Coronavirus News (284)

The First Amendment in the age of disinformation.  This month, Trump retweeted a response to a Republican member of Congress, Mark Green, who suggested that Speaker Nancy Pelosi could stage a coup. .............  The United States is in the middle of a catastrophic public-health crisis caused by the spread of the coronavirus. But it is also in the midst of an information crisis caused by the spread of viral disinformation, defined as falsehoods aimed at achieving a political goal. (“Misinformation” refers more generally to falsehoods.) .............  The conspiracy theories, the lies, the distortions, the overwhelming amount of information, the anger encoded in it — these all serve to create chaos and confusion and make people, even nonpartisans, exhausted, skeptical and cynical about politics. The spewing of falsehoods isn’t meant to win any battle of ideas. Its goal is to prevent the actual battle from being fought, by causing us to simply give up. .......... effective disinformation campaigns are often an “elite-driven, mass-media led process” in which “social media played only a secondary and supportive role.” ...........   Though Fox News is far smaller than Facebook, the social media platform has helped Fox attain the highest weekly reach, offline and online combined, of any single news source in the United States .......... the mass distortion of truth and overwhelming waves of speech from extremists that smear and distract. ........   the separate problem of “troll armies” — a flood of commenters, often propelled by bots — that “aim to discredit or to destroy the reputation of disfavored speakers and to discourage them from speaking again” .............   the “use of speech as a tool to suppress speech is, by its nature, something very challenging for the First Amendment to deal with.” ........   Other democracies, in Europe and elsewhere, have taken a different approach. Despite more regulations on speech, these countries remain democratic; in fact, they have created better conditions for their citizenry to sort what’s true from what’s not and to make informed decisions about what they want their societies to be. Here in the United States, meanwhile, we’re drowning in lies.  .......  Mill and Meiklejohn stand for the proposition that unfettered debate — Holmes’s “free trade in ideas,” or the “marketplace of ideas,” coined by Justice William O. Douglas in 1953 — furthers the bedrock values of the pursuit of truth, individual autonomy and democratic self-governance. ............ the use of propaganda to “make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism.” ............ good ideas do not necessarily triumph in the marketplace of ideas. “Free speech threatens democracy as much as it also provides for its flourishing” ........ “Once a defense of the powerless, the First Amendment over the last hundred years has mainly become a weapon of the powerful” ...........  Instead of “radicals, artists and activists, socialists and pacifists, the excluded and the dispossessed,” she wrote, the First Amendment now serves “authoritarians, racists and misogynists, Nazis and Klansmen, pornographers and corporations buying elections.” .......... Justice Elena Kagan warned that the court’s conservative majority was “weaponizing the First Amendment” in the service of corporate interests, in a dissent to a ruling against labor unions. .......   The purpose of free speech is to further democratic participation. “The crucial function of protecting speech is to give persons the sense that the government is theirs, which we might call democratic legitimation” .......... the conservative media did not counter lies and distortions, but rather recycled them from one outlet to the next, on TV and radio and through like-minded websites. .............  In the eyes of many conservatives, news outlets like The Washington Post, The New York Times and CNN do not fill that role when they challenge a story that Trump and Fox News promote. ........... Content that prompts hot emotion tends to succeed at generating clicks and shares, and that’s what the platforms’ algorithms tend to promote. Lies go viral more quickly than true statements .........   some fact-checking methods significantly reduce the prevalence of false beliefs ........ a misleading message in a microtargeted ad “remains hidden from challenge by the other campaign or the media” ........... In Europe, there is historically an understanding that democracy needs to protect itself from anti-democratic ideas. ..........   there is no equivalent of Fox News or Breitbart in France. ....... In March, the World Health Organization appealed for help with what it called an “infodemic.” ........... Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple have monopoly power in their markets like that of the “oil barons and railroad tycoons” of the early 20th century. ...........   The ideal subject of fascist ideology was the person “for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e. the reality of experience),” Arendt wrote, “and the distinction between true and false (i.e. the standards of thought) no longer exist.”

The Intricacies of Colombia’s War, Stitched Together in a Novel  They can be interventionists or mercenaries, they can be idealists or cynics, but they fight, administer or narrate these wars with little command over one crucial fact: Violence poisons everything. 

Trump’s Overhaul of Immigration Is Worse Than You Think This administration has attacked every aspect of the immigration system — and it won’t be easy to undo. ........... how meticulously the Trump administration has pursued the destruction of immigration in America ......... Through administrative orders, strict enforcement and mere threat, the White House has attacked virtually every aspect of immigration, legal and illegal. ......... This transformation of the American immigration system has been perhaps the administration’s boldest accomplishment ......... Between 2016 and 2019, annual net immigration into the United States fell by almost half, to about 600,000 people per year — a level not seen since the 1980s — ............   To scare people from bringing their families over the border, Jeff Sessions, the attorney general at the time, said, “We need to take away children.” ............ In Barack Obama’s last year as president, the ceiling for refugee admissions was 110,000. For the current fiscal year, it’s 15,000. .......... “Are you having a good time with your refugees?” he said with smirk to a roaring crowd in Minnesota recently. .......... The administration had threatened to furlough 70 percent of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services employees, blaming the pandemic, but some of those employees said the real problem was restrictive policies and delays in visa applications that have sharply reduced revenue from the processing fees that fund the agency. ...........  Mr. Trump also has ended “temporary protected status” for 400,000 people from El Salvador, Haiti, Sudan and elsewhere who have legally lived and worked in the United States for decades after being provided a haven from war or natural disaster. ...........   rejecting, by law and action, the Trump administration’s racism, cruelty and xenophobia would reaffirm that America is a nation of immigrants who help revitalize the country — an ideal that most Americans support. 

Editor’s Note: The Editorial Board’s Verdict on Trump’s Presidency And an urgent call to action. ......... Kids who are too young to remember anyone else have now learned that racism, xenophobia and bullying tweets are hallmarks of presidential behavior. They don’t remember a Republican Party that wasn’t an obsequious cult of personality or presidential debates that weren’t confusing shouting matches. They think it’s normal for every other word out of a president’s mouth to be bravado, innuendo or, too often, a lie. .............  they live in a country where representative democracy is under assault from algorithmic gerrymandering, institutionalized voter suppression and foreign and domestic disinformation campaigns. .........   his record of racism and corruption to his utter administrative incompetence. ...... In the midst of an economic calamity unmatched in generations, a pandemic of global scope and a nation more divided than in modern memory, the stakes couldn’t be greater.