and vague, and rarely used as a self-identifier. There is little to no political solidarity among most of these voters, especially first-generation immigrants, who hail from different cultural, economic, and religious backgrounds with varying political histories and sensitivities. To put it simply, the Asian American electorate is overwhelmingly diverse.
Different ethnic groups communicate and receive news on different chat and social media platforms beyond the tech behemoths of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, popular among English-language voters. Since the AAPI umbrella represents voters from more than 30 different ethnic groups and languages, misinformation campaigns within these communities are challenging to track.
For example, Chinese Americans who hail from mainland China tend to use WeChat, while those from Taiwan and Hong Kong use Line and WhatsApp, respectively. Korean Americans have KakaoTalk, Vietnamese Americans mostly rely on Facebook, and many Indian Americans use WhatsApp. Meanwhile, many immigrants with limited English proficiency naturally gravitate toward native-language media — television, radio, and print media — that is produced in the US or from their home country, which might carry its own individual biases.
“I don’t know if there is a liberal Korean newspaper in America,” said Jeong Park, a reporter who formerly covered the Asian American community for the Orange County Register. In the lead-up to the election, Park noticed that Korea Daily, the largest US newspaper for Korean Americans, began to produce videos that alleged election fraud and corruption within the Biden family, which garnered hundreds of thousands of views.
“Korean newspapers are mostly moderate to conservative and work to amplify the voices of the business class, but I’m pretty alarmed at how those videos have so many views,” he said.
The same dynamic exists among Vietnamese US-based media, according to volunteers at Viet Fact Check, a project launched by the Progressive Vietnamese American Organization (PIVOT). “In our own efforts to raise awareness in our community, we’ve been turned down or muzzled by Vietnamese-language press because of the fear of offending advertisers or the readership,” said Nick Nguyen, the group’s research lead. “The same pay-for-eyeballs phenomenon across the internet is also taking place here.”
Consistent among most Asian American organizers who spoke with Vox was the concern with the Epoch Times’s media empire — including affiliates like New Tang Dynasty Television (NTD TV) and China Uncensored, which have 1.29 million and 1.48 million YouTube subscribers, respectively. That’s a conservative estimate of the Epoch Times’s reach; its affiliates have separate YouTube channels and Facebook pages across multiple languages, all with hundreds of thousands of followers or subscribers. These pages employ a “sophisticated translation operation,” one activist described, in disseminating articles and videos on Facebook and YouTube with an anti-China slant.
Since misinformation experts and researchers usually specialize in one language or platform, there is little comprehensive research on how this phenomenon impacts AAPI voters as a whole. Groups like APIAVote, though, are anticipating misinformation will be a recurring tactic in future elections.
“We’re working with community-based organizations that have a presence on each of these platforms,” Chen said. “Based on what we’ve seen in the African American and Latino community, these types of fear-based attacks are also affecting our ethnic communities.”
How overlapping information networks can fuel false narratives
The types of false narratives Asian Americans encounter online are not wholly distinct from misleading English- or Spanish-language media. Some voters are already avid viewers and readers of One America News, Newsmax, or Fox News, and seeing content in their native language may only reaffirm existing beliefs.
“The core of this tactic relies on people’s sense of insecurity and fear by misinterpreting certain policies or outcomes,” said Sunny Shao of AAPI Data, who has done research on social media rhetoric, WeChat, and Chinese American voter behavior. “Sometimes it can be straight-out misinformation, but oftentimes, there’s a cultural twist.”
Inaccurate or false news about the presidential election results generally relies on similar narratives perpetrated on some English-language conservative channels and sites, like Breitbart and the Daily Caller: that voter fraud is a pervasive issue in the US or that Beijing favors Biden. Some content also stokes racial tensions by preying on anti-Black prejudices, in light of images from this summer’s Black Lives Matter protests and the “scarcity mindset” that some immigrants have. These biased narratives are usually oversimplified and presented without nuance, which make them easily digestible for audiences with limited English and cultural context.
Some unfounded claims, like that of Biden being a radical socialist, aren’t aimed at a specific community, as Recode’s Shirin Ghaffary reported. Yet they find resonance among Latino and Asian immigrants distrustful of communist governments, whose suspicions can lead them down information echo chambers that further solidifies these conspiratorial beliefs.
Research shows that people are more likely to trust information that originates from sources they’re familiar with — friends, family, or those within their cultural community on Facebook groups, YouTube channels, or Instagram pages. As a result, peer-to-peer sharing within closed chat groups on platforms like WhatsApp and Telegram are driving the spread. And the misinformation is not just from one source: These information networks can overlap, and first-generation immigrants might be swayed by perceptions of US politics from their home country, according to anecdotes from community members.
For example, analysis of American politics from Taiwan — which has taken a proactive stance against domestic disinformation — has largely been in favor of Trump, said Rath Wang, communications director of Taiwanese Americans for Progress. While the Taiwanese government did not officially endorse any presidential candidate, its media ecosystem is still skewed. Pre-election polls by YouGov found Taiwan to be the only one out of 15 European and Asian states with citizens favoring Trump over Biden.
Several prominent Chinese dissidents have also promoted the message that Republicans and Donald Trump are the only ones who can “stop China” from politically encroaching on Taiwan, Wang added. It doesn’t help that most Americans traditionally lump the Chinese diaspora under the “Chinese American” umbrella, which overlooks the population’s geopolitical complexity. Immigrant voters who still have ties to their home country deeply care about foreign policy, and this generalizing “ignores the community’s political diversity,” Wang said.
A similar development has occurred in Vietnam, whose state media is predominantly pro-Trump. There, the Epoch Times — under the name Dai Ky Nguyen — developed an experimental network of pro-Trump, anti-China pages, which soon became one of the country’s largest Facebook publishers. The New York Times described the operation as “a Vietnamese experiment,” and the Vietnam team was reportedly tapped to build the US arm of the Epoch Times’s operation in 2017. This misinformation network has become “a force in right-wing media,” the New York Times reported, commanding tens of millions of social media followers on Facebook and YouTube spread across dozens of English and foreign-language pages.
“A lot of channels like the Epoch Times are superspreaders of misinformation, and it’s not clear from their Facebook or YouTube presence where they come from,” said Deanna Tran, Viet Fact Check’s operations lead. “It’s shared on multiple platforms at the same time, and then it gets absorbed into our communities and makes it seem like it’s homegrown, when in fact there might be outside influence involved potentially.”
Misinformation can also be community-specific, varying by region or by ethnic enclave. In early November, ProPublica reported that at least two dozen groups on WeChat had spread misinformation about how the federal government was “preparing to mobilize” in the case of riots on Election Day, in an attempt to frighten Chinese voters to stay home. Reuters also reported that several nonpartisan South Asian groups worked together to correct fake news about the voting process on WhatsApp, an unmoderated and decentralized chat service.
“It’s not that we only have a WeChat or a WhatsApp problem; these platforms are accelerants,” said Vincent Pan, executive director of Chinese for Affirmative Action and co-founder of Asian Americans Against Trump, who is familiar with misinformation on WeChat. “It accelerates a lot of vulnerabilities that Chinese and other Asian immigrants with limited English proficiency have. They live in scarcity, under tremendous social and economic pressure and uncertainty.”
“Meet the community where they’re at”: Organizers demand support from social media platforms and political parties
While the potential for misinformation on these platforms is known, the effort to stanch the spread has primarily fallen to the hands of grassroots organizers from within these ethnic communities. These efforts also vary by ethnic group. Community members are tasked with not just finding and reporting fake news but actively debunking these claims and becoming an accurate, neutral news source — often with little manpower and financial support.
According to Pan, the non-English social media landscape is usually homogeneous, operating as an insular echo chamber where little fact-checking is done. “There’s not the same level of balance, in terms of political balance or racial and ethnic balance,” he said. “It’s a priority of ours to meet the community where they’re at.”
This “data void” is also occurring in the Latino community, as Vox’s Ghaffary has reported: “There are only two major Spanish-language broadcast news networks in the US: Univision and Telemundo. This leaves room for media operations — not just on the internet but also via local radio channels and newspapers — to spread less accurate reporting,” according to a Spanish misinformation researcher.
While accurate and nonpartisan sources of information in Asian languages do exist, they are few and far between, and their online presence can’t compete against viral posts with an inflammatory or biased slant. “The message discipline in conservative media is amazing,” said Nguyen of Viet Fact Check. “Think of the juggernauts we’re facing, and there are no progressive alternative voices in Vietnamese media. For us, we just try to keep a very neutral and fact-based tone.”
But platforms too have a responsibility to mitigate the spread of non-English misinformation, Nguyen added, as this phenomenon is no longer unique to the English-speaking population. While Facebook announced it will take measures to stem election misinformation related to the vote count, similar content remains accessible on YouTube and is gaining traction. One researcher told Recode that YouTube doesn’t appear to actively push such content, which is “somewhat hard to find,” but it’s possible the platform’s moderation focus is less strict surrounding foreign-language misinformation on US elections.
Viet Fact Check, a volunteer-run group, has tried to register as an independent fact-checker on Facebook, but faced obstacles to verification. “I’m comfortable saying we are the No. 1 neutral-to-progressive fact-checking Vietnamese source in the US,” Nguyen said. “And while Facebook has tried to mobilize third-party groups to fact-check, we’re not technically a media organization. We’re all volunteers.”
This grassroots work isn’t sufficient, nor is it sustainable. Organizers say Democrats need to commit to outreach and budget in translation services to reach these historically overlooked communities. “The Democratic Party needs to recognize that there are certain political sensitivities within the Asian American umbrella,” said Wang of Taiwanese Americans for Progress. “For Taiwanese Americans, it’s crucial that candidates express their backing for Taiwan. … Since Trump has been so vocal about China, many believe that he will take action to support Taiwan.”
It’s also a matter of trust. About half of AAPI voters in the 2020 Asian American Voter Survey have not been contacted by a major party, a huge missed opportunity, according to Shao, the researcher from AAPI Data. Pockets of Asian American voters live in battleground states and can be a deciding factor in congressional or state legislature races.
There are both cultural and language barriers that prevent people from breaking through the misinformation trap. For example, many first-generation immigrants lack the civic knowledge about how elections work, thus relying on community-driven translated content that might not always be true. A direct approach from political parties and candidates, then, could make a difference in how these voters perceive certain policies and elections. On-the-ground regional or state-level work is required to disaggregate and disentangle the myth of the “AAPI voter” and their varying interests.
“We ran Asian-language ads and direct mail in four to five different swing states against vulnerable Republicans,” said Pan, of Asian Americans Against Trump. “The parties and candidates weren’t doing it themselves, and it was too frustrating to sit and watch our communities go the wrong way.”
In late October, Bloomberg reported that Asian American voters could “play a decisive role” in turning Georgia blue, with Indian Americans as the state’s largest Asian ethnic group. With Georgia’s upcoming Senate runoff race in January, the AAPI vote is similarly coveted. These voters could be crucial in swaying elections in races that have thin margins, Pan added, and politicians — at the regional, state, and national levels — should be focused on investing and distributing more resources.
“We’ve realized that if we can’t always rely on regulatory protections from Facebook or backing from a national party,” Pan said. “We have to organize.”
A mass burial took place on Sunday at Zabarmari village. (photo: Ahmed Kingimi/Reuters)
Boko Haram: At Least 110 Civilians Killed in 'Gruesome’ Nigeria Massacre
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "A 'gruesome' massacre against farmers in northeastern Nigeria killed at least 110 people, the United Nations has said, raising tolls initially indicating 43 and then at least 70 dead."
Farmers harvesting crops in Borno state attacked by armed men on motorcycles, in the ‘most violent direct’ assault against civilians this year, UN says.
The killings took place in the early afternoon of Saturday in the village of Koshobe and other rural communities in the Jere local government area near Maiduguri, the capital of the conflict-hit Borno state.
“Armed men on motorcycles led a brutal attack on civilian men and women who were harvesting their fields,” Edward Kallon, the UN’s humanitarian coordinator in Nigeria, said in a statement on Sunday.
“At least 110 civilians were ruthlessly killed and many others were wounded in this attack,” he added, noting that several women are believed to have been kidnapped.
“The incident is the most violent direct attack against innocent civilians this year. I call for the perpetrators of this heinous and senseless act to be brought to justice,” Kallon said.
There has been no claim of responsibility for the attack, but the armed group Boko Haram and its splinter faction, the Islamic State in West Africa Province (ISWAP), have carried out a series of deadly assaults in the area in recent years.
Both groups are active in the region, where fighters have killed more than 30,000 people in the past decade during an armed campaign that has displaced some two million and has spread to neighbouring countries including Niger, Chad and Cameroon.
Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, who took office in 2015 promising to fix the security crisis, denounced the latest massacre.
“I condemn the killing of our hard-working farmers by terrorists in Borno state. The entire country is hurt by these senseless killings,” the president said via his spokesman.
But security analyst Sulaiman Aledeh said many in the country are growing frustrated with the authorities’ inability to contain the conflict.
“If you’ve seen [what happened to] Niger, President Mahamadou Issoufou had to sack his security chiefs when 89 soldiers were killed. So Nigerians are asking why are you keeping these people,” he told Al Jazeera from Lagos.
“The problem here has to do with the government of the day seems to be rewarding loyalty over professionalism. They [Nigerians] think by now the government should’ve tried a few good other men to get them out of this mess.”
‘So much suffering’
Earlier on Sunday, Borno Governor Babaganan Umara Zulum told journalists that at least 70 farmers were killed. He was speaking in Zabarmari village after attending the burial of 43 people whose bodies were recovered on Saturday.
Zulum urged the federal government to recruit more soldiers, Civilian Joint Task Force members and civil defence fighters to protect farmers in the region.
He described people facing desperate choices.
“In one side, they stay at home they may be killed by hunger and starvation, on the other, they go out to their farmlands and risk getting killed by the insurgents,” he said.
“The security forces are obviously losing this war,” he told Al Jazeera, describing 2019 as “the deadliest year” for Nigerian security forces since Boko Haram’s armed campaign started in 2009.
“About 800 security forces were killed, mostly in the first half of last year, and the Nigerian military responded by changing its strategy introducing what they called the ‘super camp strategy’ by which they withdrew soldiers from remote communities and rural areas and consolidated them in what they call ‘super camps’ in order to reduce military fatalities,” Bukarti said.
“The strategy succeeded in reducing military fatalities but the side-effect of that is that the Nigerian military has effectively surrendered control of rural Nigeria to Boko Haram fighters.
“You have Boko Haram ruling northeastern Nigeria and criminal gangs ruling the rural communities of northwestern Nigeria; this has a devastating effect on Nigeria’s economy and the future of the country entirely.”
Speaking to Al Jazeera from Maiduguri, Vincent Lelei, the UN’s deputy humanitarian coordinator for Nigeria, said people in the region “live in extreme fear” amid the prolonged crisis “which has led to so much suffering, so much displacement and destruction of livelihoods”.
“Borno state is a state with very good soil, there is a lot of water on the ground, and a lot of crops grow very quickly,” he said. “Given the opportunity, the livelihoods of the people could recover so quickly – but this insecurity, this problem of violence against unarmed civilians is reducing those opportunities.”
Scientific integrity is key for protecting the field against attacks. (photo: sanjeri/Getty Images)
Want More Science-Based Policies? Start by Protecting the Scientists
Maria Caffrey, Union of Concerned Scientists
Caffrey writes: "Now more than ever we need to establish scientific integrity policies and laws that prevent the suppression and distortion of scientific research, and prohibit retaliations against scientists."
s we approach the holidays I, like most people, have been reflecting on everything 2020 has given us (or taken away) while starting to look ahead to 2021.One thing I am particularly looking forward to is hearing more from experts and scientists so that we can usher in a new era of science-based policymaking. But before we get too excited about what those changes could be, there are some essential actions that the Biden administration must take to ensure that the scientists and their work will be protected over the next four years and beyond.
I am eager to put the past behind me, but I am also acutely aware that if we do not make the effort to learn from our history then we risk repeating it. So how can we close the gaps in our laws to ensure that industry cannot profit at the expense of public health or diminish our public lands? Two words: scientific integrity.
Scientific integrity refers to the professional culture, norms, and rules that underpin the production, communication, and use of scientific research. Now more than ever we need to establish scientific integrity policies and laws that prevent the suppression and distortion of scientific research, and prohibit retaliations against scientists. Without this we risk future abuse and manipulation of science and harm to the public good.
We Need More Than Listening
By now we have all become sadly accustomed to the current administration sidelining scientists, most prominently Dr. Anthony Fauci, because the facts they provide do not fit with the political rhetoric of the moment.
I have my own history of filing a scientific integrity complaint with the National Park Service (which falls under the Department of the Interior) after senior ranking employees attempted to censor one of my scientific reports. I know all too well the damage and pain that these actions cause, not just for the individual scientist, but also because these attacks on science over the last few years have undermined sound, evidence-based decision making.
President-elect Biden has repeatedly said that he will listen to the scientists. While this is certainly a welcome change, listening can only take us so far. This past week Lauren Kurtz from the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund and my colleague Gretchen Goldman published an article listing 10 actions the new administration should implement to show their commitment to strengthening government science:
- Clearly prohibit political interference and censorship.
- Protect scientists' communication rights.
- Acknowledge that attempts to violate scientific integrity, even if ultimately not fruitful, are still violations.
- Protect federal scientists' right to provide information to Congress and other lawmakers.
- Commit to incorporating the best science as part of agency decisions.
- Elevate agency scientific integrity policies to have the full force of law.
- Publicly release anonymized information about scientific integrity complaints and their resolutions at every agency.
- Institute an intra-agency workforce, potentially under the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, to coordinate scientific integrity efforts across agencies, foster discussion of policy improvements, and standardize criteria for policies across agencies.
- Strengthen whistleblower protections.
- Ensure that policies cover all actors who will be dealing with science.
All of these recommendations have been reinforced by what we have learned during the Trump administration. They would ensure that no future administration could do things like edit climate change reports to include scientifically unsound language questioning climate change, suppress oil and gas safety information, prevent scientists from discussing their work in public forums, or withhold vital scientific information that is required under other laws, such as the Endangered Species Act.
When it comes to changes at the Department of the Interior, the Union of Concerned Scientists has articulated specific actions that the Biden administration should implement if they want to ensure that government scientists are free to do their work without political interference. Scientists deserve the right of last review and the ability to comment publicly, they shouldn't have to fight for their publications to be published, and they should have a pathway to anonymously file a complaint if they think their rights have been breached.
I spent over a year staring at my finished climate change report on my National Park Service desk wondering why it was being delayed. I was later pressured to makes edits I did not agree with. When I fought back I was told that I could be removed as an author or have my work not published at all. Given my own experience, these suggestions to fix our current system are deeply personal to me because I have seen how Interior can work against scientists to silence them when their work is politically inconvenient.
Time for Action
I have spoken to many scientists, particularly federal scientists, who are eager to turn the page so they can hurry back to the work they had been doing before this administration, but I urge caution in assuming that things can be "normal" again.
Before Trump, I naively thought the scientific integrity policies established during the Obama administration would be sufficient. I never imagined that any administration could so willfully ignore and attack expert advice and evidence that is intended to protect us and our public lands.
I have personally witnessed how hard our federal scientists work. They put in long hours with minimal pay (far less that what they could get if they worked in private industry) to pursue one simple goal: to make things better for the nation.
We need stronger scientific integrity policies to protect these people and their work. But more than that, we need stronger scientific integrity laws because they also benefit society.
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