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It's Time for the Press to Evolve |
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Tuesday, 18 December 2018 09:26 |
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Lakoff writes: "Attacks on the free press, and constant lying by political leaders, aren't just happening here in the United States. These tactics are also being used by authoritarian leaders in other countries who are taking power using the same tactics as Trump."
CNN's chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta. (photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
It's Time for the Press to Evolve
By George Lakoff, George Lakoff's Facebook Page
18 December 18
 ttacks on the free press, and constant lying by political leaders, aren't just happening here in the United States. These tactics are also being used by authoritarian leaders in other countries who are taking power using the same tactics as Trump.
These leaders understand how the press works, and they use its own tendencies against it in their efforts to erode democracy and freedom. They lie, knowing the press will repeat the lies. They create distractions because they know the press will chase the distractions. They release bad news when they think no one is paying attention. Too often, these tactics succeed.
It's time for the press to evolve. The press needs new rules, practices and guidelines to respond to the threat posed by lying authoritarians with no respect for truth, freedom, or democracy. These types of leaders attack the press because they see the truth as a threat. And it's the job of the press to report the truth.
Here are some suggestions members of the press can follow to #ProtectTheTruth:
-Ban the lie from the headline/tweet/chyron. Repeating lies only spreads them, and spreading lies is a disservice to the truth. It's possible to write engaging headlines without serving the lie. Always start with the truth, and always repeat the truth more than the lie.
-Use Truth Sandwiches. When writing about lies, always start with the truth first. Then explain the lie. Then return to the truth. Sequence and repetition matter! Truth first! Always.
-Separate News from Distractions. George Orwell said it best: "Journalism is printing what someone else doesn't want printed. Everything else is public relations." Trump's tweets have become a constant obsession for reporters. But his Twitter dramas generally just distract from the important news stories crucial to democracy. He issues crazy tweets, calls people names, and includes silly typos because he WANTS people to talk about his tweet. And those who give him what he wants need to remember Orwell's quote. What was the big story in the news before the Twitter drama started? Keep a steely focus on things that matter.
-Limit Trump photos. Images are crucial. Today, it seems like nearly every news story features a large photo of Trump. It's all Trump, all the time. It's a Trump overload. Editors need to be aware of the overall effect and make an effort to use a range of images to tell the story of our times. Politics is not just about the actors. It's about the millions of people who are affected by those actions.
-Outsmart the "Friday Dump." Politicians and corporations tend to release bad or unflattering news late Fridays, and especially on three-day weekends. This is because people pay less attention to the news at this time. So, the use of the "Friday Dump" is a tactic for hiding the truth from people. Imagine if anyone who tried this was instead greeted with a big Sunday or Monday story that also told people they were trying to hide the truth by dumping it on Friday.
These are just a few draft ideas. We'd be interested in hearing any ideas YOU may have. The real goal is to encourage members of the press around the world to engage in a serious discussion about the changes needed to protect the truth in dangerous times like these. Click below to hear more in Episode 15 of FrameLab, the podcast about politics, language and your brain!
https://soundcloud.com/user-253…/15-how-to-protect-the-truth
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How Russia Targeted Black Americans |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=45731"><span class="small">April Glaser, Slate</span></a>
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Tuesday, 18 December 2018 09:25 |
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Glaser writes: "We have no clue how many Americans opted not to vote because of Russian voter-suppression efforts or troll campaigns that aimed to smear Hilary Clinton ... But we do know that social media companies, even after testifying to Congress about the problem, have been either been underreporting the activity or not successfully looking."
Hands typing on a computer keyboard. (photo: hamburg_berlin/Shutterstock)
How Russia Targeted Black Americans
By April Glaser, Slate
18 December 18
Will lawmakers finally do something about it?
 t should be well-known by now that Russian operatives made memes and fake activist pages to try to sway the 2016 presidential campaign for Donald Trump. But what most people don’t know is that they were also selling sex toys, recruiting Americans to work with them through job listings, offering free self-defense classes, soliciting photos for a calendar, and even offering counseling to followers of page called Army of Jesus who were struggling with porn addiction. Two new reports delivered to the Senate Intelligence Committee—one from the cybersecurity group New Knowledge and the other from Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Project and the social networking–analysis firm Graphika—expand what the public knows about how a Kremlin-linked troll farm, the Internet Research Agency, widened divides in American political life during and after the 2016 election. Together, the reports comprise the most extensive research yet into exactly how Russian agents instrumentalized U.S. technology companies to launch what may be largest state-sponsored effort to manipulate voters and derail an election in U.S. history.
While the two reports both present new findings, they both also deliver some familiar conclusions: Social media companies weren’t completely forthright with Congress about the extent of Russian disinformation activities when the companies testified after the 2016 election. Both sets of researchers also found that Instagram, owned by Facebook, and YouTube, owned by Google, played a far greater role in the propaganda campaign than previously thought and that Russian agents were particularly focused on and effective at exploiting long-standing racial tensions in the U.S. For example, the New Knowledge report notes that of the 1,106 videos on YouTube the researchers reviewed, 1,063, or 96 percent, were about either police brutality or the Black Lives Matter movement. Yet when YouTube testified to Congress in 2017, the company shared in a statement, “These channels’ videos were not targeted to the U.S. or to any particular sector of the U.S. population.” While that comment may be referring to paid targeted advertising, researchers with New Knowledge wrote that the testimony “appears disingenuous.”
The researchers at New Knowledge also found that Instagram—through which, Facebook previously reported, the IRA trolls reached 20 million users, compared to 126 million on Facebook—was actually a far more fruitful platform for engagement than Facebook was, despite the smaller number of users reached. Instagram clocked in about 187 million user engagements (meaning likes, shares, and comments) while Facebook amassed about 77 million, according to the research, which tracked Internet Research Agency accounts from early 2015 to the fall of 2017. The Russian trolls were clearly aware of their success on Instagram. The report from Oxford University found that activity on Instagram from the Russian troll operation skyrocketed after the election, from 2,600 posts a month in 2016 to about 6,000 posts per month in 2017 before the accounts were shuttered by Facebook.
More than any other topic matter, much of this activity focused on infiltrating racial-justice movements and prodding racial tensions, which the New Knowledge report calls an “expansive cross-platform media mirage targeting the Black community.” That mirage included a complex architecture of accounts across multiple platforms for single fake activist groups. One such group, BlackMattersUs, hosted accounts on Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Google Plus, Facebook, and Gmail. The faux racial-justice group also hosted a page on PayPal that it shared on its website BlackMattersUS.com, as Slate first reported in November 2017. There, the Russian trolls solicited donations from Americans interested in helping to finance their purported work supporting black community leaders. (PayPal took the account down after Slate asked the company for a response and would not disclose if any money had been donated through the account.)
The attempt to collect funds via PayPal may well have been part of the larger ruse to appear like an authentic activist group, which the trolls went through great lengths to mimic. BlackMattersUS, which described itself as a “nonprofit news outlet that delivers raw and original information on the most urgent issues important to the African-American community in America,” even scraped real events planned by black activists and entrepreneurs across the country to repost on its event page, to the great surprise of the event organizers. One such event, the MLK Grande Parade in Houston, a large annual parade honoring Martin Luther King Jr., was advertised on the Russian troll site. “I think it’s a load of BS. My name is Charles—it’s not comrade,” Charles Stamps, who has organized the event since 1994, told me when I called him last fall and told him that BlackMattersUS was promoting his event. “I don’t appreciate it, and we certainly don’t want to be affiliated with it.” Russian trolls also concocted voter-suppression efforts that “were targeted almost exclusively at the Black community on Instagram and Facebook,” according to the New Knowledge report. This included memes, like one on Facebook that read “Do Not Vote for Oppressors” next to a drawing of Hillary Clinton and DonaldTrump holding hands. Another Instagram meme shared before the election by the account @woke_blacks read, “Want a quick lesson in racism & hypocrisy? Imagine in 08 if Obama had 5 children by 3 different women & was bragging about grabbing pussies,” next to the hashtag “#Boycot2016.”
This May, the House Intelligence Committee released a collection of about 3,500 Facebook and Instagram ads purchased by Russian trolls to attempt to sway the 2016 election. And it was more than a year ago, in October 2017, that executives from Twitter, Facebook, and Google first testified to Congress about Russian meddling on their platforms. Since then, the story has only become more complete—and more embarrassing for these powerful internet platforms, which hosted an enormous amount of inauthentic activity related to U.S. politics. We still don’t know how much it swung anything. That’s the thing with propaganda: It’s not obvious when it works. We have no clue how many Americans opted not to vote because of Russian voter-suppression efforts or troll campaigns that aimed to smear Hilary Clinton as a distrustful and ill candidate. But we do know that social media companies, even after testifying to Congress about the problem, have been either been underreporting the activity or not successfully looking. Yes, Facebook did set up a “war room” ahead of the 2018 elections and Twitter has gotten better at dismantling inauthentic accounts and bots—all of this with the help of thousands of content-moderation hires—but there’s still no clear legal requirement for these companies to do better, to keep a closer eye, to disclose political-ad buyers, or to be transparent about their cleanup efforts to the public.
With more information in its hands about how these companies built tools that allowed malicious state actors to walk through the front door and meddle with American political life, Congress has what it needs to start reining in these companies so that even after the public’s attention moves elsewhere, a repeat of 2016 isn’t possible. And yet: Google and Facebook spent record sums on lobbying this year, and as of yet there’s no single piece of legislation on the table to regulate these companies that Congress seems likely to rally behind—even as the reasons to take the threat of manipulative social media campaigns seriously keep piling up.
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Washington Took a Stand for Working Families. Other States Must Follow |
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Tuesday, 18 December 2018 09:20 |
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Marks writes: "Under the law, workers can take up to 18 weeks for combined family and medical paid leave a year and earn up to $1,000 a week (depending on their salary) for things such as the birth of a child, a serious illness or to care for a sick family member."
The new family leave benefits, which would go into effect in 2020, are among the most generous in the country. (photo: Alamy)
Washington Took a Stand for Working Families. Other States Must Follow
By Gene Marks, Guardian UK
18 December 18
Under Washington’s law, workers can take up to 18 weeks for combined family and medical paid leave a year – and some businesses are surprisingly behind it
 mployers in Washington state – regardless of their size – are preparing for a new paid family leave law that takes effect on 1 January.
The law requires almost all employers to collect and remit new premiums, and fulfill new reporting and notice requirements. Under the law, workers can take up to 18 weeks for combined family and medical paid leave a year and earn up to $1,000 a week (depending on their salary) for things such as the birth of a child, a serious illness or to care for a sick family member.
The benefits, which would go into effect in 2020, are among the most generous in the country.
The premiums are 0.4% of an employee’s wages (or $10 of a $2,500 paycheck) and can be split with employees funding up to 63% of the amount. Companies with fewer than 50 employees only have to collect and remit the employee portion. Self-employed workers and independent contractors are exempt.
“This program couldn’t come soon enough for Washington families,” Christina Pedersen, a mother and advocate for the law, wrote for HeraldNet. “It is long past time for the US to join the rest of the industrialized world in guaranteeing paid family and medical leave. But while we continue to advocate for a federal program, Washington state has taken a stand for working families.”
Over the past few years, many big companies have been responding to their employees’ demands for more comprehensive paid medical leave benefits. Bank of America, for example allows its employees to take up to 16 weeks of paid maternity, paternity and adoption leave. Other tech companies – from HP to Netflix – offer anywhere from 10 to 52 weeks off for similar time off, according to Recode.
But there’s also a growing trend of government getting involved.
To his credit, Donald Trump tried to include a federal program offering paid time off for new parents – funded through unemployment insurance – in his last budget proposal. But the measure saw little enthusiasm in Congress and was dropped. However, that hasn’t stopped action at the local level. States such as California, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York and the District of Columbia either have similar laws to what’s being enacted in Washington or have passed legislation that will soon be effective.
Of course, workers are behind the Washington bill. But – and maybe surprisingly – so are some business organizations.
It’s “relatively inexpensive for employers”, Bob Battles, government affairs director of the Association of Washington Business, told the Seattle Times. Battles’ group, according to the report, supports statewide business interests and was part of the negotiating team for rules surrounding the law. From an employer’s perspective, Battles is right. Let’s hope this is a trend. Programs like these can work if there both the business community and governments join to create something mutually acceptable.
I have witnessed many cases where employees at small business couldn’t afford to take extended periods of time off and their employers – not wanting to lose a good worker and desiring to the right thing – often have been forced to step up and provided financial assistance. In just about every case, the cost of doing so well exceeded the expense of a program like the one in Washington. A government-funded program may be an affordable solution that would help both employees and their employers offset these costs.
Unfortunately, there is one big drawback, and that’s the assumption of a well-run, properly administered government program. For some business owners I know, that may be asking a bit too much.
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Cabinet Warns Trump That Shutting Down Government Would Make It Harder to Steal From |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=9160"><span class="small">Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker</span></a>
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Monday, 17 December 2018 14:49 |
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Borowitz writes: "In a tense meeting on Monday, leading Cabinet members warned Donald J. Trump that shutting down the federal government would make it exponentially harder for them to steal from."
Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin. (photo: Alex Brandon/AP)
Cabinet Warns Trump That Shutting Down Government Would Make It Harder to Steal From
By Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
17 December 18
 The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report." 
n a tense meeting on Monday, leading Cabinet members warned Donald J. Trump that shutting down the federal government would make it exponentially harder for them to steal from.
Led by his Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, the Cabinet members begged Trump to prevent a government showdown that would bring their brazen spree of pillaging the nation’s coffers to a screeching halt.
“Mr. President, with the federal government up and running, I was able to take seven trips on military aircraft at a cost of eight hundred thousand dollars,” Mnuchin said. “I implore you, sir: don’t make me fly coach.”
Trump’s three oldest children, Ivanka, Eric, and Don, Jr., who have piled up impressive taxpayer-funded travel bills of their own, chimed in with an emotional plea to their father. “Daddy, please don’t make us stop plundering government money,” Ivanka said. “Not right before Christmas.”
The normally taciturn Housing and Urban Development Secretary, Ben Carson, also spoke up, warning that a government shutdown would make it impossible for him to accessorize his thirty-one-thousand-dollar dining-room set by purchasing seven-thousand-dollar place mats. “I’d really like those,” he said.
According to Kellyanne Conway, the counsellor to the President, the emotional Cabinet meeting had a profound impact on Trump. “For the first time he saw how a government shutdown would hurt people,” Conway said.
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he midterm elections were, to an important extent, a referendum on the Affordable Care Act; 
