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A steady stream of Orange residents and college students filed into Argyros Forum at Chapman University Tuesday to cast their ballots on the last day of voting for the gubernatorial recall election, one of dozens of sites in Orange County to which voters flocked.

Editors Note: This dispatch is part of the Voice of OC Youth Media program, working with student journalists to cover public policy issues across Orange County. If you would like to submit your own student media project related to Orange County civics or if you have any response to this work, contact Digital Editor Sonya Quick atsquick@voiceofoc.org.

The fate of Gov. Gavin Newsom, the 40th governor of California, is in the hands of the Golden State residents. Fred Smoller, a Chapman political science professor, attributed Newsoms response to the pandemic as the catalyst behind this recall election. Newsom is only the second governor in California to face a recall.

Some people are upset about the overreach of Newsoms aggressive shutdowns, Smoller said.

While some who voted at Chapman on Election Day were not enthused about Newsoms actions as governor, opinions on whether he needs to be replaced were divided.

I voted for Newsom to stay. I dont love the way that he has handled COVID-19, but more restrictions are better than none, said Chapman junior Audrey Fish.

Others said that Newsom had his chance to better California and failed.

Newsom hasnt been doing a good job with COVID-19, and the homelessness issue is out of control. He has had time to fix this, but he has not, said Orange resident Casey Crosby.

Some who voted in person said they felt it was a more accessible, secure way to cast their ballot. Nearly 825,000 Orange County residents opted to vote by mail, according to data provided by the OC Registrar of Voters.

I was actually expecting more people to be here, said Orange resident Chanel Martinez, I voted in person so that way I know my vote will be counted, for security reasons.

Professor Smoller said he feels confident that Newsom will hold on to his position despite what he believes will be a high Republican turnout for in-person voting.

Republicans will dominate in-person voting, but there just arent enough of them to undermine Democrats mail-in ballots, Smoller said. The state is 2-1 Democrats.

The polls closed at 8 p.m.

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Chapman University Vote Center Sees Steady Turnout on Election Day With Voters Divided on The Governors Fate - Voice of OC

Progressives want Justice Stephen Breyer to step down while Democrats still narrowly control the Senate and before the 2022 midterms, when control of the chamber is at stake. Elizabeth Gillis/NPR hide caption

Progressives want Justice Stephen Breyer to step down while Democrats still narrowly control the Senate and before the 2022 midterms, when control of the chamber is at stake.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer has said he will retire on his own terms amid calls from progressives for him to step down from the court so President Biden can name a younger liberal to take his place.

"I'm only going to say that I'm not going to go beyond what I previously said on the subject, and that is that I do not believe I should stay on the Supreme Court, or want to stay on the Supreme Court, until I die," he told NPR's legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg in an interview in Boston to promote his book, The Authority of the Court and the Peril of Politics. "And when exactly I should retire, or will retire, has many complex parts to it. I think I'm aware of most of them, and I am, and will consider them."

Breyer's remarks, while not a surprise he hired four clerks in July for the court's next term are likely to anger progressive activists who believe that the 83-year-old justice should make way for a younger nominee who holds his and their values and views. They want him to step down while Democrats still narrowly control the Senate and before the 2022 midterms, when control of the chamber is at stake.

Progressives fear a replay of the situation following the death in September 2020 of 87-year-old Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, which allowed President Donald Trump to nominate and for the Republican-controlled Senate to quickly confirm Amy Coney Barrett, giving conservatives a 6-3 supermajority on the Supreme Court. Ginsburg didn't step down in 2014 when both the presidency and the Senate were in the hands of Democrats.

But Breyer said being in the court's minority didn't deter him because "about half of our opinions, almost half, are almost always unanimous."

"I see it as trying to decide this case and trying to decide the next case," he said. "And we might be the greatest of friends ... and allies beyond belief on Case 1, and Case 2, we might be on absolute opposite sides."

But an NPR analysis of the court's last term found that the justices swerved to the right, even by the standards of the traditionally conservative Roberts court. While there was unanimity on statutory matters, the justices split along ideological lines in the high-profile politically charged cases such as voting rights.

Supreme Court justices are appointed for life, but a justice can decide to retire at any time. Progressives had hoped to push Breyer in that direction. One group, Demand Justice, even sent a billboard truck driving around the Supreme Court building in April with the message: "Breyer, retire. It's time for a Black woman Supreme Court justice," a reference to the president's vow to nominate a Black woman to the court.

The campaign to push for Breyer's retirement has not gained momentum in the Senate, which votes on judicial nominations. Only a handful of Democrats have suggested they would like to see Breyer, who was nominated to the court in 1994 by President Bill Clinton, retire of his own accord.

The White House has said that Biden's view is that retirement decisions are up to justices themselves.

Link:
Justice Breyer Says He Will Retire When He Thinks The Time Is Right - NPR

Twitter is considering a range of new features designed to provide more protection and control for users, giving you more capacity to manage your in-app interactions and protect your content, in order to avoid being held to account for outdated views that you may have shared.

As reported by Bloomberg, Twitter is considering the new additions to help users feel more open in the app, without fear of judgment and criticism.

Among features being considered, according to Bloombergs report, are:

Which is the real focus of all of these updates Twitter wants to give users more options to feel free and open in how they share and engage on the platform, without fear of being torn down by Twitter mobs or having their old comments come back to haunt them, which may cause people to hold back on posting tweets and engaging in the comments.

Because that can be a problem. As weve seen with various high-profile cases, your past, ill-advised tweets can come back to haunt you, and can be used against you, particularly if you end up taking on a prominent, public-facing role.

Film director James Gunn, for example, lost his job as director of the Guardians of the Galaxy sequels back in 2018 after his old tweeted remarks were re-surfaced, while just recently, newly appointed Jeopardy host Mike Richards was fired after offensive remarks hed made in the past were discovered, make his position untenable.

The short, sharp nature of Twitter, aligned with real-time response, can be perfect for those off-the-cuff, in-the-moment replies and comments, but cases like these highlight the dangers of such, and that could make more people more hesitant to share in the app, which could be limiting further tweet engagement.

Thats why Twitter tried out ephemeral Fleets as a less binding way to share your thoughts in the app, and a timed auto-delete option for your tweets would also align with this.

Along a similar line, Twitter has also added a new Safety Mode option this week, which aims to offer a level of protection from tweet pile-ons and Cancel Culture, which can also cause people to be more hesitant about sharing their thoughts in the app.

Essentially, Twitter wants users to comment and engage as much as possible, and elements like these are an impediment to that, which is why it's now exploring new ways to help users feel more free in what they tweet, while also giving people more ways to avoid the more negative elements, and ending up unwitting targets of abuse and scorn in the app.

Will that work?

Certainly archiving tweets makes sense though there is always the Wayback Machine and other resources that will help online sleuths uncover old comments, if they really want to look.

But it could provide another level of assurance for users, and a better sense of freedom because yes, some of the dumb things we tweeted in years past will be just that; dumb, ill-informed opinions that weve now moved past, as part of our evolution and education, which really should be commended, rather than used as a bat to beat you with.

This is especially true for younger people, whove grown up online, and have gone through their upbringing with social media as an outlet. People are going to have posted stupid things, which, in retrospect, theyll wish that they hadnt.

An auto-archive option would definitely provide benefit in this respect, while more controls over who follows and mentions you, and removing Liked tweets from view, also seem like potentially helpful, beneficial considerations.

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Twitter's Testing a Range of New Control Options, Including Auto-Archiving Old Tweets and Hiding Likes - Social Media Today

A sign of Chinese ride-hailing service Didi is seen on its headquarters in Beijing, China July 5, 2021. REUTERS/Tingshu Wang/File Photo

BEIJING, Sept 4 (Reuters) - China's ride hailing giant Didi Global Inc (DIDI.N) said on Saturday that media reports that the Beijing city government is coordinating companies to invest in it are not correct.

"Didi is currently actively and fully cooperating with cybersecurity probe, foreign media reports that Beijing city government is coordinating companies to invest in it are incorrect," it said on Weibo.

Bloomberg News reported on Friday, citing unidentified people familiar with the matter, that China's capital city was considering taking Didi under state control and had proposed that government-run firms invest in it. read more

Under the preliminary proposal, some Beijing-based companies including Shouqi Group, part of the state-owned Beijing Tourism Group, would acquire a stake in Didi, Bloomberg reported.

Beijing-based Didi faces a cybersecurity investigation by Chinese authorities after its New York initial public offering in June. Chinese authorities have stepped up their regulation of technology firms in the past year to improve market competition, data handling and their treatment of employees. read more

Didi is controlled by the management team of co-founder Will Cheng and President Jean Liu. SoftBank Group Corp (9984.T), Uber Technologies Inc (UBER.N) and Alibaba (9988.HK) are among investors in the company.

Reporting by Yilei Sun and David Stanway; Editing by William Mallard

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Originally posted here:
Didi denies reports that Beijing city is coordinating companies to invest in it - Reuters

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When earlier this month the Taliban overtook Kabul, gaining control of Afghanistan, accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube began to herald it. Pictures posted by Taliban and pro-Taliban accounts showed signs of safety. There were videos of groups military forces patrolling cities and stopping looting, and messages from its leaders.

In response to the flood of pro-Taliban content, YouTube and Facebook stopped the Taliban from using their platforms (citing US sanctions policies). Cloudflare, an internet service provider, appeared to drop Taliban sites. Twitter said it planned to ban individual pieces of Taliban content that advocated violence, according to Voxs Recode.

Are these bans actually a good idea?

The logic of this crackdown has been basically that the Taliban is badand bad things shouldnt be on social media because they encourage such behavior. It has been pushed for by certain hawkish extremism researchers and some journalists. As one of the proponents of that argument, the Counter Extremism Project, a nonprofit, argued in a statement to reporters, the Taliban represents the worst of the worst in [online] terrorist material.

Giving the Taliban a platform and allowing it to remain online in any capacity poses significant risks to public safety and security, its executive director, David Ibsen, said. But experts are skeptical that this knee-jerk reaction, probably well-intentioned,will actually help.

I question what good banning the Taliban will do for Afghans, Emerson T. Brooking, a fellow at the Atlantic Councils DFR Labs specializing in disinformation and extremism, told me.

When Facebook-owned WhatsApp took down Taliban content last Tuesday, the Financial Times reported there were poor ripple effects. The purge included a complaints helpline that was used by Afghans to report looting.

If the Taliban all of a sudden cant use WhatsApp, youre just isolating Afghans, making it harder for them to communicate in an already panicky situation,Ashley Jackson, a former Red Cross and Oxfam aid worker in Afghanistan and author of a book on the Taliban and its relationship to Afghan civilians, told the Financial Times in reference to WhatsApps decision. Preventing communication between people and the Taliban doesnt help Afghans, it is just grandstanding.

In addition to reducing communication avenues for Afghans, Brooking noted, pushing the Taliban further into digital isolation during a delicate moment in which they seek international legitimacy could let the problem disappear. He argued that allowing them to stay on social media keeps them within the global gaze and therefore subject to the pressure of the worlds judgment. If theyre pushed offline, they might be inclined to do the most repressive things that we fear will happen, Brooking said.

Even trickier is that the Taliban is also the governing body of Afghanistan. It has almost certainly violated social media policies of most platforms and is guilty of obscene atrocities, but so are many nation-states. China runs concentration camps where they brutalize Uyghur Muslims.Saudi Arabia has disappeared countless dissidents and killed thousands of civilians with airstrikes in Yemen. Even the United States military, by its own estimate, killed 700 civilians in 2019 alone. You dont have to paint a false equivalence to see that, evenly applied, whatever metric of brutality and violence that could be used to justify banning the Taliban would force tech platforms to at least consider banning these governments (and several others) if they were sincerely interested in equal application of their rules. (It becomes even thornier when a president, say in the US, is calling for violence.)

The truth is that the big five social media companies are effectively the global FCC right now, Eliza Campbell, director of the Middle East Institutes Cyber Program, told me, referring to the federal agency partly tasked with setting standards of what is permissible for broadcast TV and radio. The companies have all of this power to decide what is and what isnt a government, what is and isnt a legit government, and even who gets to be called a democracy, Campbell said.

This isnt the first timethese kinds of questions have come up. Facebook has amassed so much power that its often forced to make quasi-governmental decisions in its moderation policies. Hezbollah and Hamas in particular have produced challenging questions for the companies.

Brooking noted Hamas specifically as a parallel case to the Taliban: Both have committed atrocities, but both are governing bodies representing people in the countries they operate in. In 2017, Facebook took aggressive action against Hamas that, in Brookings view directly affected the freedom of Palestinian expression.

There is a way of thinking that the problems that happen for social media companies are solvable by social media policies. But the issue of the Taliban is, like many others, beyond the companies. What do you do when the one calling for violence is the government?

Jillian C. York, director of international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrestles with this in her new book, Silicon Values. Terrorism, she writes, was once viewed as the product of grievances, a tool, and one that could be used both by opposition forces and established regimes. But within a short period, that definition shifted within the US government to one that cast terrorism as purely an activity of sub-state actors. In other words, Max Webers specifically, the state reinforces its monopoly on violence. Somehow, violence carried out by certain governments, no matter how gruesome and unjust, is exempt from being called terrorism or thought of as the same as those from outside groups. The Taliban burst this bubble. They were the non-state actors who now govern the state.

To hide this conundrum, Facebook (and YouTube) have tried to use the law as a justification for kicking the Taliban off their platforms. But even that is shaky: The Taliban is not on the US foreign terrorist designation list. Instead, Facebook and YouTube have tried to say that sanctions law compels them to ban the Taliban. But Twitter isnt instituting a blanket ban. Add in that Facebook has lied before and its a bit hard to believe theyre compelled to do anything.

The companies end up in hot water either way. If the social media platform complies with governments demands, it becomes an extension of state power. If the company doesnt, it is an anti-democratic institution that isnt accountable to anyone. In practice,platformsstraddle the line between these two outcomes.

Facebook behaves as an extension of the US at times and against its interest at other times, depending on where the pressure and money come from, York told me. In this specific case, because of [Office of Foreign Assets Control] regulations, which sanctions the Taliban, its actually much more of a direct extension of [state power]. Essentially, York said, in adhering to US rules, social media companies help extend the reach of the United States far beyond its own borders.

Often, few notice this subtle control of information. The governmentand most people with the power to pressure a social media platformdo not want ISIS posting. Other moments highlight a subtle techno-imperialism, when the geopolitical goals of the US, which can be at odds with the safety of local populations, are carried out through social media platform enforcement. If only non-state actors are banned, and states that carry out gruesome and violent campaigns arent, it lends credence to the idea that state-sponsored violence is somehow more just. The sheer power and size of companies like Facebook and YouTube and even the much smaller Twitter end up creating a situation where there are seemingly no good answers within the status quo.

This was evident already in 2018. At that time, social media companies had received public criticism over letting violent extremists take advantage of their platform. The companies invited reporters like me to their offices to tout their work to address this. As part of an on-background press briefing at a plush DC office, they had been explaining their commitment to keeping violent and dangerous groups off their platform.

As a proxy, I asked an executive of a major technology company if they would have banned the Black Panthers. The Panthers, after all, were a national security threat according to the government. The FBI director at the time, J. Edgar Hoover, had said that the Black Panther party, without question, represents the greatest threat to the internal security of the country among domestic black extremist groups. They were occasionally violent. They killed a suspected informant. They got into a provoked shootout with police officers (though this wasnt exceptional at the time). Yes, the Black Panthers provided meals to children and a force of political organizing that worked in the service of pursuing the equality Black Americans were supposed to get from civil rights legislation. But if the US government had said that the Black Panthers were a threat to national security, and social media platforms had existed at the time, wouldnt they be banned under your current policies? I asked.

I watched the gears turn in the executives heads as they tried not to look like they were bullshitting me. They proceeded to dodge the question. They reiterated the policy of banning people advocating violence. They promised to work with governments to determine terror groups that should be banned.

I asked the question again.

An executive continued to dance around it.

Part of the reason the executive didnt elaborate is that they probably couldnt. The rules that Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social media companies use are often amorphous and contingent. What gets something or a group banned in one instance doesnt get them banned in another. YouTube defended keeping up a video of the journalist James Foley being beheaded by ISIS as newsworthy, until it received substantial pushback and reversed course. The families of Syrian victims of ISIS likely wouldnt have the same ability to mount a campaign in the mainstream media to get social media companies to remove similar types of content.

Each time something bad in the world happens, people quickly turn to these companies to examine if and how these bad things can be excised from platforms. Sometimes it makes sense, but in other moments, whats to be done is less clear. The Talibans takeover of Afghanistan, and subsequent calls for their banning from social media, is probably more the latter than the former.

The right course of action to fix this, Campbell told me, would be to go back in time and bake more social responsibility into companies as they were being built.

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Does Banning the Taliban From Social Media Actually Help Afghans? Mother Jones - Mother Jones