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The Facebook Papers: ‘History will not judge us kindly’

The Facebook Papers: ‘History will not judge us kindly’

Adrienne LaFrance writes: Before I tell you what happened at exactly 2:28 p.m. on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, at the White House—and how it elicited a very specific reaction, some 2,400 miles away, in Menlo Park, California—you need to remember the mayhem of that day, the exuberance of the mob as it gave itself over to violence, and how several things seemed to happen all at once. At 2:10 p.m., a live microphone captured a Senate aide’s panicked warning that…

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Facebook wrestles with the features it used to define social networking

Facebook wrestles with the features it used to define social networking

The New York Times reports: In 2019, Facebook researchers began a new study of one of the social network’s foundational features: the Like button. They examined what people would do if Facebook removed the distinct thumbs-up icon and other emoji reactions from posts on its photo-sharing app Instagram, according to company documents. The buttons had sometimes caused Instagram’s youngest users “stress and anxiety,” the researchers found, especially if posts didn’t get enough Likes from friends. But the researchers discovered that…

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Facebook failed the world

Facebook failed the world

The Atlantic reports: In the fall of 2019, Facebook launched a massive effort to combat the use of its platforms for human trafficking. Working around the clock, its employees searched Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram for keywords and hashtags that promoted domestic servitude in the Middle East and elsewhere. Over the course of a few weeks, the company took down 129,191 pieces of content, disabled more than 1,000 accounts, tightened its policies, and added new ways to detect this kind…

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Jan. 6 protest organizers say they participated in ‘dozens’ of planning meetings with members of Congress and White House staff

Jan. 6 protest organizers say they participated in ‘dozens’ of planning meetings with members of Congress and White House staff

Rolling Stone reports: As the House investigation into the Jan. 6 attack heats up, some of the planners of the pro-Trump rallies that took place in Washington, D.C., have begun communicating with congressional investigators and sharing new information about what happened when the former president’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol. Two of these people have spoken to Rolling Stone extensively in recent weeks and detailed explosive allegations that multiple members of Congress were intimately involved in planning both Trump’s efforts…

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Whose promised land? A journey into a divided Israel

Whose promised land? A journey into a divided Israel

Patrick Kingsley reports: We found Shai Melamud just before dusk, standing on his patio near Israel’s northern border, opposite a slope scorched black by recent rocket fire from Lebanon. Mr. Melamud, 86, was born 13 years before the state of Israel. He grew up in these hills, the son of early Zionists who helped build one of the area’s first Jewish collective farms, or kibbutzim. Over dinner, he remembered the Arab village that once stood on the now-empty hill to…

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Thoreau’s economics: the truly precious costs precious little

Thoreau’s economics: the truly precious costs precious little

John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle write: The word ‘economy’ evolved from the Greek root οἶκος. ‘Oikos’ had three interrelated senses in ancient Greece: the family, the family’s land, and the family’s home. These three, taken interchangeably, constituted the first or fundamental political unit in the ancient Greek world, especially in the minds of Greece’s hereditary aristocrats, for whom family mattered more than all other affiliations. The family, then and after, was viewed as the state in miniature, with its…

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America needs you to buy less junk

America needs you to buy less junk

Amanda Mull writes: Lately, news stories about the supply chain tend to start in similar ways. The reader is dropped into an American container port, maybe in Long Beach, California, or Savannah, Georgia, full to bursting with trailer-size steel boxes loaded with toilet paper and exercise bikes and future Christmas presents. Some of the containers have gone untouched for weeks or months, waiting for their contents to be trucked to distribution centers. On the horizon, dozens of additional vessels are…

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In Germany, global warming is changing more than just the climate. It’s changing politics, too

In Germany, global warming is changing more than just the climate. It’s changing politics, too

NBC News reports: Layers of dried mud on sidewalks, concrete roads turned to gravel and time-worn stone bridges washed away. Three months after this summer’s catastrophic floods in Germany’s Ahrweiler region, there are reminders everywhere of the destruction they wrought. The deluge, which was preceded by three consecutive summers of drought, has brought a new urgency for many to find climate change solutions — and that has impacted Germany’s politics, too. In last month’s federal election, the environmentalist Green Party…

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In Montana, where facts were no match for fear

In Montana, where facts were no match for fear

The New York Times reports: In the summer of 2020, as pandemic shutdowns closed businesses and racial justice protests erupted on American streets, Rae Grulkowski, a 56-year-old businesswoman who had never been involved in politics but was alarmed about what was happening to the country, found a way to make a difference. The connection to the turbulence of national politics might not have been immediately clear. Ms. Grulkowski had just heard about a years-in-the-making effort to designate her corner of…

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Christians must reclaim Jesus from his church

Christians must reclaim Jesus from his church

Peter Wehner writes: The election of the elders of an evangelical church is usually an uncontroversial, even unifying event. But this summer, at an influential megachurch in Northern Virginia, something went badly wrong. A trio of elders didn’t receive 75 percent of the vote, the threshold necessary to be installed. “A small group of people, inside and outside this church, coordinated a divisive effort to use disinformation in order to persuade others to vote these men down as part of…

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Republican opposition to the public interest

Republican opposition to the public interest

Binyamin Appelbaum writes: Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the top House Republican, recently took to social media to warn that Democrats have hatched a dastardly plot. “Democrats,” he said, “want to track every penny you earn so they can then tax you and your family at the maximum possible amount.” Well, yes. Democrats want Americans to pay the full amount they owe in taxes. What doesn’t get enough attention is that many Republicans seem not to agree. Resistance to taxation…

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Counterterrorism off the rails: Israel’s declaration of Palestinian human rights groups as ‘terrorist’ organizations

Counterterrorism off the rails: Israel’s declaration of Palestinian human rights groups as ‘terrorist’ organizations

Eliav Lieblich and Adam Shinar write: On Friday, Oct. 22, 2021, Israeli Minister of Defense, Benny Gantz, declared six West Bank Palestinian civil society organizations as “terrorist organizations.” Among them are prominent and well-established human rights organizations such as Al-Haq – which has been active in the occupied territories since 1979. The declaration has received sharp rebukes from international and Israeli human rights groups, the UN, and several members of the U.S. Congress. The U.S. State Department requested Israel to…

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How public health took part in its own downfall

How public health took part in its own downfall

Ed Yong writes: There was a time, at the start of the 20th century, when the field of public health was stronger and more ambitious. A mixed group of physicians, scientists, industrialists, and social activists all saw themselves “as part of this giant social-reform effort that was going to transform the health of the nation,” David Rosner, a public-health historian at Columbia University, told me. They were united by a simple yet radical notion: that some people were more susceptible…

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Facebook services are used to spread religious hatred in India, internal documents show

Facebook services are used to spread religious hatred in India, internal documents show

The Wall Street Journal reports: Mark Zuckerberg praised India in December as a special and important country for Facebook Inc., saying that millions of people there use its platforms every day to stay in touch with family and friends. Internally, researchers were painting a different picture: Facebook’s products in India were awash with inflammatory content that one report linked to deadly religious riots. Inflammatory content on Facebook spiked 300% above previous levels at times during the months following December 2019,…

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