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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

Is democracy the most appropriate name for a large-scale representative system such as that of the early United States? At the end of the 18th century, the history of the terms whose literal meaning is rule by the peopledemocracy and republicleft the answer unclear. Both terms had been applied to the assembly-based systems of Greece and Rome, though neither system assigned legislative powers to representatives elected by members of the dmos. As noted above, even after Roman citizenship was expanded beyond the city itself and increasing numbers of citizens were prevented from participating in government by the time, expense, and hardship of travel to the city, the complex Roman system of assemblies was never replaced by a government of representativesa parliamentelected by all Roman citizens. Venetians also called the government of their famous city a republic, though it was certainly not democratic.

When the members of the United States Constitutional Convention met in 1787, terminology was still unsettled. Not only were democracy and republic used more or less interchangeably in the colonies, but no established term existed for a representative government by the people. At the same time, the British system was moving swiftly toward full-fledged parliamentary government. Had the framers of the United States Constitution met two generations later, when their understanding of the constitution of Britain would have been radically different, they might have concluded that the British system required only an expansion of the electorate to realize its full democratic potential. Thus, they might well have adopted a parliamentary form of government.

Embarked as they were on a wholly unprecedented effort to construct a constitutional government for an already large and continuously expanding country, the framers could have had no clear idea of how their experiment would work in practice. Fearful of the destructive power of factions, for example, they did not foresee that in a country where laws are enacted by representatives chosen by the people in regular and competitive elections, political parties inevitably become fundamentally important institutions.

Given the existing confusion over terminology, it is not surprising that the framers employed various terms to describe the novel government they proposed. A few months after the adjournment of the Constitutional Convention, James Madison, the future fourth president of the United States, proposed a usage that would have lasting influence within the country though little elsewhere. In Federalist 10, one of 85 essays by Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay known collectively as the Federalist papers, Madison defined a pure democracy as a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, and a republic as a government in which the scheme of representation takes place. According to Madison, The two great points of difference between a democracy and a republic, are: first, the delegation of the government, in the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, the greater the number of citizens, and greater sphere of country, over which the latter may be extended. In short, for Madison, democracy meant direct democracy, and republic meant representative government.

Even among his contemporaries, Madisons refusal to apply the term democracy to representative governments, even those based on broad electorates, was aberrant. In November 1787, only two months after the convention had adjourned, James Wilson, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, proposed a new classification. [T]he three species of governments, he wrote, are the monarchical, aristocratical and democratical. In a monarchy, the supreme power is vested in a single person; in an aristocracyby a body not formed upon the principle of representation, but enjoying their station by descent, or election among themselves, or in right of some personal or territorial qualifications; and lastly, in a democracy, it is inherent in a people, and is exercised by themselves or their representatives. Applying this understanding of democracy to the newly adopted constitution, Wilson asserted that in its principles,it is purely democratical: varying indeed in its form in order to admit all the advantages, and to exclude all the disadvantages which are incidental to the known and established constitutions of government. But when we take an extensive and accurate view of the streams of power that appear through this great and comprehensive planwe shall be able to trace them to one great and noble source, THE PEOPLE. At the Virginia ratifying convention some months later, John Marshall, the future chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, declared that the Constitution provided for a well regulated democracy where no king, or president, could undermine representative government. The political party that he helped to organize and lead in cooperation with Thomas Jefferson, principal author of the Declaration of Independence and future third president of the United States, was named the Democratic-Republican Party; the party adopted its present name, the Democratic Party, in 1844.

Following his visit to the United States in 183132, the French political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville asserted in no uncertain terms that the country he had observed was a democracyindeed, the worlds first representative democracy, where the fundamental principle of government was the sovereignty of the people. Tocquevilles estimation of the American system of government reached a wide audience in Europe and beyond through his monumental four-volume study Democracy in America (183540).

Thus, by the end of the 18th century both the idea and the practice of democracy had been profoundly transformed. Political theorists and statesmen now recognized what the Levelers had seen earlier, that the nondemocratic practice of representation could be used to make democracy practicable in the large nation-states of the modern era. Representation, in other words, was the solution to the ancient dilemma between enhancing the ability of political associations to deal with large-scale problems and preserving the opportunity of citizens to participate in government.

To some of those steeped in the older tradition, the union of representation and democracy seemed a marvelous and epochal invention. In the early 19th century the French author Destutt de Tracy, the inventor of the term idologie (ideology), insisted that representation had rendered obsolete the doctrines of both Montesquieu and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, both of whom had denied that representative governments could be genuinely democratic (see below Montesquieu and Rousseau). Representation, or representative government, he wrote, may be considered as a new invention, unknown in Montesquieus time.Representative democracyis democracy rendered practicable for a long time and over a great extent of territory. In 1820 the English philosopher James Mill proclaimed the system of representation to be the grand discovery of modern times in which the solution of all the difficulties, both speculative and practical, will perhaps be found. One generation later Mills son, the philosopher John Stuart Mill, concluded in his Considerations on Representative Government (1861) that the ideal type of a perfect government would be both democratic and representative. Foreshadowing developments that would take place in the 20th century, the dmos of Mills representative democracy included women.

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Democracy - Democracy or republic? | Britannica

By Victor Kiprop on September 26 2018 in World Facts

The United States of America is governed as a federal republic, and therefore some argue that the U.S. is not a democracy. A republic is defined as a political system in which the supreme power is vested upon the citizenry that is entitled to vote for its representatives and officers responsible to them, while a democracy is defined as a government of the people and by the people exercised through elected or direct representative. It can be difficult to distinguish between a democracy and a republic, and therefore it would be rational to conclude that the United States is both a democracy and a republic.

The key difference between a republic and a democracy is not how power is projected, but the limits to power. Both use the representational system, meaning that the citizenry is represented in the government by elected leaders. In both cases, the majority rule, but in a republic the constitution limits how the government can exercise power. These rights are inalienable and cannot be changed or altered by an elected government. The United States is a typical example of a republic state because the constitution limits the power of the government. Some rights such as the Bill of Rights, the right to vote, and the powers to amend the constitution are limited and cannot be changed by the sitting government without consulting the public directly.

The United States is a democracy, but it is not a true democracy. Instead, it is a representative democracy. The common forms of democracy are direct democracy and representative democracy. A direct democracy is a system of government in which the majority have their say on every matter concerning governance. Direct democracies hold referendums each time an issue has to be decided upon because there are no elective representatives. The United States is a representative democracy, as the public elects individuals to represent them at the government level. The United States is also a constitutional democracy, meaning that the functions and roles of the government are governed by the constitution that also protects the rights and privileges of the citizenry regardless of whether they are majority or minority.

Modern states present themselves as democratic republics governed by a constitution. The government can amend the constitution through acts of parliaments and referendums. As long as the constitution continues to protect the rights of the people, the citizenry continues to vote for representatives, and the constitution limits the power of the government, the United States remains both a republic and a democracy.

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Is the United States a Republic or a Democracy? - WorldAtlas