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.”
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.
U.S. tops 60,000 daily coronavirus infections for first time since early August New study shows Republican-leaning counties hardest hit in recent weeks. .......... The virus is spreading in rural communities in the heartland ......... “Stay home. Wear a mask. Stay six feet apart. Wash your hands frequently.” ......... The widespread use of powerful steroids and other treatments has lowered mortality rates among people who are severely ill. ............. the dry indoor environment is congenial to the spread of respiratory viruses. ......... “Inevitably, we’re moving into a phase where there’s going to need to be restrictions again” ......... The virus isn’t going away magically, and everyone needs to prepare for a challenging winter. ........ the tendency for people to lower their guard around individuals they know best ......... Much of the new transmission is taking place in rural communities in the heart of the nation with limited hospital capacity. They also tend to have older populations more vulnerable to severe outcomes from covid-19. ........ “red” counties with the most intense leanings toward Republicans have had the largest recent increases in cases, while “blue” counties that lean Democratic have tended recently to be flat. ........ the Republican-leaning communities have been less inclined to follow public health guidance, including recommendations about mask-wearing and social distancing ........ Many of the country’s leading medical experts, including top federal government doctors, have urged adherence to public health guidelines, but that message has competed with the pronouncements of President Trump and his closest political allies, who have played down the threat of the coronavirus. .......... the White House strategy for fighting the pandemic is bolstered by the Great Barrington Declaration, a document posted online by three “dissenting scientists” that argues the virus should be allowed to spread at natural rates among younger, healthier people while older people and others who are vulnerable are kept isolated. .......... “It’s eventually going to spread everywhere in the U.S. … This virus is opportunistic.
Pelosi, Mnuchin cite progress in economic relief talks but eye obstacles with Senate Republicans During a nearly 90-minute call, the two negotiators said they continued to exchange proposals on stimulus, virus testing ........... Pelosi and Mnuchin have been discussing a new spending deal between $1.8 trillion and $2.2 trillion, although President Trump has said he would support even more. ......... McConnell next week plans to put a roughly $500 billion package on the Senate floor, close to a quarter the size of the package Mnuchin and Pelosi are working on. ............. “I’ve told him. So far, he hasn’t come home with the bacon," the president said of Mnuchin. ........... “The Republicans are very willing to do it,” Trump said, insisting that Pelosi is standing in the way and “she’s got a lot of mental problems.” ............ Trump’s uneven posturing appears to have only strengthened Pelosi’s determination to hold out for a bigger and better deal, despite pressure from a number of House Democrats to reach an agreement now. ........... Mnuchin and Pelosi have agreed on several measures to include in a new stimulus plan, including a desire to send another round of $1,200 stimulus checks, more small- business aid and help for the airline industry. They also have sought to extend emergency unemployment insurance, although there have been differences on how to structure such assistance. .............. Defending his call for higher spending, Trump repeatedly asserted without evidence or explanation that China would pay for the nearly $2 trillion stimulus package. “I’d like to see more money — because it comes back,” he said on Fox Business Network. “We’re going to take it from China. I’ll tell you right now: It’s coming out of China.” ............. The president has repeatedly made false claims about foreign nations paying for domestic spending projects, for instance claiming that Mexico would fund construction of a wall along the southern U.S. border. ............. Asked how he would get China to pay for the stimulus package, Trump asserted: “Well, there’s lots of ways. Okay? There’s a lot of ways. And I’ll figure all of them out. I already have them figured out.” A pandemic should be the great equalizer. This one had the opposite effect. The virus is ushering in the greatest rise in economic inequality in decades, both globally and in the United States. .......... Thanks to the rise of China, India and other countries, the share of people living in abject poverty (under $2 a day) is less than a quarter of what it was in 1990. ........... about 100 million people are falling back into extreme poverty this year. ......... The World Food Program — recipient of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize — estimates that the number facing hunger will double this year to 265 million people. .......... 38 percent of those who have lost work due to covid-19 don’t have even a month’s worth of savings. ........... In the current recession, the top 25 percent, after a slight initial decline, has bounced back completely. The bottom 25 percent, on the other hand, has cratered, with job losses of more than 20 percent. .......... For those whose jobs can be done remotely — bankers, consultants, lawyers, executives, academics — life goes on with a few hiccups. For those who worked in restaurants, hotels, cruise ships, theme parks, shopping malls, work has simply disappeared. ............. The tragedy is that we know what we need to do. In March, Congress and the administration acted swiftly and boldly to pass a massive relief and stimulus package, which was so successful it seems to have made many in Washington complacent. It has now largely expired, and the two parties are back to their partisan warfare. The Democrats are right to want a much larger relief package than the administration is offering. Cities and states should not be punished for the collapse in tax revenue that have resulted from the pandemic. But surely the best path for the country is for Democrats to accept the concessions they have extracted from Republicans and then push for more after Election Day. ............. I cannot help but wonder whether the relative normalcy of life for elites has prevented us from understanding the true severity of the problem. For those of us using Zoom, things have been a bit disruptive and strange. But for tens of millions of people in the United States — and hundreds of millions around the world — this is the Great Depression. Can we please help them?
