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Kareem Abdul-Jabbar | This Year, the Oscars Got It Right
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, The Hollywood Reporter
Abdul-Jabbar writes: "The Oscar competition means different things to different people. For the average moviegoer, it's mostly about the glitz, glamour and gossip."
For marginalized groups — in the industry and at home — recognition by the Academy is more than an ego boost or a glamorous diversion but signals to the world that "the lives they live, the struggles they face, are worthy of depicting."
he Oscar competition means different things to different people. For the average moviegoer, it's mostly about the glitz, glamour and gossip. Nothing wrong with that. I'd like to know if Daniel Kaluuya and LaKeith Stanfield got along on the set of Judas and the Black Messiah. Did Leslie Odom Jr. give Aldis Hodge an atomic wedgie for drinking the last cappuccino at the wrap party for One Night in Miami? Gimme the tea!
For people in the film industry, the Oscars are about career boosts, artistic validation and financial rewards. "An Oscar really is life-changing for anyone involved," said film financier Paul Brett, who won an Oscar as executive producer of The King's Speech in 2011. "It opens enormous doors — every agent and producer wants to talk to you afterwards." A director's film that was in development limbo suddenly gets a green light, a writer moves from a $15 million film to a $100 million film, and an actor is co-starring with Meryl Streep instead of Tommy Wiseau.
But for most marginalized people — both in the movie business and in the movie theaters or at home in front of the TV — the Oscars represent something entirely different. It is a means to an end: having their stories told and being portrayed in ways that show the country values them as individuals and values their culture. Their worth can't be established just by plugging in a Black, Asian, Latinx or LGBTQ+ sidekick character here and there, it has to come from the stories themselves in acknowledging that the lives they live, the struggles they face, are worthy of depicting.
Pop culture is the roiling language of the zeitgeist. If you want to know what society is thinking and what direction it's heading socially, politically and morally, examine pop culture's vibrant entrails. Movies form a large part of that pattern, which is why they are so influential in the culture rejecting and embracing ideas, ideals and people. Fiction is the architect of our future, and film has a long history of imagining a speculative world that the real world then makes happen. Whether it's moon landings in A Trip to the Moon (1902) and From the Earth to the Moon (1958) or a Black president in Rufus Jones for President (1933) and 24 (2001), it happened on film before it became a reality. Film utters the childish possibility, which matures into the articulated reality.
That's what movies and TV can do for marginalized people — erode the myths and misconceptions that keep them outside the mainstream by conveniently ignoring their contributions. The Oscar nominations announce to billions around the world which stories and storytellers matter. So every time a film is recognized by the Academy, the people represented by that film are also recognized. They become visible.
This was a good year for cultural diversity and the Oscars. Best picture nominations include major Black activist characters (Judas and the Black Messiah, The Trial of the Chicago 7), Asian American characters (Minari) and women (Nomadland, Promising Young Woman). Two of the five director nominees are women. All the major categories, including acting and writing, boast a balance of diverse voices. Even more important, these selections weren't about virtue-pandering, they are all wonderful films that deserve praise. Two of the best films of the year are shorts. The Letter Room, written and directed by Elvira Lind, is a touching and hopeful film about the power of art to ease our isolation. Two Distant Strangers, written by Travon Free and directed by Free and Martin Desmond Roe, is a Groundhog Day-like meditation on the police versus Black community told with exceptional humor and horror.
This year, the Oscars got it right. The nominees are a choir of diverse voices — a song that celebrates the soul of who we want to be. Many underrepresented people are rejoicing.
But I wonder if this year's diversity bonanza is because the theaters were closed and streamers became the great equalizer among viewers. Were audiences that had been previously ignored when theaters were open now welcomed into the fold because they were watching first-run movies on TV? While most people in the film industry receive DVDs or links to watch movies, Academy members are probably also more aware of the general public and movies that might reflect them and their viewing preferences. Especially after a year with a pandemic that almost destroyed the movie theater business and a year that included Black Lives Matter protests involving up to 26 million people. No one wanted to see a repeat of the tone-deaf 2016 Oscars that Chris Rock hosted during the #OscarsSoWhite controversy. In a famous clip, Rock interviewed mostly Black people outside a Compton movie theater, asking them about that year's nominees. After asking if they'd seen Spotlight or Bridge of Spies, one woman asked if Rock was making up the titles because she'd never heard of them. This sentiment was echoed by several others. Though it was funny, it was also one of the most insightful commentaries on the power of movies to isolate people.
That's why it's important to know if this year's Oscars are a pandemic anomaly or a sign that we are walking up the yellow brick road toward the future with arms linked and optimism that the members of the Academy really do have a brain, a heart, and courage.
A peaceful protest in response to the video release of the fatal police shooting of 13-year-old Adam Toledo. (photo: Shafkat Anowar/AP)
Demands Grow for Federal Probe Into Fatal Police Shooting of Adam Toledo
Marina E. Franco, Axios
Franco writes: "Attorneys and advocates in Chicago are asking the Department of Justice to intervene in the investigation of Adam Toledo, as the video of an officer fatally shooting the 13-year-old of Mexican descent makes waves."
ttorneys and advocates in Chicago are asking the Department of Justice to intervene in the investigation of Adam Toledo, as the video of an officer fatally shooting the 13-year-old of Mexican descent makes waves.
Why it matters: Activists are asking that Latinos not be forgotten in discussion of reforms to policing that have been prompted by cases like George Floyd’s.
- After Black Americans, Latinos face the second-highest rate of death by law enforcement, according to data analysis from the Washington Post.
- Toledo was shot March 29 during a police chase in the Little Village neighborhood of Chicago, where the majority of the population is Latino.
- Bodycam footage shows him empty-handed when the shot was fired, even though officers claimed it had been an “armed confrontation.”
A health care worker administers a dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine. (photo: Roger Kisby/Bloomberg/Getty Images)
'Held to Ransom': Pfizer Demands Governments Gamble With State Assets to Secure Vaccine Deal
Madlen Davies, Rosa Furneaux, Iván Ruiz and Jill Langlois, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism
Excerpt: "Pfizer has been accused of 'bullying' Latin American governments in Covid vaccine negotiations and has asked some countries to put up sovereign assets, such as embassy buildings and military bases, as a guarantee against the cost of any future legal cases, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism can reveal."
fizer has been accused of “bullying” Latin American governments in Covid vaccine negotiations and has asked some countries to put up sovereign assets, such as embassy buildings and military bases, as a guarantee against the cost of any future legal cases, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism can reveal.
In the case of one country, demands made by the pharmaceutical giant led to a three-month delay in a vaccine deal being agreed. For Argentina and Brazil, no national deals were agreed at all. Any hold-up in countries receiving vaccines means more people contracting Covid-19 and potentially dying.
Officials from Argentina and the other Latin American country, which cannot be named as it has signed a confidentiality agreement with Pfizer, said the company’s negotiators demanded additional indemnity against any civil claims citizens might file if they experienced adverse effects after being inoculated. In Argentina and Brazil, Pfizer asked for sovereign assets to be put up as collateral for any future legal costs.
One official who was present in the unnamed country’s negotiations described Pfizer’s demands as “high-level bullying” and said the government felt like it was being “held to ransom” in order to access life-saving vaccines.
Campaigners are already warning of a “vaccine apartheid” in which rich Western countries may be inoculated years before poorer regions. Now, legal experts have raised concerns that Pfizer’s demands amount to an abuse of power.
“Pharmaceutical companies shouldn't be using their power to limit life-saving vaccines in low- and middle-income countries,” said Professor Lawrence Gostin, director of the World Health Organization’s Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law. “[This] seems to be exactly what they're doing.”
Protection against liability shouldn’t be used as “the sword of Damocles hanging over the heads of desperate countries with a desperate population,” he added.
Pfizer has been in talks with more than 100 countries and supranational organisations, and has supply agreements with nine countries in Latin America and the Caribbean: Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico, Panama, Peru, and Uruguay. The terms of those deals are unknown.
Pfizer told the Bureau: “Globally, we have also allocated doses to low- and lower-middle-income countries at a not-for-profit price, including an advance purchase agreement with Covax to provide up to 40 million doses in 2021. We are committed to supporting efforts aimed at providing developing countries with the same access to vaccines as the rest of the world.” It declined to comment on ongoing private negotiations.
Most governments are offering indemnity – exemption from legal liability – to the vaccine manufacturers they are buying from. This means that a citizen who suffers an adverse effect after being vaccinated can file a claim against the manufacturer and, if successful, the government would pay the compensation. In some countries people can also apply for compensation through specific structures without going to court.
This is fairly typical for vaccines administered in a pandemic. In many cases adverse effects are so rare that they do not show up in clinical trials and only become apparent once hundreds of thousands of people have received the vaccine (a 2009 H1N1 flu vaccine, for example, was eventually linked to narcolepsy). Because manufacturers have developed vaccines quickly and because they protect everyone in society, governments often agree to cover the cost of compensation.
However, the government officials from Argentina and the unnamed country who spoke to the Bureau felt Pfizer's demands went beyond those of other vaccine companies, and beyond those of Covax, an organisation created to ensure low-income countries can access vaccines, which is also requiring its members to indemnify manufacturers. This presents an additional burden for some countries because it means having to hire specialist lawyers and sometimes pass complex new legislation, so manufacturers’ liabilities can be waived.
Pfizer asked for additional indemnity from civil cases, meaning that the company would not be held liable for rare adverse effects or for its own acts of negligence, fraud or malice. This includes those linked to company practices – say, if Pfizer sent the wrong vaccine or made errors during manufacturing.
“Some liability protection is warranted, but certainly not for fraud, gross negligence, mismanagement, failure to follow good manufacturing practices,” said Gostin. “Companies have no right to ask for indemnity for these things.”
Dr Mark Eccleston-Turner, a lecturer in global health law at Keele University, said Pfizer and other manufacturers have received government funding to research and develop the vaccines and are now pushing the potential costs of adverse effects back on to governments, including those in low- and middle-income countries. (Pfizer’s partner BioNTech was given $445m by the German government to develop a vaccine and the US government agreed a deal in July to pre-order 100m doses for nearly $2bn, before the vaccine had even entered phase three trials. Pfizer expects to make sales of $15bn worth of vaccines in 2021.)
In Eccleston-Turner’s opinion, it looks like Pfizer “is trying to eke out as much profit and minimise its risk at every juncture with this vaccine development then this vaccine rollout. Now, the vaccine development has been heavily subsidised already. So there's very minimal risk for the manufacturer involved there.”
The Bureau spoke to officials from two countries, who all described how meetings with Pfizer began promisingly but quickly turned sour, and reviewed a report by the Brazilian Ministry of Health.
The Argentinian Ministry of Health began negotiating with the company in June and President Alberto Fernández held a meeting with Pfizer Argentina’s CEO the following month. During subsequent meetings Pfizer asked to be indemnified against the cost of any future civil claims. Although this had never been done before, Congress passed a new law in October allowing for it. However, Pfizer was not happy with the phrasing of the legislation, according to an official from the president’s office. The government believed Pfizer should be liable for any acts of negligence or malice. Pfizer, said the official, disagreed.
The government did offer to amend the existing law to make it clear “negligence” meant problems in the distribution and delivery of the vaccines. But Pfizer was still not satisfied. It asked the government to amend the legislation through a new decree; Fernández refused.
“Argentina could compensate for the vaccine’s adverse effects, but not if Pfizer makes a mistake,” said the official, who has detailed knowledge of the negotiations. “For example, what would happen if Pfizer unintentionally interrupted the vaccine’s cold chain [of -70C transport and storage] … and a citizen wants to sue them? It would not be fair for Argentina to pay for a Pfizer error.”
The official said talks soon became tense and complicated: “Instead of giving in on some points, Pfizer demanded more and more.” In addition to the changes in the new law, it asked Argentina to take out international insurance to pay for potential future cases against the company (countries were also asked to do this during the H1N1 outbreak).
In late December, Pfizer made another unexpected request: that the government put up sovereign assets – which might include federal bank reserves, embassy buildings or military bases – as collateral.
“We offered to pay for millions of doses in advance, we accepted this international insurance, but the last request was unusual: Pfizer demanded that the sovereign assets of Argentina also be part of the legal support,” the official said. “It was an extreme demand that I had only heard when the foreign debt had to be negotiated, but both in that case and in this one, we rejected it immediately.”
The failed negotiations mean Argentinian citizens, unlike those in neighbouring countries, do not have access to Pfizer’s vaccine, leaving them with Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine, AstraZeneca’s vaccine and those delivered through Covax. The government is also negotiating to acquire vaccines from Moderna, Sinopharm and CanSino.
“Pfizer misbehaved with Argentina,” said Ginés González Garcia, Argentina’s former minister of health. “Its intolerance with us was tremendous.” (González Garcia resigned at the weekend after allegations that VIPs had been allowed to jump the queue for vaccines.)
The same demands were made of Brazil’s Ministry of Health. Pfizer asked to be indemnified and asked the ministry to put up sovereign assets as collateral, as well as create a guarantee fund with money deposited in a foreign bank account. In January, the ministry refused these terms, describing the clauses as “abusive”.
An official from another Latin American country, which cannot be named, described talks unfolding similarly. They said the government began negotiating with Pfizer in July, before the vaccine was approved. There was a perception that Pfizer’s negotiators had a “good cop, bad cop” routine, with the “bad cop” pressing the government to buy more doses.
“[At that time] there was not a single drug or vaccine in the world with this kind of technology that had been shown to be safe and effective … You had this lady putting pressure saying: ‘Buy more, you’re going to kill people, people are going to die because of you,’” the official said.
Negotiations became fraught when the company asked for additional indemnity. The government had never awarded any kind of indemnity before and did not want to waive liability, but Pfizer said this was non-negotiable. Negotiations continued and eventually a deal was signed, but after a delay of three months.
As Pfizer has only 2 billion doses to sell across the world this year – apparently on a first come, first served basis – the official is angry about a delay that likely pushed the country further back in the queue.
One of the reasons the government wanted Pfizer’s vaccines was because the company said they could be delivered quickly. Yet in the contract, Pfizer wanted to reserve the right to modify the schedule. There was no room for negotiation. “It was take it or leave it,” said the official.
The official said: “Five years in the future when these confidentiality agreements are over you will learn what really happened in these negotiations.”
Pfizer told the Bureau: “Pfizer and BioNTech are firmly committed to working with governments and other relevant stakeholders to ensure equitable and affordable access to our Covid-19 vaccine for people around the world.”
A Black Lives Matter rally. (photo: Evelyn Hockstein/WP)
US Marshals Used Drones to Spy on Black Lives Matter Protests in Washington, DC
Sam Biddle, The Intercept
Biddle writes: "The U.S. Marshals service flew unmanned drones over Washington, D.C., in response to last summer's Black Lives Matter protests, documents obtained by The Intercept via the Freedom of Information Act show."
The flights, revealed in documents obtained by The Intercept, underscore the growing militarization of policing.
he U.S. Marshals Service flew unmanned drones over Washington, D.C., in response to last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests, documents obtained by The Intercept via the Freedom of Information Act show.
The documents — two brief, heavily redacted emails — indicate the Marshals flew the drones over Washington on June 5 and 7, when nationwide protests against police brutality in the wake of George Floyd’s murder were at their height. The surveillance flights occurred just days after the Trump administration ordered the mobilization of the near entirety of federal law enforcement against Washington’s protesters. The aggressive physical crackdown against Black Lives Matter rallies, particularly in Washington, D.C., spurred its own wave of outrage as police beat, chased, and chemically dispersed largely peaceful demonstrators. Less visible law enforcement responses to the rallies also drew intense criticism, including the use of social media surveillance and, in particular, the use of aerial surveillance over multiple cities by the Air National Guard and Department of Homeland Security. Government aircraft monitored 15 cities during the protests, according to the New York Times, filming demonstrators in New York, Philadelphia, and Dayton, Ohio; a Predator drone was deployed over Minneapolis.
One email provided by the Marshals Service is dated June 5 and carries the subject line “UAS Status for Protests,” apparently referring to Unmanned Aircraft Systems, common military jargon for drones. It contains only a few fragments of unredacted text but appears to have contained notes from a “UAS briefing in response to the protests” and states that a redacted entity “responded to Washington DC” and “conducted one flight,” the same day Mayor Muriel Browser asked Donald Trump to “withdraw all extraordinary law enforcement and military presence from Washington, DC.” The June 7 email is similarly fragmentary and censored but notes that the redacted entity once again “responded to Washington DC” and “conducted several flights.”
Marshals Service spokesperson James Stossel declined to answer any questions about the purpose of the June 5th and 7th flights or what data was collected, stating, “The USMS does not release details of operational missions,” and denied that the Marshals flew drones over the city on any other dates. Asked how the robotic aerial surveillance of protests conforms with the agency’s narrowly defined mission, Stossel said, “The Marshals Service conducts a broad array of missions as authorized by Federal Law which may include ensuring the rule of law is maintained during protests.” Press reports from this period describe the protests in question as peaceful.
The previously unreported flights raise the question of why the U.S. Marshals Service would be flying drones over mass gatherings of First Amendment-protected activity in the nation’s capital. The marshals are the oldest law enforcement branch in the United States, dating to the 18th century, and their present day grab bag of responsibilities is more or less constrained to protecting courthouses, asset forfeitures, operating the Witness Protection Program, transporting prisoners, and hunting fugitives. The vestigial agency has historically been cagey about the existence or purpose of its drone program: In 2013, the Los Angeles Times reported, “In 2004 and 2005, the U.S. Marshals Service tested two small drones in remote areas to help them track fugitives,” but the test was “abandoned … after both drones crashed.”
Documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union that same year via the Freedom of Information Act were also heavily redacted, providing only murky outlines of how the agency was conducting aerial surveillance. These ACLU documents stated that the Marshals possessed a “rapidly deployable overhead collection device that will provide a multi-role surveillance platform to assist in [redacted] detection of targets.” Another document provided to the ACLU noted that the marshals deployed surveillance drones through their Technical Operations Group, or TOG, which “provides the U.S. Marshal Service, other federal agencies, and any requesting state or local law enforcement agency, with the most timely and technologically advanced electronic surveillance and investigative intelligence available in the world,” according to the Marshals Service website. The Marshals’ spokesperson, however, told The Intercept, “No USMS UAS flights were conducted at the request of any other agency.”
While the Marshals Service quietly acknowledged the existence of its drone surveillance “pilot program” in its 2020 annual report, the flights were largely described as tied to the agency’s core responsibility of apprehending fugitives. But the document does briefly note that “UAS operators also deployed … in support of the USMS mission during the nationwide civil unrest in Summer 2020.” The report doesn’t mention what exactly this drone-based “support” entailed, but the Marshals’ on-the-ground violence against protesters in Portland prompted widespread criticism last summer.
Experts say it’s still unclear why the U.S. Marshals are even in a position to conduct these flights in the first place. “How did it become part of the mission of U.S. Marshals Service to engage in aerial surveillance during a protest movement?” said Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst at the ACLU. “It’s hard to know with all the secrecy, but it looks like once again, powerful high-tech tools sold to the public for use against the worst criminals are now being deployed against peaceful protesters and activists.”
Matthew Guariglia, a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The Intercept that the fact there’s a Marshals Service drone program at all is indicative of how thoroughly crime-fighting agencies in the United States now resemble war-fighting forces: “The Marshals service has drones for much the same reason that many local police departments have tanks,” Guariglia said. “The slow militarization of local and federal law enforcement as a result on the war on crime, war on drugs, and war on terror have created dozens of desperate law enforcement agencies with advanced technology and bloated budgets.” The mere knowledge that a drone is or even could be watching demonstrators “threatens to chill out right to protest,” Guariglia added.
Stanley also objected to the near-full redaction of the flight emails, which the Marshals Service argued was warranted on the basis that they would reveal secret investigative techniques and “could reasonably be expected to endanger the life or physical safety of any individual.” But as Stanley pointed out, it’s not as if flying a camera-packing drone over a throng of people is a new or secret technique in the year 2021. “How high are the chances they used their drones in some clever, innovative way they need to keep secret because nobody else has thought of it?” he explained. “No matter how they’re using it, the Marshals Service needs to be open and transparent given the relative novelty of drones as a law enforcement surveillance tool and their significant implications for our privacy. This kind of reflexively secretive behavior is one reason activists and communities tend not to give agencies the benefit of the doubt when they seek new surveillance technologies.”
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. (photo: Drew Angerer/Getty)
Facebook Knows It Was Used to Help Incite the Capitol Insurrection
Craig Silverman, Ryan Mac and Jane Lytvynenko, BuzzFeed
Excerpt: "Last month, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified in front of a House of Representatives committee that his company had done its part 'to secure the integrity of the election.'"
An internal task force found that Facebook failed to take appropriate action against the Stop the Steal movement ahead of the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, and hoped the company could “do better next time.”
ast month, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified in front of a House of Representatives committee that his company had done its part “to secure the integrity of the election.” While the social network did not catch everything, the billionaire chief executive said, Facebook had “made our services inhospitable to those who might do harm” in the lead-up to the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Less than a week after his appearance, however, an internal company report reached a far different conclusion: Facebook failed to stop a highly influential movement from using its platform to delegitimize the election, encourage violence, and help incite the Capitol riot.
Shared on Facebook’s employee communication platform last month, the report is a blunt assessment of how people connected to “Stop the Steal,” a far-right movement based on the conspiracy theory that former president Donald Trump won the 2020 US presidential election, used the social network to foment an attempted coup. The document explicitly states that Facebook activity from people connected to Stop the Steal and other Trump loyalist groups including the Patriot Party played a role in the events of Jan. 6, and that the company’s emphasis on rooting out fake accounts and “inauthentic behavior” held it back from taking preemptive action when real people were involved.
“Hindsight is 20/20, at the time, it was very difficult to know whether what we were seeing was a coordinated effort to delegitimize the election, or whether it was free expression by users who were afraid and confused and deserved our empathy,” reads the report, which was put together by an internal task force studying harmful networks and obtained by BuzzFeed News. “But hindsight being 20/20 makes it all the more important to look back to learn what we can about the growth of the election delegitimizing movements that grew, spread conspiracy, and helped incite the Capitol insurrection.”
The report, titled “Stop the Steal and Patriot Party: The Growth and Mitigation of an Adversarial Harmful Movement,” provides yet another case study of how relatively small but coordinated groups of people are able to wreak havoc and spread misinformation on the world’s dominant social network. It’s also a sober admission that a company, which recorded more than $29 billion in profit last year, still struggles to track and preempt networks of people seeking to sow discord and undermine liberal democracy in the US and around the world.
Even though the company spent months preparing for potential delegitimization of the election from Trump and his supporters, Facebook was outmaneuvered by a powerful network of coordinated accounts that promoted groups where members glorified hate, incited violence, and sought to spread a big election lie, according to the report. It notes that while Facebook was satisfied “at having made it past the election without major incident,” that feeling was “tempered by the rise in angry vitriol and a slew of conspiracy theories that began to steadily grow” after Election Day, Nov. 3.
Joan Donovan, research director of Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy, said the Stop the Steal movement began long before Election Day, and Facebook’s failure to prepare shows it’s unable to protect democracy.
“For me, at the end of the day, it comes down to: Do you care? Do you care enough about democracy? Do you care enough about the fate of the nation to ensure that your product is not used to coordinate and overthrow the government?” she said. “There is something about the way Facebook organizes groups that leads to massive public events. And when they’re organized on the basis of misinformation, hate, incitement, and harassment, we get very violent outcomes.”
In response to questions for this story, a Facebook spokesperson said the company took a number of steps to limit content that sought to delegitimize the election, including the suspension of Trump’s account, labeling candidates’ posts with vote-counting information after Trump prematurely declared victory, and the removal of the original Stop the Steal group.
“As we’ve said previously, we still saw problematic content on our platform during this period and we know that we didn’t catch everything,” Facebook said in a statement. “This is not a definitive report. It’s a product of one of many teams who are continuing to study what happened so we can continue improving our content moderation.”
Employees were made aware of the original Stop the Steal Facebook group, which emerged on election night, after it was “flagged for escalation because it contained high levels of hate and violence and incitement (VNI) in the comments.” By the time Facebook removed it, on Nov. 5, it had become a movement, amassing more than 300,000 members in a 24-hour span with more than a million people wanting to join. The group’s takedown and splintering into offshoot groups caused a major problem for Facebook, which took a “piecemeal” approach to enforcement and failed to see Stop the Steal as a wider, harmful movement, according to the internal report.
“Because we were looking at each entity individually, rather than as a cohesive movement, we were only able to take down individual Groups and Pages once they exceeded a violation threshold,” the report reads. “After the Capitol Insurrection and a wave of Storm the Capitol events across the country, we realized that the individual delegitimizing Groups, Pages and slogans did constitute a cohesive movement.”
Do you work at Facebook or another technology company? We’d love to hear from you. Reach out to ryan.mac@buzzfeed.com or via one of our tip line channels.
It was only after the violence of Jan. 6, according to the report, that Facebook teams realized they were dealing with a movement that “normalized delegitimization and hate in a way that resulted in offline harm and harm to the norms underpinning democracy.” And while the company spent months preparing for people to dispute election results, the report calls delegitimization a “new territory” in which “few policies or knowledge existed” prior to election night.
The document contradicts Zuckerberg’s statement to Congress about Facebook being “inhospitable” to harmful content about the election, and refutes chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg’s January comment that the insurrection was “largely organized on platforms that don’t have our abilities to stop hate, don’t have our standards and don’t have our transparency.” It also shows that while Facebook said it was prepared for election destabilization and was monitoring signals for unrest, it failed to stop a movement that led to real-world harm.
Facebook disputed the idea that the report went against Zuckerberg’s and Sandberg’s public statements and noted that both had said there was violative content on the platform that the company did not catch.
Donovan said the report’s revelations and the misleading comments by Facebook leadership expose the true nature of the company and its products.
“This shows the company is anti-democratic at the very least,” she said, “and at the very worst, it shows that they know the risks, and they know the harm that can be caused and they are not willing to do anything significant to stop it from happening again.”
“All of the fastest growing FB Groups were Stop the Steal”
The report focuses on two actors in the election delegitimization movement on Facebook: Stop the Steal, which started as a fast-growing Facebook group before splintering into various offshoots, and the Patriot Party, an attempt led by far-right personalities to create a new political party for Donald Trump.
Created on the night of Nov. 3, the original Stop the Steal Facebook group was started by pro-Trump activist Kylie Jane Kremer, who said at public events leading up to Jan. 6 that it had more than a million people waiting to be added before it was shut down by the company two days later. The removal of the original group had the effect of cutting off the head of a hydra, as copycat and offshoot groups sprung up in its place.
The original Stop the Steal group, and the offshoots that emerged after it was banned, grew quickly thanks to what the report labels “super-inviter” accounts. The biggest Stop the Steal groups had 137 super-inviters, who invited 67% of the groups’ members, according to the report. These accounts were each responsible for inviting more than 500 people to groups. Facebook’s analysis found the super-inviters worked in coordination, lied about their locations, and used private groups and chats to coordinate activity.
The report compared this behavior to “growth hacking,” a marketing term often used to describe using shortcuts or other tactics to boost the popularity of a brand or business.
“Growth hacking may not always be bad,” the report reads. “A democratic movement, a movement seeking human rights, or an advertising movement, may all employ legitimate techniques to grow their audience quickly. However, when the growth is mixed with the signals of harm we described above, this rapid growth indicates the spread of harm, and may indicate coordinated harm.”
Facebook declined to comment on what, if any, action it took against super-inviter accounts.
“From the earliest Groups, we saw high levels of Hate, [violence and incitement] and delegitimization, combined with meteoric growth rates — almost all of the fastest growing FB Groups were Stop the Steal during their peak growth,” the report reads.
A table in the report illustrates how much hate existed in Stop the Steal groups compared to other political and social issue groups. While 0.13% of all civic groups on Facebook had at least five comments with white supremacist terms, more than 4% of Stop the Steal groups exhibited the same characteristic. Similarly, while 0.89% of civic groups on Facebook had at least five pieces of content deemed as “violence and incitement,” nearly 43% of Stop the Steal groups showed the same behavior.
The report also revealed that people affiliated with hate and right-wing militant organizations were active in Stop the Steal and Patriot Party groups.
“One of the most effective and compelling things we did was to look for overlaps in the observed networks with militias and hate orgs,” the report says. “This worked because we were in a context where we had these networks well mapped.”
The groups included people belonging to the Proud Boys, whose groups and pages had been banned by Facebook in 2018 and whose members were indicted for their role in the insurrection.
In a lengthy post to his own Facebook page last September, Zuckerberg outlined the steps his company had taken to protect the election, including the strengthening of “enforcement against militias, conspiracy networks like QAnon, and other groups that could be used to organize violence or civil unrest in the period after the elections.” Facebook’s own researchers, however, found that members of the supposedly banned groups remained on Facebook and were able to link up with Stop the Steal and Patriot Party supporters to help undermine the election.
BuzzFeed News and researchers have previously shown how militant and extremist groups and pages continued to operate and recruit on the social network, long after the bans were put in place.
On Dec. 31, for example, an image superimposed with the text “OCCUPY CONGRESS THE GREAT BETRAYAL IS OVER” was shared to a private Patriot Party group, which had about 23,500 members.
“If they won’t hear us, they will fear us,” read another piece of text on the image, which included the date, Jan. 6, 2021.
The Growth of Stop the Steal
The report says Stop the Steal was “flagged for escalation because it contained high levels of hate and violence and incitement (VNI) in the comments.” But by the time it was removed, it had already become central to a burgeoning movement.
“It wasn’t until later that it became clear just how much of a focal point the catchphrase would be, and they would serve as a rallying point around which a movement of violent election delegitimization could coalesce.”
The phrase “Stop the Steal” predates the Facebook group of the same name started by Kremer, and was used by Trump adviser Roger Stone back in 2016. It reemerged as a rallying cry for bogus claims of election fraud among Trump supporters in the months before the 2020 election, a fact that Facebook should have been well aware of, according to Donovan.
“Everybody knew that Stop the Steal or something like it was on its way,” she said. “That went on for months prior to Jan. 6. It’s not like it was hiding behind the kind of tricks that Russia were using in 2016. They’re not hiding behind any of that.”
Donovan said the company’s failure is partly a result of its focus on inauthentic activity, such as people using fake accounts. Facebook ignores how its products create coordinated activity among real people, and the harm that can result, she said.
“They have insisted that somehow inauthenticity is the measure by which they should take action,” Donovan said. “This report is not path-breaking if you’ve been studying the way in which disinformation operators have evolved. In 2016, you had to engineer lots of fake engagement and stories because the networks were not mature enough. It’s only after you have four years of MAGA and the Trump caravan and the anti-vaxxers meeting up with the militia groups during the pandemic that you start to see these networks become agile, extensible, and adaptable to the moment.”
Facebook’s own report found that Kremer and other far-right figures were able to use Facebook to grow their influence in the period between the election and the insurrection.
After Facebook banned Kremer’s Stop the Steal group on Nov. 5, it became a rallying cry for her and her mother, Amy Kremer, during their subsequent cross-country bus tour, where a BuzzFeed News analysis found that speakers spread false lies about the election and at times explicitly advocated for violence. The tour was led by their organization, Women for America First, which also obtained the permit for the Washington, DC, event on Jan. 6 where Trump called upon supporters to march to the Capitol.
The Kremers did not respond to requests for comment sent to Women for America First.
“It has 1.2 million people in the queue [waiting to be added]. Well, what do you think happened? Facebook shut it down,” Amy Kremer said at a Morehead City, North Carolina, rally on Dec. 2 where another speaker joked about conservatives shooting liberals.
“It came all the way from the top from Mark Zuckerberg to shut it down, so they shut it down,” Kylie Jane Kremer said at a rally in Des Moines, Iowa, on Dec. 6.
Like the Kremers, Ali Alexander, a far-right activist who has spread conspiracy theories about Rep. Ilhan Omar and Vice President Kamala Harris, worked to undermine the election offline and used Facebook to supercharge the Stop the Steal movement. He appeared at the Jan. 6 rally and also worked with GOP lawmakers to put “maximum pressure on Congress while they were voting,” according to the Washington Post.
Facebook’s analysis found that he and the Kremers were key figures in growing the movement and said Alexander, an early promoter of “Stop the Steal” as a slogan, “was able to elude detection and enforcement with careful selection of words, and by relying on disappearing stories,” an ephemeral content feature in which images or posts disappear after 24 hours.
“We also observed [Alexander] formally organizing with others to spread the term [“Stop the Steal”], including with other users who had ties to militias,” the report reads. Alexander did not respond to a request for comment.
Online, people associated with the pro-Trump Patriot Party attempted to recruit people to their groups from Stop the Steal, according to Facebook’s findings. As a result, there was overlap between the networks of people who joined their respective groups. The report found that the content and invitations to these groups were linked to “higher levels of hate and violence, suggesting that these movements were harmful and that the harm was perpetuated through a network.”
It concludes Stop the Steal and Patriot Party “normalized delegitimization and hate in a way that resulted in offline harm and harm to the norms underpinning democracy.”
Facebook’s researchers also outline the bureaucratic, policy, and enforcement struggles of the social giant when trying to respond to a coordinated, fast-paced movement that exploits its platform to spread hate and incite violence. Despite the company removing the most populous Stop the Steal groups from its platform, the enforcement was “piecemeal” and allowed other groups to flourish.
The company admitted that it only realized it was a cohesive movement “after the Capitol Insurrection and a wave of Storm the Capitol events across the country.”
Facebook suspended Trump’s account late on the evening of Jan. 6. By then it had spent months trying to remove Stop the Steal groups, but was still failing.
A Jan. 8 BuzzFeed News analysis found 66 active Stop the Steal groups and 72 events. The largest group was private, touted 14,000 members, and explicitly said its goal was “to make aware the issues of fraudulent voting practices and Fraudulent ballot counting. also, to make these issues transparent for all!”
“Do better next time”
The report identifies ways for Facebook to improve its systems and detection, and raises questions and about gaps that its current policies don’t address.
“What do we do when a movement is authentic, coordinated through grassroots or authentic means, but is inherently harmful and violates the spirit of our policy?” the report says. “What do we do when that authentic movement espouses hate or delegitimizes free elections?”
Ultimately, the report says, the issue is that the company is not prepared to deal with what it calls “coordinated authentic harm.”
“We learned a lot from these cases,” the report says. “We’re building tools and protocols and having policy discussions to help us do better next time.”
The report echoes previous high-profile examples where Facebook failed to act and later issued a report promising to do better. In 2017, a postmortem concluded Facebook failed to combat disinformation, fake accounts, and other efforts to manipulate discourse around the 2016 election. In 2018, a human rights report commissioned by the company concluded that it failed to stop its platform “from being used to foment division and incite offline violence” in Myanmar, helping fuel an alleged genocide.
Donovan said the networks of people that made Stop the Steal a powerful force on Facebook are not going away, and things could get even worse given the company’s history of failure combating harmful movements.
“Unfortunately, in the long run, what we know about social media is that people don’t relinquish these networks if the companies do nothing to stop this coordinated infrastructure from reassembling itself like some crazy Voltron,” she said. “We’re going to be fighting the same thing in 2022 and 2024. And it’s only going to get bigger, badder, more messy, more agile, more flexible — and more violent.”
Relatives mourning outside a hospital mortuary in Delhi after seeing bodies of Covid-19 victims on Friday. (photo: Atul Loke/NYT)
As Covid-19 Devastates India, Deaths Go Undercounted
Jeffrey Gettleman, Sameer Yasir, Hari Kumar and Suhasini Raj, The New York Times
Excerpt: "India's coronavirus second wave is rapidly sliding into a devastating crisis, with hospitals unbearably full, oxygen supplies running low, desperate people dying in line waiting to see doctors - and mounting evidence that the actual death toll is far higher than officially reported."
atalities have been overlooked or downplayed, understating the human toll of the country’s outbreak, which accounts for nearly half of all new cases in a global surge.
Each day, the government reports more than 300,000 new infections, a world record, and India is now seeing more new infections than any other country by far, almost half of all new cases in a global surge.
A great white shark. (photo: Smithsonian Magazine)
Following Rumors of Poaching, Scientists Discover Great White Shark Population in California's Gulf
Emily Denny, EcoWatch
Denny writes: "When marine biologist Daniel J. Madigan was working on a research project around Isla San Esteban, Mexico, he heard rumors of illegal shark poaching occurring off the Gulf of California."
hen marine biologist Daniel J. Madigan was working on a research project around Isla San Esteban, Mexico, he heard rumors of illegal shark poaching occurring off the Gulf of California. At the time, eight fishermen illegally caught and killed as many as 14 great white sharks, Hakai Magazine reported.
After contacting the poachers and examining the shark teeth they had collected, Madigan, from the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada, was able to determine that four of the 14 sharks were juveniles and almost half could have been mature females.
Surprised by the findings, Madigan and his colleague, University of Delaware assistant professor and shark specialist Aaron Carlisle, compared their findings with a NOAA report that estimated the adult female mortality rate for the entire eastern Pacific was around just two sharks annually, UDaily reported.
When they saw these mortality numbers didn't line up, the researchers realized there was a "harvest of a large‐bodied, protected species that has been largely hidden from researchers and managers," they wrote in their findings, published in Conservation Letters.
"He (Madigan) found, in just a two-week time period, more mortality in this one location than what we thought for the whole ocean," Carlisle told UDaily. "It was pretty clear then that, well, something kind of important is happening here."
Researchers estimate that great white shark populations are very small, with only hundreds of large adults and a few thousand white sharks total. Usually gathered around seal colonies, the handful of great white shark populations can be found in areas such as Central California, Guadalupe Island in Mexico, South Australia, and South Africa, according to UDaily.
Researchers say their results are alarming, as they show high rates of mortality of the eastern North Pacific (ENP) population, expected to be only a few hundred adults. Their results also highlight how little they previously knew about great white shark populations in the Gulf of California, Hakai Magazine reported.
"It's been about 20 years since a new 'population' of white sharks has been discovered," Carlisle told UDaily. "The fact that the eastern Pacific has so much infrastructure focused on white sharks and we didn't know that there were these sites in the Gulf of California was kind of mind-blowing."
Although their findings raise a "red flag" to other researchers and scientists that more needs to be done to protect the important predators, the study's authors were hesitant to publish their findings at first, knowing it would spark tension between them and local fishermen, Hakai Magazine reported.
Currently, 80 percent of fishing in the Gulf of California is considered unsustainable. Although the United States and Mexico have laws in place to prevent the catching and killing of the species, as resources continue to become more scarce, fishermen are forced to rely on less conventional, and sometimes illegal, fishing practices for income, like poaching white sharks, Hakai Magazine reported.
"It was an ethical dilemma for me," Madigan explained, according to Hakai Magazine. "I didn't love the potential side effects of publishing the paper. But once I had that information, I felt obligated to put it out there."
While the researchers said their study was not intended to cause problems in the fishing community, they hope it can shine a light on alternative ways coastal communities can support their local economies.
"This seems like it would be a perfect situation for ecotourism, much like there is at Guadalupe Island," Carlisle explained, according to UDaily. "There could be huge opportunities to build businesses around these populations of sharks, and that's just from a management point of view. From a science point of view, there's all sorts of fun things you could do."
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