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VATICAN CITY (CNS) Human lives and jobs are not the only things threatened by the coronavirus pandemic: In many countries, democracy and efforts to build a more just world also are under attack, said Father Arturo Sosa, superior general of the Jesuits.

Democracy can be one of the victims of the pandemic if we do not take care with our political condition, Father Sosa told Vatican News. At this time, for example, many governments -- including so-called democratic governments -- are taking the path of authoritarianism.

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The interview was published on the eve of the July 31 feast of St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits. Pope Francis, also a Jesuit, joined Father Sosa and his confreres for a feast-day lunch at the orders headquarters near the Vatican.

In the interview, Father Sosa said many governments are using the pandemic as an excuse to restrict or end their assistance to migrants and refugees, which is a great mistake if we want to make the world more fraternal and just.

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To discriminate against migrants would be and is a great danger and would be a sign of a world that we do not want, he said.

The Jesuit superior said he also is concerned about how some businesses are using the pandemic as an excuse to fire workers or reduce salaries and benefits, including for health care.

In other words, the pandemic is an occasion to take steps forward or to take steps backward, he said. And we must be very aware of this as the Catholic Church and as people committed to justice and peace so that we can build a more welcoming, more democratic society.

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Inspired by St. Ignatius, he said, Jesuits and other Catholics know that being close to the poor is always important, but especially during this pandemic.

If we are not capable of looking at the world up close, sharing the point of view of the poor, which is the point of view of the crucified Jesus, then we will make mistakes in our decisions, he said.

The heart of the Ignatian experience and, therefore, of Ignatian spirituality, is a personal and profound encounter with Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, which leads to such a familiarity with God that one can find him in every thing and every moment, Father Soso said. That intimate relationship becomes a source of true freedom because it helps a person be fully available to do only that which God desires, without attachments to any person, place or institution.

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Jesuit superior warns of pandemic's threat to democracy - America Magazine

As experts sound the alarm about rising COVID-19 cases in Africa, Tanzanias President John Magufuli has a very different message. In Magufulis telling, Tanzania is free from the virus and tourists should feel confident about visiting the country. To ensure that the public will take his word for it, official data on the number of positive cases has not been released since the end of April, part of a pattern of hiding, or tightly controlling information that in most countries can be accessed and interrogated without incident. Since his election in 2015 on an anti-corruption platform, Magufulis penchant for eliminating or suppressing discordant narratives has proven toxic to his countrys democracy.

Brave Tanzanians continue finding ways to speak out about the shrinking space for discourse and dissent in their country. Outsiders, including UN human rights experts, have spoken out about the persecution of journalists, civil society leaders, and opposition politicians. They note that the governments crackdown has escalated in recent weeks, with reports that an opposition leader was attacked by unidentified assailants, the arrests of eight opposition members for alleged unlawful assembly, the suspension of a newspapers license, and a police raid on training organized by the Tanzanian Human Rights Defenders Coalition.But neighboring states are largely silent about the countrys increasingly authoritarian direction.

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In this climate, its difficult to be optimistic about the upcoming October elections.The legal context in which opposition parties operate has changed, limiting their capacity to mobilize voters, and major civil society organizations have been disqualified from observing the polling.In Zanzibar, where citizens civil and political rights have been denied multiple times in the context of elections, the voter registration system has only added to citizens'mistrust of the process. The stage increasingly looks to be set for an election that serves the interests of the current leader, but erodes popular trust in democracy itself.

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Tanzania

Elections and Voting

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Troubling Trends Threaten What Little Trust Remains in Tanzania's Democracy - Council on Foreign Relations

Does Facebook have too much power?The scale of internet platforms such as Google and Facebook is unprecedented in the tech world and, I would argue, unprecedented since the Dutch East India Company. They are ubiquitous in almost every country that has an economy. And when you are ubiquitous, the political imperative is to align with power.

And that is why in countries such as the Philippines Facebook has been used to marshal public opinion in support of death squads. In Cambodia, it is being used to suppress dissent. In Myanmar it was used to incite ethnic cleansing. Thats what happens in authoritarian regimes.

In democratic regimes, these companies are actually more powerful than the government. Because they are so ubiquitous, that they can use their users as a human shield politically, to prevent any kind of change. So what you see is the defiance of subpoenas in the UK and Canada. And pre-Trump, and even early into Trumps reign, they defied Congress.

Facebook, in particular, has more monthly users than there are notional adherents to Christianity. Roughly twice as many as there are people in China. And when your numbers are that big, your ego can sometimes give you the illusion that you are a nation state.

In practice, in the US, how does this work?Facebooks approach can be explained by the way [Facebooks chief operating officer] Sheryl Sandberg took to recruiting a government relations team. Google has people that lobby both parties and it spends more money than Facebook, but it tries to do so in a way that is discreet. Facebook hired rightwing operatives such as [ex-Bush aide and energy lobbyist] Joel Kaplan. Someone made the point that Kaplan was hired to lobby Republicans but in reality it appears hes been more successful lobbying Facebook. Kaplan has got Facebook tightly aligned with the Trump administration. Kaplan even got involved in the Brett Kavanaugh supreme court nomination.

Is there a risk for Facebook in aligning itself closely with Trump?The trick when youre doing political lobbying is not to take up a position so extreme that if your side loses you cant come back from it. I dont know whether Facebook has gone too far to the right. Only time will tell. Zuckerberg has met privately with Trump on two occasions without any prior notice the second time was only discovered because of leaks. Is he doing that with Biden? I dont think so.

Did Facebook win the 2016 election for Trump?The 2016 election was incredibly close because of a series of factors which would have been hard to predict. But in the end, if you look at voter suppression of suburban white women, black people, and young people who had voted for Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries by the Trump campaign on Facebook and Instagram in the states which Trump had to win, then more than enough voters were discouraged from going to the polls to make the difference. Social media can do this by, for example, running ads which show long queues or disturbances at voting stations, or messaging creating apathy about the democratic process. It took nine things happening before that for that factor to matter at all, but it was really important. So Facebook had a lot to do with Trump getting elected. There were no rules then that said you couldnt use social media to suppress votes.

Facebook approached it like engineers. They said: Wow, these guys are willing to commit their whole budget. So theyre willing to let us run the experiment of whether we can get this to actually work. Wow, this is cool.

It never occurred to them that doing it for one side and not the other might be an ethical problem. It never occurred to them that doing so might actually lead to consequences for the country that would be hard to recover from. Remember, this is a company that had the motto move fast and break things. But when you apply move fast and break things in politics, the things youre breaking are the lives of everybody in the country.

The value system of internet platforms, but especially Facebook, is a threat to whatever remains of democracy in the US.

If Biden wins in 2020, do you think hell make any attempt to reform or regulate these platforms?I wrote an open letter that was published in Wired. It was triggered by President Obama suggesting that Biden should work with Eric Schmidt and Reid Hoffman two of the absolute architects of the current internet culture. And my basic message is, go ahead, take their money, work with them on the campaign, but you cannot work with them on technology policy. And you have to recognise that the thing that made these guys so successful and that makes them valuable to you in the campaign makes them singularly unqualified to help you out there.

Ive had several people connected to the Biden campaign say my article is going like wildfire.

Having politics take place on social media has given the social media platforms enormous power. And so, when you look at hate speech, disinformation, conspiracy theories, if you take them out, the level of engagement on these platforms goes way, way down and with it, their economic value. Hate speech, misinformation, conspiracy theories, that is the lubricant for their business.

They would claim theyve taken steps to reduce that type of contentEvery time theres pressure on them to either eliminate a bad actor like Alex Jones, or to take down a piece of bad information like something on the pandemic or Trumps looting shooting post, they take down the bare minimum.

When you take out a few things and leave everything else up, it creates the illusion that everything else is OK. These people have shown no willingness to self-regulate, no understanding of the responsibilities they have to society. Its time for society to take matters into its own hands.

So how should social media be regulated?There are four categories: safety, privacy, honesty and competition.

Safety has two elements. First, no tech product should be shipped until it demonstrates safety and freedom from bias; and if that fails, the penalties should be huge. Second, in the US, we have a safe harbour for internet platforms called Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. I would like to amend it so that any company that does not treat all content identically loses the protection of Section 230. So this goes after the algorithms that amplify content such as hate speech, disinformation and conspiracy theories disproportionately, giving political power to the most extreme voices.

It is a very small change. It doesnt say you cant do algorithmic amplification, but if you do it you are under threat of legal action. And there have to be real teeth. You have to give everybody the right to sue. They have to be able to sue for explicit financial rewards, even for things that dont normally have a financial price. For instance you could put a price on revenge porn which gets amplified like crazy.

The second category is privacy. There I would like to follow the Shoshana Zuboff model of treating private data as a human right, as opposed to an asset. Thats a big leap from where we are. So the starting point is to move to an opt-in model GDPR and the California Computer Privacy Act, are both opt-out, so all the burden is on the consumer. I want to reverse the burden and place it on the people who use data, transfer it and so on.

Third, honesty. Google and Facebook have an oligopoly power over ad networks. The industry suspects that many of the ads they are paying for are never seen. If thats true it means the revenues are overstated, which would be a securities law violation, which may give rise to a felony, which would have jail time associated with it. That would change incentives very rapidly.

Last, competition. The US economy is horribly concentrated but in this industry it is particularly damaging. So I want to revive the three core antitrust laws in the US, which have been allowed to become essentially moribund. I want to get back in the business of encouraging entrepreneurship, encouraging innovation, because these guys have they stopped all that. A Biden administration has the opportunity to address of all this.

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Roger McNamee: Facebook is a threat to whatever remains of democracy in the US' - The Guardian

One hundred and fifty-five years after Confederate troops surrendered at Appomattox and Bennett Place, their battle flag has finally come down in Mississippi and their statues are retreating from courthouse squares and university quads. As the children of generations of Black southerners who fought against the lies of the Lost Cause, we celebrate this most recent surrender and look forward to walking down streets that are not shadowed by monuments to men who claimed to own our ancestors. But we cannot understand why these monuments lasted so long without challenging the inequities they were erected to justify. In fact, many who support flags and statues coming down today also advocate voter suppression, attack healthcare and re-segregate our schools. We must attend to both the systems of injustice and the monuments that have justified them if we are to realize liberty and justice for all.

If you examine the bases of statues that are being hauled away, most bear a date between the 1890s and 1920s. These monuments did not rise in defiance of the federal troops who were sent by Congress and Ulysses S Grant to enforce Reconstruction and guarantee political power to the new Black citizens of the south in the 1860s and 1870s. If a statue of Robert E Lee or Jefferson Davis had been proposed during Reconstruction, the very suggestion would have sparked a riot. But after the compromise of 1876, when Rutherford B Hayes agreed to remove federal troops from the south, newly established Black and white political alliances were subjected to the violence of white terrorist organizations and the propaganda of white supremacy campaigns.

As Martin Luther King Jr taught on the steps of the Alabama state house in 1965: To meet this threat, the southern aristocracy began immediately to engineer this development of a segregated society. Black people were driven from public life and blamed for the troubles of a society that had invested its resources in treasonous rebellion against the United States. Jim Crow laws went on the books to offer a legal structure for the caste system that had built plantation wealth with enslaved labor. If it may be said of the slavery era that the white man took the world and gave the Negro Jesus, then it may be said of the Reconstruction era that the southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow, King said. And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man.

George White, the last Black congressman from the south during Reconstruction, finished his term representing North Carolinas second congressional district in 1902. Five years later, the United Daughters of the Confederacy petitioned the University of North Carolina to erect a memorial to alumni who had fought for the Confederacy. With Jim Crow established, their cause was no longer lost. In the Jim Crow south, these veterans and their descendants celebrated the sacrifices their fathers and grandfathers had made to defend white supremacy. Before a cheering crowd of more than 1,000 people who gathered to dedicate their new Confederate Monument, Julian Carr recalled how 100 yards from where we stand, less than 90 days perhaps after my return from Appomattox, I horse-whipped a Negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds, because upon the streets of this quiet village she had publicly insulted and maligned a southern lady, and then rushed for protection to these University buildings where was stationed a garrison of 100 federal soldiers. Like Confederate monuments in almost every southern community, this one was erected to celebrate that no federal authority was willing to challenge white supremacy.

After the Brown v Board of Education decision rendered Jim Crow unconstitutional in 1954, Black and white people in the civil rights movement worked tirelessly to demand federal enforcement of Reconstruction-era promises: Black citizenship, equal protection under the law and the right to vote. As in the moral struggle of the civil war, our parents and their colleagues risked their lives in non-violent struggle to make the promise of America real for all of her citizens. As Coretta Scott King said: Struggle is a never-ending process. Freedom is never really won, you earn it and win it in every generation.

While the gains of the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act transformed the horizon of possibility for millions of Americans, the Second Reconstructions work of establishing a genuine multiethnic democracy was not completed before calls for law and order, traditional values and a tax revolt rallied a Confederate resistance once again. By uniting white voters in the suburbs, the sun belt, and the south, the Southern Strategy promised white people political power in an increasingly diverse America for the next 50 years.

While the divisive politics of Trumpism may be the last gasp of the Southern Strategy, the question of whether America can do the work of becoming a genuine democracy still remains. Removing monuments to the lie of white supremacy is an important step, but a shared future depends on redistributing power and resources so that every American, no matter their race, income, geography or immigration status, has access to healthcare, public education, affordable housing, a living wage, clean water and a livable planet.

In this moment when millions of Americans are suffering from a triple crisis of poverty, Covid-19 and police brutality, we need more than a conversation about monuments. We need concrete action to address the incredible disparities in death rates among Black, brown and poor people. This pivotal moment for our nation and our world is beckoning us to dismantle injustice and rebuild with love as the foundation. We can build a more just, humane, equitable and peaceful world. But, as King so prophetically admonished us: The hour is late. And the clock of destiny is ticking out. We must act now before it is too late. We must act now, America.

Bishop William J Barber, II is president of Repairers of the Breach and co-chair of the Poor Peoples Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. He is author of We Are Called to Be a Movement

Dr Bernice A King, the youngest child of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr and Coretta Scott King, is a global thought leader, orator, peace advocate and CEO of the King Center, which was founded by her mother

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Removing monuments is the easy part. We must make America a real democracy - The Guardian

One of the worst affected industries during the coronavirus outbreak has been, ironically, a profession that should have been reporting on it.

Scores of newspapers have laid off staff, or closed entirely, in the past four months, in what one expert has predicted will be an extinction-level event for the industry.

The more recent cuts come to an industry which has long been in decline, robbing large swathes of the US of news coverage, and its the state of journalism that is examined in Ghosting the News, a book by the Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan, which lays out the state of journalism in America, and the desperate need for its revival.

Sullivan writes that while the disinformation spread by Donald Trump and his supporters, and their subsequent cries of fake news at anything unfavorable about the president or his administration covered by mainstream news organizations, is well documented, something just as important and equally depressing in journalism is happening.

While these may grab the publics attention, another crisis is happening more quietly, Sullivan writes.

Some of the most trusted sources of news local sources, particularly local newspapers are slipping away, never to return. The cost to democracy is great. It takes a toll on civic engagement even on citizens ability to have a common sense of reality and facts, the very basis of self-governance.

The news industry, where profits tend to vary between slim and non-existent, has particularly suffered over the past four months. Scores of newspapers have laid off staff or closed entirely, according to Poynter, and in April Penny Abernathy, the Knight chair in journalism and digital media economics at the University of North Carolina, told the Guardian she expected hundreds, not dozens of newspapers and news websites to close.

But this acute loss is the result of a long decline, Sullivan writes. More than 2,000 newspapers have closed since 2004: and many of those that remain are mere shadows of their former selves.

Facebook and Google have borne much of the blame, sucking up the advertising that local newspapers, in particular, once relied on. The 2008 recession meant further losses.

Round after round of layoffs and buyouts at nearly every paper in the country resulted; local journalists who thought they had a lifetime job covering local government, for example, were out on the street, Sullivan writes.

Copy editors were deemed nonessential. Unsurprisingly, the quality of many newspapers went down.

The result was many communities no longer having a newspaper dedicated to local coverage, resulting in news deserts areas which have no local news coverage at all. In 2018 a study by Abernathy, at the University of North Carolina, found that 1,300 US communities have completely lost news coverage.

The impact, Sullivan says, is stark.

Studies have shown us some interesting things. For example, municipal borrowing costs go up when local news declines. Why? Because the watchdog isnt there and so, local government becomes less efficient and more prone to corruption or at least wasteful spending, Sullivan said.

When Americans are told day after day that reporters are dishonest, that they are 'scum' or 'the enemy of the people, it has an effect

We also know that people become less civically engaged when local news declines. They become more partisan: Less likely to cross the political aisle to vote for a candidate whose party they dont belong to. It increases the tribalism that is already such a curse in American politics.

While this has been a long time coming, Sullivan believes it could have been exacerbated by the ascension of Trump, and his loathing of any media which disagrees with him.

I dont know that it can be proven, but I firmly believe that Trumps attacks on the press have caused harm, Sullivan said.

When Americans are told day after day that reporters are dishonest, that they are scum or the enemy of the people, it has an effect. It turns people against the press. And at least some people will react by walking away from traditional news sources.

Of course, the converse is also true many people have decided they need trustworthy news sources more than ever. So its a mixture, and I think we need some time to pass before we figure out what the real effects have been.

Its not all bad news for journalism, however. Sullivan points to the success some non-profit organizations have had in recent years as a way news organizations could revive their fortunes.

The philanthropic, non-profit model is important, as national organizations like ProPublica have demonstrated so beautifully. That is already an important piece of the local-news puzzle, as we see outlets like Voice of San Diego, MinnPost [which covers Minnesota], CalMatters [a California-based politics site], The City [in New York City] and many others doing vital work.

Im also hopeful that more traditional outlets, particularly regional newspapers, will continue to increase the digital subscriptions in a way that will sustain them. There need to be many different ways to fill the growing void.

Its really important because the way our democracy functions squarely rests on having informed citizens.

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Local journalism is on its knees endangering democracy. Who will save it? - The Guardian