20 February 23
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Oh, the things you will learn in a court filing from the company suing Fox News for defamation (and $1.6 billion).
In a text message to his producer, Alex Pfeiffer, sent the day of the January 6 insurrection, Tucker Carlson—friend to war criminals and serial liars alike—called Trump “a demonic force, a destroyer.” The host added: “But he’s not going to destroy us.” We know this thanks to a Thursday court filing from Dominion Voting Systems, the voting technology company currently suing Fox News for $1.6 billion over the network’s 2020 election coverage. The filing offers an inside glimpse at what the network’s top stars and executives were saying amongst themselves about Trump’s election lies—i.e., that they were bullshit—despite claiming that the election had been stolen with Dominion’s help.
“From the top down, Fox knew ‘the dominion stuff’ was ‘total bs,’” the filing reads, citing “a mountain of direct evidence.” Positing that the reason the network “peddle[d] this false narrative to its viewers,” attorneys for Dominion said that “Fox’s correct call of Arizona for Joe Biden triggered a backlash among its audience and ‘the network [was] being rejected.’” For example, two days after the election, on November 5, 2020, Carlson texted Pfeiffer to claim that the team that had called Arizona for Biden was going to screw up his reputation as a right-wing crackpot (our words). “We worked really hard to build what we have,” Carlson said, according to the filing. “Those fuckers are destroying our credibility. It enrages me.” Pfeiffer then responded that “many on ‘our side’ are being reckless demagogues right now.” (“Our side” presumably refers to hosts like Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham.) “Of course they are,” Carlson wrote back. “We’re not going to follow them.” He added that the then president was good at “destroying things. He’s the undisputed world champion of that. He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong.”
The filing notes that, days later, Carlson wrote privately that Trump needed to admit “that there wasn’t enough fraud to change the outcome” of the election. Later, he wrote that Sidney Powell, one of Trump’s lawyers, was “lying” about having evidence of fraud. A few days after that, Carlson expressed similar ideas to Ingraham, saying, “Sidney Powell is lying by the way. I caught her. It’s insane.” Ingraham responded, “Sidney is a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy.” Carlson replied, “It’s unbelievably offensive to me. Our viewers are good people and they believe it.”
And yet, by mid-January, Carlson was apparently all in on publicly pushing Team Trump’s election lies on his viewers. Just weeks after the insurrection and his likening of Trump to the devil, the prime time host had Mike Lindell on his show, where, per the filing, the My Pillow founder “spouted…conspiracies on air after previewing them for Carlson’s staff during a pre-interview.”
In a statement, Fox News said: “There will be a lot of noise and confusion generated by Dominion and their opportunistic private equity owners, but the core of this case remains about freedom of the press and freedom of speech, which are fundamental rights afforded by the Constitution and protected by New York Times v. Sullivan.” The network also insisted that Dominion “mischaracterized the record, cherry-picked quotes stripped of key context, and spilled considerable ink on facts that are irrelevant under black-letter principles of defamation law.”
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Ukrainian soldiers fire a Pion artillery system at Russian positions near Bakhmut, Donetsk region, Ukraine. File. (photo: AP)
ALSO SEE: EU Top Diplomat:
'Ukrainians Receive a Lot of Applause, but Not Enough Ammunition'
The high-risk visit to the historic Ukrainian capital — where air raid sirens blared as Biden walked the streets with President Volodymyr Zelensky — signals continued commitment from the United States, the largest financial and military backer of Ukraine’s effort to repel Russian invaders from its territory.
Biden was spotted with the Ukrainian leader outside St. Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery shortly before noon local time, his appearance capping hours of speculation during an intense security lockdown that had blocked car traffic and even pedestrians from certain streets.
Following talks with Zelensky and a visit to the U.S. Embassy, Biden departed Kyiv several hours later, according to a reporter traveling with him. Though brief, Biden’s visit represented one of the most remarkable presidential trips in modern history, sending him into a country at war and a city under regular bombardment without the heavy U.S. military presence that provided a protective shield during visits to Iraq or Afghanistan.
In his remarks alongside Zelensky, Biden said the U.S. would provide another half-billion dollars of assistance to Ukraine.
Biden has insisted the United States will continue to back Ukraine against Russia for “as long as it takes” despite flagging support among the American public and no near-term prospect of peace talks.
His administration has provided some $30 billion in security aid since President Vladimir Putin sent Russian forces into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, initiating the largest ground war in Europe since World War II — one that has cost his country and Ukraine hundreds of thousands of casualties.
Under Biden’s leadership, the United States and its NATO allies have gradually expanded the array of weaponry they have pledged to include heavy tanks, but Ukrainian leaders continue to press for more sophisticated weapons as the combatants prepare for renewed offensives this spring.
Biden said his visit was intended to reaffirm American backing for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, which Russia has violated since 2014, when Putin annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and launched support for a separatist campaign in the eastern Donbas region.
Photos showed Biden and Zelensky embracing in front a wall where photos of slain soldiers were displayed.
The White House has attempted to cast the deepening conflict as a high-stakes battle that will determine not only Ukraine’s fate, but also that of democracies and the rule of law everywhere, arguing that if Putin is permitted to seize parts of another nation by force, it will give a green light to other autocrats.
“When Putin launched his invasion nearly one year ago, he thought Ukraine was weak and the West was divided. He thought he could outlast us,” Biden said in a statement issued by the White House. “But he was dead wrong.”
Video later showed the president, wearing a dark suit and striped tie, seated with Zelensky, who wore his trademark military-style attire.
The visit represented a major boost for Zelensky, whose domestic support has soared, in line with national unity and anti-Russian fury, since Putin’s invasion.
As a wartime leader, Zelensky now faces the formidable task of propelling Ukraine’s fatigued military into Russian-occupied territory while also persuading foreign partners to provide ever greater military support, including fighter jets. U.S. officials have so far declined to provide aircraft to Ukraine.
Biden’s trip comes as questions abound about the longevity of global backing for Ukraine and the cohesion of the U.S.-led coalition that has enabled Kyiv’s military success so far, and China is reported to be actively considering sending military aid to Russia.
While Western nations continue to proclaim strong support, many have grown worried about the economic and political costs of a protracted conflict — and about their ability to keep the money and munitions flowing.
Opinion polls show that Americans are growing weary of the aid effort, mirroring complaints across the globe about billions going to Ukraine instead of other priorities. In recent weeks, the White House has told Kyiv that it could soon see limits in support from the United States and other countries.
The series of massive U.S. aid packages approved to date for Ukraine materialized under a Democratic-controlled Congress. Republicans retook the House in November, and a vocal right-wing minority in the GOP has threatened to curtail support.
Biden’s trip was shrouded in secrecy and, on the ground in Kyiv, involved even greater security than other high-level visits. Biden had been due to leave for an announced visit to Poland from Washington on Monday evening but, according to a small group of reporters who traveled with Biden to Kyiv, actually departed Washington around 4 a.m. Sunday.
Journalists accompanying Biden reported that they had agreed to withhold real-time details of the president’s movements until he departed, including information about how he arrived in the Ukrainian capital. The country’s airspace has been closed for the past year.
While other world leaders have visited Kyiv to meet with Zelensky and tour the war-scarred city over the past year, Biden has stayed away because of security concerns and fears about the possibility of conflict between the world’s two largest nuclear powers. He sent senior aides including Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin his place. First lady Jill Biden made a surprise visit to western Ukraine on Mother’s Day.
In contrast, Britain’s Boris Johnson visited Kyiv three times as prime minister in the months following the February invasion.
A reporter traveling with Biden reported around 2 p.m. local time that the president had left Kyiv. No further details about his travel were immediately available.
During the visit, Biden and Zelensky held private talks at the Mariinsky Palace, a ceremonial Baroque structure overlooking the Dnieper River in central Kyiv.
Zelensky said the discussion “brings us closer to victory,” according to a White House pool report.
He noted that his first call as the Russian invasion began on the night of Feb. 24, 2022, was to the United States.
“You told me that you could hear explosions in the background,” Biden said in response. “I’ll never forget that.”
Biden said he had asked Zelensky that night how he could be of help and twice repeated what he said was the Ukrainian leader’s response: “Gather the leaders of the world. Ask them to support Ukraine.”
“You said that you didn’t know when we’d be able to speak again. That dark night one year ago, the world was literally at the time bracing for the fall of Kyiv,” Biden continued. “Perhaps even the end of Ukraine.”
“One year later, Kyiv stands. And Ukraine stands. Democracy stands,” he said. “The Americans stand with you, and the world stands with you.”
Biden also made a stop at the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv, which was closed for several months after Russia’s invasion. He was accompanied by aides including national security adviser Jake Sullivan.
It was not immediately clear whether Biden would still make his previously announced trip to Poland, where he had been scheduled to meet with President Andrzej Duda and leaders of the Bucharest Nine, a group of mostly former Eastern bloc nations once under Soviet influence that formed after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and is increasingly wary of its larger neighbor’s expansionist aspirations.
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Antony Blinken, right, said Wang Yi, left, did not apologise for the overflight of the Chinese balloon over US territory. (photo: Stefani Reynolds/Reuters)
Top diplomats hold ‘direct, candid’ talks in Munich amid tensions over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the downing of a suspected Chinese spying balloon.
The meeting of the two senior officials happened late on Saturday on the sidelines of a global security conference in Munich, Germany, just hours after Wang scolded Washington as “hysterical” in a running dispute over the US’s downing of the suspected Chinese spy balloon.
Relations between the two countries have been fraught since Washington said China flew a spy balloon over the country before US fighter jets shot it down on President Joe Biden’s orders. The dispute also came at a time when the West is closely watching Beijing’s response to the Ukraine war.
In an interview to be aired on Sunday morning on NBC News’s “Meet the Press with Chuck Todd,” Blinken said the US was very concerned that China is considering providing lethal support to Russia and that he made clear to Wang that “would have serious consequences in our relationship”.
“There are various kinds of lethal assistance that they are at least contemplating providing, to include weapons,” Blinken said, adding that Washington would soon release more details.
Speaking to reporters in a briefing call, a senior State Department official said China was trying to “have it both ways” by claiming it wants to contribute to peace and stability but at the same time taking “concerning” steps to support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“[The] secretary was quite blunt in warning about the implications and consequences of China providing material support to Russia or assisting Russia with systematic sanctions evasion,” the senior official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
Russia and China signed a “no limits” partnership last February shortly before Russian forces invaded Ukraine, and their economic links have boomed as Moscow’s connections with the West have shrivelled.
The West has been wary of China’s response to the Ukraine war, with some warning that a Russian victory would colour China’s actions towards Taiwan. China has refrained from condemning the war or calling it an “invasion”.
Earlier, speaking at a panel at the conference, Wang reiterated a call for dialogue and suggested European countries “think calmly” about how to end the war.
He also said there were “some forces that seemingly don’t want negotiations to succeed, or for the war to end soon,” without specifying to whom he was referring.
No apology
During his meeting with Wang, Blinken also condemned the incursion of the alleged Chinese surveillance balloon and “stressed it must never happen again,” the secretary of state said in a tweet.
The balloon’s flight this month over US territory triggered an uproar in Washington and prompted Blinken to postpone a planned visit to Beijing. That February 5-6 trip would have been the first by a US secretary of state to China in five years and was seen by both sides as an opportunity to stabilise increasingly fraught ties.
In the interview with NBC, Blinken said Wang did not apologise for the balloon’s flight.
“I told him quite simply that that was unacceptable,” Blinken said, referring to the balloon’s violation of US air space, adding that he had not discussed with Wang rescheduling his trip to China.
China reacted angrily when the US military downed the 60-metre (200-ft) balloon on February 4, saying it was for monitoring weather conditions and had blown off course. Washington said it was clearly a surveillance balloon with a massive undercarriage holding electronics.
For his part, Wang told Blinken that their countries’ relations had been damaged by how Washington reacted to the balloon, according to Chinese state news agency Xinhua.
Wang “made clear China’s solemn position on the so-called airship incident” and “urged the US side to change course, acknowledge and repair the damage that its excessive use of force caused to China-US relations,” Xinhua reported.
Earlier, speaking at a panel at the conference, Wang reiterated a call for dialogue and suggested European countries “think calmly” about how to end the war.
He also said there were “some forces that seemingly don’t want negotiations to succeed, or for the war to end soon,” without specifying to whom he was referring.
No apology
During his meeting with Wang, Blinken also condemned the incursion of the alleged Chinese surveillance balloon and “stressed it must never happen again,” the secretary of state said in a tweet.
The balloon’s flight this month over US territory triggered an uproar in Washington and prompted Blinken to postpone a planned visit to Beijing. That February 5-6 trip would have been the first by a US secretary of state to China in five years and was seen by both sides as an opportunity to stabilise increasingly fraught ties.
In the interview with NBC, Blinken said Wang did not apologise for the balloon’s flight.
“I told him quite simply that that was unacceptable,” Blinken said, referring to the balloon’s violation of US air space, adding that he had not discussed with Wang rescheduling his trip to China.
China reacted angrily when the US military downed the 60-metre (200-ft) balloon on February 4, saying it was for monitoring weather conditions and had blown off course. Washington said it was clearly a surveillance balloon with a massive undercarriage holding electronics.
For his part, Wang told Blinken that their countries’ relations had been damaged by how Washington reacted to the balloon, according to Chinese state news agency Xinhua.
Wang “made clear China’s solemn position on the so-called airship incident” and “urged the US side to change course, acknowledge and repair the damage that its excessive use of force caused to China-US relations,” Xinhua reported.
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Police violence. (photo: Erin O'Flynn/The Daily Beast/Wikimedia Commons/Reuters/Getty Images)
Contemporary deaths at the hands of police—deaths like those of Tyre Nichols and George Floyd—are not much different from the way my grandfather was murdered in Birmingham.
Nichols was stopped for a traffic violation on Jan. 7 that turned into an altercation, a chase, a brutal beating, and days later his death as a result of his injuries. Officer body-camera and other police video show the horrific and escalating force of that night. The Black officers involved in, or witness to, Nichols’ beating were indicted, fired, and now face murder charges. The special police unit—for high-crime areas—that retained these officers was disbanded, and other police, fire and EMT personnel have, or will, face additional disciplinary action.
This latest example of excessive use of force by police comes 32 years after another videotaped police beating of another Black male motorist.
After a police chase, Rodney King was ordered out of his automobile and assaulted. I watched appalled as four Los Angeles police officers kicked and clubbed King for 15 minutes. A bystander caught the confrontation on camera in what even police leadership called an aberration. Police use of excessive force was ubiquitous 30 years ago, but personal video devices were not, and I remember thinking at the time that this footage will finally prove to white America what Black America already knows—law enforcement doesn’t protect and serve all its citizens. Some it brutalizes. But real-time images, obviously, didn’t have the influence they do now, and despite the recording of King’s vicious beating, a jury found that the officers in the case—three of them white—acted within the purview of their authority. That verdict incited the 1992 Los Angeles riots.
Thankfully, there were no riots in Memphis when Nichols’ videotaped beating was broadcast to the public. Most credit the quick and decisive acts of justice by police leadership and local prosecutors for quelling what could have been a backlash of outrage. Those actions prove a lot has changed in societal attitudes about policing since 1992. Unfortunately, not enough to have saved George Floyd in 2020.
Another video by another bystander allowed us to watch as Floyd struggled for air and life under the knee of a Minneapolis policeman. That eight minutes and 46 seconds of video further galvanized public perception about the misuse of police power and proved fundamental to the prosecution’s case against the officers involved.
Ninety years ago, another Black man was killed by a police officer acting under the authority of the laws and rules of the times. Robert Harrington was the same age as Tyre Nichols, 29, when he was shot multiple times by Birmingham Alabama police for what a newspaper account called “resisting arrest.” Harrington was a master wood carver from St. Petersburg, Florida who had moved with his pregnant wife and young daughter to work on the homes of the bustling steel industry moguls of the “Magic City.” Driving a new car and having been seen around town with his wife who could pass for white, he’d been in Birmingham only a few months before he was beaten and shot.
Jim Crow police forces had members who wore blue uniforms by day and white sheets by night. Birmingham’s police department was no different, and were notorious for enforcing the strict, and draconian, laws of segregation with threats, and force. In Birmingham those laws and rules were dubbed the “black codes.” Police boasted and joked about the beating they’d given Harrington, and his enraged wife, Anna Kate, was vociferous in her anger and complaints about the police. Not something Black people did in those times, and for her own safety she fled Birmingham in secrecy.
Robert and Anna Kate were my grandparents. There were no bystanders with phones or video cameras, no police investigation, and no protests over his death.
The Civil Rights & Restorative Justice Project, based at Northeastern University School of Law has recorded more than 150 incidents of police violence against Black citizens in Alabama in the years 1930-1970. In a report released by CRRJ, at least 144 African Americans were killed by police officers during that period, and 129 of those incidents occurred in Jefferson County, where Birmingham is the county seat. The CRRJ cases are the ones where researchers were able to identify a paper trail, and were primarily police shootings. One can only imagine the countless other assaults and shootings—in this century and last—that were unwitnessed, undocumented, and will remain forgotten.
I’ve written a novel about my grandfather’s police shooting—a response to the pain and anger I felt watching the Floyd video. In my research I pored over the archives of Black newspapers dating to the early 20th century, and marveled at what has changed for Black people in America, and what hasn’t. My biggest takeaway: the news and headlines offered in those early publications are painfully similar to those sparking today’s national conversation about race, social justice, and policing.
Last year, 2022, marked the highest number of shooting fatalities by on-duty police officers in this country since tracking began in 2015. Nearly a quarter of those killed last year were Black citizens. Sadly, we’re off to a troubling start in 2023. Through the last week in January, reports from local police departments indicate there have been 79 police shooting fatalities. Race identifiers aren’t clear, because police departments either did not report the race of the deceased, or as is the case in most of these incidents, body camera documentation is not available.
The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act—addressing racial bias, excessive use of force by police, and aiming to reduce misconduct by law enforcement officers—was introduced in Congress two years ago this month. It passed the House but stalled in the U.S. Senate. The bill has an ambitious agenda with elements that will inevitably lead to extensive negotiations between federal, state, and local agencies, and police unions. But there are two, very common-sense, and actionable components, that would immediately point American policing on a path toward equal treatment for all citizens, in all its communities.
First, establish a federal registry of police misconduct complaints and officer disciplinary actions. It’s a forthright and prudent idea. This information, if reported at all, resides in unlinked databases that don’t allow law enforcement agencies to properly vet officers who transfer from one police force to another.
Second, mandate that all police officers use body cameras and dashboard cameras. A no-brainer. These images speak louder than a thousand excuses, fabrications, and differences of opinion about what constitutes excessive force.
I wish there had been some police accountability when my grandfather was killed almost a century ago—an investigation that would shed light on the circumstances of his death. It would have given my family closure, and maybe some peace. Because there was not, grandpa is just another tragic example of what can result when Black citizens, and disproportionately Black men, interact with the police on any day of any month in America.
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Beatriz Gonzalez and Jose Hernandez, the mother and stepfather of Nohemi Gonzalez, who died in a terrorist attack in Paris in 2015. The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments in Gonzalez v. Google on Tuesday. (photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
The justices are set to hear a case challenging Section 230, a law that protects Google, Facebook and others from lawsuits over what their users post online.
The next year, her father sued Google and other tech companies. He accused the firms of spreading content that radicalized users into becoming terrorists, and said they were therefore legally responsible for the harm inflicted on Ms. Gonzalez’s family. Her mother, stepfather and brothers eventually joined the lawsuit, too.
Their claims will be heard in the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday. And their lawsuit, with Google now the exclusive defendant, could have potentially seismic ramifications for the social media platforms that have become conduits of communication, commerce and culture for billions of people.
Their suit takes aim at a federal law, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields online platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Google’s YouTube from lawsuits over content posted by their users or their decisions to take content down. The case gives the Supreme Court’s justices the opportunity to narrow how that legal shield is applied or to gut it entirely, potentially opening up the companies to liability for what users post and to lawsuits over libel, discriminatory advertising and extremist propaganda.
A day after hearing the Gonzalez v. Google case, the court is scheduled to hear a second tech lawsuit, Twitter v. Taamneh, over whether Twitter has contributed to terrorism.
What the Supreme Court ultimately decides on the cases will add to a pitched battle around the world over how to regulate online speech. Many governments say that social networks have become fertile ground for hate speech and misinformation. Some have required the platforms to take down those posts. But in the United States, the First Amendment makes it difficult for Congress to do the same.
Critics of Section 230 say that it lets the tech companies avoid responsibility for harms facilitated on their watch. But supporters counter that without the legal shield, the companies will take down more content than ever to avoid lawsuits, stifling free expression.
The Supreme Court case “can have an impact on how those companies do business and how we interact with the internet, too,” said Hany Farid, a professor at the school of information at the University of California, Berkeley. He filed a brief with the Supreme Court supporting the Gonzalez family members who are suing Google.
Ms. Gonzalez, a first-generation college student who was studying design at California State University, Long Beach, was killed while out with friends during the Paris attacks in 2015. The Islamic State later claimed responsibility. She was the only American killed.
Her father, Reynaldo Gonzalez, sued Google, Facebook and Twitter in 2016, arguing the platforms were spreading extremist content. That included propaganda, messages from the Islamic State’s leaders and videos of graphic violence, he said. Citing media reports, the lawsuit mentioned specific videos that showed footage of Islamic State fighters in the field and updates from a media outlet affiliated with the group. The online platforms didn’t do enough to keep the terrorist group off their sites, the lawsuit said.
YouTube and other platforms say they screen for such videos and take down many of them. But in 2018, research that was based on a tool developed by Mr. Farid found that some Islamic State videos stayed up for hours, including one that encouraged violent attacks in Western nations.
Facebook and Twitter were removed as defendants in the lawsuit in 2017, the same year Ms. Gonzalez’s mother stepfather and siblings joined plaintiffs. Last year, a federal appeals court ruled that Google did not have to face the Gonzalez family members’ claims because the company was protected by Section 230.
In May, lawyers for Ms. Gonzalez’s family asked the Supreme Court to step in. By using algorithms to recommend content to users, the lawyers argued, YouTube was essentially engaging in its own form of speech, which was not protected by Section 230.
Ms. Gonzalez’s father and the plaintiffs in the Twitter case declined to comment through their lawyer, Keith Altman. Mr. Altman said that courts had “pushed the limits” of the Section 230 legal shield to the point that it was “unrecognizable.” A lawyer for Ms. Gonzalez’s other family members did not respond to a request for comment. The lawyer who will argue both cases before the Supreme Court, Eric Schnapper, also declined to comment.
Google has denied the Gonzalez family’s arguments about Section 230. It has said that the family’s claims that Google supported terrorism are based on “threadbare assertions” and “speculative” arguments.
In Congress, efforts to reform Section 230 have stalled. Republicans, spurred by accusations that internet companies are more likely to take down conservative posts, proposed tweaking the law. Democrats said the platforms should take more content down when it spreads misinformation or hate speech.
Instead, courts started exploring the limits to how the law should be applied.
In one case in 2021, a federal appeals court in California ruled that Snap, the parent of Snapchat, could not use Section 230 to dodge a lawsuit involving three people who died in a car crash after using a Snapchat filter that displayed a user’s speed.
Last year, a federal judge in California said that Apple, Google and Meta, Facebook’s parent, could not use the legal shield to avoid some claims from consumers who said they were harmed by casino apps. A federal judge in Oregon also ruled that the statute didn’t shield Omegle, the chat site that connects users at random, from a lawsuit that said an 11-year-old girl met a predator through its service.
Tech companies say it will be devastating if the Supreme Court undercuts Section 230. Halimah DeLaine Prado, Google’s general counsel, said in an interview in December that the protections had been “crucial to allowing not just Google but the internet to flourish in its infancy, to actually become a major part of the broader U.S. economy.”
“It’s critically important that it stands as it is,” she said.
A spokesman for Meta pointed to a blog post where the company’s top lawyer said the case “could make it much harder for millions of online companies like Meta to provide the type of services that people enjoy using every day.”
Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.
Activists have raised concerns that changes to the law could cause the platforms to crack down on content posted by vulnerable people. In 2018, a new law ended the protections of Section 230 when platforms knowingly facilitated sex trafficking. The activists say that caused sites to take down content from adult sex workers and posts about L.G.B.T.Q. people.
The Gonzalez case has also attracted interest from the Justice Department. In a December brief, the agency told the Supreme Court it believed that Section 230 “does not bar claims based on YouTube’s alleged targeted recommendations of ISIS content.” The White House has said the legal shield should be removed.
Mr. Farid acknowledged it was possible the court could gut the Section 230 protections, leading to unintended consequences. But he noted that the social networks already comply with laws governing how they treat certain types of content, like German restrictions on digital hate speech. He said they could navigate narrow changes to the legal shield, too.
“The companies figured it out,” he said.
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C.W. Hamilton, a 72-year-old Army veteran in Reno, took out a $5,200 student loan in 1977 and still owes almost that amount decades later. (photo: Max Whittaker/WP)
“It’s like an anchor around my neck,” said Hamilton, a 72-year-old Army veteran in Reno, Nev. “I live on peanuts. ... I can never get from underneath this debt.”
There are nearly 47,000 people like Hamilton who have been in repayment on their federal student loans for at least 40 years, according to data obtained from the Education Department through a Freedom of Information Act request. About 82 percent of them are in default on their loans, meaning they haven’t made a voluntary payment in at least 270 days.
“This is sort of a monumental failure,” said Abby Shafroth, director of the National Consumer Law Center’s Student Loan Borrower Assistance Project. “There are so many relief programs in the student loan system to address some sort of financial distress. But it’s this real patchwork, and borrowers struggle to navigate it. The department itself and its servicers often can’t navigate it either.”
While these borrowers represent a sliver of the 43.5 million people with federal student debt, their existence is an indictment of policies meant to help people manage their loans. Years of administrative failures and poorly designed programs have denied many borrowers an off-ramp from a perpetual cycle of debt. Even as the Biden administration tries to remedy these problems — including fighting legal challenges to its plan to cancel up to $20,000 in debt for many — the fixes could still leave vulnerable borrowers like Hamilton on the sidelines.
The road to repayment
To understand how tens of thousands of people could be in debt for decades, consider the options for repaying federal student loans. When borrowers leave school, they are automatically assigned to a standard 10-year repayment plan. Others extend the period by enrolling in graduated plans that increase payments over time or income-driven repayment plans that tie their monthly bill to earnings and family size.
People can also temporarily pause their payments through deferment or forbearance, which can lengthen the timeline. From the time student loan borrowers’ first loans enter repayment, the median length of time it takes to pay in full is 15½ years, according to the Education Department. How much you borrow, how much you earn and whether you get your degree can all play a role in how quickly you pay off the debt.
Those last two factors played a starring role in Hamilton’s struggle to repay his student loans. After a dispute with an instructor, he left Cochise before completing his aviation studies. That led to a series of low-wage jobs and relocations for work. School loans were low on the list of priorities for the father of five. Hamilton doesn’t recall receiving any notice to make payments for the first decade after leaving school, which he suspects is because he moved around so much.
“The job market was really tight at the time, so I was taking different jobs for a while and didn’t have a locked-down address,” Hamilton recalls. “We didn’t have cellphones at that time, so they couldn’t call and say, ‘Hey, you’re behind on your loans.’”
But the debt caught up with him soon after he began receiving Social Security disability benefits. Injuries from stints fighting wildfires and fixing airplanes left Hamilton unable to work, and his federal benefits became fair game for collection. Through the Treasury Offset Program, the federal government has been garnishing his disability benefits on and off since 2002.
Before the Education Department paused payments and collection in 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic, he’d involuntarily paid more than $13,000. Treasury last deducted $175.05 from his $1,165 monthly Social Security check to service fees and interest on his loans — leaving Hamilton still owing $4,963.
“It’s tough because they’re taking all of this money, for all of these years, and nothing is going to the principal,” Hamilton said. “I’m getting nowhere. I was climbing up, but my debt kept going up.”
He had tried to shake free from the offset. Given his disability, Hamilton applied for a discharge of his loans through a program for totally and permanently disabled borrowers but was denied. He opted for student loan rehabilitation, a one-time process that brings a borrower back into good standing after nine consecutive payments. But Hamilton fell back into default. He said he was then advised to consolidate, another way to exit default by taking out a new loan to repay the past-due debt, but felt uneasy about another loan.
A fresh start
An analysis of federal data from July 2003 to April 2016 found 70 percent of borrowers in default were able to bring their student loans back into good standing within 10 years, but the rest remained in default. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau found that up to a third of borrowers who exit through loan rehabilitation default again within two years. It’s a problem that reflects the limitations of the system, said Brian Denten, an officer with the Pew Charitable Trusts’ project on student borrower success.
“You only get one shot at each of these options,” Denten said. “After that, if you default again, you can either pay off your entire loan in full or essentially sit there and have your wages, Social Security or tax refund garnished until your obligation is resolved.”
The Biden administration is temporarily waiving the rules governing default, offering 7.5 million people like Hamilton a “fresh start” by placing their loans in good standing when the payment pause ends even if they’ve defaulted multiple times in the past.
The initiative will eliminate borrowers’ record of default before the repayment pause and reinstate their eligibility for federal Pell grants, work-study and additional student loans to help those who may have dropped out before completing their degrees. It will also spare people from the seizure of wages, tax refunds and Social Security benefits.
Rich Williams, senior adviser in the Office of the Undersecretary at the department, said the Biden administration is working to understand the administrative, regulatory and statutory changes needed to realign the existing delinquency and default consequences.
“The principles that we are following as we’re exploring policies like the new income-based repayment plan ... [are] that borrowers shouldn’t be in repayment for more than 25 years,” Williams said. “We’re going through that exploration phase, and Fresh Start is the first step.”
The one-time initiative isn’t exactly seamless. Rather than being automatically enrolled, people in default must contact the department’s Default Resolution Group or their loan holders to take full advantage of the program. They will have one year from the end of the student loan payment pause — set to expire later this year — to make payment arrangements. Failure to act will throw borrowers back into default.
“A big part of it will be getting the word out,” Denten said. “We know from speaking with servicers and borrowers that it can be hard to establish a regular line of communication.”
Even if people take advantage of the program, they could end up defaulting again. Denten said connecting distressed borrowers to an income-driven repayment plan will be critical. Depending on their income, people enrolled in such plans can pay as little as $0 a month and it would count as credit toward loan cancellation. It is a lifeline, however, that doesn’t always reach the people most in need.
Promise and failure
With the advent of income-driven repayment nearly 30 years ago, borrowers could avoid being saddled with education loans in old age: If you keep up with payments, the federal government will forgive your remaining balance after 20 years for undergrad loans or after 25 years for graduate school debt. The plans also let people struggling with their debt avoid delinquency and default, as the less you earn, the less you pay each month.
But in the early days, the Education Department and its student loan servicers did little to publicize the plans.
Rosalie Lynch, 72, said she learned about them only in 2015 after doing her own research. By then, she had twice defaulted on the $25,000 in student loans she amassed in the early 1980s for a bachelor’s degree in social work from Bethel College and master’s degree in counseling from Kansas State University. Lynch had tried to stay ahead of her payments but stumbled in the wake of a “toxic” marriage, she said.
“He wouldn’t help me and expected me to take on all of the financial responsibilities,” said Lynch, who works as a mental health counselor in Idaho. “There were times I just couldn’t afford [my student loans]. They had to be a low priority. The kids needed food, they needed clothes. I don’t make that much money.”
On the advice of her loan servicer, Lynch said she often postponed her payments through forbearance. It paused the bill, but not the interest. Between the periods of forbearance and default, Lynch accumulated enough interest and fees to more than double her debt to $65,000. Because of her wages, Lynch qualified to make a $0 monthly payment under the IDR plan. Still, she worries she will die in debt. Federal student loans are discharged upon death.
Like Lynch, Patricia C. Vener-Saavedra, 70, spent years in forbearance before enrolling in an income-driven repayment plan a decade ago. Working as an adjunct instructor for years left her stretching to cover basic living expenses, which didn’t include student loans. Vener-Saavedra said she learned about income-driven repayment after her loans were transferred to a new servicer.
“I kept asking my different servicers if there was anything I can do besides forbearance. And all I heard was ‘No, no,’” Vener-Saavedra said. “Finally, it changed to someone who said, ‘Oh, yeah, you can get an income-based plan.’ And I’m like, ‘How long has this existed?’”
With a $0 monthly payment, the IDR plan provided a path to clearing the debt Vener-Saavedra acquired for a master’s degree in astrophysics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York. But the $35,000 in student loans she graduated with in 1991 has since ballooned to $88,141.
“I’ll be 85 when the loans are forgiven,” Vener-Saavedra said. “If I knew about these income plans earlier, I might not be in this position.”
Shafroth at the National Consumer Law Center said that with the existence of income-driven plans, no one in the federal student loan system should be in repayment for more than 25 years. The Education Department has previously disclosed that 4.4 million borrowers have been repaying their debt for at least 20 years, with half of them in default.
Yet a 2022 Government Accountability Office report found that the department had erased the balances of only 132 people as of June 2021 under the IDR plans. It said the agency failed to ensure that payments were accurately tracked until a decade after the first income-driven plan was implemented. As a result, some people with older loans are at high risk of spending more time in repayment than necessary.
Researchers at the GAO said the department never provided borrowers regular updates on their progress toward debt cancellation or readily available information about forgiveness requirements. Without that guidance, researchers said, people who believed they were making progress may not have known that postponing payments doesn’t count.
The blistering report arrived a day after the Biden administration announced in April that it would temporarily allow any month in which borrowers made payments to retroactively count toward forgiveness, even if they were not enrolled in an income-driven plan. The one-time revision meant at least 40,000 people would now receive automatic loan cancellation.
“There are student debts that should have been canceled, but no one bothered to do that,” Williams of the Education Department said. “So we’re automatically correcting those errors and discharging those loans.”
Under the initiative, the department will also grant a one-time account adjustment to count the months borrowers postponed their payments through forbearance if they remained in that status for years. Still, other features of the IDR adjustment will shut out many distressed borrowers.
Months in which borrowers are delinquent or in default do not count toward the forgiveness threshold. What’s more, the department is only counting payments as far back as 1994. Both of those stipulations will probably leave Hamilton and Lynch out in the cold.
“There doesn’t seem to be a good reason for this,” Shaforth said of the exclusions.
In January, the advocacy group Student Borrower Protection Center sent a letter urging the Education Department to reconsider excluding time in default from the account adjustment, saying “failure to fully remedy these harms would be an unforced error.”
The Education Department declined to comment on the matter.
Advocates have long questioned the rationale behind the federal government’s relentless pursuit of student loan payments from distressed borrowers.
Unlike the Education Department, banks and lenders in the private market routinely write off the debt they can’t collect, and there is a statute of limitations on collection, Shaforth said. While the federal student loan program is not as flexible, she said, the department does have the power to settle, compromise and terminate the collection of debts. She said the agency could use other regulations that give the government an out when it can’t collect a debt within a reasonable time.
“I would think that 40 years should be a reasonable time,” Shaforth said.
READ MORE 
A plume of dark smoke rises over East Palestine, Ohio, after a freight train derailed earlier this month. The smoke is from a controlled detonation of chemicals. (photo: Gene J. Puskar/AP)
Unions say rail companies’ desire for increased profits is driving up safety risks – and more accidents will happen without action
Workers and union officials cited the Norfolk Southern Railway derailment in early February as a glaring example of why safety reforms to the industry – which include providing workers with paid sick leave – need to be made.
Thirty-eight cars on the train derailed in the town of East Palestine, near the Pennsylvania border, including 11 cars carrying hazardous materials that incited an evacuation order, a controlled release of chemicals, and fears of harmful chemical exposure to residents, wildlife and waterways.
Unions and rail companies have been at loggerheads for years over new contracts that would address what workers describe as poor working conditions, and would provide paid sick days amid grueling schedules caused by labor cuts.
“Without a change in the working conditions, without better scheduling, without more time off, without a better work-life balance, the railroad is going to suffer,” said Ron Kaminkow, the general secretary of Railroad Workers United, an Amtrak engineer in Reno, Nevada, and the vice-president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (Blet) local 51. “It’s just intrinsic, with short staffing. Corners get cut and safety is compromised.”
Greg Regan, president of the AFL-CIO’s transportation trades department, said the loss of workers in recent years, which has coincided with record profits for railroad corporations, was the driving force for deteriorating conditions on US railroads.
The railroad industry workforce plummeted from over 1 million workers in the 1950s to fewer than 150,000 in 2022, with a loss of 40,000 railroad jobs between November 2018 and December 2020. The six major railroad corporations that have yet to agree to provide workers with paid sick days reported over $22bn in profits, and spent more than $20bn on stock buybacks and shareholder dividends last year.
Regan said the derailment in Ohio was an example of why these working-condition issues need to be addressed.
“It increases a lot of risk in what is a very dangerous industry. When things go wrong there can be very tragic consequences,” added Regan.
The corporations are also opposing reforms to implement mandatory participation to an anonymous close-call reporting system so workers can report safety concerns without fear of reprisal and identify problems before they result in accidents, said Leo McCann, chair of the rail labor division of transportation trades department.
“It’s kind of an eye-opener,” McCann said of the Ohio derailment. “It’s an illustration of how the railroads operate and how they’re getting away with a lot of things.”
Workers criticized the decision by Congress and the Biden administration to impose a tentative new contract agreement on all railroad unions, despite more than half of represented members voting to reject it due to the lack of paid sick days.
The majority of workers in precision railroad scheduling systems – operational systems focused on cutting costs – currently have no paid sick days and face attendance points for taking time off, which could result in termination.
Workers have complained that disciplinary attendance systems, coupled with drastic staffing cuts, have diminished morale, incentivized workers to continue working through illness or fatigue, and increased safety risks.
On 2 February, all 12 railroad unions issued a resolution demanding paid sick days for railroad workers. Bernie Sanders and Republican senator Mike Braun held a press conference with union representatives on 9 February to add further pressure to corporations to provide workers with at least seven paid sick days.
The renewed push comes shortly after CSX Transportation announced it came to an agreement with two unions representing 5,000 railroad workers to provide four days of paid sick leave to all workers and allow workers to use up to three personal leave days for sick leave.
“The next step is to make sure we bring other railroads to the table and hopefully get a resolution,” said Regan. “This is the worst relationship that has been between the railroads and their workers in my career.” He said the tension had been exacerbated by the rail companies’ determination to increase profits by cutting staff.
“When you’re going to treat your employees that way, to continue to try to squeeze as many pennies out of each individual worker as you possibly can, without any regard for their wellbeing, you’re going to have really contentious bargaining sessions like we had last year,” he said.
“The railroad companies do not want to actually participate. They’re just anti-regulatory in their mind, but that’s not the case here: it’s about safety, and to ensure workers can go home to their families at night and not have a tragedy happen to them,” added McCann.
“The railroads are more interested in profitability and keeping their return on investment up and their numbers down so they can satisfy Wall Street, and they just live behind this shield hoping nothing will happen.”
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