covid – Techdirt (original) (raw)

In The Vax Wars, RFK Jr. Predictably Wields Misinformation As A Weapon

from the down-with-the-sickness dept

The second most frustrating aspect of RFK Jr.’s performance as the head of Health and Human Services has been just how predictable the actions he’s taken are. When you start with a simple premise, that Kennedy is a vehement anti-vaxxer, the view that measles is less harmful than the MMR vaccine makes sense. The appointment of other wellness charlatans tracks perfectly. The pulling back on COVID vaccination guidance fits like a puzzle piece. And it should be no surprise that Kennedy decided to fire every single vaccine expert on the ACIP panel to clear the way for his anti-vaxxer views.

But really, truly, the most frustrating part of his reign thus far has been Congress’ complete unwillingness to end this era of malfunction, or in any way attempt to control it. From Kennedy’s nomination hearings all the way to the present, our representatives in Washington have sat back, arms folded, completely disinterested in the very real harm and, yes, deaths that are and will occur due to Kennedy’s incompetence.

But, god damn it, I have to believe that Congress at least might have a problem being lied to directly by Kennedy. And that appears to be what he did when he sent a report to back up his changing of the COVID vaccine guidance. The report is reportedly filled with studies that are either unpublished, under current dispute, or which don’t actually say what he says they say. Misinformation, in other words, fed directly by the HHS Secretary to a Congress that is supposed to oversee his work.

Titled “Covid Recommendation FAQ”, the document has not been posted on the HHS website, though it is the first detailed explanation of Kennedy’s announcement from the agency. Medical experts who reviewed all the citations in the FAQ said it distorts some legitimate studies and cites others that are disputed and unpublished.

One of the studies the HHS document cites is under investigation by its publisher, Sage Journals, regarding “potential issues with the research methodology and conclusions and author conflicts of interest,” according to a link on the study’s webpage.

“This is RFK Jr.’s playbook,” said Dr. Sean O’Leary, chair of the Committee on Infectious Diseases for the American Academy of Pediatrics and an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. “Either cherry-pick from good science or take junk science to support his premise — this has been his playbook for 20 years.”

To that end, there are more issues with the research and studies powering this document of bullshit. Rather than just published studies that are under current dispute, some of the studies cited haven’t even been published yet. That means no peer review. Kennedy has been quite fond recently of the phrase “gold standard science”, as though he just learned it. He doesn’t seem to know what it means, however. Peer reviewed studies are the gold standard in science and medical research, for what should be painfully obviously reasons. Even the NIH’s own site acknowledges this. If your research or paper cannot survive the scrutiny of your peers, how good can it really be?

Other studies, including unpublished studies, are cited in support of the CDC’s new guidance despite those studies explicitly stating that they should not be.

Another study cited in the document is a preprint that was made available online a year ago, and has still not been published in a peer-reviewed journal. Under the study’s title is an alert that “it reports new medical research that has yet to be evaluated and so should not be used to guide clinical practice.”

The FAQ draws on the preprint to claim that “post-marketing studies” of COVID vaccines have identified “serious adverse effects, such as an increased risk of myocarditis and pericarditis” — conditions in which the heart’s muscle or its covering, the pericardium, suffer inflammation.

While research early in the pandemic did find that, new research not included in the memo indicates that the risk has fallen with new vaccine protocols.

More cherry picking, it seems, along with a complete disregard for the very researchers that performed the research as to how it is used. Kennedy recently claimed his HHS would follow the science and scientists wherever the data leads. He is not, because it doesn’t conform to his agenda.

And then there are the bald-faced lies.

In two instances, the HHS memo makes claims about dangers to pregnant women that are actively refuted by the papers it cites to back them up. Both papers support the safety and effectiveness of COVID vaccines for pregnant women.

The HHS document says that another paper it cites found “an increase in placental blood clotting in pregnant mothers who took the vaccine.” But the paper doesn’t contain any reference to placental blood clots or to pregnant women.

“I’ve now read it three times. And I cannot find that anywhere,” said Turrentine, the OB-GYN professor.

If he were grading the HHS document, “I would give this an ‘F,'” Turrentine said. “This is not supported by anything and it’s not using medical evidence.”

Folks, there ought to be zero instances of our government operating on lies when it comes to creating policy. But that’s all this is. An agenda-driven madman heading up HHS changing policy and programs with a wave of a hand to comport with his misguided agenda, all while it’s being supported by either AI-generated slop or whatever the hell this FAQ-of-lies is.

So, to members of Congress on one side of the political aisle, I merely ask this: have you no pride? You’re okay with being spoon-fed lies from a former democrat simply because Dear Leader says so? You’re okay with having blood on your hands as a result of your inability to do your job performing oversight? You’re okay with being the useful idiot in Kennedy’s agenda?

Filed Under: cdc, covid, data, disinformation, fake studies, guidance, health and human services, misinformation, rfk jr., vaccines

RFK Jr. Re-Staffs ACIP With Half As Many Experts But Infinitely More Anti-Vaxx Crackpots

from the promises-made-promises-broken dept

Mere days ago, and only a few weeks out from a meeting in Atlanta to discuss immunization policy and vaccination recommendations, we talked about the batshit move by RFK Jr. to fully wipe out and fire the entirety of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), an immunization advisory panel. All 17 members of the panel were given their walking papers, effective immediately, leaving a gaping hole in American healthcare when it comes to vaccination policies. ACIP recommendations aren’t always adopted by the CDC and HHS, though deviations from them have historically been rare. Those recommendations typically result in adopted policy from the CDC, which is in turn followed by everyone from insurance companies in terms of what they cover, to clinicians around the country, all the way down to members of the public as they seek to follow the published guidance. It’s a very, very important group of advisors when it comes to American health.

Well, Kennedy has re-staffed ACIP in record time. And, to the surprise of exactly nobody, among the 8 people he appointed are a bunch of anti-vaxxers. Kennedy, who announced the firings of ACIP in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, went an even less professional route by announcing the new members on ExTwitter. When he followed up on his WSJ op-ed on ExTwitter as well, Kennedy had this to say about who he would put on the panel to replace them.

In case you can’t see the screenshot, that’s RFK Jr. saying:

Yesterday, I retired 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices or ACIP, the @CDCgov external panel that wields the grave responsibility of adding new vaccines to the recommended childhood schedule. Over the coming days, I will use this platform to announce new members to populate ACIP. None of these individuals will be ideological anti-vaxxers. They will be highly credentialed physicians and scientists who will make extremely consequential public health determinations by applying evidence-based decision-making with objectivity and common sense.

He lied to everyone. As I said, he absolutely put ideological anti-vaxxers on this panel. And if you don’t believe me, let’s take the case of Robert Malone. Malone claims to have invented mRNA vaccines. While Malone absolutely conducted important research into this technology, the claim he invented it is disputed widely, with the technology instead resulting from the work of hundreds of individuals and researchers. Despite his work on those vaccines, or perhaps because of it in an misguided way, Malone has spread misinformation about vaccines, including speaking at anti-vax rallies. And if that isn’t specific enough for you to accept that Kennedy lied about his intentions, I’ll just drop this here, straight from Malone’s own mouth:

Before COVID-19, the term anti-vaxxer was targeted towards people who are against all vaccines. Targeted as a way to delegitimize their complaints and observations, by personally delegitimizing them. More PsyWar. But times have changed. The defamatory attack has become a badge of honor.

Various news articles state that 35–45% of Americans, including myself, find vaccine mandates unacceptable. The government and corporate media have defined this group of people as being anti-vaxxers. Some people still believe that the term anti-vaxxer is a pejorative. I do not – I view it as high praise.

He may desire to frame his being labeled as an anti-vaxxer purely a result of his distaste for “mandates” that were both temporary and narrowly targeted when it came to what the federal government required, but his framing of this whole thing is a straw man, anyway. He’s labeled an anti-vaxxer because he speaks at rallies claiming that vaccines, or at least mRNA vaccines, “can damage your children. They may damage their brains, their heart, their immune system and their ability to have children in the future. Many of these damages cannot be repaired.” Oh, and he once claimed that the COVID vaccines cause a “form of AIDS.” If that isn’t an anti-vaxxer, then the term no longer has any meaning.

Malone is not the only troubling appointment in Kennedy’s cadre of clowns.

Another is Martin Kulldorff, one of the co-authors of the widely criticized Great Barrington Declaration, which called for letting COVID-19 spread largely unabated. Health experts called it “unethical.”

Vicky Pebsworth is also on the list, as well as on the board of the National Vaccine Information Center, one of the nation’s oldest anti-vaccine groups that promotes the false claim that vaccines cause autism.

Kennedy also appointed Retsef Levi, who has penned articles alleging dangers of COVID-19 vaccines, including a flawed 2022 article that was later corrected and an unpublished article co-authored with COVID-contrarian and Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo.

And so there you have it. Because of a flawed Congress that can’t do real oversight on the nominations of an even more flawed President, America will now get its vaccination guidance from a panel that is no less than half full of anti-vaxxers who have engaged in misinformation around those very same vaccines. Freedom has been restored, just in time for many of us to get sick, and possibly die, from diseases that need not be a problem, but likely will be. Like measles. Or COVID, again.

Or, universe forbid, the next novel pandemic that comes to be as a result of our national infection of distrust of actual experts on matters of science.

Filed Under: acip, anti-vaxxers, covid, health and human services, martin kulldorff, retsef levi, rfk jr., robert malone, science, vaccine recommendations, vaccines, vicky pebsworth

CDC Half-Steps RFK Jr.’s New COVID Vaccine Guidance As Top Scientist Resigns

from the rudderless-ship dept

It’s time for yet another reminder that HHS Secretary RFK Jr. is an incapable leader at odds with the scientists who actually know what they’re talking about. At the CDC specifically, we recently discussed the government’s decision to do away with the team that was helping to identify, track, and remediate elevated levels of lead appearing in the blood of children throughout the country. While Kennedy appeared to lie directly about his agency’s response to at least one instance of elevated BLLs in Milwaukee, along with how he was going to retain staff at HHS generally, he also recently and seemingly unilaterally altered the guidance for COVID vaccines. More specifically, he revoked the guidance that healthy children and pregnant women should get vaccinated and boosted. It appears that the CDC itself was completely unaware this change in policy was coming.

The health agency’s immunization schedules were not, in fact, updated at the time of the announcement, though. The Washington Post subsequently reported that the CDC was blindsided by the announcement. Five hours went by after the video was posted before CDC officials said they received a one-page “secretarial directive” about the changes, which was signed by Kennedy and puzzlingly dated May 19, according to the Post.

The reversal for vaccination during pregnancy was received particularly poorly by the medical community, given that a COVID infection during pregnancy can be catastrophic to the mother, who’s immune system is weakened during pregnancy, and for the pregnancy itself. On the CDC site itself there are still pages recommending COVID vaccination for children as young as six months old to prevent things like long COVID or related longer term illnesses. Perhaps that explains why the CDC didn’t exactly do as Kennedy directed.

Late Thursday, the CDC updated the immunization schedules. Contradicting what Kennedy said in the video, the CDC did not remove its recommendation for COVID-19 vaccines for healthy children in the child and adolescent immunization schedule. Instead, it added a stipulation that if a child’s doctor agrees with the vaccination and parents “desire for their child to be vaccinated,” healthy children can get vaccinated.

In practice, it is unclear how this change will affect access to the vaccines. Health insurers are required to cover vaccines on the CDC schedules. But, it’s yet to be seen if children will only be able to get vaccinated at their doctor’s office (rather than a pharmacy or vaccine clinic) or if additional consent forms would be required, etc. Uncertainty about the changes and requirements alone may lead to fewer children getting vaccinated.

Which appears to be all that Kennedy is after here. A longtime vaccine opponent, Kennedy appears to be applying his own viewpoints, rather than those of scientists or medical professionals, to American healthcare policy. And, as a result, the CDC recently lost its top expert on COVID vaccinations.

The resignation, first reported by The Associated Press and confirmed by CBS News, comes just a week after health secretary and anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. unilaterally revoked and altered some of the CDC’s recommendations for COVID-19 vaccines, restricting access to children and pregnant people. The resignation also comes three weeks before CDC’s experts and advisors are scheduled to meet to publicly evaluate data and discuss the recommendations for this season—a long-established process that was disrupted by Kennedy’s announcement.

The departing CDC official, Lakshmi Panagiotakopoulos, a pediatric infectious disease expert, was a co-leader of a working group on COVID-19 vaccines who advised experts on the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). She informed her ACIP colleagues of her resignation in an email on Tuesday.

“My career in public health and vaccinology started with a deep-seated desire to help the most vulnerable members of our population, and that is not something I am able to continue doing in this role,” Panagiotakopoulos wrote.

With Kennedy at the helm, this tracks with what we’ve written about before. Vulnerable populations, in Kennedy’s documented views, are not victims. They, or their genetics, are the cause of their own suffering or vulnerability, and can be more or less dismissed from concern.

But an exodus of scientists and medical professionals from the CDC should be viewed as a sort of cry for help from those communities. The man running HHS is implementing healthcare policy at odds with healthcare professionals and scientists. And based on what? A report on American health that is built upon an AI fever-dream?

“More of us should be resigning in protest,” one federal health official told CBS News in response to Panagiotakopoulos’ resignation.

If they’re not allowed to actually do their work, then I guess that’s probably true. But draining the brainpower from HHS such that all that remains is whatever the brain worm left in Kennedy’s head can takeover is not going to produce better healthcare outcomes for Americans.

Filed Under: cdc, covid, covid guidance, covid vaccines, hhs, rfk jr.

Federal COVID-19 Resource Site Now Redirects To A White House Vendetta Blog & Conspiracy Site

from the how-useless dept

While I’m sure all of us would like to completely forget about COVID-19, it is simply the case that the virus hasn’t forgotten about us. Gone are the days of the pandemic, of course, so this isn’t meant to fear monger. But the fact is that hundreds of Americans are still dying of this disease every single week, with even more hospitalizations for it as well. The point is that this is still a health issue that healthcare providers, and the public, can benefit from guidance on. Guidance that was, in part, found at www.covid.gov, which earlier this month offered up information on treatments, vaccinations, testing, strategies to avoid infection, and so on.

But now that page is gone. Instead, it redirects to a White House site that appears to be someone’s interpretation of a Donald Trump personal vendetta and conspiracy blog about the origins of the virus and how much Anthony Fauci sucks and just might be the devil.

Navigating to COVID.gov brings up a slick site with rich content that lays out arguments and allegations supporting a lab-based origin of the pandemic and subsequent cover-up by US health officials and Democrats.

While there remains no definitive answer on how the COVID-19 pandemic began, the scientific data available on the topic points to a spillover event from a live wild animal market in Wuhan, China. The scientific community largely sees this as the most likely scenario, given the data so far and knowledge of how previous outbreak viruses originated, including SARS-CoV-1. By contrast, the lab origin hypothesis largely relies on the proximity of a research lab to the first cases, conjecture, and distrust of the Chinese government, which has not been forthcoming with information on the early days of the health crisis. Overall, the question of SARS-CoV-2’s origin has become extremely politicized, as have most other aspects of the pandemic.

Now, I want to be very clear about something: I referred to the lab leak theory as a conspiracy in the title of this post not as a derogatory term, but because that is what is being alleged. The theory is that the virus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and that the leak was covered up by any number of individuals, depending on which version of the theory you believe. The fact is that the origin of the disease is not known as a matter of certainty and some number of intelligence groups and others suspect it leaked from a lab. Nobody should really care what I think about matters of healthcare, but I don’t view the theory that this disease may have leaked from a lab particularly unworthy of consideration, if not further study.

Which is entirely besides the damned point. The government site was meant to be a resource for healthcare providers and the public to help stay informed and combat this ongoing disease. There was no reason to do away with that guidance. If the current Trump administration, with its brand new and very incompetent head of HHS, RFK Jr., wanted to alter some of the guidance on the site, they were free to do so. This is something else, repurposing a tool for the public into Trump’s personal vendetta machine.

It’s not just a problem for those looking for information of the kind that used to be on the site. The other issue here is that the redirected site makes some very bold, very big claims about COVID-19. I’m not going to go through them one by one, nor am I going to attempt to debunk any of the claims. I would suggest only that you look at it through the eyes of someone looking for science or healthcare and is instead met with claims about both that are neither. Here is just one statement made near the top of the page:

By nearly all measures of science, if there was evidence of a natural origin it would have already surfaced. But it hasn’t.

By nearly all measures of science, a statement like that is completely antithetical to science. I don’t even need to go try to uncover the source of the statement to know one simple thing: that isn’t how scientists talk.

There have been more than enough actions taken in recent years that have promoted distrust of medicine, of science, and of experts. Actions like the above serve only to supercharge all of that distrust, further politicizing something that ought have no bearing in politics.

And, really, all that will do is spur on the next healthcare crises. Which, as we’ve been discussing, might already be beginning.

Filed Under: anthony fauci, covid, donald trump, lab leak, rfk jr.

Zuckerberg’s Spineless Surrender: Rehashing Old News To Enable False GOP Narratives

from the the-layers-of-wrongness-we-need-to-unpeel dept

Two bits of news came out of the letter Mark Zuckerberg sent to Rep. Jim Jordan this week (and how people responded to it), neither of which are what you’re likely to have heard about. First, Donald Trump seems to be accusing himself of rigging the 2020 election against himself.

And, second, Mark Zuckerberg has absolutely no spine when it comes to Republican pressure on Meta’s moderation practices. He falsely plays into their fundamentally misleading framing, all to win some temporary political favors by immediately caving to pressure from the GOP.

You may have seen a bunch of headlines in the past couple of days claiming that Mark Zuckerberg “admitted” that the Biden White House pressured him about “censoring” content and he wished he’d stood up to them more. It got plenty of coverage. Unfortunately, almost none of that coverage is accurately reporting what happened, what’s new, and what was actually said.

The reality is pretty straightforward: Mark Zuckerberg folded like a cheap card table, facing coercive pressure from Rep. Jim Jordan to modify Meta’s moderation practices. What he says misleadingly plays into Jordan’s mendaciously misleading campaign. In short, Zuckerberg’s claim that he would stand up to government pressure on moderation is undermined by the fact that he’s revealing this literally while caving to government pressure on moderation.

First, it’s necessary to understand the history. It’s no secret that the White House sought to persuade social media companies to adjust their content moderation practices. They said so publicly. Hell, there was just a big, giant, massive Supreme Court case about that, where the details of government requests to social media were on full display.

But, as the Supreme Court Justices themselves made clear during the oral arguments, the White House reaching out to media providers and trying to persuade them on editorial decisions is nothing new, nor is it problematic. The only thing that matters is if the government uses coercive techniques, in which it threatened the company or punished the company if it failed to comply.

Justices Kavanaugh and Kagan were talking about this during the oral arguments:

JUSTICE KAVANAUGH: You’re speaking on behalf of the United States. Again, my experience is the United States, in all its manifestations, has regular communications with the media to talk about things they don’t like or don’t want to see or are complaining about factual inaccuracies.

[….]

JUSTICE KAGAN: I mean, can I just understand because it seems like an extremely expansive argument, I must say, encouraging people basically to suppress their own speech. So, like Justice Kavanaugh, I’ve had some experience encouraging press to suppress their own speech.

You just wrote about editorial. Here are the five reasons you shouldn’t write another one. You just wrote a story that’s filled with factual errors. Here are the 10 reasons why you shouldn’t do that again.

I mean, this happens literally thousands of times a day in the federal government.

And just the fact that the Supreme Court did not see any evidence of this being coercive should say something.

Nothing in what Zuckerberg said changes any of that. He simply repeats what was already known and already public: that, yes, White House officials sought to persuade Meta in how it handled some moderation elements. Much of that pressure was public, and even the pressure that was private has been revealed before.

Remember, Jim Jordan has spent the last couple of years weaponizing the House Judiciary Committee to misleadingly claim that the government was “weaponized” to suppress conservative speech. He’s sent dozens upon dozens of subpoenas, almost all of which misleadingly demand responses or data based on his false belief that basic, fundamental trust & safety work is somehow an attack on free speech rights.

But make no mistake about Jordan’s end goal here: it is to prevent websites from ever doing anything to try to counter the spread of disinformation. We’re not even talking about removing or blocking content. He doesn’t want there to be any effort to fact check or debunk nonsense. And that’s because the party that he is a part of is the largest producer and purveyor of complete and utter bullshit. And having people point that out is seen as an attack.

So Jordan has framed any attempt to refute nonsense as “an attack on free speech.” Tragically, much of the media (and plenty of tech execs) have fallen into this trap and accepted Jordan’s framing.

Finally, that brings us to Zuckerberg’s letter from this week. In it, he admits (again) what has been widely known and widely reported on, and was central to the Murthy v. Missouri Supreme Court case: that some people in the White House sought to persuade Meta to take Covid misinfo more seriously.

In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree. Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure. I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it. I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today. Like I said to our teams at the time, I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.

So what is actually revealed here? Literally nothing new at all. It was already widely reported that the White House tried to persuade Meta to be more responsive. And there were reasons for this. People were dying from Covid, and internal documents show that Zuckerberg himself was hoping that Facebook would be helpful in getting people vaccinated. But the platform was being bombarded with conspiracy theories, lies, and nonsense that was misleading people into putting lives at risk.

So, yes, of course the White House would reach out to Meta and suggest that the platform should do better in stopping the flood of misleading, dangerous info. None of that should be revelatory or even noteworthy.

And if you read what Zuckerberg says here, he still says that they didn’t do anything because of pressure from the White House: “Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decision, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement…”

But then he says, “I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.”

And what does that even mean? First of all, Meta was pretty fucking outspoken. When Joe Biden accused Meta of “killing people,” Meta went all out in calling that claim crazy. They said that the Biden administration was “looking for scapegoats for missing their vaccine goals” and “we will not be distracted by accusations which aren’t supported by the facts.”

So, what’s new here? It was widely known that the White House wanted Meta to be more responsible about Covid and vaccine misinfo. They said so publicly and privately. The private emails were widely reported on and subject to a landmark Supreme Court case that was just decided less than two months ago. None of that is new.

Zuckerberg also says that they made their own decisions and it wasn’t due to White House pressure, which confirms what was said during the Supreme Court case.

The only “new” thing here is Zuck suggesting he regrets not being more aggressive in… what…? In making sure more people saw misinformation that might lead them to make bad decisions and get sick and possibly die? And again, it’s not even that Meta didn’t push back. They pushed back hard.

And yet, Jim Jordan and the House Judiciary are claiming that this was some big revelation:

So, again, neither of the first two points are new or even meaningful. It was public knowledge that the White House spoke to Meta. And, of course Meta moderated (not censored) the speech of Americans, because those Americans violated Meta’s policies. And, as a private entity, they’re free to do that. That’s American freedom, something Jim Jordan seems unable to comprehend.

Regarding the Hunter Biden laptop story, that’s the next paragraph of Zuckerberg’s letter:

In a separate situation, the FBI warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma in the lead up to the 2020 election. That fall, when we saw a New York Post story reporting on corruption allegations involving then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s family, we sent that story to fact-checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting for a reply. It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story. We’ve changed our policies and processes to make sure this doesn’t happen again for instance, we no longer temporarily demote things in the U.S. while waiting for fact-checkers.

Again, literally nothing in this is new. All of this was known at the time. Indeed, Meta admitted it at the time and admitted that it had probably been too quick to limit the spread of the story (just as Twitter had done, admitting the very next day that the policy was a bad one and needed to change). We’ve covered all this in great detail before.

Furthermore, Zuckerberg said this exact same thing on Joe Rogan two years ago. This also led people to falsely claim that he admitted that they blocked the spreading of that NY Post story due to pressure from the White House, even though he said no such thing.

Both times, he said that the FBI gave general warnings about “hack and leak” operations that the Russians were working on, which is no surprise given that the Russians did exactly that during the 2016 election in releasing the DNC emails. The FBI (unsurprisingly!) also said that there were a number of potential targets, including Hunter Biden. And that was also obvious. Anyone in the President’s family and political circle would be obvious targets. At no point has anyone suggested that the FBI said that they should suppress this particular story.

And, remember, the original Hunter Biden story was weakly sourced. Multiple news organizations, including Fox News, had turned down the story. That was because there were all sorts of questions about its legitimacy. And given what had happened in the past, it seemed wise to be cautious.

Indeed, these days Republicans seem oddly quiet about news organizations still holding back on reporting on the documents that were hacked from top Republicans like Roger Stone by the Iranians in this election cycle. Is Jim Jordan going to accuse companies of illegally interfering in the election because they won’t publish those documents that are embarrassing to Trump? Why the silence Jim? Oh right.

Even more to the point, at the time of that NY Post story, the Trump administration was in charge. It was October of 2020, a month before the 2020 election. So, this “truth” from Donald Trump is absolutely insane, because he appears to be accusing himself of “rigging” the election against himself:

If you can’t see that, it’s Donald Trump posting on Truth Social:

“Zuckerberg admits that the White House pushed to SUPPRESS HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP STORY (& much more!). IN OTHER WORDS, THE 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION WAS RIGGED. FoxNews, New York Post, Rep. Laurel Lee, House Judiciary Committee.

Again, that is Trump saying “the White House” in 2020 “rigged” the Presidential election. So far, the only reporter I’ve seen call this out is Philip Bump at the Washington Post. This is Trump being so confused, he’s accusing himself of rigging the election.

Finally, Zuckerberg’s letter concludes with even more nonsense.

Apart from content moderation, I want to address the contributions I made during the last presidential cycle to support electoral infrastructure. The idea here was to make sure local election jurisdictions across the country had the resources they needed to help people vote safely during a global pandemic. I made these contributions through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. They were designed to be non-partisan spread across urban, rural, and suburban communities. Still, despite the analyses I’ve seen showing otherwise, I know that some people believe this work benefited one party over the other. My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another or to even appear to be playing a role. So I don’t plan on making a similar contribution this cycle.

Why is he even bringing up his personal donations if this is about Meta? And, furthermore, is he really saying that he won’t do any more donations simply because “some people believe” that donations for safe voting benefit one party or another?

This is the most spineless response to a mendacious, targeted campaign by a politician who is weaponizing the power of the government to pressure a media company over its editorial policies. And Zuck folds like a cheap card table. And it’s doubly ironic, because part of that folding is claiming he won’t fold again (something he didn’t even do in the first place, but is doing now).

Oh, and of course, Elon jumps in to say this “sounds like a First Amendment violation.”

Dude, the Supreme Court literally just covered this in a case that talked quite a bit about your own site and said (pretty fucking clearly) that the record did not support any claim of a First Amendment violation.

All of this is stupid. That letter is written in the worst possible way. While it does not state anything fundamentally false, it makes it sound like things that have been public knowledge for years are somehow a new admission. It further directly enables idiots like Trump, Jordan, and Musk to claim false things about what happened. And, finally, it just contributes to a totally unnecessary news cycle.

The only actual “news” out of all this is (1) Zuckerberg has no spine and simply cannot stand up to bad faith government pressure to change his moderation practices when it comes from Republicans (he was fine doing so when it came from Democrats) and (2) Donald Trump has accused himself of rigging his own election against himself.

Zuckerberg has to know how this would play out. After all, the same misleading reaction happened two years ago when he went on Rogan’s podcast. The only reasonable interpretation of this is that he sent this letter, knowing how it would be interpreted, to give Jordan/Trump red meat to continue believing their own false and misleading claims in case Trump wins in the fall. It’s stupid and cynical, but that’s the kind of politics Meta seems to play these days.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, coercion, content moderation, covid, donald trump, elon musk, hunter biden, jawboning, jim jordan, mark zuckerberg, persuasion, vaccine disinformation
Companies: facebook, meta

ISPs Are Still Ripping Off A COVID Broadband Discount Program

from the oh-look,-telecom-subsidy-fraud dept

Fri, Oct 6th 2023 05:34am - Karl Bode

During peak pandemic, the FCC launched the Emergency Broadband Benefit (EBB program), giving lower income Americans a 50(50 (50(75 for those in tribal lands) discount off of their broadband bill. Under the program, the government gave money to ISPs, which then doled out discounts to users if they qualified.

But (and I’m sure this will be a surprise to readers) ISPs erected cumbersome barriers to actually getting the service, or worse, actively exploited the sign up process to force struggling low-income applicants on to more expensive plans once the initial contract ended. Very much in character.

The EBB was rebranded the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) as part of the Infrastructure Bill (the payout to the general public was dropped to $30 a month). But late last year, the FCC Inspector General issued a report saying that ISPs and wireless carriers were consistently and artificially inflating the number of qualified users in order to take taxpayer money they didn’t deserve.

A year has gone by, and another FCC Office of the Inspector General (OIG) report has emerged noting that, yes, ISPs and wireless providers are still ripping the program off. When a low-income user stops using a provider’s broadband service, the ISP is supposed to report this back to the FCC so that funding can be repurposed for folks who actually need it.

The OIG found that’s very often… not happening, and that dozens of ISPs were exploiting the FCC’s lack of follow through:

“We made a startling and troubling discovery: dozens of participating mobile broadband providers de-enrolled few, if any, ACP subscribers for non-usage and, like Provider X, claimed reimbursement for all or nearly all their ACP subscribers (the suspect providers).”

The OIG also found that a large number of ISPs continue to take taxpayer money for users they never actually served in the first place; part of an ongoing investigation they’ll provide more details on down the road.

There’s an ongoing debate as to whether to renew the ACP program. Generally its been widely supported because it not only helps (some) low-income families, it throws a big chunk of additional taxpayer money into the laps of industry giants.

On the one hand, low-income users genuinely do benefit from a $30 monthly drop in their broadband bill. On the other hand, we’re effectively giving money to giant telecoms in exchange for temporarily lower rates; rates that wouldn’t be high in the first place if these same giants hadn’t spent decades dismantling most meaningful competitors and competent government oversight.

It’s why it’s important to target the real problem with U.S. telecom: consolidated telecom monopoly power (and the corruption that protects it). Instead, the FCC (in this case at the behest of Congress) often engages in regulatory theater, applying superficial external fixes to the symptoms of telecom monopoly power, while rarely taking meaningful aim (or even acknowledging) the underlying disease.

Filed Under: Affordable Connectivity Program, broadband, covid, fcc, high speed internet, low-income families, subsidies, telecom

Congress May Not Renew Low-Income Broadband Program Birthed During COVID

from the strike-at-the-root dept

Mon, Jul 10th 2023 05:19am - Karl Bode

But (and I’m sure this will be a surprise to readers) reports are that big ISPs erected cumbersome barriers to actually getting the service, or worse, actively exploited the sign up process to force struggling low-income applicants on to more expensive plans once the initial contract ended. Very much in character.

The EBB was rebranded the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) as part of the Infrastructure Bill (the payout to the general public was dropped to $30 a month). And, once again, not at all surprisingly, the FCC discovered that “dozens” of U.S. broadband providers were ripping the program off to the tune of millions of dollars across Alabama, Ohio, Oklahoma and Texas.

That said, the program was still a good thing for millions of people. Data routinely indicates that affordability is the biggest obstacle to broadband adoption, and $30 off their bill was a huge deal for many. Especially in tribal areas long neglected by the private sector and government alike.

Everybody’s experiences with COVID home education and telecommuting briefly shined a bright spotlight on substandard U.S. broadband and policy issues. But with our attention on COVID waning, its impetus for reform on broadband access is as well. ACP money will run out soon, and the debate has begun as to whether Congress should renew the ACP program:

Nineteen million households have enrolled in the government’s broadband benefit system as of June, but that figure is well under the estimated 49 million eligible. The program and a predecessor initiative have “suffered persistent abuses … as telecom giants have induced price hikes, speed cuts, and fraud risks,” a Post investigation found.

Consumer groups and Democrats unsurprisingly want to renew the program. And why not; in a country that endlessly throws subsidies at a wide variety of industries (especially military) and billionaires for doing absolutely nothing, why not spend some cash on a program that (mostly) helped the poor. Republicans are generally split on whether the program should be extended.

There’s some nuance here though. The problem remains that the program isn’t actually fixing the underlying problem. U.S. broadband is expensive and spotty because both parties have historically allowed telecom giants to monopolize access and crush competition. The result of this monopolization isn’t surprising: high prices, spotty service, slower speeds, and comically terrible customer service.

Enter the ACP, which basically throws billions of dollars at companies responsible for the very problem we’re trying to fix so that they’ll temporarily lower high prices they’re directly responsible for. Yes, the end result still helps a low-income family struggling to get online, but it’s important to understand you wouldn’t need this kind of program if the two parties were willing to challenge monopoly power.

Democrats are often better than the GOP on telecom policy. But even they have a comical aversion to acknowledging that the real problem here is consolidated, concentrated monopoly power. Democratic FCC leaders will talk endlessly and ambiguously about their dedication to “bridging the digital divide,” but they’re literally incapable of making public statements calling out the monopolies responsible for it.

So yes, I do think it makes sense to renew the program. As a country we spend a lot more money on significantly dumber ideas. But it would be lovely if that extension was paired with some base level realization that progress isn’t actually being made unless you strike at the real root of the problem: telecom monopolies and the bipartisan corruption that protects them from competition.

Fewer monopolies, more competition, and competent regulatory oversight generally means lower prices, and no need for the ACP in the first place. But we’re not really interested in cracking down on monopolies, government support for pro-competitive policies is limited at best, and industry continues to successfully defang telecom regulators and consumer protection standards year after year.

Filed Under: ACP, broadband, covid, digital divide, ebb, fcc, high speed internet, low income, subsidies, telecom

Colorado Finally Kills Dumb 2005 Comcast-Backed State Law Banning Community Broadband Networks

from the counterproductive-bullshit dept

Thu, May 4th 2023 01:36pm - Karl Bode

U.S. telecom monopolies like AT&T and Comcast spent millions of dollars and several decades quite literally buying shitty, protectionist laws in around twenty states that either banned or heavily hamstrung towns and cities from building their own broadband networks. Even in instances and areas where AT&T and Comcast have repeatedly failed to upgrade or expand their broadband networks.

This dance of dysfunction was particularly interesting in Colorado. While lobbyists for Comcast and CenturyLink managed to convince state leaders to pass such a law (SB 152) in 2005, the legislation contained a provision that let individual Colorado towns and cities ignore the measure with a simple referendum. So they’ve been doing exactly that, en masse, for years.

This week, Colorado state leaders finally passed a law eliminating the restrictions entirely, eighteen years after they were first introduced:

“Today, the state took a big step in establishing a competitive economy for generations to come. SB23-183 removes the biggest obstacle to achieving the Governor’s goal to connect 99% of Colorado households by the end of 2027,” said Colorado Broadband Office Executive Director Brandy Reitter. “Each local government is in a unique position or different phase of connecting residents to high-speed internet, and this bill allows them to establish broadband plans that meet the needs of their communities.”

That leaves sixteen states with laws banning community broadband, after both Arkansas and Washington state eliminated their restrictions in 2021. Such laws are almost always ghost written by heavily taxpayer subsidized telecom monopolies, which have routinely tried to portray grass roots annoyance at monopolization and market failure as some form of vile socialist boondoggle.

It’s a scenario where giant telecoms get to have their cake and eat it too; often refusing to upgrade their networks in under-served or minority areas (particularly true among telcos offering DSL), while simultaneously ghost writing shitty laws preventing these underserved towns from doing anything about it — even if local voters, long struggling to gain access to broadband, vote in favor of it.

These communities wouldn’t be building broadband networks if they weren’t annoyed by decades of market failure. Or decades of federal regulators too captured to embrace policies that competitively challenge the nation’s biggest telecom monopolies.

Telecom monopolies could have responded to this by providing better, cheaper service, but given the nature of widespread U.S. corruption, it was simply easier to buy terrible state laws.

The home schooling and telecommuting boom of peak COVID put the counterproductive stupidity of these bills in very stark relief. As has the $42 billion in looming broadband funds made possible by the recent passing of the infrastructure bill. If that money is to be spent effectively, eliminating pointless, monopoly-backed restrictions on creative broadband alternatives is a good first step.

Filed Under: broadband, colorado, community broadband, covid, high speed internet, home schooling, market failure, municipal broadband, telecom

from the just-make-an-angry-youtube-video-or-something dept

Back in January, we wrote about the Seattle public school district filing an absolutely laughable lawsuit against basically all of big social media, based on a bunch of misread and misunderstood studies, and general moral panic that social media must be “bad” for kids. In February, we wrote about the school district in Mesa, Arizona filing a very similar lawsuit (using the same law firm). We wondered if we were going to see a flood of such lawsuits.

Also, we pointed out how these school districts were effectively announcing publicly to all parents that they had given up on actually educating their children on how to understand the modern digital world, and were basically caving to moral panics and admitting that they don’t know how to prepare children for today’s world. As I noted in both of those stories, if I were a parent in either district, I would be furious.

Well, be careful what you wish for, because last week, at least two* more such lawsuits were filed, including one by the San Mateo County Board of Education, which oversees the school district that my children attend. So, yeah, now I’m furious. As I told the superintendent in an email last week, I had been actually quite happy with how the schools my children attended had taught digital citizenship, and how to they seemed to have good programs designed to prepare kids for a digital future. But, filing such a ridiculous lawsuit is the opposite of that and now has me concerned that the district is so unprepared to teach kids about the modern world that I should be worried about their education.

It gets even worse. The San Mateo County lawsuit is similar to the ones filed in Seattle and Mesa, but with a few differences. While both of the others mainly focused on (already laughable) “public nuisance” claims, San Mateo… also includes a RICO claim.

Yes. RICO.

As regular readers of Techdirt well know, IT’S NOT RICO, DAMMIT. It’s never RICO. But it’s especially not RICO in this case. RICO means something. It most certainly does not mean “a lot of these companies have been bad for the kids I’m supposed to be teaching how to live in the modern world, which we can only support by cherry picking and misrepresenting evidence.” You need to show conduct of an enterprise, through a pattern of racketeering activity called predicate acts causing injury to the plaintiff’s business or property. And you need to show all five elements in there.

Here’s how the San Mateo County Board of Education — which is responsible for educating my children — handle that. They claim each of the defendants (Google, Snapchat, and TikTok — but not Meta, which we’ll get to, and not Twitter, which, hrmph, I guess I’ll also get to) have formed “an association-in-fact” with the “shared goal… to preserve and enhance the market for its social media platforms and RICO Defendants’ own profits.” I mean, under that definition companies in any industry have “an association.” But that’s not how the law actually works.

What about the “pattern of racketeering?” Well… again, they basically say these companies wanted more users, and that’s racketeering. Oh, and then at the very end they just randomly accuse these social media companies of wire fraud. I wish I were joking.

RICO Defendants had the common purpose of preserving and enhancing the market for their platforms and for youth as consumers for RICO Defendants’ own profits, regardless of the truth, the law, or the health consequences to the American people, including Plaintiffs’ students and the communities Plaintiffs serve.

RICO Defendants deceived consumers to use RICO Defendants’ platforms while concealing and/or suppressing the relevant findings and research. RICO Defendants deceived consumers, particularly parents and children, adolescents, and teenagers, by claiming that they did not market to children, adolescents, and teenagers, while engaging in marketing and manipulation of their platform algorithms with the intent of causing children, adolescents, and teenagers to engage in excessive use of their platforms, regardless of the health or safety concerns.

RICO Defendants achieved their common purpose through co-conspirators’ actions in deceiving consumers, regulators, and the general public about the dangerous nature of their platforms. Through the enterprise, RICO Defendants engaged in a pattern of racketeering activity consisting of numerous acts of racketeering in the Northern District of California and elsewhere, including mail fraud and wire fraud, indictable offenses under 18 U.S.C. §§ 1341, 1343.

That’s not how any of this works.

How about the “predicate acts?” Well, here they claim that social media companies… use the mail “to mislead the public.”

From a time unknown and continuing until the time of filing of this complaint, in the Northern District of California and elsewhere, RICO Defendants and others known and unknown did knowingly and intentionally devise and intend to devise a scheme and artifice to mislead, and obtain money and property from, members of the public by means of material false and misleading pretenses, representations, and promises, and omissions of material facts, knowing that the pretenses, representations, and promises, were false when made.

The “mail fraud” and “wire fraud” seem to be based on the laughable claim that these companies… sent promotional material through the mail. Really.

For the purpose of executing and attempting to execute the scheme and artifice described herein, RICO Defendants and their co-conspirators would and did: knowingly place and cause to be placed in any post office or authorized depository for mail matter, matters and things to be sent and delivered by the United States Postal Service (and its predecessor, the United States Post Office Department); took and received therefrom such matters and things; and knowingly caused to be delivered by mail according to the direction thereon, and at the place at which it is directed to be delivered by the person to whom it is addressed, any such matter and thing, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1341.

They also fail to plead how any of these harmed SMCBoE’s business or property, meaning they didn’t actually plead all the elements of RICO anyway.

After reading this, I asked defense attorney, and RICO specialist, Ken White whether he thought the lawsuit, and especially the RICO claims had any merit. Ken did not hold back:

It’s a mish-mash of junk science, nanny-statism, and pro-se-style and likely sanctionable legal buffoonery. The RICO claims are preposterous and betray the vexatious intent of the entire — pun definitely intended — enterprise. This is the worst that modern pandering, performative litigation has to offer. Jesus, just make an angry YouTube video or something. This is exactly why judges need to be much more aggressive sanctioning lawyers and reporting them to the bar.

The RICO claims are definitely the most preposterous, but that doesn’t mean the other parts of the lawsuit are any better. As Ken notes, it’s full of junk science. It takes correlations to be proved causation (despite tons of evidence to the contrary — such as the fact that adolescent suicide rates were way higher in the 1980s and 90s than they are today). It cherry picks unsubstantiated claims regarding social media and focuses on extreme cases that have been overplayed in the media.

Just as an example, it calls out the infamous “devious licks” TikTok challenge that got a lot of attention in the fall of 2021. The complaint implies, without any evidence, that the devious licks challenge caused a problem in San Mateo schools based entirely on the headline in one school newspaper. Really. Of course, as we covered back in 2021, the whole devious licks thing was mostly a silly moral panic spread by adults. Kids in schools actually responded to the few cases of actual vandalism (which has happened in school probably going back to the beginning of school) and many turned it around and created the “angelic yields” challenge of getting kids to help clean up their schools.

The complaint also ignores that TikTok banned anything related to “devious licks” as soon as it started getting any attention. It was moral panic reporting from news reporters and adults that spread the concept.

So why is the San Mateo County Board of Education suing the news?

There is, of course, the ever popular comparison to tobacco:

It is apparent that when the YouTube, TikTok, and Snap companies were faced with a choice about making a change, they decided to stay the course. They simply put profit over the health and safety of children. Like the public health crisis caused by Big Tobacco, the YouTube, TikTok, and Snap companies have endeavored to shift blame and shirk responsibility through a concerted effort to withhold and distort the facts. Despite their advanced knowledge of the disaster they are causing, the YouTube, TikTok, and Snap companies have made no meaningful attempt to address this exploding crisis. As they look for new and ingenious way to leverage their unmatched access to technology to keep children addicted to their platforms, Defendants feed their own addiction, to profits and ever larger user bases. Due to the YouTube, TikTok, and Snap companies’ unwillingness to address the crisis of their making, the San Mateo Board of Education and its Superintendent feel they have no other choice than to bring this lawsuit to ensure the health and safety of children in their care.

Except that almost every sentence in this paragraph is false. It’s embarrassing. First of all, tobacco has no redeeming value. Social media is about speech. Not smoking a harmful product. Kids have free speech rights as well, though apparently my local school board wishes to deny them of that right.

Second, all of these companies have large trust and safety and research teams that actually do tons of work to try to limit any harm, especially to kids. I already mentioned how TikTok stopped the spread of the “devious licks” concept almost immediately. The complaint ignores that.

The complaint also ignores copious studies that show most students get tremendous value out of social media, not harm. Just recently the Pew Research Center released a massive report showing how the vast majority of students found they benefited from social media, and only a small minority found it problematic. Or how about this massive study from 2019 of over 12,000 students, that could find no evidence to support the idea that social media made kids depressed.

Incredibly, the complaint does mention the recent Pew study, but totally misrepresents what it says. It does not mention how the majority of students found they benefited from social media, and only 9% said it had a negative impact on their lives. You’d think such a stat would be relevant. Instead, the complaint focuses just on how many teens say they use social media and don’t want to give it up, and then leap to insisting that this proves that social media is addictive and that the companies are nefarious.

But, uh, try asking that same question about… watching TV, hanging out with friends, or even reading books, and you’d likely get pretty similar answers. Kids do it because it’s fun and it’s how they socialize. Hell, ask the same questions about going to school. Indeed, kids go to school every day, and I’d bet they’d report that school leads to a higher level of depression than social media.

Maybe the School Board should be suing itself? Or at least, be willing to do the same kind of research that Meta did to try to learn about its own impact on teenagers’ well being. No, instead, it would rather stick its head in the sand and insist that it must be social media to blame for the school not being prepared to educate and take care of kids following a pandemic.

You’d think that these other studies might give the people behind this lawsuit pause. Indeed, I asked the superintendent if she had read those studies and if she had any comment on them. Instead, she passed me on to a San Francisco PR shop and said they’d answer my questions. I asked the PR guy in question on Friday. On Sunday he told me that his client (which appears to be the law firm, rather than the school board) would not debate this with me (I wasn’t asking for a debate, I simply said I was hoping he could explain some of the decisions, since they appeared incomprehensible). Despite follow ups to both the PR guy and the Board, asking for simple answers to straightforward questions, no further responses were given.

Specifically both of them also failed to reply to my question about who actually initiated this process: was it the school or the law firm of Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy? The law firm put out a silly press release about it. It is a different law firm than the one that filed the Seattle and Mesa cases, but at least that law firm didn’t… do the RICO.

The only one of my questions that was answered by the Board in an FAQ they posted, was that this is (not surprisingly) being handled on contingency, meaning that the law firm isn’t getting paid unless they win this case. Which they won’t. So, really, this just seems like an attempt by a terrible, mockable law firm, which deserves to be sanctioned, to try to score some cheap advertising.

And, now, we get to the very, very notable absence of Meta (Facebook and Instagram) in the defendant list. It’s… you know… kind of a glaring omission, given that it’s the largest social media platform, and so many of the studies that the complaint relies on are actually about Meta’s platforms and not the ones in the actual lawsuit.

Incredibly, the complaint uses (a misreading of) Meta’s own research… against those other companies! There are literally 5 pages of the lawsuit talking about the research leaked by Frances Haugen about Meta. And, of course, yet again, this research is misleadingly presented and cherry picked.

In 2021, a whistleblower and former employee of Meta Platforms, Inc. (“Meta”), known formerly as Facebook, Inc., leaked documents to journalists at the Wall Street Journal and government officials. These documents showed that Meta was aware as early as 2019 that one of its platforms, Instagram, caused body image issues to worsen for at least one third of teenage girls on the platform based on its own research and analysis. These documents settled what scientists had long suspected about Instagram’s harmful impact on children, in addition to confirming that Meta was completely aware of this issue based on Meta’s own studies. The leak confirmed that Meta designed Instagram in a way to risk the mental and physical health of children because that is what makes Meta profitable.

Except… that’s not what the leak showed at all. As we’ve highlighted in great detail over and over again, the study actually showed that in every category they studied for boys, Instagram made more teen boys feel better about themselves than worse (by a significant amount). And in 11 out of 12 categories, they made more teen girls feel better, rather than worse. There was only one category in which more girls felt worse, and it was body image, where the breakdown was still pretty close to equal. And, the whole freaking point of the study and the internal report that Haugen leaked, was that Facebook found this one category making girls feel worse to be unacceptable. That’s why they called it out!

Even as the complaint highlights how Meta was carefully studying this to understand what was happening and look for ways to fix the problems, the complaint pretends that they learned this… and ignored it.

And then to try to tie all this research from Meta (who again, was not sued in this complaint!) back to the companies that were actually sued, the complaint literally just says the other companies are all the same… “on information and belief.”

Defendants’ platforms operate similarly or in the same way as Meta’s platforms. On information and belief, Co-conspirators were and continue to be fully aware of the negative consequences of their platforms and their effects on minors’ health. Co-conspirators intentionally designed their platforms to exploit children and leave them riddled with mental and emotional health issues. Co-conspirators have endeavored to shift blame and shirk responsibility through a concerted effort to withhold and distort the facts, saying one thing publicly while admitting privately that the mental health issues detailed herein are caused by their platforms. Co-conspirators have conducted research and analysis, and have compiled data and documentation further substantiating the harms they cause to minors, and have falsely represented that they would disclose this research. Co-conspirators have intentionally withheld this information from the American people in a coordinated campaign to protect their profits from public scrutiny.

On information and belief indeed. Once again, this is not how any of this works.

And, of course, this raises the question of why Meta is not included in the lawsuit. I asked the superintendent and the PR guy, and neither would respond. I wondered if it could have something to do with the number of Meta employees who are parents with kids in San Mateo schools? It’s possible, though YouTube is also headquartered in the county and it’s still being sued.

As for the absence of Twitter, well, Twitter was never quite as big as the other big social media companies and always much less interesting to teens anyway, so one way to read this decision is as something of an insult to Elon Musk and his social media toy. Twitter is barely even mentioned in the complaint at all with the only mention coming to note that TikTok was bigger than Twitter. But… much of the research on social media happened around Twitter, in part because Twitter was the social media app with the most open API (which has since changed under new management). So, once again, we’re in a situation where the complaint uses research done on other platforms to hold YouTube, Snapchat, and TikTok to blame, despite little shown connection. As Ken White noted above, this is sanctionable behavior, and the kind of thing you expect in a pro se filing, not one from a formerly reputable law firm.

The only attempt the SMCBoE makes towards showing harm to the schools is by noting that… their own school districts weren’t prepared for the mental health crisis of the pandemic. Yes.

More than 8 in 10 public school reported that, due to the pandemic, students exhibited stunted behavioral and socioeconomical development. Sixty-one percent (61%) of schools perceived that general misconduct had increased. Schools reported substantial increases in the frequency of tardiness, skipping class, rowdiness, bullying, fighting, threats of fighting, use of electronic devices during class, and other classroom disruptions. Thirty-six percent (36%) of schools recorded an increase in vandalism.

And so we have to… sue social media? The same social media that… enabled your schools to stay open and relevant during the pandemic? The same social media that allowed kids across San Mateo County to continue to communicate with their social circle while they were locked down in their homes for over a year? The same social media — especially YouTube — that was critical to helping teachers continue to provide lessons to kids online? I know my kids were regularly assigned to watch science and history YouTube videos during remote learning, and many of those videos were fantastic! Way better than most science and history lectures I had in school.

That’s who you’re suing?

Like other school districts, Plaintiffs bear the cost of the increased need for youth mental health services. Operating under pre-crisis budgets, Plaintiffs have scrambled to reallocate resources to address the mental health crisis. Plaintiffs have diverted time and funds to hire additional health care professionals, to train teachers and staff on how to educate students on their mental health, to develop mental health curriculum and materials, and to keep students and parents notified and informed about mental health issues that arise.

Again, what does that have to do with social media? We had a pandemic. That’s been kinda stressful for everyone. And that’s true of kids as well. But social media actually helped tons of kids get through the pandemic and still stay in contact with their social circle.

Indeed, the complaint even admits all this:

During the Covid-19 pandemic, due to lockdowns, remote schooling, and physical isolation from friends, young people drastically increased their use of social media. One study explained its findings: “adolescents augmented their social media use, including general screen time.

But, then it blames all the mental health problems… on social media, and not the “physical isolation from friends” or the stress of, you know, a freaking pandemic.

This use of social media is accompanied by detrimental mental health effects

Again, studies show the opposite. The very Pew study that this complaint relies on to show that kids use social media a lot… showed that it did not have detrimental effects on the vast majority of kids.

Also, it turns out more people are absent from school… and somehow that’s also social media’s fault rather than a deadly, contagious virus.

Absenteeism also became a problem during the Covid-19 pandemic. Public schools reported both student and teacher chronic absenteeism increased compared to prior school years. Seventy-two percent (72%) of schools reported an increase in chronic student absenteeism compared to pre-pandemic school years.

The complaint details high rates of absenteeism at some of its schools, and makes zero effort to actually connect that to social media. It just acts as if it must be true, despite no reason to believe they’re connected, and many, many fairly obvious reasons to suggest that the pandemic is actually to blame.

The complaint also tries to connect bad behavior in schools to social media… and fails in almost hilarious ways. It mentions that since 2020 the entire county (which has a population of over 700,000 with between 85k and 100k enrolled students) there were… OMG… TWELVE threat incidents involving the internet.

Most egregiously, since 2020, Plaintiffs’ schools have had 72 Student Threat Assessment Training (“STAT”) Level 2 cases, 12 of which (16.7%) were a direct result of negative social media use.

Wait. Wait. Wait. So, with nearly 100,000 students, across three separate school years, you had… twelve incidents from social media? That’s an average of… four a year? From at least 85,000 students? I’m shocked it’s that low!

They also blame two hoax shooter phone calls… on the internet?

In addition to vandalism, social media has been tied to active shooter hoaxes. In October 2022, two San Mateo County high schools—Woodside High School and South San Francisco High School—had to go into lockdown when hoax phone calls to police departments reported possible active shooters on the campuses.

You don’t think it’s got more to do with the rise in actual high profile school shootings?

And, I mean, kids do stupid stuff like this. When I was in junior high school, a kid I knew from around the corner called in a bomb threat because he wanted to get out of a test he wasn’t ready for. We didn’t blame anyone, but him. Because he did it. Some kids are always going to do something like this. It happened before social media, and literally nothing in this lawsuit shows that social media has increased this kind of thing. Nor does it even attempt to link these claims to the internet, rather than just generally assuming they must be connected.

This whole lawsuit is a mess. And it’s a joke. And I’m sad because the people who brought this lawsuit are the people in charge of educating my kids. And anyone who thinks this lawsuit makes sense has shown a real failure. It’s a failure of critical thinking. It’s a failure of understanding evidence. It’s a failure of being carried away by a moral panic instead of evidence. It’s a failure in passing the blame. It’s a failure in not doing your damn job as educators.

It’s just shameful all around. I’m hoping more parents call out this nonsense. Yes, it’s difficult to manage schools these days, especially with all the nonsense culture wars and craziness. But any school board member who thinks this is how they should be spending their time will never receive my vote again, and makes me think it’s time to actively campaign against them in the future. They are failing our children.

* As noted above, this wasn’t the only such lawsuit filed last week. Bucks County, Pennsylvania filed one, as well. And, you know, it’s dumb too. Though, they did sue Meta as well. And went with the whole “public nuisance” claim like everyone else, but weren’t so crazy to go for the RICO nonsense. It’s still ridiculous and should fail easily in court, but this post was long enough, and frustrating enough that Bucks County gets off with just this one footnote paragraph.

Filed Under: covid, moral panic, nancy magee, protect the children, rico, san mateo, san mateo county, san mateo county board of education, social media
Companies: facebook, google, instagram, meta, snapchat, tiktok, youtube

Following Massive Protests Against COVID Policies, Chinese Government Again Ramping Up Its Censorship Efforts

from the pushing-back-against-the-pushback dept

A deadly fire in an Urumqi apartment complex has led to something rarely seen in China: massive protests across the nation against the Chinese government’s actually draconian COVID restrictions. Most of the city of Urumqi is on lockdown, with residents banned from leaving their homes. These restrictions may have contributed to the death toll. Witnesses (and one video) claimed lockdown barriers prevented fire trucks from getting to the scene of the fire.

Elsewhere in the country, people have been forced to sleep at work due to quarantine conditions. Others have been bused from their homes to quarantine facilities. Meanwhile, COVID numbers continue to climb, suggesting the recently instituted “zero COVID” policies aren’t actually addressing the problem.

Starting in Urumqi, protests soon spread across the country. Faced with open expressions of anger, the Chinese government is reacting the way it always reacts when it is faced with dissent: by increasing the footprint of its jackboot.

Internet and phone use is heavily regulated (and heavily surveiled) in China. Whatever was already working is being intensified. And whatever hasn’t been applied yet is being put into motion. No longer will it take creating or sharing content the government doesn’t like to earn police visits, criminal charges, or both. Now, as CNN reports, it will only take a nearly passive sign of approval directed at content the Chinese government dislikes to attract the government’s negative attention.

Internet users in China will soon be held liable for liking posts deemed illegal or harmful, sparking fears that the world’s second largest economy plans to control social media like never before.

China’s internet watchdog is stepping up its regulation of cyberspace as authorities intensify their crackdown on online dissent amid growing public anger against the country’s stringent Covid restrictions.

The new rules come into force from Dec. 15, as part of a new set of guidelines published by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) earlier this month.

The Chinese government would prefer an airtight stranglehold, and this is just some expected tightening of its grip. As the government has certainly noticed, the more it tries to censor, the more creative citizens are when circumventing the efforts. Rotated videos, screenshots of content, coded language, unexpected communication platforms… all of these help keep citizens one step ahead of the censors.

So, the rules continue to roll out. And they get more extreme with every iteration.

The regulationis an updatedversion of one previously published in 2017. For the first time, it states that “likes” of public posts must be regulated, along with other types of comments. Public accounts must also actively vet every comment under their posts.

However, the rules didn’t elaborate on what kind of content would be deemedillegal or harmful.

This vagueness is a feature, not a bug. You’ll know you’ve violated the new rules when uniformed officers swing by the house to inform you that you’ve violated them. The solution is to stop liking other people’s posts: winning by not playing.

But there’s an upside to China’s ever-expanding censorship programs, especially when they’re trailing ever-expanding dissent. Even China’s massive surveillance apparatus can’t possibly hope to catch them all.

However, analysts also questioned how practical it would be to carry out the newest rules, given that public anger is widespread and strict enforcement of these censorship requirements would consume significant resources.

“It is almost impossible to stop the spread of protest activities as the dissatisfaction continues to spread. The angry people can come up with all sorts of ways to communicate and express their feelings,” Cheng said.

The Chinese government has the power. But it also has billions of people to keep an eye on. Dissent will never be completely silenced. And as long as that’s true, there’s still hope for the nation.

Filed Under: censorship, china, covid, free speech, intermediary liability, internet, protests