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18 February 21
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Kate Klonick | Inside the Making of Facebook's Supreme Court
Kate Klonick, The New Yorker
Klonick writes: "Since its founding, in 2004, Facebook had modelled itself as a haven of free expression on the Internet. But in the past few years, as conspiracy theories, hate speech, and disinformation have spread on the platform, critics have come to worry that the company poses a danger to democracy."
The company has created a board that can overrule even Mark Zuckerberg. Soon it will decide whether to allow Trump back on Facebook.
n a morning in May, 2019, forty-three lawyers, academics, and media experts gathered in the windowless basement of the NoMad New York hotel for a private meeting. The room was laid out a bit like a technologist’s wedding, with a nametag and an iPad at each seat, and large succulents as centerpieces. There were also party favors: Facebook-branded notebooks and pens. The company had convened the group to discuss the Oversight Board, a sort of private Supreme Court that it was creating to help govern speech on its platforms. The participants had all signed nondisclosure agreements. I sneaked in late and settled near the front. “Clap if you can hear me,” the moderator, a woman dressed in a black jumpsuit, said.
Since its founding, in 2004, Facebook had modelled itself as a haven of free expression on the Internet. But in the past few years, as conspiracy theories, hate speech, and disinformation have spread on the platform, critics have come to worry that the company poses a danger to democracy. Facebook promised to change that with the Oversight Board: it would assemble a council of sage advisers—the group eventually included humanitarian activists, a former Prime Minister, and a Nobel laureate—who would hear appeals over what kind of speech should be allowed on the site. Its decisions would be binding, overruling even those of Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s founder. Zuckerberg said he had come to believe that a C.E.O. shouldn’t have complete control over the limits of our political discourse. “Maybe there are some calls that just aren’t good for the company to make by itself,” he told me.
In 2019, Facebook agreed to let me report on the process, and I spent eighteen months following its development. Last month, the board ruled on its first slate of cases, which dealt with, among other topics, the glorification of Nazis and misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic. In the next few months, it will decide an even larger question: whether Donald Trump should be cut off indefinitely from his millions of followers for his role in inciting the insurrection at the Capitol, on January 6th. Nathaniel Persily, a law professor at Stanford, told me, “How the board considers the issues and acts in that case will have dramatic implications for the future of the board, and perhaps for online speech in general.”
In the beginning, Facebook had no idea how the board would work. To come up with ideas, the company held workshops with experts in Singapore, New Delhi, Nairobi, Mexico City, Berlin, and New York. “My job was to go all over the world and get as much feedback as possible,” Zoe Darmé, who oversaw the consultation process, told me. At the workshop in New York, in the hotel basement, participants sat at tables of eight or nine and ran simulations of cases. I sat between Jeff Jarvis, a journalism professor, and Ben Ginsberg, a Republican lawyer who represented George W. Bush in Bush v. Gore.
For our first case, the moderator projected a picture of a smiling girl in a yearbook photo, with a cartoon thought bubble that read “Kill All Men.” Facebook had removed the post for violating its hate-speech rules, which ban attacks based on “sex, gender identity.” To many, this seemed simplistic. “It’s a joke,” one woman said. “There has to be an exception for humor.” Facebook’s rules did include a humor exception, for instances in which the user’s intent was clear, but it was difficult to discern this person’s motivation, and attendees worried that a broad carve-out for jokes could easily provide cover for hate speech. Carmen Scurato, who works at Free Press, an Internet-advocacy organization, pointed out the historical disadvantage of women, and argued that hate-speech policies ought to take power dynamics into account. In the end, the group voted to restore the photo, though no one knew exactly how to write that into a rule.
This kind of muddy uncertainty seemed inevitable. The board has jurisdiction over every Facebook user in the world, but intuitions about freedom of speech vary dramatically across political and cultural divides. In Hong Kong, where the pro-democracy movement has used social media to organize protests, activists rely on Facebook’s free-expression principles for protection against the state. In Myanmar, where hate speech has contributed to a genocide against the Rohingya, advocates have begged for stricter enforcement. Facebook had hoped, through the workshops, to crowdsource beliefs about speech, but the results were more contradictory than anticipated. In New York, for example, sixty per cent of people voted to reinstate the “Kill All Men” post, but only forty per cent did so in Nairobi. Amid other theories, Darmé speculated, “Where countries are perhaps more concerned about safety, because they live in an area with less rule of law—and therefore there’s a chance of a group actually maybe trying to kill all men—there’s less concern about free speech.” The full explanation is likely more complex; regardless, the divergent results underscored the difficulty of creating a global court for the Internet.
Some of the workshops devolved into disarray. In Singapore, Nairobi, and New Delhi, a few participants refused to sign the nondisclosure agreements, protesting Facebook’s lack of transparency; in Germany, someone commandeered the microphone and berated the company for killing democracy. “We had to learn to put on our body armor,” Darmé said. In New York, the session remained civil, but just barely. Some participants thought that the board would be ineffectual. “The whole thing seemed destined for failure,” Sarah T. Roberts, a professor of information studies at U.C.L.A., told me. “Skeptics will think it’s captured by the corporate interest of Facebook. Others will think it doesn’t do enough, it’s a pseudo-institution.” Some predicted the board would come to have grand ambitions. Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia, said, “If the board is anything like the people invited to New York, I wouldn’t be surprised if it got out of control and became its own little beast that tried to change the world one Facebook decision at a time.”
Participants had been instructed to use an app called Slido to submit questions for group discussion, which could be voted up or down on the agenda. The results were projected on a screen at the front of the room. The app had worked well abroad, but in New York it became a meta-commentary on content moderation. Sophisticated questions about “automatic tools for takedowns” and the “equity principle with diverse communities” were soon overtaken by a joke about “Game of Thrones.” Posts were initially anonymous, but users quickly found a way around the system; “Harold” wrote, “I figured out how to identify self,” which provoked laughter. The moderator shouted to regain control of the room. In the midst of the chaos, someone posted, “Can we abandon Slido and talk?,” which quickly accumulated likes.
The idea that Facebook, like a fledgling republic, would need to institute democratic reforms might have seemed silly a decade ago. In 2009, shortly after the company was criticized for quietly changing its terms of service to allow it to keep users’ data even after they deleted their accounts, it released a video of Zuckerberg, clad in an uncharacteristic button-up shirt and a tie, announcing a “new approach to site governance.” People would be able to vote on Facebook’s policies; the company called it “a bold step toward transparency.” In the first referendum, on whether to change the terms of service, only 0.32 per cent of users voted. “In its own eyes, Facebook has become more than merely a recreational website where users share photos and wish each other a happy birthday,” a columnist for the Los Angeles Times wrote. “It is now a global body of citizens that should be united and protected under a popularly ratified constitution. But it’s hard to have a democracy, a constitution or a government if nobody shows up.” In 2012, the project was quietly shuttered, and, as with Crystal Pepsi, Google Wave, and the Microsoft Zune, no one remembers that it existed.
This was still a hazily optimistic time for Facebook. The company promised to “give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” As more users joined tech platforms, companies instituted rules to sanitize content and keep the experience pleasant. Airbnb removed housing ads that displayed Nazi flags; Kickstarter disallowed crowdfunding for “energy food and drinks”; Etsy told users to be “helpful, constructive, and encouraging” when expressing criticism. Facebook hired content moderators to filter out pornography and terrorist propaganda, among other things. But, because it saw itself as a “neutral platform,” it tended not to censor political speech. The dangers of this approach soon became apparent. Facebook now has some three billion users—more than a third of humanity—many of whom get their news from the site. In 2016, Russian agents used the platform in an attempt to sway the U.S. Presidential election. Three years later, a white supremacist in New Zealand live-streamed a mass shooting. Millions of people joined groups and followed pages related to QAnon, a conspiracy theory holding that the world is controlled by a cabal of Satan-worshipping, pedophilic Democrats. The First Amendment has made it difficult for the U.S. government to stop toxic ideas from spreading online. Germany passed a law attempting to curb the dissemination of hate speech, but it is enforceable only within the country’s borders. As a result, Facebook has been left to make difficult decisions about speech largely on its own.
Over time, the company has developed a set of rules and practices in the ad-hoc manner of common law, and scholars have long argued that the system needed more transparency, accountability, and due process. The idea for the Oversight Board came from Noah Feldman, a fifty-year-old professor at Harvard Law School, who has written a biography of James Madison and helped draft the interim Iraqi constitution. In 2018, Feldman was staying with his college friend Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, at her home in Menlo Park, California. One day, Feldman was riding a bike in the neighboring hills when, he said, “it suddenly hit me: Facebook needs a Supreme Court.” He raced home and wrote up the idea, arguing that social-media companies should create “quasi-legal systems” to weigh difficult questions around freedom of speech. “They could cite judicial opinions from different countries,” he wrote. “It’s easy to imagine that if they do their job right, real courts would eventually cite Facebook and Google opinions in return.” Such a corporate tribunal had no modern equivalent, but Feldman noted that people need not worry: “It’s worth recalling that national legal systems themselves evolved from more private courts administered by notables or religious authorities.” He gave the memo to Sandberg, who showed it to Zuckerberg. For a few years, Zuckerberg had been thinking about establishing a “legislative model” of content moderation in which users might elect representatives to Facebook, like members of Congress. A court seemed like a better first step.
In November, 2018, Feldman gave a short presentation to Facebook’s corporate board, at Zuckerberg’s invitation. “I didn’t feel like I was convincing my audience,” he told me. Feldman recalled that some members felt such a body wouldn’t sufficiently improve the company’s legitimacy; others worried that it could make decisions that would contradict Facebook’s business interests. A few minutes in, Zuckerberg defended the proposal. He noted that a huge proportion of his time was devoted to deliberating on whether individual, high-profile posts should be taken down; wouldn’t experts be better at making those decisions? The idea remained controversial, but Facebook’s corporate structure allows Zuckerberg to make unilateral decisions. Soon after, he ordered the project to begin. “I was kind of stunned,” Feldman told me. “Like, holy shit, this is actually going to happen.”
One day in June, 2019, an Uber dropped me off at Facebook’s campus, in a parking lot full of Teslas. For the past couple of years, while working as a law professor, I had been researching how tech companies govern speech. That morning, I headed into MPK 21, a five-hundred-thousand-square-foot building designed by Frank Gehry, with a rooftop garden inhabited by wild foxes. (Signs discourage interaction with them.) Walls are plastered with giant posters bearing motivational phrases like “Nothing at Facebook Is Somebody Else’s Problem” and “The Best Way to Complain Is to Make Things.” When you visit, you register at a touch-screen kiosk and sign a nondisclosure agreement pledging that you won’t divulge anything you see. The company knew that I was coming as a reporter, but the woman at the desk didn’t know how to print a pass without a signed agreement; eventually, another employee handed me a lanyard marked “N.D.A.” and said, “We’ll just know that you’re not under one.”
I began by shadowing Facebook’s Governance and Strategic Initiatives Team, which was tasked with creating the board. The core group was made up of a dozen employees, mostly in their thirties, who had come from the United Nations, the Obama White House, and the Justice Department, among other places. It was led by Brent Harris, a former consultant to nonprofits who frequently arrived at our meetings eating a granola bar. The employees spent much of their time drafting the board’s charter, which some called its “constitution,” and its bylaws, which some called its “rules of the court.” During one meeting, they used pens, topped with a feather, to evoke the quills used by the Founding Fathers.
The group was young and highly qualified, but it was surrounded by tech executives who sometimes became actively involved. Early drafts of the charter included a lot of dry, careful legal language, but in later versions some of it had been stripped out. “Feedback is coming from people high in the company, who are not lawyers,” Harris told me, during one meeting. I noted that someone had changed all references to “users” in the charter to “people,” which seemed to imply that the board governed not only Facebook’s customers but everyone in the world. Harris exchanged glances with another employee. “Feedback is coming from people very high in the company,” he said. I later learned from the team that Zuckerberg had been editing the charter to make it “more approachable.”
Employees on the governance team sometimes referred to themselves as “true believers” in the board. Kristen Murdock, who was an intelligence officer in the Navy before coming to Facebook, told me, “This is going to change the face of social justice on the Internet.” But some executives did not hold it in the same regard. Elliot Schrage, then the head of global policy and communications, told people involved that he was skeptical of the project and did not think it could be improved. (Schrage claimed, through a spokesperson, that he was “fully supportive of efforts to improve governance” but that he “did have concerns about how to build a credible program.”) Nick Clegg, a former Deputy Prime Minister of the U.K. who was supervising the governance team, told me, in 2019, that he was reluctant to let the board weigh in on sensitive topics, at least early on. “I would love to think that we’d have a relatively uncontroversial period of time,” he said. At one point, a director of policy joked about ways to make the board seem independent, asking, “How many decisions do we have to let the Oversight Board win to make it legit?”
In time, the workings of the court came together. The board originally included twenty members, who were paid six-figure salaries for putting in about fifteen hours a week; it is managed by an independent trust, which Facebook gave a hundred and thirty million dollars. (“That’s real money,” a tech reporter texted me. “Is this thing actually for real?”) According to Facebook, as many as two hundred thousand posts become eligible for appeal every day. “We are preparing for a fire hose,” Milancy Harris, who came to the governance team from the National Counterterrorism Center, said. The board chooses the most “representative” cases and hears each in a panel of five members, who remain anonymous to the public. Unlike in the Supreme Court, there are no oral arguments. The user submits a written brief arguing her case; a representative for the company—“Facebook’s solicitor general,” one employee joked—files a brief explaining the company’s rationale. The panel’s decision, if ratified by the rest of the members, is binding for Facebook.
The “most controversial issue by far,” Darmé told me, was how powerful the board should be. “People outside the company wanted the board to have as much authority as possible, to tie Facebook’s hands,” she said. Some wanted it to write all of the company’s policies. (“We actually tested that in simulation,” Darmé said. “People never actually wrote a policy.”) On the other hand, many employees wondered whether the board would make a decision that killed Facebook. I sometimes heard them ask one another, in nervous tones, “What if they get rid of the newsfeed?”
As a result, the board’s powers were limited. Currently, users can appeal cases in which Facebook has removed a post, called “take-downs,” but not those in which it has left one up, or “keep-ups.” The problem is that many of Facebook’s most pressing issues—conspiracy theories, disinformation, hate speech—involve keep-ups. As it stands, the board could become a forum for trolls and extremists who are angry about being censored. But if a user believes that the company should crack down on certain kinds of speech, she has no recourse. “This is a big change from what you promised,” Evelyn Douek, a Harvard graduate student who consulted with the team, fumed, during one meeting. “This is the opposite of what was promised.” Users also currently can’t appeal cases on such issues as political advertising, the company’s algorithms, or the deplatforming of users or group pages. The board can take cases on these matters, including keep-ups, only if they are referred by Facebook, a system that, Douek told me, “stacks the deck” in Facebook’s favor. (Facebook claims that it will be ready to allow user appeals of keep-ups by mid-2021, and hopes eventually to allow appeals on profiles, groups, and advertising as well.)
Perhaps most important, the board’s rulings do not become Facebook policy in the way that a Supreme Court precedent becomes the law of the land. If the board decides that the company should remove a piece of content, Facebook is obligated to take down only that post; similar posts are taken down at Facebook’s discretion. (The company states that it will remove “identical posts with parallel context” based on its “technical and operational capacity.”) Policy recommendations are only advisory. This significantly narrows the board’s influence. Some hope that the recommendations will at least exert public pressure on the company. “Facebook undermines its goals and its own experiment if it restricts the impact of the board’s decisions or just ignores them,” Douek told me. Others felt let down. “It’s not what people told us they wanted,” Darmé said. “They wanted the board to have real power over the company.”
In August, 2019, the governance team met with advisers, over snacks and seltzer, and discussed who should sit on the board. A security guard stood outside, making sure that no one explored the offices unattended. (He stopped me on my way out and told me that I couldn’t leave without an escort.) The people selected for the board would determine its legitimacy, and how it ruled, but the experts had trouble agreeing on who could be trusted with this responsibility. One attendee suggested letting the first board members choose the rest, to preserve their independence from the company. Lauren Rivera, a professor at Northwestern’s business school, cautioned against this approach: “It’s empirically proven that when you have a group self-select, in the absence of any kind of guidance, they just pick more people that look like them.” The experts then began giving their own ideas. Journalists said that the board should be mostly journalists. International human-rights lawyers said that it should be all international human-rights lawyers. Information scientists said that it should be “anyone but lawyers.” A white man at a think tank said that it should be populated with “regular people.”
Ultimately, to select its would-be judges, Facebook opened a public portal, which received thousands of nominations. It got suggestions of candidates from political groups and civil-rights organizations. It also used its initial workshops to scout potential candidates and observe their behavior. “The thing about the global consultancy process is that it was also maybe Facebook’s first true global recruiting process,” Brent Harris told me later. Jarvis, the journalism professor at the New York workshop, said, “It’s so Facebook of them.” He added, “They never called me. I wonder what I said.”
The number of people that Facebook planned to have on the board kept changing. I imagined the team sweating over a “Law & Order”-style corkboard of photographs. At one point, Kara Swisher, a tech journalist who has been critical of Facebook, nominated herself. “I would like to formally apply to be judge and jury over Mark Zuckerberg,” she wrote in the Times. Facebook didn’t take her up on it. A reporter sent me an encrypted text saying he had two sources telling him that Barack Obama would be on the board. When I asked Fariba Yassaee, who oversaw the search for members, about high-profile candidates, she smiled. “The people we’re looking at are incredibly impressive, but they also are able to do the hard work that being on the board will entail,” she said. “They need to be team players.” In May, the first board members were announced. They included Helle Thorning-Schmidt, a former Prime Minister of Denmark; Catalina Botero Marino, a former special rapporteur for freedom of expression to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights; Alan Rusbridger, the former editor of the Guardian; and Tawakkol Karman, an activist who won the Nobel Peace Prize, in 2011, for her role in Yemen’s Arab Spring protests.
The slate was immediately controversial. Some employees were angry about the appointment of Michael McConnell, a retired federal judge appointed by George W. Bush. In 2000, McConnell argued before the Supreme Court that the Boy Scouts should be allowed to exclude gay people. (This year, during a Zoom class at Stanford Law School, he recited a quote that included the N-word. He defended this as a “pedagogical choice,” but pledged not to use the word again.) “We all knew what people outside and inside the company were expecting: board members who respect all people and all cultures, including respect for L.G.B.T.Q. rights,” Darmé, who had since left Facebook, told me. “Can you really have someone on the board who’s argued something like this all the way to the highest court in the land?” Others believed that, considering that half of the country is Republican, disregarding such views would be undemocratic. “It is not a thing you can really say right now, but the vast majority of the world is much more ideologically conservative than Menlo Park,” Harris said. “How do you reflect that on the board? Or do you decide, No, we’re just not going to have that?”
People familiar with the process told me that some Republicans were upset about what they perceived to be the board’s liberal slant. In the months leading up to the appointments, conservative groups pushed the company to make the board more sympathetic to Trump. They suggested their own lists of candidates, which sometimes included members of the President’s family, most notably Ivanka and the President’s sons. “The idea was, either fill this board with Trump-supporting conservatives or kill it,” one person familiar with the process said. In early May, shortly after the board members were announced, Trump personally called Zuckerberg to say that he was unhappy with the makeup of the board. He was especially angry about the selection of Pamela Karlan, a Stanford Law professor who had testified against him during his first impeachment. “He used Pam as an example of how the board was this deeply offensive thing to him,” the person familiar with the process said. Zuckerberg listened, and then told Trump that the members had been chosen based on their qualifications. Despite the pressure from Trump, Facebook did not change the composition of the board. (Trump declined to comment.)
Several candidates declined to be considered. Jameel Jaffer, the director of the Knight First Amendment Institute, told me, “I was worried, and still am, that Facebook will use membership on the board as a way of co-opting advocates and academics who would otherwise be more critical of the company.” But others saw it as a way to push Facebook in the right direction. Julie Owono, a board member and the head of Internet Sans Frontières, told me, “I had expressed interest in joining the board because I feel, and still do, that Facebook is doing a terrible job on hate speech in environments that are already very tense.” Thorning-Schmidt, the former Prime Minister of Denmark, told me, “I needed to know this would be independent from Facebook and that Facebook would commit to following our decisions.” She met with Zuckerberg and asked that he give his word: “I had to hear it from Mark Zuckerberg myself. And he said yes.”
Critics of the board believe that it will prove to be little more than a distraction. “I think it’s a gigantic waste of time and money,” Julie Cohen, a law professor at Georgetown, said. She believes that its star-studded panel and lavish funding will prevent regulation while allowing the company to outsource controversial decisions. And, since it can currently rule only on individual posts, the board can’t address Facebook’s most fundamental problems. In mid-May, for example, a video called “Plandemic,” which claimed that vaccine companies had created COVID-19 in order to profit from the pandemic, went viral on the platform. It was taken down within a few days, but by that time it had already been seen by 1.8 million people. Ellen P. Goodman, a law professor at Rutgers, believes that Facebook needs to add more friction to the circulation of content; anything catching fire, she said, should be subject to a “virality disruptor” that stops further spread until the content has been reviewed. Zephyr Teachout, a law professor at Fordham, says that the company should do away with targeted advertising, which incentivizes the promotion of incendiary, attention-grabbing posts. “If the core of our communications infrastructure is driven by targeted ads, we will have a toxic, conflict-driven communications sphere,” she said. She also argues that the company is too big and needs to be broken up through antitrust litigation.
This summer, I spoke with Zuckerberg over Zoom. He wore a Patagonia fleece and sat in a wood-panelled room in front of a large marble fireplace. He had been heavily involved in the board’s creation: editing documents, reading memos, reviewing possible members. “I don’t see any path for the company ever getting out of the business of having to make these judgments,” he told me. “But I do think that we can have additional oversight and additional institutions involved.” He hoped, he said, that the board would “hold us accountable for making sure that we actually get the decisions right and have a mechanism for overturning them when we don’t.”
He looked tired. He seemed more at ease talking about “product” or “building tools” than he did discussing ethics or politics. It struck me that he was essentially a coder who had found himself managing the world’s marketplace of ideas. “The core job of what we do is building products that help people connect and communicate,” he said. “It’s actually quite different from the work of governing a community.” He hoped to separate these jobs: there would be groups of people who built apps and products, and others—including Facebook’s policy team and now the board—who deliberated the thorny questions that came along with them. I brought up a speech he gave at Georgetown, in 2019, in which he noted that the board was personally important to him, because it helped him feel that, when he eventually left, he would be leaving the company in safe hands. “One day, I’m not going to be running the company,” he told me. “I would like to not be in the position, long term, of choosing between someone who either is more aligned with my moral view and values, or actually is more aligned with being able to build high-quality products.”
I asked what kinds of cases he hopes the board will take. “If I was them, I’d be wary of choosing something that was so charged right off the bat that it was immediately going to polarize the whole board, and people’s perception of the board, and society,” he told me. He knew that critics wished the board had more power: “This is certainly a big experiment. It’s certainly not as broad as everyone would like it to be, upfront, but I think there’s a path for getting there.” But he rejected the notion that it was a fig leaf. “I’m not setting this up to take pressure off me or the company in the near term,” he said. “The reason that I’m doing this is that I think, over the long term, if we build up a structure that people can trust, then that can help create legitimacy and create real oversight. But I think there is a real risk, if it gets too polarized too quickly, that it will never be able to blossom into that.”
In April, 2020, the board members met for the first time, over Zoom. Facebook employees cried and took a screenshot. “It was such a profound experience to see this thing take on a life of its own,” Heather Moore, who came to Facebook from a U.S. Attorney’s office, said. After that, board members attended training sessions, which included icebreakers and trust exercises; in one, they brought pictures that represented pivotal moments in their lives. “Whether we can get along well enough to disagree and stay on mission is crucial and quite unknown,” John Samples, a member who works at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, told me. The group quickly came under intense public pressure to stand up to the company. In June, a nonprofit called Accountable Tech began targeting the board on Facebook with ads that included their photos and addressed them by name: “Pam Karlan: speak up or step down”; “Tell Michael McConnell: don’t be complicit.” Members often felt the need to assert their independence. The company assigned readings, some of which were, according to a board member, “just P.R. crap from Facebook,” and employees sat in on early meetings and mock deliberations. “We’re out of our mind if we’re in an oversight position and the people who are teaching us about what we’re overseeing are the people we’re meant to oversee,” the board member said. After complaints, Facebook employees stopped being invited to the meetings.
In October, Facebook began allowing appeals from a random five per cent of users, like a new Instagram feature, and the board’s jurisdiction was rolled out over the next month. Its docket included a post from an American user about Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, and one from a user in Myanmar claiming that there is “something wrong with Muslims psychologically.” Owono told me, “I never imagined I’d have to ask myself these kinds of hard questions so rapidly.” They reviewed the company’s Community Standards, a ten-thousand-word document that codifies Facebook’s speech policies, and consulted precedents in international human-rights law. One debate that has arisen among board members mirrors the division on the Supreme Court between “textualist” and “living” interpretations of the Constitution. Some believe that their job is to hew more closely to Facebook’s policies. “Our job is to ask, ‘What does the text mean?’ ” one member told me. “We don’t have much legitimacy if we just start making stuff up.” Others believe that they should use their power to push back against Facebook’s policies when they are harmful. Nicolas Suzor, a law professor from Australia, and a board member, told me, “I was worried we’d end up with decisions that were limited to the facts, but people are brave.”
In one of the board’s first cases, a user had posted photos and described them as showing churches in Baku, Azerbaijan, that had been razed as part of the ongoing persecution of Armenians in the region. He complained about “Azerbaijani aggression” and “vandalism,” and referred to Azerbaijanis using the word “taziki,” which literally means “washbowls” but is a play on a Russian slur. Facebook had taken down the post as hate speech, but some board members felt that it was strange to apply this rule to a complaint against a dominant group. The panel asked for a report from UNESCO, received a comment from the U.N. special rapporteur on minority issues, and another from a think tank in Ukraine, who told them that persecuted groups often used offensive language in their struggle for equality. “We learned that, during a conflict, it’s usually accepted that people would use harsh words, so there’s this idea that, especially when minority rights are at risk, there’s a custom to allow more harsh discourse,” a board member told me. “I’d never heard of that before, and I found it compelling.” In the end, they voted to take the post down, though not everyone agreed. The opinion suggested that a minority of the members “believed that Facebook’s action did not meet international standards and was not proportionate,” and that the company “should have considered other enforcement measures besides removal.”
In another case, someone in France had posted a video and accompanying text complaining that the government had refused to authorize a combination of azithromycin and hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug, as a treatment for COVID-19. Many on the right, including Trump and the French professor Didier Raoult, have claimed that hydroxychloroquine cures the illness, though the claim has been debunked, and scientists have warned that the medication can cause dangerous side effects. The user claimed that “Raoult’s cure” was being used elsewhere to save lives and posted the video in a public group with five hundred thousand members. Facebook worried that it might cause people to self-medicate, and removed it. According to one person on the board, members of the panel “who have lived in places that have had a lot of disinformation in terms of COVID-19” agreed with this decision, believing that, “in the midst of this huge pandemic affecting the entire world population, decisive measures may be adopted.” But others noted that the post was pressing for a policy change, and worried about censoring political discussions. “No matter how controversial it would seem to us, those questions and challenges are what helps scientific knowledge advance,” the board member said. They found that Facebook’s standard for censoring such speech, interpreted under international human-rights law, involved determining whether it was likely to incite direct harm. Because the combination of medicines was not available over the counter in France, they decided that the risk of causing people to self-administer was low. They voted to restore the post but encouraged the company to append a link to more reliable scientific information.
When the board was just three weeks old, Black Lives Matter protests were sweeping the country, and Trump posted on both Facebook and Twitter threatening to send in the military to subdue them, writing, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” His language echoed that of the segregationist George Wallace, who threatened civil-rights protesters in similar terms. Twitter flagged the tweet as violating its rules against “glorifying violence,” but Facebook left it unmarked. Zuckerberg released a statement saying, “I disagree strongly with how the President spoke about this, but I believe people should be able to see this for themselves.” In an interview on Fox News, he noted that he didn’t think the company should be the “arbiter of truth” on political issues. Angry employees staged a virtual walkout and raised the idea, in a leaked Q. & A., of letting the board hear the case. A few days after the incident, Suzor, the Australian law professor, suggested a full-board meeting. Users couldn’t appeal Facebook’s decision to the board—it hadn’t yet started taking cases, and the post was a keep-up—but it debated the issue nonetheless.
Several members were shocked by Trump’s threats and initially wanted to meet with Zuckerberg or release a statement condemning the platform’s decision. “I was furious about Zuck’s ‘arbiter of truth’ double-down,” one board member told me. Others felt that taking a partisan stand would alienate half the country and lose the board legitimacy. “Seventy-five million people voted for Trump,” Samples said. “What are you going to do about it?” The group discussed whether it should weigh in on matters outside its remit that are nevertheless of public importance. Jamal Greene, one of the co-chairs, told me, “The general sentiment was ‘no’ for right now, and maybe ‘no’ ever, but certainly not before we’re even doing the thing that we’re supposed to be doing.” After two hours of discussion, the members decided to stay mum. “Moralistic ranting is not going to make a difference,” Samples said. “Building up an institution that can slowly answer the hard questions? That might.”
They didn’t have much time for institution-building. On January 6th, a group of Trump supporters who disputed the results of the Presidential election stormed the Capitol, taking selfies, making threats, and attempting to disrupt the peaceful transition of power. Trump had urged on the mob by repeatedly claiming, on Facebook and elsewhere, that the election had been stolen from him. Hundreds of thousands of people had used the site to spread the claim, and to organize the rally at the Capitol. Afterward, Trump released a video tepidly disavowing violence and reiterating his claims of a fraudulent election. He tweeted, “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long.” Facebook removed two of Trump’s posts. The next morning, in a statement from his own Facebook, Zuckerberg announced an indefinite suspension of Trump’s account. “In this moment, the risk to our democracy was too big,” Sheryl Sandberg said, in an interview. “We felt we had to take the unprecedented step of what is an indefinite ban, and I’m glad we did.” The next day, Twitter permanently banned him.
Many felt that the decision was an important step. “The platforms failed in regulating the accounts, of course, since he was inciting violence, and they banned him for that only after egregious violence resulted,” Susan Benesch, the founding director of the Dangerous Speech Project, told me. “But banning him did lower his megaphone. It disrupted his ties with his large audience.” Others expressed concern that Facebook had wielded its power to silence a democratically elected leader. “The fifth most valuable corporation in the U.S., worth over seven hundred billion dollars, a near monopoly in its market niche, has restricted a political figure’s speech to his thirty million followers,” Eugene Volokh, a law professor at U.C.L.A., said. “Maybe that’s just fine. Maybe it’s even a public service. But it’s a remarkable power for any entity, public or private, to have.” Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, described Trump’s removal from Twitter as “problematic,” and Alexey Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, tweeted, “I think that the ban of Donald Trump on Twitter is an unacceptable act of censorship.”
In an interview, Sandberg noted that Trump could appeal the removal of his posts. But only Facebook had the power to refer his suspension to the board. In conversations with Facebook’s leadership, members of the governance team and the board’s trust argued that failing to bring the case before the board would undermine its legitimacy. Harris likened the board to Tinkerbell: “At the end of the day you can build all the things, but you just have to have enough people that believe in order to make it real.” Members seemed eager to take it on. One texted me, “If not us, who? And if not now, when?” Even Clegg, who had initially favored a slower rollout of the board, wanted it to hear the case. “As far as I’m concerned, this was a no-brainer,” Clegg told me. “Why wouldn’t you send it to the Oversight Board? If you didn’t, you’d be hobbling it right from the beginning.” The day after Joe Biden’s Inauguration, Facebook sent the case, asking the board to rule on whether Trump should remain indefinitely banned from the platform. Clegg added, when we spoke, that if the board can “answer also about political leaders in analogous situations, we’d be keen to hear.”
Board members found out that they were getting the case only a half hour before the public did. Members eagerly watched the board’s internal Web site to see if they had been selected for the panel. They will now have two more months to deliberate it. Civil-society groups like the Center for Democracy & Technology and R Street, a conservative think tank, are submitting comments on the case—the equivalent of filing amicus briefs—arguing for or against Trump’s reinstatement. Trump has the opportunity to submit a brief arguing why he should be reinstated. “The board’s Trump decision may affect the liberties and, yes, lives of hundreds of millions,” Samples told me. “Few U.S. Supreme Court cases ever hold such potential for good or for ill.” Ronaldo Lemos, a board member and law professor in Rio de Janeiro, told me that he believes the board has a lot of work ahead. “The Oversight Board is not going away anytime soon,” he said. “We’re not going anywhere.”
Senator Ted Cruz speaks to the media at the Cancun International Airport before boarding his plane back to the U.S. (photo: Getty)
Ted Cruz Went to Cancún While Texas Freezes and Starves
David Gilbert, VICE
Gilbert writes: "Not content with amplifying rhetoric that resulted in an insurrection on the Capitol last month, it looks like Sen. Ted Cruz decided to bail on Texas by flying with his family to a Mexican holiday resort during one of the biggest crises in his state's history."
Photos have been circulating online of the senator taking a flight with his family.
The senator’s trip has been confirmed by multiple news outlets.
Cruz’s departure was first noted on Wednesday, when he was pictured with this wife and daughter in Houston Bush Airport boarding a 4:44 p.m. United Airlines flight to Cancún.
Cruz was wearing the the same mask that he wore to President Joe Biden’s inauguration with the phrase “Come and Take” written on the side.
Cruz’s staff contacted Houston Police Department personnel and requested assistance when he arrived at the airport on Wednesday.
“A member of his staff reached out to our police personnel at the airport and said he was going to be arriving [at the airport] yesterday afternoon,” Jodi Silva, a Public Information Officer for the Houston Police Department, told VICE News on Thursday.
“I know nothing about a return or assistance on a return. I just know we monitored his movements and he requested assistance when there was a departure yesterday,” she added.
The timing of Cruz’s departure from his home state for a non-emergency vacation is mind boggling.
Millions of his constituents are without power and water across the Lone Star State following an unprecedented winter storm that hit in recent days. Now people are running out of food, too.
And as Cruz suns himself in Cancún, where the temperature is currently around a balmy 84 degrees, Texans are preparing for more snow and plummeting temperatures.
Unsurprisingly, Cruz’s flight to Cancún led to some strong reactions on social media:
Many others pointed out that while Cruz was flying to Cancún, Beto O’Rourke, who lost out to Cruz in 2018’s Senate election, was organizing volunteers who spoke to over 150,000 people across Texas, giving them advice and getting them help.
Ted Cruz’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
On Thursday morning, it appeared that rather than remain in Mexico, the senator had decided to return home. CNN reported that Cruz was booked on a flight back to Houston in the afternoon.
News crews were already at the airport, waiting to welcome him home.
Rep. Debbie Lesko, R-AZ. (photo: Getty)
'Reeks of Racism': Latinos Blast Arizona Republican Who Said Vaccinate Americans Before Hispanics
Carmen Sesin, NBC News
Sesin writes: "A Republican congresswoman from Arizona is drawing backlash for saying that Hispanics are 'good workers,' but that 'American citizens' should be vaccinated first, stirring a divisive debate on immigration amid the pandemic."
"She will continue to assure the media we are only misconstruing her nativism and white supremacy for racism," state Sen. Juan Mendez said about Rep. Debbie Lesko.
During a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing last week, Rep. Debbie Lesko, R-Ariz., said: "I worked with people that are Hispanic. I mean they're very good workers. ...We're compassionate people, but for goodness sakes, we have to take care of American citizens, or people that are here legally, first."
“I'm just not going to be able to explain to my senior citizens that we're giving away the vaccines to people that (are) here illegally," Lesko said. "I just think that's totally wrong."
Almost 32 percent of Arizona's population is Latino. At the same time, fewer than 4 percent of people in the state are undocumented, according to the Pew Research Center.
Arizona is already prioritizing senior citizens, health care workers and other critical care workers for vaccination.
"It reeks of racism," state Sen. Martin Quezada, as Democrat whose district overlaps with Lesko’s, said of Lesko's remarks. "There are a lot of people of color in her district and for her to be disconnected and really that offensive about how she sees us, as nothing more than good workers and not entitled to equitable vaccine distribution."
Lesko's comments came as the committee was discussing a Covid-19 relief bill. A Republican amendment would have prioritized American citizens for vaccines. Democrats argued that essential workers across the country include undocumented immigrants, so keeping them from being vaccinated wouldn't help slow the spread of the virus. The amendment did not pass.
Lesko said in a statement to several news outlets that what she said was something "that could be misinterpreted," but she doubled down on her comments on social media, tweeting: “It’s outrageous that Democrats are prioritizing illegal immigrants over American citizens! Their Covid-19 'plan' would allow illegal immigrants to get vaccinated ahead of our nation’s seniors who are desperately waiting to get vaccinated."
"Larger epidemic of hate and ignorance"
Lesko's remarks, says Northern Arizona University political scientist Stephen Nuño, are a familiar appeal to voters by Republicans who have used immigration as a wedge issue. Lesko was a co-sponsor of Arizona's law SB1070, which allowed state law enforcement during routine traffic stops to ask about citizenship and immigration status to anyone deemed suspicious; many parts of SB 1070 have been struck down by the courts.
Amid a pandemic, "Lesko’s horrifyingly ignorant comment makes no sense from a scientific perspective — diseases do not stop spreading just because a person is undocumented," Nuño said.
Democratic state Sen. Juan Mendez served with Lesko when she was in the state Legislature.
"Since the voters of Phoenix’s west valley chose to elevate her hate and ignorance, her new position has only emboldened her to take every opportunity to disparage an entire ethnicity to drive division," Mendez said. "She is willing to condemn her district and the state to a longer and more ravaging virus just to reaffirm her racism."
In Arizona, Latinos have had a higher rate of Covid-19 infections, hospitalizations and deaths than non-Hispanics, yet they are lagging in vaccination rates.
"There are already so many barriers for Latino communities accessing the vaccine," Mendez said. "But Rep. Lesko seems to be hell-bent on intimidating the Latino community further by encouraging racism in our community."
The district Lesko represents is mostly urban and includes a significant Latino population, almost 173,000 out of 798,000.
"She will continue to assure the media we are only misconstruing her nativism and white supremacy for racism," Mendez said. "Unfortunately, Rep. Lesko is only a symptom of a larger epidemic of hate and ignorance.”
Leanne Nunes, a first-year student at Howard University and the executive college director at IntegrateNYC, walks through her neighborhood in Mount Vernon, New York. (photo: Desiree Rios/Vox)
How School Funding Can Help Repair the Legacy of Segregation
Anna North, Vox
North writes: "America's schools spend less money on Black students. Closing the gap is key to equality."
he walls at the high school Leanne Nunes attended in the Bronx were painted a color she likes to call “penitentiary beige.”
The cafeteria, located in the basement, had no windows. About half of her classrooms didn’t have windows, either. “It felt kind of jail-like,” Nunes, now a first-year student at Howard University, told Vox. “It felt like the building itself was trying to keep you in.”
And the lack of resources went beyond the physical space. Laptops for students were often old or broken. Students struggled to get access to the classes they wanted. For example, the school could only afford to offer art or music in a single year, not both. “You’d have to pick,” Nunes said, “and by ‘you’d have to pick,’ I mean the school made the decision for you.”
Looking back, she said, “there were a lot of opportunities where I think young people could have been learning or engaging with content better, but they didn’t really have the chance to.”
What Nunes experienced isn’t out of the ordinary — it’s the norm around the country. While affluent school districts can afford to offer students everything from the latest technology to a range of advanced classes, schools in lower-income areas often struggle to provide the basic necessities. That gap has become a chasm during the Covid-19 pandemic, when something like a cafeteria with no windows becomes a very real health hazard.
And because of the legacy of housing discrimination, especially against Black Americans, the poorest schools in the country disproportionately serve Black students and other students of color. “Since genocide and enslavement built the country, there have been intentional systems put in place to bar, particularly, Black children from quality public schools,” Khalilah Harris, acting vice president for K-12 education policy at the Center for American Progress, told Vox.
Nationwide, majority-nonwhite districts get $23 billion less in funding every year than majority-white districts, despite having the same number of students. That gap translates to a lower-quality education for many Black students and other students of color — which, in turn, perpetuates and widens America’s racial inequities. “All of the implications of not being able to get an education — these are linked to people’s ability to support themselves, to support their families, to have healthy communities,” Verna Williams, the dean of the University of Cincinnati College of Law, who has studied reparations for educational segregation, told Vox.
People who were denied the opportunity for a fair education can’t get those years back. But there’s a lot the US can do to make sure that Black children now, and in the future, can access the same high-quality schooling that’s available to some white kids.
The first step, many say, is federal grants to close the funding gaps between schools that serve majority-Black communities and schools that serve white ones. The next is cutting the link between school funding and property taxes so that schools in Black communities can receive more funding in the future. And beyond money, some say the country needs a culture shift in how it supports teachers and students, and in the whole narrative around schools and students nationwide.
“The idea that there’s good schools and bad schools and that is determined by the students within them is harmful and not true,” Nunes, now the executive college director at the educational equity organization IntegrateNYC, told Vox. “There are no good schools and bad schools. There’s schools that currently have and historically have had what they need to succeed, and schools that don’t.”
Underfunded schools mean a worse education for Black students — and impact the rest of their lives
The history of educational inequity in America today is inextricably linked to housing discrimination. From the 1930s to the late 1960s, the federal government refused to insure mortgages in neighborhoods where Black people lived, a form of discrimination known as redlining. That meant people couldn’t get bank loans for homes in such neighborhoods, locking many Black families out of homeownership and forcing others to turn to predatory lenders. Those who did manage to buy homes in redlined neighborhoods saw property values fall as they were unable to get loans for repairs or improvements.
Over time, redlining led to a situation where “if a Black person would move in, white people would move out” of a neighborhood, Elise Boddie, a law professor and the Newark director of Rutgers University’s Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice, told Vox. Then “resources would also flow out of a neighborhood” and “neighborhoods would decline, leading to further disinvestment.”
The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited redlining, but its effects persist today: Homes in neighborhoods that are at least 50 percent Black are valued at about half the price of homes in neighborhoods with no Black residents, according to a 2018 Brookings Institution study.
That disparity affects schools because their funding is largely tied to local property tax revenues. That means schools in lower-income neighborhoods simply have less money to work with. In 2016, for example, the Chicago Ridge School District in Illinois had $9,794 to spend on each pupil, NPR reported. Rondout District 72, less than an hour away in the Chicago suburbs, had $28,639.
Less money means, quite simply, less of everything for Black students and the schools they attend. That includes fewer experienced teachers: Schools with high percentages of Black and Latinx students have nearly twice as many first-year teachers as schools with low Black and Latinx enrollment, according to the New York Times.
It includes professionals like school nurses and counselors — in one recent survey, Black students were less likely than white students to say they could reach out to a teacher or counselor at school if they needed help with a mental health issue. And it includes electives, advanced classes, and other features of a well-rounded curriculum; for example, just a third of schools with high Black and Latinx enrollment offer calculus, according to the Times. “So many resources that we see in wealthy schools are a product of the fact that those schools are in wealthy districts,” Boddie told Vox.
These disparities, in turn, lead to disparities in things like graduation rates and college attendance. In 2017-2018, for example, the average graduation rate for white public high school students nationwide was 89 percent. For Black students, it was 79 percent. In some states, the gap was even wider — 21 percentage points in Minnesota, for example, and 24 percentage points in Wisconsin. White students graduated at higher rates than their Black peers in every single state.
Meanwhile, just 34 percent of Black Americans ages 18 to 24 were enrolled in college as of 2016, compared with 42 percent of white Americans in the same age range. White students were also more likely than Black students to graduate within six years, and to attend top-tier colleges — where graduates earn over $2 million more in their lifetimes than graduates of less selective institutions, according to the Hechinger Report.
All this means the gap in school funding ends up widening the income and wealth gaps between Black and white Americans, which leaves Black people with less money for housing — and reinforces the disparities that led to school funding gaps in the first place.
And the Covid-19 pandemic has only exacerbated these problems. Underfunded schools don’t just lack highly trained teachers and staff; in some cases, they’re literally falling apart.
“Here in Baltimore, where I live, there are schools where the resolution was just to solder windows shut that were broken because there were not funds to replace all of the windows,” Harris said. Other schools have substandard HVAC or electrical systems, or a lack of running water to wash hands — all of which make them dangerous to reopen during the pandemic. Overall, more than half of schools need some form of repair, and about half of school districts in America needed to replace systems like air conditioning or plumbing, according to a 2020 report by the Government Accountability Office — and a majority of those districts served communities of color.
If policymakers try to reopen schools in the pandemic without addressing the safety issues that disproportionately impact Black students and other students of color, “you are sending a message about which children are a priority,” Harris said.
To close the gap, underfunded schools need money
It’s past time for policymakers at the highest levels of government to send another message, advocates say: that all children deserve a safe, high-quality education. One way to send that message loud and clear is with money.
The federal government can help equalize school funding by giving grants to underfunded schools, Harris said. One proposal developed by the Center for American Progress, called Public Education Opportunity Grants, would have the government provide about $63 billion per year — enough for about $12,000 per student — to the 25 percent of districts with the highest poverty rate in each state. States with fewer resources overall, as measured by gross state product, would get extra money to help equalize funding across states.
School districts would be required to use the money specifically to improve access to education for historically underserved groups, including Black or Indigenous students and other students of color, students with disabilities, and students from low-income families. And they’d be required to set improvement targets for student outcomes and resource equity, and report on their progress toward meeting them. For students attending the most impoverished schools, it’s crucial to “account for all the ways their communities have been impacted so that those schools aren’t suffering because of the tax base,” Harris said.
Above and beyond that money, schools need to be part of the conversation around rebuilding American infrastructure, Harris said. CAP has proposed an additional federal investment to repair the many schools in America that are in substandard condition. A lot of this money would go to fixing the buildings themselves — just repairing systems like heat, plumbing, and ventilation in Detroit public schools would cost $500 million, according to a 2019 CAP analysis. In Baltimore, it could cost up to $2.8 billion.
But the federal government should go beyond these basics to ensure that schools have broadband internet and working computers in every classroom, and that their furniture and spaces support learning for students with disabilities. All told, fixing school buildings alone would cost as much as $200 billion, according to CAP, and investing in technology and other needs could bring the price tag higher.
These are large amounts of money, sure to face opposition from Republicans (and some Democrats) in Congress. But research shows that increased funding has a real impact on student outcomes. One 2015 study, for example, found that a 10 percent increase in spending per student for all 12 years of public school led to 7.25 percent higher wages in adulthood, and that the effects were greater for low-income students. Another, published in 2019, found that an increase in spending was associated with an increase in graduation rates.
And the pandemic has directed more attention than ever to the problems with schools, with teachers and some parents pointing out that the same repairs that have been necessary now are even more urgent in a time of Covid-19. Their argument, according to Harris: “You want our kids to go back? We want them to go back, but did you forget this school building we were protesting just a year or two ago when there was no heat?”
The arrival of a new administration and a Democratic majority in Congress, however small, may create an opportunity for a big investment. Though the Biden administration has not specifically taken up the Public Education Opportunity Grants proposal, the president has proposed tripling funding for schools under the existing Title I program, which provides federal money to schools with a high percentage of low-income students. (The grants proposed by CAP would be more carefully targeted to improve equity than Title I dollars, which can be spent in a variety of ways, Harris said.) Education Secretary-designate Miguel Cardona, a former fourth-grade teacher, has said that “investing in public education is one of the most critical things he will be focusing on,” Harris said.
Overall, Harris and others hope that the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress “will understand the urgency to move faster and harder on progressive policy as opposed to policies that come from compromise, when the compromise should not be had on the backs of children.”
Federal funding is only the first step
Action at the federal level can put pressure on states, too. CAP’s Public Education Opportunity Grants proposal would also include money for “states that are trying to pilot moving away from property taxes to fund schools,” Harris said, to incentivize more equitable models and help state governments put them into practice.
Moreover, if Congress took up the federal school grants program, it could help bring greater attention to the problem. “It brings the conversation out to a national stage,” B.J. Walker, who works with the We the People National Alliance on a campaign to advance quality education as a constitutional right, told Vox. “And something on a national stage is likely to get seen by more than if you go fight 50 battles on the ground.”
While grants from the federal government can begin to remedy some of the inequities of school funding in America, to finish the job, states and local districts will need to change the way they allocate funds — moving away from formulas based on property tax that perpetuate the harms of housing segregation.
This is, in many ways, a harder problem than distributing federal funding, because it requires change from countless state and local governments all around the country. In every state, “you’re going to have a different set of dynamics, you’re going to have a different set of players,” Walker said. Some of those players are wealthy parents who are sure to push back against efforts to alter a system that benefits them — “people who buy big, expensive houses and that’s one of the ways they invest in their schools,” as Walker puts it.
But advocates are beginning to tackle the problem. In some cases, they’re going through the courts to argue that underfunded schools violate children’s civil rights. In 2016, for example, a group of Detroit public school students sued the state of Michigan arguing that they had been deprived of their rights as citizens under the 14th Amendment by their underresourced schools.
Public schools in Detroit overwhelmingly serve Black and Latinx students in low-income communities, and the lawsuit described devastating effects of a lack of funding on the quality of education, from physics classes using biology textbooks to buildings infested with rodents, the New York Times reported. And in 2020, a court found in favor of the students, with Judge Eric L. Clay writing that when “a group of children is relegated to a school system that does not provide even a plausible chance to attain literacy, we hold that the Constitution provides them with a remedy.”
The case didn’t break the link between property tax and school funding in Michigan. But it did lead to a settlement between the students and the state, in which Gov. Gretchen Whitmer promised to send $2.7 million to support literacy efforts in Detroit schools, and propose legislation before the end of her term that would provide an additional $94.4 million. Similar cases, such as one in California, have led to settlements as well.
“I think we’re going to see a lot more of those cases,” Harris said, in which students and their advocates argue “that property taxes are causing their schools to be woefully underfunded and not providing an adequate education.” In addition to the Detroit and California cases, suits challenging inequities in school funding have been filed in Kansas, Pennsylvania, and Florida in recent years, and in December, a judge in New Mexico ruled that the state would have to come up with a new system for allocating money that “does not create substantial disparities in capital funding among the school districts in New Mexico.”
Lawsuits aren’t the only way to change school funding formulas. In many cases, state legislatures could decide to move away from property taxes and allocate school funding differently. That would no doubt prompt pushback from more affluent parents, but the combination of a pandemic and a nationwide reckoning around racism could convince more state lawmakers that it’s a fight worth having. Legislation to change school funding formulas has been floated in recent years in Maryland and Ohio. In 2019, Massachusetts passed a bill to add $1.5 billion per year in school funding, with a focus on districts serving low-income students.
One way to push state legislators toward these initiatives is through federal money, which could show what’s possible when schools actually have the resources they need. “A lot of people think, ‘The reason why that school’s not a good school is because those are bad kids and bad neighborhoods and bad communities,’” Walker said. Federal investment would show “that these schools can do something different than you perceive them or expect them to do.”
Money is important, but cultural change has to happen, too
As crucial as it is to get underfunded schools the resources they need, many say money is just the beginning of addressing inequality and systemic racism in American education. As Walker puts it, “it isn’t just the money, but what the money is spent on.”
For example, even when Black students go to well-funded, suburban schools like those in Evanston, Illinois, they still often get fewer resources than their white peers. To make sure students get equal opportunities within schools, districts need to look at which students have access to the most experienced teachers, and offer teachers support and training to help them teach students at all levels, Walker said — not just those who come into the classroom with a good foundation already.
Still, some say that even with more funding, any strides toward equality won’t be permanent without an intentional push to integrate schools. “Funding depends on a politician,” Boddie, of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice, said. “The political system is greased by the people who have power and resources, and so often that is not Black children.”
That means money apportioned one year could be gone the next unless districts do the work to make sure that Black students and other students of color go to the same schools as white students. School districts in Berkeley, California, and Montclair, New Jersey, have made efforts to integrate schools, using busing, magnet programs, and other ways of bringing students from different neighborhoods together at school. While the results aren’t perfect, research shows that integrating schools can increase graduation rates for Black students and decrease their risk of poverty in adulthood.
How students are treated within schools is crucial as well. IntegrateNYC, where Nunes is executive college director, has proposed a five-part plan for truly integrating New York City schools. One of those parts is building relationships, “looking at the different interactions that are happening across identity groups, and how the curriculum is either helping or harming those interactions,” Nunes said. “Even if a school is demographically diverse, you can still have a curriculum that is helping to perpetuate individual segregation.”
Teachers need to be trained in culturally responsive pedagogy, which essentially means the ability “to teach the kids who are in front of them and prepare them to live in a global society,” Harris said. That can mean anything from teaching students in a language they understand to simply making sure they actually learn the realities of history. “You shouldn’t have some white kids who hear the Civil War was about states’ rights” without learning that the “right” at issue was the power to enslave people, Harris explained.
Another part is using a restorative justice approach to stop the school-to-prison pipeline wherein Black students and other students of color are disproportionately disciplined and arrested within schools, ultimately contributing to mass incarceration. To combat this, IntegrateNYC calls for the removal of police officers from schools, as well as greater investment in guidance counselors and social workers, and training in restorative justice for teachers and staff.
Educational equity will require not just money but a deep examination of how Americans view young people, and how the country measures value and success, Nunes said. “Asking these questions of ourselves and each other and having these conversations is something that needs to happen,” she said.
“We can’t couch racial justice issues only in criminal justice and housing, or helping people to be entrepreneurs,” Harris said. “Education undergirds every part of our lives in this country.”
The nation's 3 million grocery workers lag other essential workers when it comes to vaccine priority. (photo: Getty)
Grocery Workers Say They Can't Get Vaccines, Even as They Help Distribute Them
Abha Bhattarai, The Washington Post
Bhattarai writes:
Just 13 states, including Maryland and Virginia, are offering vaccines to grocery workers
orkers at a Kroger-owned supermarket near Seattle breathed a sigh of relief last fall when they learned a coronavirus vaccine was around the corner.
Months later, they’re still waiting. Though more than 100 vaccinations a week are given at Quality Food Centers’ in-house pharmacy, most store employees have yet to schedule theirs. Some workers, including baggers and produce clerks, say they’ve been pulled into the distribution effort and told to monitor newly inoculated customers for side effects without proper training, protection or extra pay.
“Once again, grocery workers have been put on the back burner and forgotten about,” said one QFC clerk, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he fears losing his job. “People are frustrated, to say the least. We have a vaccine program, but nobody knows what’s going on.”
Though hailed as “heroes” early in the pandemic, the nation’s 3 million grocery workers lag other essential workers when it comes to vaccine priority. Just 13 states — including Maryland, Virginia, California, New York and Pennsylvania — have begun inoculating such employees as the broader vaccine rollout is hampered by widespread delays, according to the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, which represents 800,000 U.S. grocery employees
“The threat of this pandemic for essential workers is worse now than ever before,” Marc Perrone, the union’s president, told reporters this month. “Simply put, the failures in early vaccine distribution under the past administration have left millions of Americans and essential workers defenseless.”
At least 170 grocery employees have died and thousands more have tested positive for coronavirus, according to data from labor advocacy groups and media reports. Many workers say they have taken on additional hours and responsibilities to keep up with booming demand. Grocery stores and pharmacies were among the only retailers not swept up by shutdowns early in the pandemic, which workers say has placed additional strain on their jobs. Though many companies, including Kroger and Meijer, offered hazard pay early on, nearly all have stopped.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends including grocery workers in the second stage of the vaccine rollout — Phase 1B — along with firefighters, police officers and other front-line essential workers. But states are free to set their own guidelines. Eleven states, including Florida, Indiana, Ohio and Texas, do not have a clear plan to prioritize grocery workers, according to the workers advocacy group United for Respect.
In Tennessee, grocery workers aren’t expected to qualify for the vaccine until the second half of the year, along with overnight camp counselors and prison inmates, who are part of the state’s Phase 3 designation.
“Our employees have worked tirelessly during this pandemic and yet are not being given the protections necessary to do their job,” said Addie James, marketing director for four High Point Grocery and Cash Saver stores in Memphis. “It feels like you’re screaming into the void but nobody is listening.”
Workers say their vaccine challenges are further proof of how they have been shortchanged during the pandemic, especially as their employers are pulling in record profits and winning government contracts to administer vaccines. Kroger, the nation’s largest grocery chain, made $3 billion in profit in the year ending Oct. 31, an 88 percent increase from 2019. In the last quarter alone, profits spiked 140 percent, to $631 million, year over year. Other big retailers, including Walmart, Target and Albertsons, also reported explosive sales gains.
“The message is that we’re easily replaceable,” the Seattle QFC worker said. “As far as the vaccine goes, nobody knows when we can get them.”
Though the pharmacy occasionally gives leftover doses to employees at the end of the day, he said, only a few colleagues have gotten them. He’d like to see greater urgency given the public-facing nature of their jobs.
“People talk about their bubbles and pods, but we don’t have a choice,” the worker said. “There’s no social distancing in a grocery store when you’re dealing with 1,700 people a day.”
Kristal Howard, a spokeswoman for Kroger, said the company provides its pharmacists and other health care workers with “many forms of training,” including online modules, patient safety guides, and life support and CPR courses.
The grocery giant, which has already administered more than 380,000 vaccines, is encouraging all employees to get inoculated and is giving a $100 bonus to those who do, she said. In all, Kroger has spent $1.5 billion on safety measures and extra pay during the pandemic.
“Our most urgent priority throughout the COVID-19 pandemic has been to provide a safe environment for our associates and customers,” Howard said in a statement.
The government pays pharmacies and stores $45.33 to administer the two-dose vaccine, according to industry sources. That rate, set by Medicare, is similar to reimbursement fees for administering other vaccines, such as for the flu or shingles.
Major chains like Walmart and Target say they’re planning to offer employee vaccinations at stores and distribution centers when available. Many, including Trader Joe’s, Aldi and Dollar General also are offering extra pay, free rides and cash bonuses to workers who get vaccinated. And Walmart on Thursday said it would raise wages for nearly one-third of its U.S. employees after a strong holiday season, lifting average pay to $15 an hour but leaving the starting rate at $11.
The gourmet grocery chain in Los Angeles where Dawn Smith works will pay workers for the time it takes to get inoculated, and also cover transportation costs. But Smith, who has been counting the days until she can get the shot, says it’s unlikely she’ll be eligible until March.
The 40-year-old assistant bakery manager says she’s spent the past year worried about taking the virus home to her son and in-laws.
“Of course health-care workers should get the vaccine first, that’s not a question,” Smith said. “But how many people am I exposed to in a day? Hundreds. Sick or well? I don’t know. Customers come in with masks under their nose, sipping their coffee as they walk around.
“We are trying as hard as we can, but this year has been a huge doozy,” she said. “It’s taken a huge toll, mentally and physically, on all of us.”
Employees have to sanitize cash registers, handles and telephones. “Everything has to be sprayed down every two hours,” Smith said, adding that a number of colleagues tested positive for the coronavirus around the holidays. “We’re constantly washing our hands. You have to think about every single move you make all day. It’s exhausting and anxiety-riddled.”
“There’s a light at the end of the tunnel now,” she said. “We just don’t know when we’ll get there.”
Even in states where grocery employees qualify for vaccinations, actually getting one can be a challenge.
“It’s like buying concert tickets: If you’re not online at dawn, clicking on the site for hours until something goes through, you’re out of luck,” said a Whole Foods employee in the Chicago area who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he fears retribution. The worker, who was sick with covid-19 last year, has yet to get the vaccine and said he knows of only one colleague who has gotten it so far.
“We are essential workers,” he said. “They should be able to get us to the front of any line, but instead we’re sitting there refreshing the Walgreens site like everyone else.”
In Indiana, grocery clerk Alicia Hoaks, 36, says she expects to be among the “last of the last” to get the vaccine. The state is currently giving priority to residents 65 and older, as well as first responders and health-care workers, but has not announced a timeline for grocery or retail workers.
“Our pharmacists were vaccinated, but the rest of us are still waiting,” said Hoaks, who takes two buses to her job at a big-box supermarket in Lafayette. “It’s scary, working around people all day and worrying about bringing home the virus to my mother and grandmother. I’m the outside link, the one going to work every day in the middle of a pandemic."
Protesters demonstrate against the military coup in Myanmar. (photo: EPA)
Officials Detained, Celebrities Sought as Protests Continue in Myanmar
La Prensa Latina
Excerpt: "Eleven Myanmar foreign affairs ministry officials were detained during the early hours of Thursday morning and the military junta issued arrest warrants against several celebrities as protests continued across the country."
The officials were arrested at 4.30 am (19:30 GMT on Wednesday) under the accusation of joining the civil disobedience movement that emerged after the Feb. 1 military coup, a source from the foreign ministry told EFE.
The low-ranking officials were hiding in homes provided by a philanthropic association in the capital Naypyitaw.
The mass strikes started by workers in the health sector and which have spread to many others are paralyzing government services and becoming perhaps the most effective strategy of the civil disobedience movement against the coup. State media each day orders workers to return to their duties.
The military junta also announced that arrest warrants have been issued against celebrities accused of incitement to the civil disobedience movement.
Among the celebrities are popular actors Lu Min, Zin Wine, Pyay Ti Oo, director Na Gyi and singer Anegga, the military reported through its True News information agency Wednesday.
“We’re not gonna stop till the DICTATOR falls !!!!!,” Na Gyi wrote on Facebook on Thursday.
Since the coup, led by General Min Aung Hlaing, and until Wednesday, at least 495 people have been detained, including 35 who have been released, the Association for the Assistance of Political Prisoners said.
Meanwhile, protests continued throughout the country Wednesday in places such as Yangon, Naypyitaw, Myitkyina, the tourist town of Bagan, and Mandalay. In many places slogans such as “No Dictatorship” and “We want democracy” were painted running down roads in huge letters.
A day after Yangon’s “broken-down car” protest to block military and police vehicles, cars were back up and running, however they crawled along the roads to continue their traffic blockades.
Meanwhile, several government websites, including the Central Bank, public broadcaster MRTV and True News information agency were down Thursday after hackers attacked them overnight.
On its Facebook page, the Myanmar Hackers group said that its targets are the profiles linked to Tatmadaw, as the military is known in the country.
“We are fighting for justice in Myanmar,” the group said.
“Our blog is helping them (hackers) to attack the army sites, military government sites and sites who are standing with Myanmar coup… It is like mass protesting of people in front of government websites,” it added.
Global hacktivist group Anonymous tweeted a video Thursday with a person in a Guy Fawkes mask speaking through a voice changer. He said the “illegitimate government has limited the public’s access to information by placing a curfew on internet access and muzzling the local media.”
“Min Aung Hlaing, release the political fugitives and concede your illegitimate claim to power. Your attempts to divide the nation and incite chaos have not gone unnoticed. We will not stand by while the people of Myanmar are denied their right to a free and democratic political system,” ending its statement with “Expect us.”
The hack coincided with the fourth overnight internet blackout across the country. The London-based internet monitor NetBlocks reported Thursday that the network was available again at 9 am Thursday morning after a disconnection of about 8 hours.
“The practice is detrimental to public safety and incites confusion, fear and distress in difficult times,” said NetBlocks.
The military junta justified its seizure of power by alleging fraud in the November election won by leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party.
Great Barrier Reef. (photo: Fotolia)
Great Barrier Reef Found to Be in Failing Health as World Heritage Review Looms
Graham Readfearn, Guardian UK
Readfearn writes: "A government report card has found the marine environment along the Great Barrier Reef's coastline remains in poor health, prompting conservationists to call for urgent action ahead of a world heritage committee meeting this year."
Reef water quality report card gives condition of marine environment a ‘D’ grade relative to earlier reports
The reef water quality report card, released on Wednesday, said the health of corals and seagrass meadows in inshore areas had not improved, but water quality was slightly better than previous years.
Officials gave the condition of the marine environment in 2019 a “D” grade relative to reports covering 2017 and 2018.
The federal environment minister, Sussan Ley, and Queensland’s environment and Great Barrier Reef minister, Meaghan Scanlon, said improved farm practices and a $667m investment to support graziers and sugar cane farmers was helping water conditions.
“The fact that the overall marine condition remains poor underlines the importance of those investments,” Ley said.
The world heritage-listed Great Barrier Reef is the world’s largest coral reef system but is under increasing pressure from climate heating that caused mass bleaching events in 2016, 2017 and 2020.
The report’s monitoring period ended before the onset of widespread bleaching in early 2020.
Scientists say improving water quality and reducing sediments, fertilisers and chemicals running into the reef’s waters will give the system a greater chance of recovering from future bleaching.
The UN’s world heritage committee is due to review the status of the reef at a meeting scheduled for June in China.
In 2017, the committee said progress towards meeting water quality targets needed to be accelerated.
Governments have set a raft of targets for 2025 for the reef’s catchments.
Ley and Scanlon pointed to reductions in levels of dissolved inorganic nitrogen – originating from fertilisers – with cumulative levels dropping 25.5% since 2013. The target is a 60% drop by 2025.
Wet tropics and Burdekin farmers had been key contributors to water quality improvements, the ministers said.
The Queensland government says dissolved inorganic nitrogen is linked to algal blooms, outbreaks of coral-eating starfish and coral disease.
As well as water quality, there are also targets for improving land management practices for sugar cane, grazing, horticulture, grains and bananas.
Some 90% of land in priority areas should be using best practice by 2025, according to the targets.
Only 12.7% of land for sugar cane farming was using best practice, the report card said. The banana industry was the highest performer, according to the report, with 65% of land covered.
The Queensland government passed new reef water quality laws in 2019 that will give the government power to set minimum standards.
Some rules around better record keeping are already in place, but others are scheduled for later this year and 2022.
Dr Lissa Schindler, Great Barrier Reef campaigner at the Australian Marine Conservation Society, said the report card showed governments “still have a long way to go” to reach the water quality targets being eyed by the world heritage committee.
“Improving water quality needs the support and dedication of all farmers and graziers in Queensland and they’ll need backing from the Queensland government to adopt the best practices required,” Schindler said. “That’s why we are calling for more funding to help the agricultural sector comply quickly with the regulations.”
She hoped that in the next report card in 2022, the affect of the government’s new laws would force improvements.
Richard Leck, head of oceans at WWF-Australia, said: “We know that the world is watching on for Australia’s performance in improving water quality on the great barrier reef and it’s concerning that progress is slow. But it is heartening that there is some progress.
“The Queensland and Australian government need to commit to long-term investments to improving water quality and to make sure the reef regulations are adequately enforced.
“What this report shows is that we need long term commitments on water quality. It is a long-term problem and a lot needs to be done.”
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