We should get people vaccinated against Covid-19

We should get people vaccinated against Covid-19

(Photo by Ben Hasty/MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle via Getty Images)

The Trump administration left Joe Biden with what was, by all accounts, a shambles of a plan to actually administer vaccines to people. But the combination of time, attention, and professionalism sorted those problems out, and we are now in a situation where anyone who wants a vaccine can get one pretty easily.

Unfortunately, a decent slice of the population seems disinclined to get one.

And doubly unfortunately, the Biden administration seems to me to be taking a somewhat unfocused and scattershot approach to dealing with that reality.

The White House, I think, ought to take a gut check. Do they believe that vaccinating a huge share of Americans to obtain herd immunity and prevent future outbreaks is important? If they don’t, that’s fine. But then I think they owe it to the world to adopt a more GOP-like attitude toward the virus. We can just say, look, people who want a vaccine should take it and people who don’t can do what they want, and either way we’re opening things up. That’s not really what I think, and I don’t think it’s what Team Biden thinks either.

But if they want to get people vaccinated, it’s time for a reboot where we make sure that spurring more vaccinations is the top consideration when any agency is making decisions relevant to Covid. Everyone needs to stop, think about what they’re doing, and ask themselves “does doing it this way get more people or fewer people vaccinated?” Then they need to change what they’re doing to make sure we are getting the “more people” answer.

Increase vaccination payment rates

I got vaccinated by driving to a federally-run mass vaccination site in Baltimore, organized by FEMA and the National Guard, and hosted at the stadium where normally the Ravens play. That’s a great model for a scenario where demand for the vaccine outstrips supply, you want to centralize everything to minimize waste, and you don’t worry have to too much about inconveniencing people.

Now we’ve shifted to more of a retail paradigm where shots are available at pharmacies and other places that are convenient.

The vaccines are free to you, the patient, because they are covered by Medicare and Medicaid, and then Obamacare and the CARES Act mandate that insurers cover vaccines for free. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services seem to have a fair amount of discretion over the payment rates, and set one reimbursement schedule under Trump and then a slightly higher one under Biden. Biden should go back and have them further increase the payment rates to say that administrative reimbursements need to go up to compensate for the higher cost of marketing to the more reluctant population.

Right now, there is technically nothing stopping pharmacies from trying to gouge private insurers who are simply required to pay whatever it is that a vaccination costs. But basic common sense and a desire to avoid scandal and backlash have prevented pharmacies from charging high rates. And indeed, in practice pharmacies got off to a slow start in terms of actually giving out shots. There’s probably no way for the administration to just pay people to get vaccinated.

Twitter avatar for @ProfEmilyOster

But if the White House, HHS, Treasury, and CMS all work together with the pharmacy chains and the insurers, they should be able to create a situation where it’s worth the pharmacy chains’ while to get people their shots. That could involve giving them cash or gift cards. It could also involve things that the federal government just isn’t going to directly do, like paying Donald Trump to do vaccine endorsement ads.

Obviously, insurance companies won’t like any of this. But legally speaking, Biden has the power to make them swallow the costs. And it’s a fight worth having — the substance of vaccination is important and nobody likes insurance companies.

Make the vaccine mandatory

There’s obviously not going to be a national rule that everyone has to get a Covid vaccine.

But the maps of states that require an MMR or DTaP vaccine for kids to go to school are really boring because all 50 states require it.

This is a state rather than a federal issue. But we now have a vaccine authorized for use in kids as young as 12, and Pfizer is talking about getting authorization for kids as young as two by September. Biden’s Education Department can encourage states to add the Covid vaccine to their requirement list, and can also just flip to straightforwardly agreeing with Republicans about school openings, emphasizing that if teachers are worried about Covid, they should get vaccinated.

Over 100 colleges are already requiring Covid vaccinations, and university administrators tend to be the kind of people who care what Democratic Party presidents say, and Biden should encourage more to do that.

Biden can also clarify that while employers need to accommodate people with bona fide religious or medical reasons to avoid vaccination, requiring vaccination as a condition of employment is allowed. My guess is most employers won’t do that, but it’s common for healthcare facilities to require staff to get flu shots, and it would be reasonable to do the same for Covid shots.

“I hate to sound like I don’t care, but I really don’t,” one union rep told The Washington Post.

Well, I care whether cops die on the job and I also care whether they spread illness among the public. The International Association of Police Chiefs says it’s legal for departments to mandate vaccination, and blue states and cities should go forward with that. If the officers that are so brain-poisoned by right-wing politics that they won’t take a vaccine choose to resign, that’s not the worst thing either.

Last but by no means least, the military requires all kinds of vaccinations but has not yet made the Covid vaccine mandatory. I think that was a damaging decision. Vaccine refusal rates in the military appear to be high, and I’m honestly not surprised. Military officers order soldiers to take vaccines all the time. And they also order soldiers to do dangerous things all the time. Given the nature of the military setting, failure to mandate the vaccine signals some kind of profound lack of confidence. And I worry it could emanate out from the service members to their friends and family on the civilian side. If we want people vaccinated, we should require vaccination where plausible.

Substance over process

Now what people say about all this is the military “can’t” mandate a vaccine that’s only available under Emergency Use Authorization from the FDA. I’ve also heard that some public colleges and universities are worried about litigation here, though others say that’s nonsense. Certainly it’s not stopping Rutgers.

Be that as it may, I am not an attorney, so don’t take legal advice from me.

To me, the key thing is that Biden needs to set a substantive goal and then bend the process to that end. If we want people to take the vaccine, then either make exceptions to the rules that require full authorization or else get the full authorization done. It’s a bit absurd that we don’t have a nominee to run the FDA while we’re in the middle of a huge global public health crisis, but this issue is frankly too big to be left up to process-focused career civil servants. I’m not a doctor or a scientist, and neither is Biden.

But at a certain point, Biden needs to decide whether he trusts the scientific and medical advice he is being given. From everything I understand, the vaccines are safe and effective and people should be encouraged to take them. Biden also appears to have been told that and believes that it is true. It’s not his job as President of the United States to make the regulatory agencies believe as if they believe themselves on this subject.

Here’s an example. Remember earlier in the article when I wrote that Obamacare and the CARES Act mandate that insurers cover vaccines for free? Well the way this works is that the Affordable Care Act required private insurance to cover the cost of everything on the CDC’s official vaccination schedule. Now, it might seem to you that given that the CDC website is full of information urging you to get a Covid vaccine, the Covid vaccines would be on that vaccination schedule. But they aren’t! Why not? Don’t ask me, ask the CDC.

The good news is that the authors of the CARES Act were aware that the American public health agencies operate according to their own mysterious purposes and just slapped a “this also applies to Covid vaccines” clause into the relevant statute. That’s political leadership.

Align guidance with goals

Here’s the CDC’s current guidance on which activities are considered safe vs unsafe:

This, to me, is not the guidance that you give people if your policy goal is to encourage vaccinations. I would say that if you’re fully vaccinated, everything is extremely safe. And if you’re partially vaccinated, you should wear a mask and try to stay home as much as possible until you’re fully vaccinated. And if you’re not vaccinated at all, you should get vaccinated.

“How risky is it to get a haircut?” was a great question for October 2020. But if you’re vaccinated, you should get a haircut. If you’re a few weeks away from full vaccination, chill out and get a haircut when you’re vaccinated. If you’re not vaccinated, go get vaccinated. If you’re impatient to get a haircut as soon as possible, go get a J&J shot.

Similarly, this incredibly strict CDC guidance for summer camps is totally misaligned with the goal of encouraging vaccination. The guidelines should be:

Everyone who is age-appropriate and medically eligible should get vaccinated. Everyone younger should be free to play maskless if they wish.

Then let’s have a fun summer, which will be safe because of all the vaccinations.

A setting where everyone over 12 has been vaccinated is extremely unlikely to have any severe Covid cases. And if there are people over 12 who haven’t been vaccinated, the solution is to get them vaccinated, not to walk on eggshells around it.

Vaccinate America’s kids

The New York Times article about likely FDA approval of vaccinating teenagers contained this nugget that I thought was revelatory:

“I do think we need to have a national and global conversation about the ethics of our vaccinating kids, who are low risk for serious complications from the virus, when there aren’t enough vaccines in the world to protect high-risk adults from dying,” said Jennifer B. Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

Now Joe Biden is a politician. And he’s a pretty good one. He didn’t get where he is by telling mothers to deprioritize their children’s health in order to help foreigners. That’s not going to be the policy of his administration, nor would it be the policy of any administration.

He has to be aware, though, that many well-credentialed public health experts think that’s immoral. But those experts are conversely aware, of course, that “no American teens can get vaccinated until we’ve hit every person in the developing world over 50” is not a rule that will fly in the basic American political context. The experts will look at me ranting and raving about how the only CDC guidance about summer camps should be vaccinate the older kids and the staff and they’ll say “well, it wouldn’t actually be the worst thing in the world if a lot of Republicans decided not to vaccinate their children.”

To some extent they're right — you wouldn’t want to waste shots by mandating them for middle school and high school students next fall when we could be shipping that medicine to Indonesia. The problem is then those same people are going to point to the existence of continued Covid infections and millions of unvaccinated children as the reason various mandates and warnings need to stay in place.

It’s going to take real leadership to say, no, we are not going to do that. We are taking Covid seriously and our strategy to beat it is to vaccinate, and we are going to vaccinate everyone. Give Covax all the money in the world. Global vaccination should absolutely be the Biden administration’s number two priority — but that means pursuing it primarily by trying to boost vaccine production. The number one priority has to be pulling every lever possible to vaccinate as many Americans as possible.

Are Quakers oats good for weight loss?

 An easy way to start losing weight is by adding oatmeal to your diet. Whether you start eating it for breakfast, or even eat it for both breakfast and lunch, and then follow that up with a healthy dinner, oats can kick-start your weight loss journey. There are a few important reasons why oatmeal can be an important part of a healthy diet.

1. Oats provide important nutrients

The next first thing you might be thinking is, what about the carbs? It’s true, oatmeal has a decent amount of carbs. Although popular diets villainize carbs, there are actually certain types that are great for your health. The carbs in oatmeal are whole-grain carbs, which are good for you., because we need complex carbs for energy! It’s much easier to get the exercise you need in order to lose weight when your body feels good and has energy. Oats are such a great source of complex carbs and will help fuel your day.

Overindulge in simple carbs, like refined bread, sugar, or pasta is when carbs are unhealthy. When you choose oatmeal for weight loss, you’ll get plenty of complex carbs. However, make sure you don’t over sweeten your oatmeal with refined sugars because it could defeat the purpose of eating healthy. Try lightly sweetening your oatmeal with honey, maple syrup, and even fresh fruits.

Complex carbs aren’t the only nutrients that oats provide. In fact, oatmeal is a great source of many vitamins and minerals. Some of these vitamins and minerals include vitamins B1 and B5, manganese, phosphorus, and magnesium. Oats are also a great source of a couple of important antioxidants. One antioxidant group that’s predominantly found in oats are called avenanthramides. Studies show that avenanthramides have anti-itching and anti-inflammatory effects. As you make oatmeal a regular part of your diet, your body may start to feel healthier, helping you stay dedicated to weight loss.

2. Oatmeal Can Reduce Appetite:

Not only does oatmeal contain many important nutrients that will help you feel better about sticking to your new diet, but because oatmeal contains so many complex carbs, it’s a great source of dietary fiber. Fiber is an extremely important nutrient for weight loss because it takes longer to digest. This means that eating fiber helps you feel fuller longer, and reduces that overwhelming desire to snack.

Another benefit of fiber oatmeal? Oats actually contain a specific type of fiber called Beta-Glucan that’s essentially a superhero when it comes to reducing appetite. Beta-Glucan is a soluble fiber that turns into a paste in your digestive tract. This means it stays in your digestive system for a longer period of time than other foods. Not only does this keep you full longer, as all fiber does, but Beta-Glucan may also help control blood sugar levels, especially for those with diabetes. This in turn can help control cravings, meaning you may find it easier to eat less. One last benefit of Beta-Glucan? One study has shown that it may lead to increased production of PYY, a satiety hormone your body produces. In short, oatmeal can help you feel fuller longer so you aren’t tempted to eat unhealthy snacks or overindulge once hunger does set in.

3. Oatmeal can be eaten in so many different ways:

One reason so many people struggle with weight loss is that they shift to eating foods that are bland and unsatisfying. Because of its versatility, oatmeal is neither of these things! While you shouldn’t add a ton of sugar, there are plenty of other ways to change up the recipe and make your oatmeal delicious.

Try adding a small handful of nuts, like slivered almonds or chopped pecans. This will add protein and a crunch to your meal. Adding a spoonful of your favorite nut butter is another great way to up the protein content of your breakfast while changing up the flavor.

If you like your oatmeal sweet, skip the brown sugar and add a helping of your favorite fruit. You could even add applesauce or mashed banana if you really want to incorporate the sweetness into your oatmeal.

Now that you know that oatmeal is good for weight loss, you need to make sure you’re eating the right type of oatmeal to maximize its benefits.

New York Times says goodbye to 'op-eds' and hello to 'guest essays' -- but will it invite in the rest of America? | Press Watch

New York Times says goodbye to 'op-eds' and hello to 'guest essays' -- but will it invite in the rest of America? | Press Watch

May 6, 2021 9:16 am EDT

Changing a label, in and of itself, never solves anything. But the New York Times opinion section’s big announcement last week that “op-eds” will henceforth be known as “guest essays” is a fantastic and important move — if editors there are bold enough to take the next logical steps.

The result could be a brilliant reinvention of the intellectual public square, full of wonderfully diverse voices where the only barrier to entry is a willingness to argue in good faith. 

A space currently bounded by conventional establishment wisdom — occasionally breached by trolling — could instead expose the Times audience to the full range of national discourse, with all interesting, relevant and honestly argued viewpoints welcome.

This of course is a best-case scenario. It depends on Times opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury and her new deputy Patrick Healy (fresh from overseeing the Times’s deeply flawed politics coverage) openly recognizing the error of their previous ways. 

While that might seem almost inconceivable, they do take their marching orders from publisher A.G. Sulzberger, who, at an all-hands staff meeting after he fired Kingsbury’s predecessor James Bennet back in June, bluntly expressed his view that the op-ed format was broken. “I think there’s a structural problem with the form itself,” he said. 

So how does this reinvention begin with a label change? Let me explain.

The term “op-ed” was antiquated, opaque and, most importantly, ambiguous. Although the “op-ed” designation was ostensibly intended (since its coinage 50 years ago) to provide views distinct from those of the Times itself — with its essays placed “opposite” the editorial page — the presence of the Times’s own staff “op-ed columnists” muddled the message, effectively giving anything that ran there the imprimatur of the Times.

As University of Maine journalism professor Michael Socolow, who has traced the history of the Time op-ed page, explains: “For many Times readers (and even employees), the page looks like a unified platform or singularly powerful megaphone, and therefore anyone given access must be pre-approved and judged endorsement-worthy.”

So while the Times opinion section was publicly committed to a tolerance for “different views,” it was effectively a space defined by its columnists, who ranged all the way from upper-class center-left to upper-class center-right. Of late, center-right extended to include climate skepticism and anti-Arab racism but not Trumpism. Center-left stopped well short of anti-capitalism. And the voices of the marginalized were off the page almost entirely. 

Now, with the “guest essays” label putting non-staff writing clearly at arm’s length, the original mission of the op-ed feels attainable. 

Quality control, not opinion control

That would mean an actual diversity of views, not just from across the traditional political spectrum, but across other spectra as well. Kingsbury vowed precisely that in an interview on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” on Sunday, saying: “We want to publish a wide range of opinions, arguments, ideas, whether it’s across the left-right spectrum, but as most Americans, you know, really looking far beyond that spectrum.”

She also said, “We can’t be afraid to hear out and interrogate all ideas, especially bad ones, because in my opinion, that’s the most effective way to knock them down.”

CNN’s Brian Stelter recognized that as a powerful principle: “So, read it, challenge it, rebut it. That’s the opposite of cancel culture, isn’t it?”

“Exactly,” Kingsbury said.

There are still some things that guest essayists shouldn’t be allowed to do on the pages of the New York Times — chief among them inciting violence and advocating genocide. But beyond that, if a view is held by a politically significant portion of the American electorate, it deserves to be part of the mix.

That means explicitly welcoming anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist and pro-Arab arguments that have historically been shunned, as well as writers who are younger, more diverse, less credentialed and less fortunate. 

And especially now, the political right has a lot of explaining to do. With the Republican Party unmoored from reality, actively nativist and anti-science, it’s crucial that people who speak for it be invited to at least attempt to articulate what their actual views are and how they arrived at them. 

The key for the Times opinion section going forward should be quality control, not opinion control. There should be a near-zero tolerance for bad-faith arguments — those that rely on false statement, hyperbole, unfair descriptions of competing views, absurd straw men, logical fallacies and trolling. But as long as the arguments are honest, I think almost anything goes. 

That would be a huge ratcheting up of standards from those the Times opinion page currently applies, which mostly rely on the quaint notion of “fact-checking,” which is both anemic and insufficient. 

Not every publication could pull this off — in fact, maybe not any publication other than than the Times — but did you know that nearly 150 people work in its opinion section?

This is where editors come in.

Here’s what Sewell Chan, the editorial page editor of the Los Angeles Times — and a former deputy opinion editor at the New York Times — had to say in a recent panel discussion, which I think was dead-on:

Instead of thinking about “Are some ideas acceptable or not acceptable?” … what I think we’re more likely to be encountered with are ideas that are provocative or challenging or difficult or controversial. And our job as editors is to help the writer — whether we personally agree or not is not relevant — our job is to help the writer adduce evidence to make the strongest possible logical and persuasive case. But it ultimately has to be a case that is grounded in logic, persuasion and evidence. And if we do that, I actually think a lot of ideas that are provocative or difficult can enter the discourse. And yes, they’ll provoke people or upset people. But we’ve done our duty as opinion editors because we’ve at least exposed our readers to the broad range of views throughout. 

Practically speaking, helping some writers meet those standards will be hard, if not impossible — especially for essayists who are at heart advocating such things as nativism or Christian supremacy, but are accustomed to launching their arguments by denying any such thing.

And it may be impossible for Republicans to honestly address the most important question of the moment: Why they continue to engage in the Big Lie (and so many smaller ones).

But then they’ve opted out; they haven’t been silenced. If they complain about being canceled, just turn over the email chain.

Imagine if a process like this had been in place when Sen. Tom Cotton wrote an op-ed last June full of slippery and dishonest arguments attempting to incite the violent dispersal of Black Lives Matter protesters. Rather than getting published — and then retracted, but only after a newsroom revolt that ended Jim Bennet’s career — it would have been either edited into an honest expression of Cotton’s objection to BLM protests or, more likely, spiked.

Who is this person and why did we invite them?

As part of the “redesign” of Opinion, New York Times lead product designer Dalit Shalom promised a “second important editorial change”: “a more detailed bio about the author whose opinion we are sharing.”

Adopting a “dinner party metaphor,” the designer wrote that “this kind of intentional introduction can be seen as a toast, providing context, clarity and relevance around who someone is and why we chose them to write an essay.”

There’s been no sign of any such thing thus far. Bios remain a couple or three lines long, offering little more than institutional affiliations.

But increased transparency is an essential part of the way forward, as I argued immediately after Bennet’s ouster. Firstly, it would fix the longstanding problem caused by the wildly insufficient identification of opinion writers’ sometimes spectacular conflicts of interests.

Beyond that, it would provide readers with valuable context: Why was this person invited to offer a guest essay in the first place? What do they bring to the table? 

In some cases, that could even include a warning: an advisory that the views expressed are potentially highly offensive to those who share the Times editorial board’s devotion to “progress, fairness and shared humanity,” but nevertheless are an important part of the national discourse, and that this writer has been judged to be making their argument in good faith.

That distancing — combined with an honest and defensible reason for publishing — would make it much harder for the Times to amplify something like the Cotton piece, whose only value was to allow the Times to brag that is publishes views from “both sides.” 

But let’s be clear: The publishing of performative garbage has not stopped under Kingsbury. When right-wing icon Rush Limbaugh died in February, Kingsbury understandably wanted to showcase a variety of writers, each with “a distinctive and authoritative point of view on Limbaugh’s legacy.” 

(The essay from feminist Jill Filipovic – “Cracking open his slobbering hatred of women allows insight into his success, as well as the perversion of the party he championed,” she wrote — was one of the sharpest pieces of opinion journalism I’ve read all year.) 

But for the fan-boy view, Kingsbury picked Ben Shapiro, the hard-right provocateur well known for his bad-faith arguments. 

In an essay explaining her thinking, Kingsbury acknowledged Shapiro’s “trollish online presence and, to me, unpalatable views.” But she defended her selection by calling him “popular” on the right and “well positioned to carry Limbaugh’s message to a new generation of listeners.”

What Shapiro turned in, predictably, was a stream of offensive, valueless liberal-eye-poking that praised Limbaugh for “fighting back against the predations of a left that seeks institutional and cultural hegemony.”

As political journalist Mehdi Hasan tweeted, Shapiro was allowed to write about Limbaugh, in the New York Times, without having to “mention or grapple with” Limbaugh’s record of misogyny and bigotry. 

There might have been some value in hearing Shapiro honestly address Limbaugh’s darkness — and apparently, the Times editors actually asked him to. In a podcast a few days later, after Megyn Kelly mockingly quoted Hasan’s tweet, Shapiro replied that the Times’ editors “wanted me to do some of that stuff too.” But, he said, “I’m not gonna do that.”

Kingsbury published his piece anyway. She shouldn’t have.

How to expand the range

Ironically, considering what a debacle that was, Kingsbury’s concept of featuring a variety of voices on a particular topic should be one of the ways the Times starts to diversify its guest essays going forward — with the ever-present requirement that they actually have something of value to offer, and do so without deceit. 

Another good move would be to encourage writers to respond to what they’ve read in the opinion pages, something explicitly discouraged in the current guidelines, which relegate such responses to the Letters page.   

When someone like author Heather McGhee writes something as mind-blowing as her Feb. 13 op-ed about how white people turned the U.S. economy into a zero-sum game after the civil rights movement, that’s an occasion to host a multiplicity of views. Admittedly, in this case, Times columnist Michelle Goldberg proceeded to write about it and Times podcaster Ezra Klein interviewed McGhee — but why not get responses from people who have watched this process play out, and for that matter people who defend it?

Immigration policy is a hugely important, complicated and nuanced issue that would benefit from an intelligent debate. Some issues, like voting rights, have only one defensible view, but the opinion page should try to find someone on the opposing side who will be honest about their goals, at least.

I’d like to see open discussion about media narratives and framing. Should the behavior of the Republican Party continue to be normalized by political reporters, no matter how extreme it is? At what point do you declare a politician, or a party, presumptively untrustworthy?

The opinion pages should also address fundamental underlying issues that rarely make it into daily journalism despite their significance in day-to-day life, like wealth inequality, educational inequality, misogyny and the corrupting lure of money. 

Professional writers aren’t the only people with opinions. So the Times’s guests should include non-writers. People living incarcerated lives. People living in poverty. The undereducated. Revive the “as told to” format, if necessary. Washington Post reporter Eli Zaslow’s Voices from the Pandemic series reminded us of its incredible power.

The ubiquity of both cell-phone video and Zoom conferences suggests new ways of presenting the voices of real people. 

It’s quite possible that only the Times, with its huge opinion staff, could do this right. As I wrote last year, the major investment Bennet made in investigative reporting projects for the opinion section — which seems redundant to me — could be better used finding and raising up underrepresented voices, especially those of oppressed people.

As Sewell Chan has said, “people’s authentic lived experiences” are “often as important a form of authority as traditional research scholarship.”  

The key, of course, is not just to look for soundbites that fit a predetermined narrative (an unfortunate hallmark of Kingsbury’s new deputy, the aforementioned Patrick Healy). The key is to find people who lead representative lives and get them to honestly express not just what their views are, but how they came to hold them. 

In her essay explaining the opinion redesign, Kingsbury hearkened back to the original goals of the op-ed section — “the allure of clashing opinions well expressed” — and vowed to host a space “where voices can be heard and respected, where ideas can linger a while, be given serious consideration, interrogated and then flourish or perish.”

I wish her godspeed. But doing that will depend on her recognizing how much more there is to do than change a label.

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Yes, Facebook’s Oversight Board upheld Trump’s suspension. But here’s the bigger issue.

Yes, Facebook’s Oversight Board upheld Trump’s suspension. But here’s the bigger issue.

Washington Post

By Nathaniel Persily

May 7, 2021 at 1:00 a.m. GMT+9

What does the decision tell us about how Facebook’s unique and novel institution will shape online speech?

Then-GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump is seen on a television screen during the first Republican presidential debate at Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland on Aug. 6, 2015. (Bloomberg)

On Wednesday, the Facebook Oversight Board issued its much-anticipated decision concerning the suspension of Donald Trump’s account. Basing its decision on international human rights standards, the board decided to uphold the suspension — but required Facebook to revisit its decision in six months to see if the emergency conditions that led to the account removal still exist. Of course, the decision is important for the future of speech online, but it also sets a precedent for this unique experiment in institutional design.

The decision is important. The process is more so.

Most observers will stop at the headline decision: Board upholds Trump suspension. But how the board reached its decision and reconceived its powers and jurisdiction deserves greater attention. Originally, the board was conceived to issue up-or-down decisions, approving or denying Facebook takedowns. But now the board has set a precedent by giving itself a new kind of remand power, effectively telling Facebook, “Okay for now, but come back to us in six months to justify yourself again.”

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It’s anyone’s guess as to whether and how it intends this rule to apply to account takedowns more generally. Facebook takes down over 4 billion accounts per year, almost all for violating its spam rules but many others for violating community guidelines regarding hate speech, obscenity and other harmful content.

The board also provided information on its dialogue with Facebook over the Trump case, explaining what it asked Facebook and what Facebook refused to provide. Facebook declined to answer seven of 46 questions, justifying its refusals in terms of privacy, relevance, attorney-client privilege and other considerations. Those unanswered questions related to its news-feed algorithm, its impact on the Jan. 6 insurrection, its contacts with government officials and the impact of the suspension on advertising.

This back and forth with the principal party to a case is quite different from how a court of law operates. It’s important, because it sets the ground rules for the board’s relationship with Facebook going forward. The reasons that Facebook offers for declining to cooperate will affect its behavior and that of the board. What’s more, now Facebook knows the board will report its nonanswers. We do not know Facebook’s actual answers to the questions posed to it, although we now have the public comments the board received, totaling over 9,000.

The board relies on international human rights

The most important aspect of the board’s adjudication of the Trump takedown was its reliance on international human rights law to guide its decision. The board’s earlier decisions also referred to applicable United Nations Conventions and treaties, as does the charter that established the board in the first place. In many respects, the Oversight Board is a first step toward realizing human rights’ defenders long-standing dream of a world court with transnational jurisdiction.

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However, it’s hard for Facebook to implement human rights principles that were designed to bind governments, rather than to guide a private company trying to moderate content. Facebook is not a government; its news feed, which uses algorithms to deliver personalized content to billions of people, is not the public square. Facebook is in the business of what constitutional lawyers call “prior restraints” — that is, filtering speech before it reaches its audience. Its rules on hate speech, obscenity, self-harm and disinformation, to name a few, would all be unconstitutional under the First Amendment if passed by the U.S. government.

For example, an earlier Oversight Board decision ordered Facebook to reinstate a breast cancer educational video temporarily taken down under the firm’s nudity ban. Legislation that banned such videos from being published would violate both First Amendment and international human rights principles. The community standards of a social media platform present a different set of concerns, however. If Facebook filters nude pictures, it may sweep away some valuable speech, but the Internet offers no shortage of places to view the naked body. Furthermore, platform speech policies need to be applied at scale across the world by a company that has to rely on algorithmic filters and an inherently short-staffed team of content moderators in real time. These are not the conditions under which national constitutions and international human rights principles were designed to operate.

However, human rights law has a natural place when it comes to Facebook’s confrontations with governments around the world, where it can act as a sword as well as a shield. The Indian government is ordering takedowns of content and accounts criticizing the government’s coronavirus response. There, as elsewhere, Facebook could object to these enforcement actions on human rights grounds. (Notably, legally ordered takedowns are outside the Oversight Board’s jurisdiction, according to its charter.)

The Oversight Board does refer to an emerging body of U.N.-sponsored guiding principles on business and human rights. They take this guidance to suggest that just as a company should respect the rights of workers and consumers and consider the firm’s impact on the environment, so should a social media platform consider the harms it is causing or permitting. These principles are unobjectionable, as far as they go, but they do not answer the questions posed in the Trump case or any of the previous ones. It is at best unclear what they would say about whether Facebook should allow Holocaust denial, self-harm videos, or campaign-sponsored disinformation on its platform.

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In the end, the board itself will decide the meaning of human rights law in these concrete circumstances. While it is making up the rules as it goes along, and has tried to kick the difficult decision over the Trump ban back to Facebook itself, it cannot escape that responsibility. Until and unless governments take on the responsibility that Facebook has delegated to the Oversight Board, this unique and novel institution will play a significant role in shaping online free speech.

Nathaniel Persily (@Persily) is the James B. McClatchy Professor at Stanford Law School and co-director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center.

Elise Stefanik is a perfect leader of today’s GOP. Her own statements show why.

Elise Stefanik is a perfect leader of today’s GOP. Her own statements show why.

Washington Post 

Opinion by 

Greg Sargent

Columnist

May 7, 2021 at 12:17 a.m. GMT+9

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.). (Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)

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With Republicans preparing to oust Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming from the House GOP leadership and replace her with Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, reporters have been digging up past Stefanik statements displaying her true credentials as a Republican leader of the future.

Those credentials, most obviously, are her unwavering loyalty to Donald Trump and to his Big Lie about the stolen 2020 election. But another crucial credential, one getting less attention, is Stefanik’s willingness to deceive her own constituents to justify taking official action to invalidate legitimate election results.

Just before voting to object to President Biden’s electors on Jan. 6, Stefanik released a lengthy statement faithfully echoing numerous Trumpian lies about the election, included flatly debunked nonsense about 140,000 unauthorized votes in Georgia.

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This showed Stefanik embracing Trump and his lies more directly than many other Republicans, who carefully couched votes against Biden electors behind procedural objections. As Josh Marshall notes, this is a big reason Stefanik is a rising GOP star.

But what came next is also important. A few days after the insurrectionist mob attack on the Capitol, Stefanik came under fire for feeding the lies that incited the violence. She defended herself to a local news outlet.

“President-elect Biden was certified,” Stefanik told WCAX. “But that debate was important for the American people to hear.”

In other words, Stefanik said, she did the right thing in objecting to Biden’s electors, because it drew attention to problems with the election that Americans deserved to learn about. Those problems didn’t actually exist, of course, but Stefanik herself also amplified them.

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It’s important to understand that this isn’t mere after-the-fact spin. Rather, it’s an explicit declaration of liberation on the part of the speaker to deceive voters with falsehoods about legitimate election results, for the express purpose of justifying official action to overturn those results.

The pro-Trump sweet spot

Similarly, just after the violence at the Capitol, Stefanik explained her vote against Biden electors. On the House floor, she again echoed the same widely debunked claims, insisting that “tens of millions of Americans are concerned” about them and deserved to hear them debated.

This sort of phony piety is the sweet spot for Republicans who want to stand out from their colleagues in terms of appealing to the Trumpist base and getting plaudits from pro-Trump media, while retaining a veneer of respectability in the process.

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This continues today. The claim of these Republicans is that, in objecting to Biden electors, they were merely creating an outlet for people’s concerns about the election. How heroically public-spirited of them!

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), one of the slimiest practitioners of this disingenuous game, has repeatedly defended his lead role in undermining Biden electors by claiming he was merely representing his constituents’ worries about the election’s dubious outcome.

Of course, the concerns are entirely baseless, and people such as Stefanik and Hawley themselves fed those concerns relentlessly. It’s absurd to portray this as an act of public-spirited representation of constituents. Instead, these officials used their official stature to actively deceive them.

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Nor do Republicans seeking this sweet spot admit that the lies about the election (which they themselves fed) inspired the insurrection. In an interview with WWNY, Stefanik condemned the violence but declined to blame Trump for it, insisting he had not “encouraged” it.

Stefanik endorses Arizona recount

It gets worse. Stefanik just endorsed a GOP recount underway of votes in Arizona. This recount is being conducted by people who have already spread lies about the election, which means it is designed to create more fake fodder to undermine confidence in the 2020 outcome.

It’s bad that Stefanik’s fealty to Trump and his lies is among the things qualifying her to replace Cheney. But it’s perhaps more alarming that Stefanik is seen as so qualified, despite — or perhaps because of — her willingness to deceive countless voters about legitimate election results to manufacture justification for action to overturn them.

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It’s often said that GOP voters believe the election was stolen from them. But there’s a reason for this: Their elites relentlessly told them so. They had a “firehose of falsehoods blasted into their brains for months on end," as Sean Illing memorably notes.

Worse, those elites have cited those same public beliefs to justify taking action to invalidate legitimate results. And since then, they’ve kept telling their voters that they’re right to suspect something was amiss about the outcome, to justify voter suppression across the country.

Undermining democracy

All this official misconduct further undermines democratic stability. As Laura Field says, such deception has very high stakes, because it “undercuts citizens’ rational faculties” and creates distrust that “destroys the very possibility of liberal democracy.”

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I’ve argued that the real problem with the Cheney situation isn’t just that Republicans are punishing her for denouncing Trump and the Big Lie. It’s also that they’re excommunicating Cheney amid her demand that Republicans fully commit to respecting democratic outcomes going forward.

That Republicans are punishing this, of all things, suggests they might be pushing us toward an eventual breakdown. The elevation of Stefanik, who’s among the most determined in the House GOP caucus when it comes to deceiving voters about the legitimacy of our electoral system, should only fuel those fears.

Read more:

Sorry, Tucker Carlson. Polling suggests your anti-vax campaign is failing.

Sorry, Tucker Carlson. Polling suggests your anti-vax campaign is failing.

Washington Post

Opinion by 

Paul Waldman

Columnist

May 7, 2021 at 4:20 a.m. GMT+9

Fox News host Tucker Carlson. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)

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It was no easy task for Fox News host Tucker Carlson to outdo himself, but he did this week, when he unleashed the latest of many rants meant to discourage people from getting vaccinated for covid-19 (which he always frames as “just asking questions”). In his latest, Carlson tried to convince his viewers that thousands of people are dying because of the vaccine.

But at least some evidence shows that his efforts are failing. While we have a good way to go in convincing those yet unwilling to get vaccinated, their numbers are shrinking — even among Republicans, some of the most recalcitrant resisters.

Carlson, the top-rated host on cable news with about 3 million viewers a night, has found his new calling in raising doubts about the vaccines. His latest technique is to frighten his audience by telling them that thousands of people have died after taking the vaccine. Terrifying! He went on:

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Some people say, “Well, it’s just a coincidence if someone gets a shot and then dies, possibly from other causes.” No one really knows, is the truth. We spoke to one physician today who actively treats covid patients. He described what we are seeing now as the single deadliest mass vaccination event in modern history. Whatever is causing it, it is happening as we speak.

It’s true that thousands of people have died after taking the vaccine. Of course they have.

Since nearly 150 million Americans have received at least one dose and around 8,000 Americans die every day of various causes, if thousands of people hadn’t died after taking the vaccine, it would be just about the most stunning medical news in human history.

It would mean the vaccines prevent people from dying not just of covid, but also from heart disease, cancer, strokes, Alzheimer’s, food poisoning, car accidents, drowning, gun violence and getting sucked into combines. That would be some vaccine.

It does make one curious about whether Carlson himself has been vaccinated. Is this just a line he feeds the rubes, or is he willing to put himself and his loved ones at risk? As far as I can tell, he hasn’t said.

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Given Carlson’s relentless anti-vaccine propaganda — and similar statements coming from many others on the right — it is perhaps unsurprising that one of the groups expressing the greatest reluctance to take the vaccine is Republicans.

But as new polling from the Kaiser Family Foundation shows, their resistance is weakening:

Eight in ten Democrats say they’ve already gotten at least one dose of the vaccine or will get it as soon as possible, virtually unchanged from the share who said so last month (79%). Increasing enthusiasm among independents may also be slowing down, with six in ten (59%) now saying they’ve gotten at least one dose or will do so as soon as they can, similar to the 57% who said so in March.

While the growth in vaccine enthusiasm appears to have slowed among independents and Democrats, it has continued to increase among Republicans, with a majority (55%) now saying they have either received at least one dose of the vaccine or intend to do so as soon as possible. One in five Republicans (20%) say they will “definitely not” get vaccinated, down from 29% last month but still substantially larger than the share among independents (13% and Democrats (4%).

That’s still far too high, of course, and it threatens our ability to reach herd immunity. But things are moving in the right direction. And while there are many reasons a person might be hesitant to get the vaccine (some more reasonable than others), it offers some reason to hope that this resistance can be at least partially overcome.

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Unfortunately, even outside the realm of the real crazies saying that the vaccine includes a microchip that will allow Bill Gates to track your movements (as though Google and Apple aren’t already tracking them!), there are many people who still see it in their interest to politicize vaccines.

For instance, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) recently issued an order barring private businesses from requiring proof of vaccination. While DeSantis says people should get vaccinated, he was essentially joining another battle in the larger war over covid. It’s especially problematic because while government can’t force people to be vaccinated, if there were benefits available only to those who had been — eating in your favorite restaurant, going to a ballgame — it would provide a powerful incentive for more people to roll up their sleeves. That’s what will save lives and help us get back to normal as quickly as possible.

Meanwhile, Republicans across the country are fighting against anything that resembles “vaccine passports.” Wisconsin Republicans passed bills barring private businesses from requiring proof of vaccination. Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas signed a law preventing the state and local governments from requiring vaccination to access services or get a job. Montana Republicans passed a law banning employers — even hospitals — from requiring employees to be vaccinated.

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And in Michigan, GOP lawmakers are inviting conspiracy theorists to testify and considering at least one bill that could outlaw even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention card you get at your vaccination.

In other words, plenty of conservatives out there — some cynical, some nutty — want to keep vaccines as politicized as possible. But the trends at least suggest that the more people get vaccinated and the closer we get to normalcy, the more marginalized they may become.

In a few weeks, Carlson himself may decide that some other topic is more fruitful for fearmongering and forget all about his anti-vaccine campaign. Let’s hope so.

Read more:

Facebook’s oversight board whiffed. Trump deserves a permanent exile.

Facebook’s oversight board whiffed. Trump deserves a permanent exile.

Washington Post

By 

Margaret Sullivan

Media columnist

May 6, 2021 at 5:20 a.m. GMT+9

Trump abused his Facebook account hundreds of times, yet the company’s watchdog board claims his suspension was inappropriate. (Olivier Douliery/AFP/Getty Images)

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It was not a close call in January to suspend him indefinitely from the world’s largest social media platform, with nearly 3 billion user accounts. The insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6 made that obvious.

And it should not have been a close call — or anything to agonize about — for Facebook to keep him off the platform permanently.

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But agonize is apparently what the Facebook Oversight Board did, according to the weak-kneed decision the company’s quasi-independent watchdog announced Wednesday morning, after weeks spent mulling whether Trump’s punishment was appropriate. The board faulted Facebook for suspending Trump indefinitely, without clear criteria for when and whether he would return. But it also left the ban in place and told leadership to reevaluate it within six months.

“This verdict is a desperate attempt to have it both ways,” responded a London-based group of academics and advocates that calls itself the Real Facebook Oversight Board.

“Facebook knew what needed to be done all along,” charged Angelo Carusone, president of the left-leaning group Media Matters for America, which analyzed Trump’s posts, determining that about a quarter of them spread misinformation from the start of 2020 to this past Jan. 6.

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Last July, for example, Trump posted that U.S. deaths from the coronavirus were “just about the lowest in the world,” and that they were “way down, a tenfold decrease” from the height of the pandemic. In fact, the country was just entering a deadly summer surge of infections.

Last spring, he used Facebook to defend his horrendous comments about civil rights protests that followed the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

And on New Year’s Day, Trump’s Facebook posts called on his followers to “stop the steal” and promoted the “BIG protest rally in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6.”

Facebook finally suspended his account when that rally provoked a deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol.

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Too little, too late. And yet, according to the oversight board’s non-decision Wednesday, somehow also too far.

“It was not appropriate for Facebook to impose an ‘indefinite’ suspension,” the board wrote. “It is not permissible for Facebook to keep a user off the platform for an undefined period, with no criteria for when or whether the account will be restored.” It’s the sort of technical hairsplitting that might be appropriate if the user in question were a foul-mouthed teenager, not a world leader whose words were getting people killed.

The board is well-intentioned, I have no doubt. Starting last fall, this “Supreme Court of Facebook” began to make binding content-moderation decisions — for instance, to remove or not remove a particular post — that come their way after the company’s internal review process has run its course. Its members are an impressive lot, including Alan Rusbridger, former editor of the Guardian newspaper, and Helle Thorning-Schmit, the former prime minister of Denmark.

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They are understandably concerned about the complex interplay between free-speech issues and public welfare.

So it doesn’t surprise me that some admirable champions of the First Amendment cheered the board’s move, which does, after all, keep Trump off Facebook for now.

“The board’s ruling is thoughtful and persuasive,” said Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute, praising not only the main ruling but also the board’s directive that Facebook investigate its own role in amplifying Trump’s dangerous speech and contributing to the events of Jan. 6.

I suspect this will work about as well as assigning the fox to investigate his role in the bloody trail of feathers outside the henhouse.

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What was called for here was a clear, unambiguous message: That a hugely influential public official — arguably the most powerful person in the world — can’t use Facebook to endanger the public welfare. And once he does just that, hundreds of times, he can’t come back.

What’s more, we already have solid indications that Facebook’s “not appropriate” suspension did society a lot of good.

Online misinformation about election fraud plummeted by 73 percent the week after various social media sites — particularly Twitter — banned Trump from their platforms in January, a research firm found.

Here’s the real problem: The oversight board was a flawed idea from the start. As tech journalist and Recode founder Kara Swisher put it, its members were charged with the impossible — “trying to push back the ocean with one hand.”

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Such self-regulation “is an excellent way to appear to promote particular values and keep scrutiny and regulation to a minimum,” University of Virginia media studies professor Siva Vaidhyanathan observed last year.

At its core, the board is a high-priced fig leaf meant to avoid real accountability. Mission accomplished.

(Correction: An earlier version of this column reported that former president Donald Trump wrote more than 1,400 Facebook posts on Jan. 1, 2020, and Jan. 6, 2021, instead of between those dates. The version has been corrected.)

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For more by Margaret Sullivan visit wapo.st/sullivan