How Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Failed Children on Safety, States Say

[Note:  This item comes from reader Monty Solomon.  DLH]

How Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Failed Children on Safety, States Say

The C.E.O. and his team drove Meta’s efforts to capture young users and misled the public about the risks, lawsuits by state attorneys general say.

By Natasha Singer

Jun 22 2024

Natasha Singer, who covers children’s online privacy, reviewed several thousand pages of legal filings in states’ lawsuits against Meta for this article.

In April 2019, David Ginsberg, a Meta executive, emailed his boss, Mark Zuckerberg, with a proposal to research and reduce loneliness and compulsive use on Instagram and Facebook.

In the email, Mr. Ginsberg noted that the company faced scrutiny for its products’ impacts “especially around areas of problematic use/addiction and teens.” He asked Mr. Zuckerberg for 24 engineers, researchers and other staff, saying Instagram had a “deficit” on such issues.

A week later, Susan Li, now the company’s chief financial officer, informed Mr. Ginsberg that the project was “not funded” because of staffing constraints. Adam Mosseri, Instagram’s head, ultimately declined to finance the project, too.

Mosseri’s email

Unfortunately I don’t see us funding this from Instagram any time soon.

The email exchanges are just one slice of evidence cited among more than a dozen lawsuits filed since last year by the attorneys general of 45 states and the District of Columbia. The states accuse Meta of unfairly ensnaring teenagers and children on Instagram and Facebook while deceiving the public about the hazards. Using a coordinated legal approach reminiscent of the government’s pursuit of Big Tobacco in the 1990s, the attorneys general seek to compel Meta to bolster protections for minors.

A New York Times analysis of the states’ court filings — including roughly 1,400 pages of company documents and correspondence filed as evidence by the State of Tennessee — shows how Mr. Zuckerberg and other Meta leaders repeatedly promoted the safety of the company’s platforms, playing down risks to young people, even as they rejected employee pleas to bolster youth guardrails and hire additional staff.

In interviews, the attorneys general of several states suing Meta said Mr. Zuckerberg had led his company to drive user engagement at the expense of child welfare.

“A lot of these decisions ultimately landed on Mr. Zuckerberg’s desk,” said Raúl Torrez, the attorney general of New Mexico. “He needs to be asked explicitly, and held to account explicitly, for the decisions that he’s made.”

The state lawsuits against Meta reflect mounting concerns that teenagers and children on social media can be sexually solicited, harassed, bullied, body-shamed and algorithmically induced into compulsive online use. Last Monday, Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, the United States surgeon general, called for warning labels to be placed on social networks, saying the platforms present a public health risk to young people.

His warning could boost momentum in Congress to pass the Kids Online Safety Act, a bill that would require social media companies to turn off features for minors, like bombarding them with phone notifications, that could lead to “addiction-like” behaviors. (Critics say the bill could hinder minors’ access to important information. The News/Media Alliance, a trade group that includes The Times, helped win an exemption in the bill for news sites and apps that produce news videos.)

In May, New Mexico arrested three men who were accused of targeting children for sex after, Mr. Torrez said, they solicited state investigators who had posed as children on Instagram and Facebook. Mr. Torrez, a former child sex crimes prosecutor, said Meta’s algorithms enabled adult predators to identify children they would not have found on their own.

Meta disputed the states’ claims and has filed motions to dismiss their lawsuits.

In a statement, Liza Crenshaw, a spokeswoman for Meta, said the company was committed to youth well-being and had many teams and specialists devoted to youth experiences. She added that Meta had developed more than 50 youth safety tools and features, including limiting age-inappropriate content and restricting teenagers under 16 from receiving direct messages from people they didn’t follow.

“We want to reassure every parent that we have their interests at heart in the work we’re doing to help provide teens with safe experiences online,” Ms. Crenshaw said. The states’ legal complaints, she added, “mischaracterize our work using selective quotes and cherry-picked documents.”

But parents who say their children died as a result of online harms challenged Meta’s safety assurances.

“They preach that they have safety protections, but not the right ones,” said Mary Rodee, an elementary school teacher in Canton, N.Y., whose 15-year-old son, Riley Basford, was sexually extorted on Facebook in 2021 by a stranger posing as a teenage girl. Riley died by suicide several hours later.

Ms. Rodee, who sued the company in March, said Meta had never responded to the reports she submitted through automated channels on the site about her son’s death.

“It’s pretty unfathomable,” she said.

The Push to Win Teenagers

Meta has long wrestled with how to attract and retain teenagers, who are a core part of the company’s growth strategy, internal company documents show.

Teenagers became a major focus for Mr. Zuckerberg as early as 2016, according to the Tennessee complaint, when the company was still known as Facebook and owned apps including Instagram and WhatsApp. That spring, an annual survey of young people by the investment bank Piper Jaffray reported that Snapchat, a disappearing-message app, had surpassed Instagram in popularity.

Later that year, Instagram introduced a similar disappearing photo- and video-sharing feature, Instagram Stories. Mr. Zuckerberg directed executives to focus on getting teenagers to spend more time on the company’s platforms, according to the Tennessee complaint.

The “overall company goal is total teen time spent,” wrote one employee, whose name is redacted, in an email to executives in November 2016, according to internal correspondence among the exhibits in the Tennessee case. Participating teams should increase the number of employees dedicated to projects for teenagers by at least 50 percent, the email added, noting that Meta already had more than a dozen researchers analyzing the youth market.

Email on Zuckerberg’s goals

Mark has decided that the top priority for the company in 2017 is teens.

In April 2017, Kevin Systrom, Instagram’s chief executive, emailed Mr. Zuckerberg asking for more staff to work on mitigating harms to users, according to the New Mexico complaint.

Mr. Zuckerberg replied that he would include Instagram in a plan to hire more staff, but he said Facebook faced “more extreme issues.” At the time, legislators were criticizing the company for having failed to hinder disinformation during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign.

Mr. Systrom asked colleagues for examples to show the urgent need for more safeguards. He soon emailed Mr. Zuckerberg again, saying Instagram users were posting videos involving “imminent danger,” including a boy who shot himself on Instagram Live, the complaint said.

Two months later, the company announced that the Instagram Stories feature had hit 250 million daily users, dwarfing Snapchat. Mr. Systrom, who left the company in 2018, didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Meta said an Instagram team developed and introduced safety measures and experiences for young users. The company didn’t respond to a question about whether Mr. Zuckerberg had provided the additional staff.

‘Millions’ of Underage Users

In January 2018, Mr. Zuckerberg received a report estimating that four million children under the age of 13 were on Instagram, according to a lawsuit filed in federal court by 33 states.

Facebook’s and Instagram’s terms of use prohibit users under 13. But the company’s sign-up process for new accounts enabled children to easily lie about their age, according to the complaint. Meta’s practices violated a federal children’s online privacy law requiring certain online services to obtain parental consent before collecting personal data, like contact information, from children under 13, the states allege.

In March 2018, The Times reported that Cambridge Analytica, a voter profiling firm, had covertly harvested the personal data of millions of Facebook users. That set off more scrutiny of the company’s privacy practices, including those involving minors.

Mr. Zuckerberg testified the next month at a Senate hearing, “We don’t allow people under the age of 13 to use Facebook.”

Attorneys general from dozens of states disagree.

State attorneys general complaint

Within the company, Meta’s actual knowledge that millions of Instagram users are under the age of 13 is an open secret that is routinely documented, rigorously analyzed and confirmed, and zealously protected from disclosure to the public.

In late 2021, Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee, disclosed thousands of pages of internal documents that she said showed the company valued “profit above safety.” Lawmakers held a hearing, grilling her on why so many children had accounts.

Meanwhile, company executives knew that Instagram use by children under 13 was “the status quo,” according to the joint federal complaint filed by the states. In an internal chat in November 2021, Mr. Mosseri acknowledged those underage users and said the company’s plan to “cater the experience to their age” was on hold, the complaint said.

Mosseri’s message

Tweens want access to Instagram, and they lie about their age to get it now.

In its statement, Meta said Instagram had measures in place to remove underage accounts when the company identified them. Meta has said it has regularly removed hundreds of thousands of accounts that could not prove they met the company’s age requirements.

Fighting Over Beauty Filters

A company debate over beauty filters on Instagram encapsulated the internal tensions over teenage mental health — and ultimately the desire to engage more young people prevailed.

It began in 2017 after Instagram introduced camera effects that enabled users to alter their facial features to make them look funny or “cute/pretty,” according to internal emails and documents filed as evidence in the Tennessee case. The move was made to boost engagement among young people. Snapchat already had popular face filters, the emails said.

But a backlash ensued in the fall of 2019 after Instagram introduced an appearance-altering filter, Fix Me, which mimicked the nip/tuck lines that cosmetic surgeons draw on patients’ faces. Some mental health experts warned that the surgery-like camera effects could normalize unrealistic beauty standards for young women, exacerbating body-image disorders.

As a result, Instagram in October 2019 temporarily disallowed camera effects that made dramatic, surgical-looking facial alterations — while still permitting obviously fantastical filters, like goofy animal faces. The next month, concerned executives proposed a permanent ban, according to Tennessee court filings.

Other executives argued that a ban would hurt the company’s ability to compete. One senior executive sent an email saying Mr. Zuckerberg was concerned whether data showed real harm.

In early 2020, ahead of an April meeting with Mr. Zuckerberg to discuss the issue, employees prepared a briefing document on the ban, according to the Tennessee court filings. One internal email noted that employees had spoken with 18 mental health experts, each of whom raised concerns that cosmetic surgery filters could “cause lasting harm, especially to young people.”

But the meeting with Mr. Zuckerberg was canceled. Instead, the chief executive told company leaders that he was in favor of lifting the ban on beauty filters, according to an email he sent that was included in the court filings.

Zuckerberg’s email to executives

It has always felt paternalistic to me that we’ve limited people’s ability to present themselves in these ways, especially when there’s no data I’ve seen that suggests doing so is helpful or not doing so is harmful.

Several weeks later, Margaret Gould Stewart, then Facebook’s vice president for product design and responsible innovation, reached out to Mr. Zuckerberg, according to an email included among the exhibits. In the email, she noted that as a mother of teenage daughters, she knew social media put “intense” pressure on girls “with respect to body image.”

Stewart’s email to Zuckerberg

I was hoping we could maintain a moderately protective stance here given the risk to minors. … I just hope that years from now we will look back and feel good about the decision we made here.

Ms. Stewart, who subsequently left Meta, did not respond to an email seeking comment.

In the end, Meta said it barred filters “that directly promote cosmetic surgery, changes in skin color or extreme weight loss” and clearly indicated when one was being used.

Priorities and Youth Safety

In 2021, Meta began planning for a new social app. It was to be aimed specifically at children and called Instagram Kids. In response, 44 attorneys general wrote a letter that May urging Mr. Zuckerberg to “abandon these plans.”

“Facebook has historically failed to protect the welfare of children on its platforms,” the letter said.

Meta subsequently paused plans for an Instagram Kids app.

By August, company efforts to protect users’ well-being had become “increasingly urgent” for Meta, according to another email to Mr. Zuckerberg filed as an exhibit in the Tennessee case. Nick Clegg, now Meta’s head of global affairs, warned his boss of mounting concerns from regulators about the company’s impact on teenage mental health, including “potential legal action from state A.G.s.”

Describing Meta’s youth well-being efforts as “understaffed and fragmented,” Mr. Clegg requested funding for 45 employees, including 20 engineers.

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The WHO says corporate greed is causing millions of preventable deaths

The WHO says corporate greed is causing millions of preventable deaths

By Danyaal Raza

Jun 20 2024

https://canadahealthwatch.ca/2024/06/20/the-who-says-corporate-greed-is-causing-millions-of-preventable-deaths

The World Health Organization is no stranger to issuing reports. Often filled with bureaucratic language on niche topics, no one would bat an eye if a dictionary was needed to decode the confusing jargon found in a typical WHO release.

Their latest is an entirely different beast. 

Nestled under the technical title “Commercial Determinants of Non-Communicable Diseases in the WHO European region” is a clear and frank report on how the profit-motive leads to 2.7 million preventable deaths a year, in Europe alone. 

Most responsible are companies from the tobacco, alcohol, processed food, and fossil fuel industries, in addition to familiar actors in health care like pharmaceutical companies, and newer entrants like private equity investment firms. 

How are these corporate players causing such harm? 

Among the many mechanisms highlighted are: industry lobbying that weakens regulation, market concentration with monopoly-like effects, one-sided international trade and investment agreements, the subversion of science and manipulation of research, reputation-washing through corporate social responsibility initiatives, tax-avoidance coupled with extractive financial practices, and a motive to function with the lowest possible labour standards.. The WHO’s report also notes how industry uses health crises or “shocks” to opportunistically maximise profits at the expense of health.

Though the list is long, each topic is summarised in just a few pages, with front loaded key points and illustrative case studies in what amounts to a surprisingly readable text.

One case study addresses increasing private equity ownership stakes in the health sector. In Germany, nearly 20% of ambulatory (or ‘community’) healthcare centres are owned by private equity firms. In Sweden, a third of primary care clinics are. Higher costs and worse patient outcomes result from this ownership model. Why? These firms often cut staff and increase fees to patients, while using the same health centres to take out debt, write-off taxes, and extract profits to pay both investors and executives. 

Other chapters and cases examine alcohol labelling, gig work, patent law and industry-funded advocacy groups, among many others.

The authors of the report unite these seemingly disparate areas under a ‘commercial determinants of health’ banner. Described as “the ways in which commercial sector actors and their products and practices impact on health” the report notes “the fact that diverse commercial actors are causing avoidable harm reflects their shared underlying motivation to maximize profits.”

Importantly, this WHO release does more than bring corporate harms to light. It offers examples of how such health-harming activities can be beaten back. 

For example, how Estonia advanced a sugar tax on pop and juice, or how European drug prices were brought under control for conditions like asthma and COPD, and how a ban on marketing unhealthy food in the UK is on the cusp of being won. 

Yet, the report on its own will do little to change the problems it identifies. Though important, the WHO is a multinational, member-driven organisation that typically does not engage in the type of gritty politics and persuasion required to put this genie back in the bottle.

Nonetheless, there are clear implications for Canada. For example, private equity firms are taking increasing interest in our healthcare system, reputation washingunder the guise of corporate social responsibility is common practice here, and precarious working conditions in Canada have long been known to contribute to death and disease. 

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Why China is winning the EV war

[Note:  This item comes from friend Desire Banse.  DLH]

Why China is winning the EV war

By Vox

Jun 7 2024

The Biden administration set a climate goal that 50 percent of all new car sales in the US would be electric by 2030. Meanwhile, China reached that milestone this year, in 2024. This video explains how China was able to fast-track EV adoption and develop an EV battery that rivals what any other country has been able to do so far. It’s been a decade of government strategies that have created some of the biggest battery companies in the world, like CATL and BYD. The Biden administration wants to keep Chinese cars and batteries out of the country — but our video explains what kind of position that puts the US in in terms of meeting its own climate goals. Sources and further reading: https://www.vox.com/climate/2024/3/4/… https://www.technologyreview.com/2023… https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/27/bu… https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2… https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articl… https://www.iea.org/reports/global-cr…

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Louisiana becomes nation’s first state to require Ten Commandments in classrooms

Louisiana becomes nation’s first state to require Ten Commandments in classrooms

By LEXI LONAS

Jun 19 2024

Louisiana becomes nation’s first state to require Ten Commandments in classrooms

Louisiana became the first state in the nation to require the Ten Commandments be displayed in public school classrooms.  

Gov. Jeff Landry (R) signed the Republican-led bill Wednesday that got some bipartisan support in the Louisiana Senate to display the Ten Commandments in all public elementary and high school classes.  

The signs must be in “large, easily readable font” in classrooms by the beginning of 2025. The posters will also contain a three-paragraph statement that will say the Ten Commandments have been a prominent part of American education.  

“The Pelican State has rightly recognized the history and tradition of the Ten Commandments in the state,” said Matt Krause, of counsel at First Liberty Institute. 

“Putting this historic document on schoolhouse walls is a great way to remind students of the foundations of American and Louisiana law. First Liberty was grateful to play a part in helping this bill reach the Governor’s desk. We applaud Louisiana for being the first, but by no means the last, state to take this bold step for religious liberty,” he added. 

The move has already sparked legal challenges, a major concern of Democrats who have opposed the bill.

“It’s a lawsuit waiting to happen,” Democratic state Sen. Royce Duplessis told CBS affiliate WWL-TV in April. “I think we are going to likely lose in court.”

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) announced its intent to sue, arguing the law violates the First Amendment.

“We are preparing a lawsuit to challenge H.B. 71. The law violates the separation of church and state and is blatantly unconstitutional. The First Amendment promises that we all get to decide for ourselves what religious beliefs, if any, to hold and practice, without pressure from the government. Politicians have no business imposing their preferred religious doctrine on students and families in public schools,” the ACLU said Wednesday.

The upcoming battle will be a test for other states that have considered implementing similar laws, such as Tennessee and Texas.

Sleepless in Seattle as a Hellcat Roars Through the Streets

[Note:  This item comes from friend David Rosenthal.  Check out this link for the current chapter in this story: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/18/us/seattle-belltown-hellcat-judgment.html  DLH]

Sleepless in Seattle as a Hellcat Roars Through the Streets

The modified Dodge Charger roaming Seattle’s downtown by night has infuriated residents. But it seems no one can stop it.

May 29 2024

City leaders and police officers have responded to complaints about the renegade driver with warnings, citations, criminal charges and a lawsuit.Brian Lau for The New York Times

As much of Seattle tries to sleep, the Hellcat supercar goes on the prowl, the howls of its engine and the explosive backfires from its tailpipes echoing off the high-rise towers downtown.

Windows rattle. Pets jump in a frenzy. Even people used to the ruckus of urban living jolt awake, fearful and then furious.

Complaints have flooded in for months to city leaders and the police, who have responded with warnings, citations, criminal charges and a lawsuit, urging the renegade driver to take his modified Dodge Charger SRT Hellcat from the city streets to a racetrack. Instead, the “Belltown Hellcat,” with its distinctive tiger-stripe wrap, has remained on the move.

For hundreds of thousands of people with Instagram accounts, the driver is a familiar character: @srt.miles, otherwise known as Miles Hudson, a 20-year-old resident of one of the Belltown neighborhood’s pricey apartments. For all the aggravated residents who view him with increasing disdain — “Entire neighborhoods are angry and sleep deprived,” one resident wrote their local council member — many more are tracking his escapades on social media, celebrating a life unencumbered by self-consciousness or regret.

When Mr. Hudson posted a video (350,441 likes) showing his speedometer topping 100 miles per hour during a downtown outing to get boba tea, a follower asked: “How does it feel living my dream?” When he posted a video (698,858 likes) showing the rowdy rattles of the Hellcat, another replied: “You really make the town so fun at night.”

In one self-reflective post, Mr. Hudson captured video (69,742 likes) of himself watching a television news segment that discussed the city’s concern about his driving, and proceeded to rush frantically around the apartment, pretending to be fearful that the police were on to him. “I like your content so when they arrest you I’m coming to get you,” one follower replied.

On one recent night when a police officer stopped Mr. Hudson, he pulled out his phone to show the officer his Instagram account and endeavored to explain that he was professionally unable to alter his late-night driving habits.

“No disrespect, but I feel like I’m doing my thing,” he told the officer, according to body-camera footage. “I’ve turned it into a career, and the car has paid for itself. 650,000 followers.”

To some residents, the city’s failure to stop Mr. Hudson’s exploits is but another example of its inability to bring an end to the homelessness, street crime and occasional mayhem that have plagued the downtown area since the pandemic. And it all raised a mystifying question about the incentives of modern life: What happens when fame and infamy can be equally lucrative?

The Belltown neighborhood has been transformed in recent decades from a grungy, semi-industrial arts district to a sort of ideal of moneyed urban living, with bike-friendly streets, hip cafés and condo towers so desirable that one penthouse there became the setting of the steamy “Fifty Shades of Grey” book series. This month, the rooftop of one such luxury tower featured a $1.7 million McLaren sports car to entice a prospective buyer. Other rooftops feature decks with lounge chairs and firepits, offering views of the Space Needle in one direction and waterfront sunsets in the other.

Mr. Hudson’s own Belltown apartment showcases panoramic views, decorated inside with neon lights and anime artwork. In his online postings, he can be seen playing video games and consuming iced pumpkin cream chai tea lattes.

He debuted the Hellcat seven months ago on Instagram, showing off the power of its engine and the interior ceiling lights that looked like a night sky. He casually took viewers along on an outing to Starbucks.

It did not take long, though, for a different social media story to emerge, one of unfolding chaos, narrated by Mr. Hudson in breathless expletives as he rolls around the city. If not out in his car, roaring through the streets, he is in the apartment, late at night, trying his hand at cooking.

In one video (669,757 likes), he got off the couch to ride a hoverboard over to his kitchen to cook some burgers, but the pan soon burst into flames, and Mr. Hudson raced around on his hoverboard trying to contain it. He had a fire extinguisher on hand in a later video when he tried to fry Twinkies. There was no fire this time, but the Twinkies were charred to a crisp. “I can’t cook,” he shouted.

His refrigerator, shown in another video (886,343 likes), looked to be barren save for some condiments and Lunchables.

Through the bleak Seattle winter, he posted about modifications to his car. In a video with nearly 700,000 likes, he could be seen out on the street at 2 a.m., starting it up. “It sounds like a shotgun,” he said, and asked his followers if it was too loud.

“Never too loud, I say not loud enough,” someone replied.

For the neighbors, the vehicle was plenty loud, and complaints were pouring in to city officials. One woman wrote that she lived with P.T.S.D. and woke up in fear because the backfiring vehicle sounded like gunshots outside her building. “This is the first time in 13 years that I’ve started seriously considering moving out of downtown,” she wrote. Another wrote in after 6 a.m. saying the tiger-striped Hellcat had been revving up and down streets for two hours. “What will it take for this to end?” the man wrote.

Chris Allen, who lives in the city center, said the backfires sound like explosions rattling the windows of his 17th-floor unit. While he regularly used a white-noise machine to drown out the blare of motorcycle and emergency vehicles, the machine was no match for the Hellcat, said Mr. Allen, adding that he has appealed to Meta, which owns Instagram, to take down Mr. Hudson’s account.

“He’s clearly committing crimes,” he said. “He’s documenting it on Instagram. It’s frustrating that Instagram hasn’t taken this down.”

Eventually, though, the wheels of bureaucracy began to turn. Police officers stopped Mr. Hudson once in January, giving him a warning, then again in February, giving another warning.

During the early morning hours one night at the beginning of March, the police stopped Mr. Hudson yet again. This time, he was cited for having a modified exhaust system that amplified noise. Mr. Hudson soon paid the $155 fine.

And the complaints kept coming. A couple weeks after the citation, Mr. Hudson posted a video (79,267 likes), recording himself starting the car remotely from his apartment balcony. Below, on the street, the vehicle roared to life, exhaust blasting out the tailpipes. Mr. Hudson then panned across the Seattle skyline.

“I am the Arkham Knight,” he said, referring to the Batman villain. “I am actually the Arkham Knight. My city actually hates me.”

For the police, the Instagram videos were a trail of criminal breadcrumbs around the city, complete with narration, time stamps and footage of his speedometer.

At the end of March, the city charged Mr. Hudson with two counts of reckless driving for “operating a motor vehicle with a willful or wanton disregard for the safety of persons and/or property.” At yet another traffic stop a few days later, an officer brought out a decibel meter, recording the Hellcat at 84 decibels even while idling, the equivalent of a diesel train.

Mr. Hudson declined to talk to The New York Times without payment, but he told a reporter at The Seattle Times in March that the city needed to focus its attention on other problems. “There are way bigger issues than a Black man with a nice car who makes noise occasionally,” he said.

At that point, a different city department stepped in. The Department of Construction and Inspections sent a notice, saying it had “investigated and found a violation or violations of the Seattle Noise Control Code.” Mr. Hudson was ordered to modify the vehicle and to not “operate any motor vehicle that causes sound in violation of the Seattle Municipal Code.” The notice came with a potential fine of $1,300 per day.

To the new city leadership recently elected in Seattle, many of whom had run on law-and-order campaigns, Mr. Hudson has become an example to be made. Bob Kettle, who represents Belltown on the City Council, said that something needed to be done about what he described as the city’s “permissive environment.”

“It’s shocking that somebody can make money by disturbing or impacting thousands of people on a nightly basis,” he said in an interview.

Mr. Hudson responded with a new tactic. In answer to the city’s orders not to drive his car, he posted a new video (528,359 likes) in which he could be seen getting in the passenger seat of the Hellcat, with a woman at the wheel. She drove them away, the car roaring once again.

Now the city is trying a new strategy: The city attorney this month filed a civil complaint, seeking a court order to force Mr. Hudson to modify his vehicle and penalties that could total tens of thousands of dollars.

A response came, from a different authority figure: Mr. Hudson’s mother, Rebecca Hudson. In an email to city officials, she said the Hellcat was off the streets and in the shop.

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Meta accused of trying to discredit ad researchers

[Note:  This item comes from friend David Rosenthal.  DLH]

Meta accused of trying to discredit ad researchers

As more than 70 civil society groups sign open letter slamming ‘intimidation’
By Thomas Claburn

Jun 16 2024

https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/16/meta_ads_brazil/

Meta allegedly tried to discredit university researchers in Brazil who had flagged fraudulent adverts on the social network’s ad platform.

Núcleo, a Brazil-based news organization, said it has obtained government documents showing that attorneys representing Meta questioned the credibility of researchers from NetLab, which is part of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ).

NetLab’s research into Meta’s ads contributed to Brazil’s National Consumer Secretariat (Senacon) decision in 2023 to fine Meta $1.7 million (9.3 million BRL), which is still being appealed. Meta (then Facebook) was separately fined of $1.2 million (6.6 million BRL) related to Cambridge Analytica.

As noted by Núcleo, NetLab’s report showed that Facebook, despite being notified about the issues, had failed to remove more than 1,800 scam ads that fraudulently used the name of a government program that was supposed to assist those in debt.

In response to the fine, attorneys representing Meta from law firm TozziniFreire allegedly accused the NetLab team of bias and of failing to involve Meta in the research process.

Núcleo says that it obtained the administrative filing through freedom of information requests to Senacon. The documents are said to date from December 26 last year and to be part of the ongoing case against Meta.

A spokesperson for NetLab, who asked not to be identified by name due to online harassment directed at the organization’s members, told The Registerthat the research group was aware of the Núcleo report.

“We were kind of surprised to see the account of our work in this law firm document,” the spokesperson said. “We expected to be treated with more fairness for our work. Honestly, it comes at a very bad moment because NetLab particularly, but also Brazilian science in general, is being attacked by far-right groups.”

Similar push back against social media research is underway in the US. It was recently reported that the Stanford Internet Observatory, which has been exploring social media manipulation for the past five years, is being scaled back by the university following pressure from Republicans in the US House of Representatives.

On Thursday, more than 70 civil society groups including NetLab published an open letter decrying Meta’s legal tactics.

“This is an attack on scientific research work, and attempts at intimidation of researchers and researchers who are performing excellent work in the production of knowledge from empirical analysis that have been fundamental to qualify the public debate on the accountability of social media platforms operating in the country, especially with regard to paid content that causes harm to consumers of these platforms and that threaten the future of our democracy,” the letter says.

“This kind of attack and intimidation is made even more dangerous by aligning with arguments that, without any evidence, have been used by the far right to discredit the most diverse scientific productions, including NetLab itself.”

The claim, allegedly made by Meta’s attorneys, is that the ad biz was “not given the opportunity to appoint a technical assistant and present questions” in the preparation of the NetLabs report. This is particularly striking given Meta’s efforts to limit research into its ad platform.

In 2021, two years after shutting down ad transparency tools from ProPublica, Mozilla, and Who Targets Me, Meta disabled the accounts of researchers at NYU’s Ad Observatory Project claiming that their work violated its terms of service. Those involved denounced the social network’s account cutoff as an attempt to stifle legitimate research into disinformation.

Meta’s discomfort with scrutiny of its systems can be also seen in the subpoenas issued to third-party developers who created an unofficial API for Meta’s Threads app “for educational and research purposes.” Meta’s legal representatives claimed the API violated the company’s terms of service.

Meta is preparing to take another step in this direction come August when it expects to shut down CrowdTangle, a social media monitoring firm it acquired in 2016. Meta cites technology and regulatory changes for its decision.

The biz has been working on a replacement tool called Meta Content Library, which it says “was designed to help us meet new regulatory requirements for data-sharing and transparency while meeting Meta’s rigorous privacy and security standards.”

In a March blog post, Brandon Silverman, co-founder and former CEO of Crowdtangle, said, “Closing down CrowdTangle 12 weeks before the US Presidential election is hard to defend…” and cited concerns about expected election interference. He also said Meta Content Library is not close to CrowdTangle yet in terms of its capabilities.

NetLab’s spokesperson said the group’s researchers “rely a lot on CrowdTangle … and not only us. [The decision to close CrowdTangle] is being discussed by pretty much everyone who studies information on Meta.”

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EPA chief vows to take on Republican-led states over pollution rules rollback

EPA chief vows to take on Republican-led states over pollution rules rollback
Michael Regan defends civil rights record and denies abandoning communities who face brunt of toxic pollution

By Oliver Milman

Jun 18 2024

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jun/18/epa-michael-regan-republicans-climate-crisis

Republican-led states attacking protections shielding disadvantaged communities from industrial pollution will be confronted by the Biden administration, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has warned.

In a Guardian interview, Michael Regan, administrator of the EPA, also denied abandoning those who face the brunt of air and water contamination in the US.

Regan said that Biden has “gone further than any other administration since the EPA was formed in 1970” to advance environmental justice. He rejected criticism that the EPA was shying away from a deepening battle with a coalition of states that aim to prevent the federal government from challenging pollution on civil rights grounds.

Advocates have accused the EPA of retreating from civil rights cases in states including Louisiana, Texas and Michigan amid a Republican assault on using civil rights laws to combat environmental problems such as air pollution which, studies show, disproportionately affects people of color.

Last year, the EPA dropped an investigation into whether Louisiana placed Black residents in an industrial stretch of the state nicknamed “Cancer Alley” at heightened risk of cancer, despite finding initial evidence of racial discrimination. Louisiana had filed a lawsuit challenging the investigation, criticizing it as a “dystopian nightmare” and calling the EPA “social justice warriors fixated on race”.

Hopes that similar civil rights cases in Flint, Michigan, and Houston, Texas, could remedy separate instances of environmental discrimination have also been dashed since the decision.

“I think the Biden administration’s EPA has potentially achieved the biggest leap forward on justice and rights since the 1960s,” said Matthew Tejada, who was a senior official working on environmental justice at the EPA for a decade, before leaving in December. “There have been huge, undeniable wins.”

“But what happened with the civil rights program is a gut punch,” he added. “When it came to standing up to Louisiana on environmental injustice, the EPA flinched. That’s very troubling.”

Regan dismissed this, however. “We are absolutely willing to take on the states,” the EPA administrator said in an interview with the Guardian. “I completely reject the notion we are afraid to take on any state; we are willing to fight for people wherever they are. We are very much committed to civil rights.”

In April, Republican attorneys general from 23 states demanded the EPA stop compelling them to resolve air, water and other pollution under title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prevents racial discrimination by entities that receive federal funding.

The EPA has argued that this “disparate impact” provision means that states are violating the act if they force specific racial groups to face the dangers of pollution from highways, industrial plants and other sources.

“In practice, ‘environmental justice’ asks the states to engage in racial engineering in deciding to, for example, issue environmental permits,” the letterfrom the Republican-led states complains, pointing out that the supreme court views the EPA’s actions as potentially unlawful.

Regan conceded that the EPA was “very realistic” about the hostile reception it will get in certain courts, such as the conservative-dominated supreme court, which he called a “tough venue” to hear arguments that certain Americans face discrimination due to the pollutants they are exposed to.

The Civil Rights Act was “a difficult tool to use to achieve some of the goals we want to achieve”, said Regan. “We want to get at these immediate threats of pollution and we are trying to pursue tools in the toolbox that are stronger, faster and more readily available,” he added.

“We are not taking any legal action off the table but children in these communities need relief right now, grandmothers who have been breathing in pollutants for 20 years need relief right now. We have been very strategic.”

Regan cited a litany of regulatory, as well as legal, accomplishments made under Biden, such as the establishment of more stringent emissions rules for cars, trucks and power plants, key sources of pollution in low-income, Black and Hispanic communities, as well as specific actions to tackle a drinking water crisis in Jackson, Mississippi, and raw sewage in Alabama. A beefed-up environmental justice office, with 200 staffers, now sits in the heart of the EPA apparatus.

Regan, who has a history of environmental justice work as an official in North Carolina, made a trip to meet residents of Cancer Alley in Louisiana in 2021 which he said was “life-changing”. Last year, the EPA sued Denka, a manufacturer of neoprene, which is used to make wetsuits and other items, due to the cancer risk its emissions pose to Cancer Alley residents. In April, the agency passed a broader rule to slash emissions of toxins from chemical plants across the US.

“We were all shedding tears of joy when we passed that rule, which will reduce the cancer risk rate by 96% for communities like those that live near Denka,” said Regan.

“I was determined after that visit the EPA would take action. We did just that. We are very optimistic that our actions are taking root in these communities and communities are responding well.” He added that Biden had made environmental justice a “core pillar” of his administration.

Environmental groups have been critical of the Biden administration over its ongoing issuance of oil and gas drilling licenses, however, such the controversial Willow oil complex in Alaska, and for allowing oil and gas production to hit historic highs despite the impact upon the climate crisis and communities living near fossil fuel infrastructure.

Further opprobrium has been heaped upon the emerging industry of carbon capture and storage, which has received federal government support as a way to sequester emissions from industries and has spawned a fresh network of pipelines and other facilities through certain communities. In December, the EPA gave Louisiana, a bastion of oil and gas industry influence, the right to make its own environmental decisions over a boom in new CCS sites.

“No agency should be issuing carbon injection well permits, but especially not overwhelmed and understaffed agencies in fossil fuel states like Louisiana,” said Jane Patton, a campaigner at the Center for International Environmental Law.

Regan said the EPA wanted to “bring the community along” on sharing concerns over CCS and denied that the Biden administration was too accommodating to the oil and gas industry. “This administration has done more to reduce fossil fuel pollution than any administration, when you add up the tonnage we are by far in the history books,” he said.

Sharon Lavigne, a teacher and activist who met Regan on his tour of Cancer Alley, said the dropping of the civil rights investigation in Louisiana was “very disappointing” but that the administrator seemed moved by residents’ plight.

“He’s the only one who ever came down to see us, he saw himself how bad it is and I think it touched his heart, I could see in his face he was concerned and was thinking ‘how could people live like this?’” she said. “We can’t have any more death caused by this pollution, we don’t have time. I think he understands that.”

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‘Encryption is deeply threatening to power’: Meredith Whittaker of messaging app Signal

‘Encryption is deeply threatening to power’: Meredith Whittaker of messaging app Signal
By Alex Hern

Jun 18 2024

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jun/18/encryption-is-deeply-threatening-to-power-meredith-whittaker-of-messaging-app-signal

Meredith Whittaker practises what she preaches. As the president of the Signal Foundation, she’s a strident voice backing privacy for all. But she doesn’t just spout ­hollow words.

In 2018, she burst into public view as one of the organisers of the Google walkouts, mobilising 20,000 employees of the search giant in a twin protest over the company’s support for state surveillance and failings over sexual misconduct.

Even now, after half a decade in the public eye, with ­congressional testimonies, university professorships and federal agency advisory roles under her belt, Whittaker is still firmly privacy-conscious.

It’s not unusual for business leaders to politely deflect the question when asked about their pay for the CV that accompanies these interviews, for instance. It’s somewhat less common to flatly refuse to comment on their age and family. “As a privacy advocate, Whittaker doesn’t answer personal questions that could be used to deduce her passwords or ‘secret answers’ for her bank authentication,” a staff member says after the interview. “She encourages others to follow suit!”

When she left Google, Whittaker shared a note internally that made it clear that she was committed to working on the ethical deployment of artificial intelligence and organising an “accountable tech industry”. She said: “It’s clear Google isn’t a place where I can continue this work.” That clarity, and lack of willingness to compromise, has led to Signal.

The Signal Foundation, created in 2017 with $50m in funding from WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton, exists to “protect free expression and enable secure global communication through open source privacy technology”.

It took over development of its messaging app, also called Signal, in 2018, and Whittaker came on board in the newly created role of president in 2022 – just in time to begin defending Signal, and encryption in general, against a wave of attacks from nation states and companies around the world.

Legislation such as Britain’s Online Safety Act (OSA) and the EU’s child sexual abuse regulation ­contained language that could be used to ban or crack private communications, while proposals by Meta to turn on end-to-end encryption for Facebook and Instagram sparked a vicious backlash from politicians such as Priti Patel, who called the plans “catastrophic” as UK home secretary.

Those attacks are nothing new, Whittaker says when we meet in the Observer’soffices. “You can go right back to 1976, when [Whitfield] Diffie and [Martin] Hellman were trying to publish the paper that introduced public key cryptography, which is the technique that allows us to have encrypted communication over the internet that works. There were intelligence services trying to prevent them.

“Through the 80s, there’s deep unease about the idea that the NSA [US National Security Agency] and GCHQ would lose the monopoly on encryption, and by the 90s, it ends up controlled under arms treaties – this is the ‘crypto wars’. You couldn’t send your code in the mail to someone in Europe; it was considered a munitions export.”

But then the huge push to commercialise the internet forced a softening – to a point. “Encryption for transactions was enabled, and large companies got to choose exactly what was encrypted. At the same time, the Clinton administration endorsed surveillance advertising as a business model, so there was an incentive to gather data about your customers in order to sell to them.”

Surveillance, she says, was a “disease” from the very beginning of the internet, and encryption is “deeply threatening to the type of power that constitutes itself via these information asymmetries”. All of which means that she doesn’t expect the fight to end any time soon. “I don’t think these arguments are in good faith. There’s a deeper tension here, because in 20 years of the development of this metastatic tech industry, we have seen every aspect of our lives become subject to mass surveillance perpetrated by a handful of companies partnering with the US government and other ‘Five Eyes’ agencies to gather more surveillance data about us than has ever been available to any entity in human history.

“So if we don’t continue to guard these little carve-outs of privacy and ultimately extend them – we have to throw some elbows to get a bit more space here – I think we’re in for a much bleaker future than we would be if we can hold this ground, and we can expand the space for privacy and free communication.”

The criticisms of encrypted communications are as old as the technology: allowing anyone to speak without the state being able to tap into their conversations is a godsend for criminals, terrorists and paedophiles around the world.

But, Whittaker argues, few of Signal’s loudest critics seem to be consistent in what they care about. “If we really cared about helping children, why are the UK’s schools crumbling? Why was social services funded at only 7% of the amount that was suggested to fully resource the agencies that are on the frontlines of stopping abuse?”

Sometimes the criticism is more unexpected. Signal was recently dragged into the US culture wars after a failed rightwing campaign to depose the new chief executive of National Public Radio, Katherine Maher, expanded to cover Signal, where Maher sits on the board of directors. Elon Musk got involved, promoting conspiracy theories that the Signal app – which he once promoted – had “known vulnerabilities”, in response to a claim that the app “may be compromised”.

The allegations were “a weapon in a propaganda war to spread disinformation”, Whittaker says. “We see similar lines of disinformation, that often appear designed to push ­people away from Signal, linked to escalations in the Ukraine conflict. We believe these campaigns are designed to scare people away from Signal on to less secure alternatives that may be more susceptible to hacking and interception.”

The same technology that brings the foundation criticism has made it popular among governments and militaries around the world that need to protect their own conversations from the prying eyes of state hackers and others.

Whittaker views this as a leveller – Signal is for all.

“Signal either works for everyone or it works for no one. Every military in the world uses Signal, every politician I’m aware of uses Signal. Every CEO I know uses Signal because anyone who has anything truly confidential to communicate recognises that storing that on a Meta database or in the clear on some Google server is not good practice.”

Whittaker’s vision is singular and does not entertain distraction. Despite her interest in AI, she is wary of combining it with Signal and is critical of apps such as Meta’s WhatsApp that have introduced AI-enabled functions.

[snip]

Opinion Indiana is revealing the real consequences of one-party rule

[Note:  This item comes from friend David P. Reed.  DLH]

Opinion Indiana is revealing the real consequences of one-party rule
By Mitch Daniels

Jun 18 2024

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/06/18/republicans-democrats-one-party-state-rule/

My home state’s citizens last month elected their next governor. No, I misspeak. Five percent of them elected him. Seven percent preferred a different candidate, and 88 percent never had a say in the decision.

The party now dominant in Indiana held its May primary, in which 12 percent of the 4.7 million registered voters participated. The winner captured 39 percent of that vote, or 5 percent of the electorate. November’s general election will be a laydown formality; the polls are basically closed, six months ahead of time, with a Republican assured of victory. This is “early voting” of a kind no one should advocate.

We have watched the national polarization that divides Americans in eerily equal numbers play out in vastly uneven ways, state to state. But talk of “red” and “blue” doesn’t capture either the full extent of the imbalance, or the knock-on consequences for the formation and pursuit of sound public policy.

The issue isn’t simply that states lean reliably Republican or Democratic. It’s that now a big majority are heavily, maybe irrevocably, tilted in one direction or the other. Where that obtains, office seekers pitch their initial appeals to the hard core on their side, as primary candidates always have. The difference is that, instead of the winner’s traditional post-primary imperative, to reach out to nonpartisans and even open-minded members of the opposing party, now their job is finished.

It happened pretty quickly. In the early 2000s, three-fifths of the states saw reasonable political balance between the two major parties. Today, “trifecta” government, meaning one-party control of the governorship and both legislative bodies, has become the norm across the 50 states. In 40 states, containing 83 percent of the American population, one party enjoys trifecta dominance, and often by overwhelming margins.

The roots of this phenomenon have been well studied. They include the cultural aggression of elite institutions and the predictable reaction to it, the nationalization of issues abetted by the collapse of local media and the pernicious effects of the antisocial media.

The gerrymandering that once exaggerated a dominant party’s political margin is no longer much of a factor; social clustering and these other factors have often done a more effective job than the political bosses ever did. In many jurisdictions today, one would have to reverse gerrymander, mixing geographies and crossing all kinds of legal boundary lines, to produce a truly competitive electorate.

Political campaigns need not necessarily be dispiriting, narrowcasting mudfests. They can be vehicles, in fact the best possible vehicles, for floating constructive ideas to an attentive public. Ideas proposed by a successful campaign have a higher likelihood of enactment after the election. Ideas fashioned not to stroke the erogenous zones of a riled-up minority of left or right, but to speak to the broader public in pursuit of a general election victory, evoke our common interest instead of our differences and antagonisms. But such campaigns rarely make sense these days.

In 2024, 30 states feature not only trifecta government but 2-to-1 majorities in at least one house. In that setting, both campaigns and governance look totally different than they do in genuine two-party polities.

I served as Indiana’s Republican governor from 2005 to 2013, limited to two four-year terms. In the first term, the Democratic opposition controlled one house of the General Assembly. The two gubernatorial contests during that period were hotly contested, and thought to be in doubt for most of the two election seasons. Once in office, to make effective change, we had to engage with our Democratic counterparts, even in the years when we achieved full but narrow legislative control.

Our campaign messages, as they had to, mostly centered on specific, new ideas: ethics reforms, access to health insurance, property tax caps, automatic tax refunds and many more, all couched in rhetoric stressing Indianans’ commonality as people, and the need for every part of the state to participate fully in its better future. Boy, is that passé.

This year, our next governor ran a smart race and won his victory fair and square. The problem is that neither he, nor any of his competitors, had an incentive to offer their soon-to-be employers a sense of how Indiana could move forward.

What voters saw instead, besides attacks on each other, were political advertisements centered on “standing up to China,” taking on foreign drug cartels and closing the Mexican border. It became difficult to tell whether these folks were running for secretary of state or secretary of homeland security. If they had any concrete suggestions more relevant to the job they were seeking, it obviously didn’t make sense to share them.

Wise policy and good government can and do emerge in lopsided states. But competition, always and everywhere, fosters innovation. In politics, it also compels a sensitivity and an outreach to the widest possible audiences. The contours of the current system don’t conduce to those outcomes; until that changes, we have to hope for candidates who, elected by 5 percent of the state, somehow come to consider their duty of service to all the rest.

The System Isn’t Built for Jan. 6, and Neither Are We

The System Isn’t Built for Jan. 6, and Neither Are We

By KATHERINE MILLER

Jun 18 2024

There won’t be a trial anytime soon — or maybe ever — for Donald Trump on charges related to Jan. 6. No matter the Supreme Court presidential immunity decision, even if the court rules that a trial can proceed, there almost certainly won’t be enough time before the election. If Mr. Trump is elected, there might not be a trial at all.

One of the things a trial gives you is an answer: There is an ending to a trial. In Manhattan last month, no matter how anyone felt about the guilty verdict, or the politics of the charges, or the cultural value of the case as a representation of what Donald Trump means in American life, Mr. Trump and everyone in the country got an ending. And that the trial itself was about such a narrow series of events and that so few people seem to have changed their minds after its ending might demonstrate how resolved the history of those hush payments already was.

Obviously endings to trials can go beyond guilt and acquittal; there are appeals that can lead to overturned convictions, and hung juries and mistrials that freeze out either possibility. But on some level even a hung jury provides an answer: Here is tangible evidence of a societal inability to resolve this issue.

There won’t even be an ending like that to Jan. 6, and if you think about it, there still isn’t a clean separation between the event and the politics of 2024.

The riot at the Capitol was happening and then it wasn’t. Mr. Trump eventually left, but didn’t leave. The House impeached, but the Senate acquitted. Prosecutors brought charges, but the process has spooled out into an in-between place.

Committees aired hearings and released transcripts; people wrote books and filed civil suits; individuals such as Rudy Giuliani have faced punishing financial penalties. And we have learned more and worse details about the inner workings of the Trump White House that melted down into disaster.

But Mr. Trump might still become president again, and he has never let go of the idea that animated Jan. 6 — that the election was stolen from him — and that idea has hardened in regular people.

It’s as if the country had a simultaneous, destabilizing experience, and it’s sitting there under the surface, and it must be doing something to the American psyche.

One of the things that makes Jan. 6 hard to neatly contain in the collective memory is the emotional, sloppy, accidental disaster nature of it. The event unfolded in public, and learning more about the lead-up to it tends to affirm the broad contours of what we knew when it took place. The select committee testimony and hearings, the indictments and civil suits and the many reported books are filled with examples of how ill conceived so much of what led to Jan. 6 was — and yet it eventually became a surreal scene where real people died, the police got beaten with American flags, aides and lawmakers ran and hid, and hundreds of people who believed Mr. Trump got wrapped up in the legal system.

The origin point of that day was Mr. Trump’s inability to accept that he lost, but everything in service of it is hard to wrap your head around. It’s not as if anybody needs a trial to form an opinion about Jan. 6. It’s not even that the criminal justice system absolutely had to be the way to handle this matter; it wasn’t, and charging or convicting Mr. Trump might have unintended consequences.

But a trial was possibly the last remaining avenue for a public re-examination of Jan. 6, certainly before the election, and possibly for years. Everyone has instead lived through an intense period of anticipating that consideration and its potential consequence, without getting it.

What all this lack of resolution can obscure is how fundamental this is to Mr. Trump as a political figure. Jan. 6 and his expansive idea of power being taken from him is something the voter has to embrace or reject or ignore or try to square with the other things the voter might care about. That the election was stolen from him is what Mr. Trump cares about, and that the transfer of power must take place is what the country was founded on, and that Mr. Trump’s endless words can manifest in cataclysmic real-life action is what people fear and the most hard-core supporters love about Mr. Trump.

That crisis is unforgettable and it is warping politics, just beneath the surface. It has to be part of why, on the edges, people who believe him about the election and take him at his word have developed an apocalyptic, distrustful view of even the most local institutions — because there truly wouldn’t be any other option but to believe the worst if something that immense had gone unchecked.

This is why a set of conservative politicians have developed elaborate cases for why the real issue was with security preparations or that there was some subversion — because if it was just Mr. Trump who’d allowed a mob to hit the Capitol because he was unhappy, then it would be unforgivable. And there are probably a good deal of people who just don’t want to think about it, no matter how much Mr. Trump is still thinking and talking about the 2020 election, no matter how much the fact of Jan. 6 is changing the voters and politicians around them.

[snip]