Facebook bans all QAnon groups as dangerous amid surging misinformation
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Facebook Inc FB.O on Tuesday classified the QAnon conspiracy theory movement as dangerous and began removing Facebook groups and pages as well as Instagram accounts that hold themselves out as representatives.
The step escalates an August policy that banned a third of QAnon groups here for promoting violence while allowing most to stay, albeit with content appearing less often in news feeds. Instead of relying on user reports, Facebook staff now will treat QAnon like other militarized bodies, seeking out and deleting groups and pages, the company said in a blog post here.
Since the August restrictions, some QAnon groups have added members, and others used coded language to evade detection, for example referring to “cue” instead of Q. Meanwhile, adherents have worked to integrate themselves in other groups, such as those concerned with child safety and those critical of restrictions on gatherings due to the coronavirus, according to researchers at Facebook and elsewhere.
“While we’ve removed QAnon content that celebrates and supports violence, we’ve seen other QAnon content tied to different forms of real world harm, including recent claims that the west coast wildfires were started by certain groups,” Facebook wrote.
“QAnon messaging changes very quickly and we see networks of supporters build an audience with one message and then quickly pivot to another.”
Recent QAnon posts have spread false information about voting and about COVID-19, researchers said, even claiming that President Donald Trump faked his diagnosis of COVID-19 in order to orchestrate secret arrests.
Classed as a potential source of domestic terrorism by the FBI, QAnon is driven by an anonymous internet poster nicknamed Q who claims to be a Trump administration insider. The core, nonsensical claim is that Trump is secretly leading a crackdown against an enormous pedophile ring that includes prominent Democrats and the Hollywood elite.
There has been no surge in arrests, and the fictitious Satanic rituals that the group cites echo longstanding legends used to anger people for political reasons, often against minorities.
Trump has praised the group as patriotic, and more than a dozen Republican congressional candidates have promoted it.
Reporting by Joseph Menn in San Francisco; Editing by David Gregorio and
Wednesday, October 07, 2020
Kyrgyz opposition groups make rival power grabs after toppling government
By Olga Dzyubenko
BISHKEK (Reuters) - The Central Asian nation of Kyrgyzstan slid deeper into chaos as rival opposition factions made grabs for power on Wednesday, a day after they stormed government buildings, forcing the prime minister to quit and a parliamentary election to be annulled
Left isolated by the resignation of Prime Minister Kubatbek Boronov’s government late on Tuesday, President Sooronbai Jeenbekov called for all party talks in a statement on Wednesday, reiterating his willingness to mediate.
Two presidents have been overthrown in Kyrgyzstan in the past 15 years, and longtime ally Russia expressed concern as protests spread across the country in the wake of Sunday’s vote.
Kyrgyzstan borders China and hosts both a Russian military airbase and a large Canadian-owned gold mining operation.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday Moscow was in touch with all the sides in the conflict and hoped that democratic process would be restored soon. China’s foreign ministry said it was highly concerned about the situation.
A total of 16 parties took part in Sunday’s election and 11 refused to accept the results, which had handed victory two establishment groups. As protests grew, the election commission annulled the vote.
At least three distinct groups have now attempted to claim leadership. The first was the Coordination Council set up on Tuesday and largely made up of established political parties opposing Jeenbekov.
Kyrgyz opposition faction claims state power in rift with allies
Crowd attacks office of biggest Kyrgyz gold miner - media
Another group which called itself People’s Coordination Council emerged on Wednesday and united five lesser-known opposition parties whose leaders have not held any senior government positions.
Finally, the Ata Zhurt political party has attempted to outmanoeuvre competitors by getting parliament to nominate its candidate Sadyr Zhaparov - freed from prison by protesters just hours earlier - for prime minister on Tuesday night.
However, an angry mob then broke into the hotel where parliament convened, forcing Zhaparov to flee through a back door, according to Kyrgyz media. It was not clear when parliament might convene again to confirm him as premier.
Making a late night appearance on television, Zhaparov said he would propose a constitutional reform before holding presidential and parliamentary elections in two to three months.
While opposition parties have made rival claims to power, the establishment parties that claimed initial victory in the election have largely kept quiet, accepting the decision to annul the vote. Jeenbekov has told his supporters not to confront the protesters to avoid escalation.
But the split among opposition parties and power grabs by competing factions have plunged the nation of 6.5 million people into uncertainty. Kyrgyz security forces appeared to avoid siding with any of the factions although their support could eventually help decide the winner.
Residents in the capital, Bishkek, quickly formed vigilante neighbourhood watch units to reinforce police, having suffered during violent revolts followed by looting in 2005 and 2010.
There were scuffles overnight between vigilantes and protesters who tried to force their way into government buildings or attacked businesses such as shops and restaurants, according to a report by local news website 24.kg.
Reporting by Olga Dzyubenko; Writing by Olzhas Auyezov; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore and Peter Graff
Breakingviews - Review: London is global corruption’s top offender
By Aimee Donnellan
LONDON (Reuters Breakingviews) - In May 2016, David Cameron raised an uncomfortable topic. At an anti-corruption summit in London, the former British prime minister sat alongside Nigeria’s president and other dignitaries and declared that money laundering was “the cancer at the heart of so many problems we need to tackle in our world”. The setting was telling, as the British capital had become the location of choice for oligarchs and corporate crooks to sanitise their ill-gotten gains.
Cameron’s tough talk did little to eradicate the problem. In “Kleptopia: How Dirty Money Is Conquering the World”, Tom Burgis catalogues the shady dollars that have flowed through Swiss banks, Mayfair mansions and even the London Stock Exchange. The stranger-than-fiction tale carries the reader to Zurich, New York, China and Zimbabwe. But the main takeaway is that, without London, global financial crime would not be possible on this scale.
Burgis reckons the city’s relationship with questionable cash traces to the fall of Britain’s empire. In its imperial heyday, London facilitated trade with the colonies. But after global power ebbed, some of the smaller outposts developed other activities. Instead of producing tobacco or tea, islands like the Bahamas provided shelter for banks and tax avoiders. The French economist Gabriel Zucman estimates $7.6 trillion ended up offshore. Once these hubs were up and running, a London location gave bankers close access to the money movers – and to the property market.
Awareness of the scale of the problem picked up after the 2008 financial crisis. The year that Lehman Brothers collapsed, just half of Britain’s commercial properties were registered to a named person. The houses on a North London road known as “Billionaires’ Row” belonged to oligarchs and a front company for former Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev.
Other recent books like Oliver Bullough’s “Moneyland” have catalogued the scale of the kleptocracy. Burgis, an investigative reporter at the Financial Times, adds to the narrative by showing the human toll of stashing money in London property. When Grenfell Tower in west London went up in flames in 2017, killing 71 and leaving 250 people homeless, the local council said it did not have enough housing. Yet the district includes 2,000 homes which are mostly empty.
“Kleptopia” also shows the at-times violent origins of the questionable cash. In 2011, oil workers in Kazakhstan went on strike when they realised their employers were only paying them half what they declared to the country’s treasury. Police used live ammunition on the protesters, while others suffered torture. The international outrage raised uncomfortable questions for Kazakhstan’s then leader, Nazarbayev. To smooth things over before an upcoming trip to Cambridge University, former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair offered him tips on how to downplay the incident.
Amid the parade of villains, “Kleptopia” features some do-gooders. Nigel Wilkins, a compliance officer at Swiss bank BSI, makes an entertaining and admirable hero. But principled individuals cannot fix the porous regulatory system that is supposed to police crooked money.
This becomes evident when Wilkins joins Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority. The watchdog is supposed to be a fiercer institution than its predecessor, which was found wanting by the financial crisis. But when Wilkins tries to show its officers how fraud happens using thousands of documents he hoarded from his time at BSI, they dismiss him.
London’s role in facilitating corporate crime could prove the capital’s undoing. The financial centre has benefitted from a robust legal system, stable markets and transparent regulations. But unchecked inflows of corrupt money are undermining the institutions that made London attractive. A parliamentary committee’s report on Russian influence in British politics, released in July, is a timely reminder of how oligarchs have converted questionable cash into political clout.
Burgis is short on practical solutions. Only the very last page of “Kleptopia” offers suggestions for weeding out financial crime. His plea to resist “lies and bullshit” is a start, but seems unlikely to stop warlords and oligarchs from robbing their compatriots and buying mansions in Chelsea.
London has made some progress in deterring money laundering. Authorities can use so-called unexplained wealth orders to confiscate suspect assets. Britain’s crown dependencies must now reveal the ownership of firms registered in their jurisdictions. But “Kleptopia” is an urgent reminder that there is a lot more to do to clean up London.
By Aimee Donnellan
LONDON (Reuters Breakingviews) - In May 2016, David Cameron raised an uncomfortable topic. At an anti-corruption summit in London, the former British prime minister sat alongside Nigeria’s president and other dignitaries and declared that money laundering was “the cancer at the heart of so many problems we need to tackle in our world”. The setting was telling, as the British capital had become the location of choice for oligarchs and corporate crooks to sanitise their ill-gotten gains.
Cameron’s tough talk did little to eradicate the problem. In “Kleptopia: How Dirty Money Is Conquering the World”, Tom Burgis catalogues the shady dollars that have flowed through Swiss banks, Mayfair mansions and even the London Stock Exchange. The stranger-than-fiction tale carries the reader to Zurich, New York, China and Zimbabwe. But the main takeaway is that, without London, global financial crime would not be possible on this scale.
Burgis reckons the city’s relationship with questionable cash traces to the fall of Britain’s empire. In its imperial heyday, London facilitated trade with the colonies. But after global power ebbed, some of the smaller outposts developed other activities. Instead of producing tobacco or tea, islands like the Bahamas provided shelter for banks and tax avoiders. The French economist Gabriel Zucman estimates $7.6 trillion ended up offshore. Once these hubs were up and running, a London location gave bankers close access to the money movers – and to the property market.
Awareness of the scale of the problem picked up after the 2008 financial crisis. The year that Lehman Brothers collapsed, just half of Britain’s commercial properties were registered to a named person. The houses on a North London road known as “Billionaires’ Row” belonged to oligarchs and a front company for former Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev.
Other recent books like Oliver Bullough’s “Moneyland” have catalogued the scale of the kleptocracy. Burgis, an investigative reporter at the Financial Times, adds to the narrative by showing the human toll of stashing money in London property. When Grenfell Tower in west London went up in flames in 2017, killing 71 and leaving 250 people homeless, the local council said it did not have enough housing. Yet the district includes 2,000 homes which are mostly empty.
“Kleptopia” also shows the at-times violent origins of the questionable cash. In 2011, oil workers in Kazakhstan went on strike when they realised their employers were only paying them half what they declared to the country’s treasury. Police used live ammunition on the protesters, while others suffered torture. The international outrage raised uncomfortable questions for Kazakhstan’s then leader, Nazarbayev. To smooth things over before an upcoming trip to Cambridge University, former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair offered him tips on how to downplay the incident.
Amid the parade of villains, “Kleptopia” features some do-gooders. Nigel Wilkins, a compliance officer at Swiss bank BSI, makes an entertaining and admirable hero. But principled individuals cannot fix the porous regulatory system that is supposed to police crooked money.
This becomes evident when Wilkins joins Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority. The watchdog is supposed to be a fiercer institution than its predecessor, which was found wanting by the financial crisis. But when Wilkins tries to show its officers how fraud happens using thousands of documents he hoarded from his time at BSI, they dismiss him.
London’s role in facilitating corporate crime could prove the capital’s undoing. The financial centre has benefitted from a robust legal system, stable markets and transparent regulations. But unchecked inflows of corrupt money are undermining the institutions that made London attractive. A parliamentary committee’s report on Russian influence in British politics, released in July, is a timely reminder of how oligarchs have converted questionable cash into political clout.
Burgis is short on practical solutions. Only the very last page of “Kleptopia” offers suggestions for weeding out financial crime. His plea to resist “lies and bullshit” is a start, but seems unlikely to stop warlords and oligarchs from robbing their compatriots and buying mansions in Chelsea.
London has made some progress in deterring money laundering. Authorities can use so-called unexplained wealth orders to confiscate suspect assets. Britain’s crown dependencies must now reveal the ownership of firms registered in their jurisdictions. But “Kleptopia” is an urgent reminder that there is a lot more to do to clean up London.
RIP
Eddie Van Halen dies at 65, guitar virtuoso ruled '70s, '80s rock
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Eddie Van Halen, the pioneering guitar player whose hard-rocking band emerged from the Sunset Strip music scene in Los Angeles in the early 1970s to stand at the top of rock ‘n’ roll for a decade, died of cancer on Tuesday. He was 65.
Van Halen’s death was announced by his 29-year-old son, Wolfgang, a bass player who joined the band, best known for songs like “Jump” and “Ain’t Talkin ‘Bout Love,” in later years.
“I can’t believe I’m having to write this but my father, Edward Lodewijk Van Halen, has lost his long and arduous battle with cancer this morning,” Wolfgang Van Halen said on Twitter.
Representatives for Eddie Van Halen did not disclose details of his death. People magazine reported the rocker died at a Los Angeles-area hospital with his wife, Janie, son and other family members at his side.
“Through all your challenging treatments for lung cancer you kept your gorgeous spirit and that impish grin,” his former wife of 26 years, actress Valerie Bertinelli, said on Twitter.
Fans placed flowers and guitar picks on Van Halen’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
“What a long, great trip its been,” the band’s flamboyant frontman during its glory years, David Lee Roth, said in a message on Twitter above a black-and-white photo of the two men clenching hands backstage at a concert.
Eddie Van Halen was born in Amsterdam on Jan. 26, 1955, and studied classical piano after moving to the Los Angeles suburb of Pasadena with his family in the 1960s.
After switching to guitar, he and his older brother, Alex, who took up the drums, formed bands that would eventually become Van Halen in the mid-1970s, with lead singer Roth and bassist Michael Anthony.
The hard-rock band, featuring Eddie Van Halen’s explosive riffs and solos, quickly became a staple of Sunset Strip clubs such as Gazzari’s and the Whisky a Go Go before releasing their eponymous debut album in 1978.
That album shot to No. 19 on the Billboard charts, becoming one of the most successful debuts of the decade and the first in a string of top-selling albums that would make Van Halen one of the biggest rock acts of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Eddie Van Halen, known for his two-handed tapping technique on the strings, earned a place along Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page as one of rock’s most celebrated guitarists. In 2012, readers of Guitar World magazine voted him the greatest of all time.
Roth, who often clashed with the Van Halen brothers, split from the band in the mid-1980s and was replaced for a decade by Sammy Hagar. The original lineup reunited in 2007 for a tour and, four years later, an album.
“My heart is broken. Eddie was not only a Guitar God, but a genuinely beautiful soul,” Gene Simmons, lead singer of Kiss and an early champion of Van Halen with record companies, said on Twitter.
Reporting by Dan Whitcomb in Los Angeles; Additional reporting by Mimi Dwyer, Lisa Richwine, Steve Gorman and Jill Serjeant; Editing by Lisa Shumaker, Gerry Doyle and Peter Cooney
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Eddie Van Halen, the pioneering guitar player whose hard-rocking band emerged from the Sunset Strip music scene in Los Angeles in the early 1970s to stand at the top of rock ‘n’ roll for a decade, died of cancer on Tuesday. He was 65.
Van Halen’s death was announced by his 29-year-old son, Wolfgang, a bass player who joined the band, best known for songs like “Jump” and “Ain’t Talkin ‘Bout Love,” in later years.
“I can’t believe I’m having to write this but my father, Edward Lodewijk Van Halen, has lost his long and arduous battle with cancer this morning,” Wolfgang Van Halen said on Twitter.
Representatives for Eddie Van Halen did not disclose details of his death. People magazine reported the rocker died at a Los Angeles-area hospital with his wife, Janie, son and other family members at his side.
“Through all your challenging treatments for lung cancer you kept your gorgeous spirit and that impish grin,” his former wife of 26 years, actress Valerie Bertinelli, said on Twitter.
Fans placed flowers and guitar picks on Van Halen’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
“What a long, great trip its been,” the band’s flamboyant frontman during its glory years, David Lee Roth, said in a message on Twitter above a black-and-white photo of the two men clenching hands backstage at a concert.
Eddie Van Halen was born in Amsterdam on Jan. 26, 1955, and studied classical piano after moving to the Los Angeles suburb of Pasadena with his family in the 1960s.
After switching to guitar, he and his older brother, Alex, who took up the drums, formed bands that would eventually become Van Halen in the mid-1970s, with lead singer Roth and bassist Michael Anthony.
The hard-rock band, featuring Eddie Van Halen’s explosive riffs and solos, quickly became a staple of Sunset Strip clubs such as Gazzari’s and the Whisky a Go Go before releasing their eponymous debut album in 1978.
That album shot to No. 19 on the Billboard charts, becoming one of the most successful debuts of the decade and the first in a string of top-selling albums that would make Van Halen one of the biggest rock acts of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Eddie Van Halen, known for his two-handed tapping technique on the strings, earned a place along Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page as one of rock’s most celebrated guitarists. In 2012, readers of Guitar World magazine voted him the greatest of all time.
Roth, who often clashed with the Van Halen brothers, split from the band in the mid-1980s and was replaced for a decade by Sammy Hagar. The original lineup reunited in 2007 for a tour and, four years later, an album.
“My heart is broken. Eddie was not only a Guitar God, but a genuinely beautiful soul,” Gene Simmons, lead singer of Kiss and an early champion of Van Halen with record companies, said on Twitter.
Reporting by Dan Whitcomb in Los Angeles; Additional reporting by Mimi Dwyer, Lisa Richwine, Steve Gorman and Jill Serjeant; Editing by Lisa Shumaker, Gerry Doyle and Peter Cooney
Polish watchdog fines Gazprom $7.6 billion over Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline
By Reuters Staff
WARSAW (Reuters) - Poland's anti-monopoly watchdog said on Wednesday it had fined Russia's Gazprom GAZP.MM more than 29 billion zlotys ($7.6 billion) for building the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline without its approval.
FILE PHOTO: A logo of Gazprom Transgaz Tomsk is pictured at the Atamanskaya compressor station, facility of Gazprom's Power Of Siberia project outside the far eastern town of Svobodny, in Amur region, Russia November 29, 2019. REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov.
The UOKiK watchdog also said it had imposed a 234 million zloty fine on five other firms involved in financing $11 billion project set to double Russia’s gas export capacity via the Baltic Sea.
Nord Stream 2 is led by Gazprom, with half of the funding provided by Germany's Uniper UN01.DE and BASF's BASFn.DE Wintershall unit, Anglo-Dutch company Shell RDSa.L, Austria's OMV OMVV.VI and Engie ENGIE.PA.
Poland sees Nord Stream 2 as a threat to Europe’s energy security as it will increase reliance on Russian energy.
The United States has also imposed sanctions on companies laying pipes for the project.
UOKiK has been examining the project for years. In August it fined Gazprom 213 million zlotys over a lack of cooperation regarding the project.
“The launch of NS2 will threaten the continuity of natural gas supplies to Poland. An increase in the price of the product is also highly likely, with the said increase being borne by Polish consumers,” said Tomasz Chrostny, president of UOKiK.
“Completion of this investment project increases economic dependence on Russian gas - not only in the case of Poland, but also of other European states,” Chrostny said.
Gazprom did not reply to a request for immediate comment.
Construction of the 1,230-kilometre pipeline is nearly finished but for a final stretch of roughly 120 km in Danish waters.
Work was halted in December as pipe-laying company Swiss-Dutch Allseas suspended operations because of the U.S. sanctions targeting companies providing vessels.
By Reuters Staff
WARSAW (Reuters) - Poland's anti-monopoly watchdog said on Wednesday it had fined Russia's Gazprom GAZP.MM more than 29 billion zlotys ($7.6 billion) for building the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline without its approval.
FILE PHOTO: A logo of Gazprom Transgaz Tomsk is pictured at the Atamanskaya compressor station, facility of Gazprom's Power Of Siberia project outside the far eastern town of Svobodny, in Amur region, Russia November 29, 2019. REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov.
The UOKiK watchdog also said it had imposed a 234 million zloty fine on five other firms involved in financing $11 billion project set to double Russia’s gas export capacity via the Baltic Sea.
Nord Stream 2 is led by Gazprom, with half of the funding provided by Germany's Uniper UN01.DE and BASF's BASFn.DE Wintershall unit, Anglo-Dutch company Shell RDSa.L, Austria's OMV OMVV.VI and Engie ENGIE.PA.
Poland sees Nord Stream 2 as a threat to Europe’s energy security as it will increase reliance on Russian energy.
The United States has also imposed sanctions on companies laying pipes for the project.
UOKiK has been examining the project for years. In August it fined Gazprom 213 million zlotys over a lack of cooperation regarding the project.
“The launch of NS2 will threaten the continuity of natural gas supplies to Poland. An increase in the price of the product is also highly likely, with the said increase being borne by Polish consumers,” said Tomasz Chrostny, president of UOKiK.
“Completion of this investment project increases economic dependence on Russian gas - not only in the case of Poland, but also of other European states,” Chrostny said.
Gazprom did not reply to a request for immediate comment.
Construction of the 1,230-kilometre pipeline is nearly finished but for a final stretch of roughly 120 km in Danish waters.
Work was halted in December as pipe-laying company Swiss-Dutch Allseas suspended operations because of the U.S. sanctions targeting companies providing vessels.
Cruise ship dismantling booms in Turkey after pandemic scuttles sector
By Bulent Usta
ALIAGA, Turkey (Reuters) - Business is booming at a sea dock in western Turkey, where five hulking cruise ships are being dismantled for scrap metal sales after the COVID-19 pandemic all but destroyed the industry, the head of a ship recyclers’ group said on Friday.
Cruise ships were home to the some of the earliest clusters of COVID-19 as the pandemic spread globally early this year.
In March, U.S. authorities issued a no-sail order for all cruise ships that remains in place.
On Friday, dozens of workers stripped walls, windows, floors and railings from several vessels in the dock in Aliaga, a town 45 km north of Izmir on Turkey’s west coast. Three more ships are set to join those already being dismantled.
Before the pandemic, Turkey’s ship-breaking yards typically handled cargo and container ships, Kamil Onal, chairman of a ship recycling industrialists’ association, told Reuters.
“But after the pandemic, cruise ships changed course towards Aliaga in a very significant way,” he said of the town. “There was growth in the sector due to the crisis. When the ships couldn’t find work, they turned to dismantling.”
Onal said some 2,500 people worked at the yard in teams that take around six months to dismantle a full passenger ship. The vessels arrived from Britain, Italy and the United States.
The shipyard aims to increase the volume of dismantled steel to 1.1 million tonnes by the end of the year, from 700,000 tonnes in January, he said.
“We are trying to change the crisis into an opportunity,” he said.
Even the ships’ non-metal fittings do not go to waste as hotel operators have come to the yard to buy useful materials, he added.
Reporting by Bulent Usta; Writing by Daren Butler and Ezgi Erkoyun; Editing by Jonathan Spicer and Barbara Lewis
ALIAGA, Turkey (Reuters) - Business is booming at a sea dock in western Turkey, where five hulking cruise ships are being dismantled for scrap metal sales after the COVID-19 pandemic all but destroyed the industry, the head of a ship recyclers’ group said on Friday.
Cruise ships were home to the some of the earliest clusters of COVID-19 as the pandemic spread globally early this year.
In March, U.S. authorities issued a no-sail order for all cruise ships that remains in place.
On Friday, dozens of workers stripped walls, windows, floors and railings from several vessels in the dock in Aliaga, a town 45 km north of Izmir on Turkey’s west coast. Three more ships are set to join those already being dismantled.
Before the pandemic, Turkey’s ship-breaking yards typically handled cargo and container ships, Kamil Onal, chairman of a ship recycling industrialists’ association, told Reuters.
“But after the pandemic, cruise ships changed course towards Aliaga in a very significant way,” he said of the town. “There was growth in the sector due to the crisis. When the ships couldn’t find work, they turned to dismantling.”
Onal said some 2,500 people worked at the yard in teams that take around six months to dismantle a full passenger ship. The vessels arrived from Britain, Italy and the United States.
The shipyard aims to increase the volume of dismantled steel to 1.1 million tonnes by the end of the year, from 700,000 tonnes in January, he said.
“We are trying to change the crisis into an opportunity,” he said.
Even the ships’ non-metal fittings do not go to waste as hotel operators have come to the yard to buy useful materials, he added.
Reporting by Bulent Usta; Writing by Daren Butler and Ezgi Erkoyun; Editing by Jonathan Spicer and Barbara Lewis
How healthy is Trump? Years of misinformation make it difficult to know
The president’s doctors have been prone to hyperbole, even as concern has grown over his weight and a secretive hospital visit
Adam Gabbatt
Mon 5 Oct 2020
Donald Trump with the former White House doctor Ronny Jackson in 2018. When discussing his medical report of that year, Jackson told reporters Trump’s health was ‘excellent’. Photograph: Carolyn Kaster/AP
On Friday morning, ex-White House doctor Ronny Jackson confidently told Fox News that Donald Trump was not exhibiting any symptoms from coronavirus.
Shortly after, a White House official came forward to confirm that Trump was, actually, experiencing symptoms – albeit minor ones – and reports said Trump had appeared tired on Wednesday and “seemed lethargic” on Thursday. On Friday afternoon he was taken to Walter Reed military hospital.
The flip-flop after Trump and the first lady, Melania Trump, tested positive for coronavirus fit a long-running pattern of misdirection by Trump and his aides over the president’s health – making it difficult to trust any official statements even at a time of intense crisis.
The litany of incidents is long. Eyebrows were raised over Trump’s supposed robustness during his first presidential campaign, after his then doctor released a hyperbolic letter about his health.
“If elected, Mr Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency,” Harold Bornstein wrote in December 2015.
The letter gushed that Trump’s “physical strength and stamina are extraordinary”, and his bloodwork was “astonishingly excellent”.
Nearly three years later Bornstein confessed that Trump had dictated the note himself, but the skulduggery over Trump’s wellbeing did not end there.
Bornstein, whose flowing hair, grey beard and penchant for chunky silver necklaces gave him an unlikely appearance for a man of medicine, also claimed that Trump’s longtime bodyguard, Keith Schiller, had conducted a “raid” on his office in February 2017, scooping up Trump’s medical charts and lab reports.
The gushing dispatch about Trump’s fitness wasn’t the last doctor’s note to be questioned.
In 2018 Jackson reported that Donald Trump weighed in at 239lb during his annual medical exam.
That put Trump a pound shy of being obese.
But in Jackson’s report, he had clocked Trump as being 6ft 3in tall – meaning the president had apparently grown an inch since 2012, when his driving license listed him as 6ft 2in.
Using Trump’s driving license height, he would have been classed as medically obese.
Many at the time were quick to point to photos of Trump standing next to Alex Rodriguez, the former New York Yankees star, who is 6ft 3in tall. In the pictures, Rodriguez is clearly taller than Trump. Similarly, photos of Trump standing next to the 6ft 1in Barack Obama in 2017 seemed to show that the pair were the same height.
When discussing his 2018 report, Jackson told reporters Trump’s health was “excellent”.
Asked how the president, who has a penchant for fast food and who avoids exercise because he believes it drains the body’s “finite” energy resources, could be in such great shape, Jackson said.
“I told the president that if he had a healthier diet over the last 20 years, he might live to be 200 years old. But I would say the answer to your question is he has incredibly good genes and it’s just the way God made him.”
Jackson, a former rear admiral in the navy who resigned from the White House in 2018, is running for the House of Representatives in November, and has been enthusiastically endorsed by Trump.
In 2019 Trump’s medical revealed that the president had gained weight, and was now considered obese.
More serious, and clandestine, was Trump’s impromptu hospital trip, on a Saturday, in November 2019.
Just as contradictory messaging was sent out about Trump’s Covid-19 symptoms, the White House offered differing descriptions of why the president was taken to the Walter Reed national military medical center, just outside Washington.
The then White House press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, initially said Trump had gone to the hospital to begin his annual medical, but CNN soon reported that the visit “did not follow the protocol of a routine presidential medical exam”, and was not listed on the White House schedule.
Two days after the trip, the Trump administration language changed. Trump was no longer at hospital to begin his medical, but was instead undergoing an “interim checkup”.
In September this year a book by the New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt alleged that Vice-President Mike Pence was put on standby as Trump went to the hospital.
Trump and his aides have also sought to exaggerate his mental acuity, as well as his physical duress.
The president has repeatedly said he aced a “difficult” cognitive test, as Trump has attacked Joe Biden’s sharpness.
In an interview with Trump in June, Fox News anchor Chris Wallace brought up the issue of the cognitive test. Wallace said he had taken the test himself.
“It’s not the hardest test,” Wallace said.
“They have a picture and it says: ‘What’s that?’ and it’s an elephant.”
On Friday morning, ex-White House doctor Ronny Jackson confidently told Fox News that Donald Trump was not exhibiting any symptoms from coronavirus.
Shortly after, a White House official came forward to confirm that Trump was, actually, experiencing symptoms – albeit minor ones – and reports said Trump had appeared tired on Wednesday and “seemed lethargic” on Thursday. On Friday afternoon he was taken to Walter Reed military hospital.
The flip-flop after Trump and the first lady, Melania Trump, tested positive for coronavirus fit a long-running pattern of misdirection by Trump and his aides over the president’s health – making it difficult to trust any official statements even at a time of intense crisis.
The litany of incidents is long. Eyebrows were raised over Trump’s supposed robustness during his first presidential campaign, after his then doctor released a hyperbolic letter about his health.
“If elected, Mr Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency,” Harold Bornstein wrote in December 2015.
The letter gushed that Trump’s “physical strength and stamina are extraordinary”, and his bloodwork was “astonishingly excellent”.
Nearly three years later Bornstein confessed that Trump had dictated the note himself, but the skulduggery over Trump’s wellbeing did not end there.
Bornstein, whose flowing hair, grey beard and penchant for chunky silver necklaces gave him an unlikely appearance for a man of medicine, also claimed that Trump’s longtime bodyguard, Keith Schiller, had conducted a “raid” on his office in February 2017, scooping up Trump’s medical charts and lab reports.
The gushing dispatch about Trump’s fitness wasn’t the last doctor’s note to be questioned.
In 2018 Jackson reported that Donald Trump weighed in at 239lb during his annual medical exam.
That put Trump a pound shy of being obese.
But in Jackson’s report, he had clocked Trump as being 6ft 3in tall – meaning the president had apparently grown an inch since 2012, when his driving license listed him as 6ft 2in.
Using Trump’s driving license height, he would have been classed as medically obese.
Many at the time were quick to point to photos of Trump standing next to Alex Rodriguez, the former New York Yankees star, who is 6ft 3in tall. In the pictures, Rodriguez is clearly taller than Trump. Similarly, photos of Trump standing next to the 6ft 1in Barack Obama in 2017 seemed to show that the pair were the same height.
When discussing his 2018 report, Jackson told reporters Trump’s health was “excellent”.
Asked how the president, who has a penchant for fast food and who avoids exercise because he believes it drains the body’s “finite” energy resources, could be in such great shape, Jackson said.
“I told the president that if he had a healthier diet over the last 20 years, he might live to be 200 years old. But I would say the answer to your question is he has incredibly good genes and it’s just the way God made him.”
Jackson, a former rear admiral in the navy who resigned from the White House in 2018, is running for the House of Representatives in November, and has been enthusiastically endorsed by Trump.
In 2019 Trump’s medical revealed that the president had gained weight, and was now considered obese.
More serious, and clandestine, was Trump’s impromptu hospital trip, on a Saturday, in November 2019.
Just as contradictory messaging was sent out about Trump’s Covid-19 symptoms, the White House offered differing descriptions of why the president was taken to the Walter Reed national military medical center, just outside Washington.
The then White House press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, initially said Trump had gone to the hospital to begin his annual medical, but CNN soon reported that the visit “did not follow the protocol of a routine presidential medical exam”, and was not listed on the White House schedule.
Two days after the trip, the Trump administration language changed. Trump was no longer at hospital to begin his medical, but was instead undergoing an “interim checkup”.
In September this year a book by the New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt alleged that Vice-President Mike Pence was put on standby as Trump went to the hospital.
Trump and his aides have also sought to exaggerate his mental acuity, as well as his physical duress.
The president has repeatedly said he aced a “difficult” cognitive test, as Trump has attacked Joe Biden’s sharpness.
In an interview with Trump in June, Fox News anchor Chris Wallace brought up the issue of the cognitive test. Wallace said he had taken the test himself.
“It’s not the hardest test,” Wallace said.
“They have a picture and it says: ‘What’s that?’ and it’s an elephant.”
SEE
Easily overblown, little-understood, and dangerous: Why we need to understand political microtargeting
Isobel Asher Hamilton
Oct 4, 2020
Isobel Asher Hamilton
Oct 4, 2020
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg leaving The Merrion Hotel in Dublin after a meeting with politicians to discuss regulation of social media and harmful content in April 2019. Niall Carson/PA Images via Getty Images
We learned this week that the Trump campaign may have tried to dissuade millions of Black voters from voting in 2016 through highly targeted online ads.
The investigation, by Channel 4, highlighted a still little-understood online advertising technique, microtargeting.
This targets ads at people based on the huge amount of data available about them online.
Experts say Big Tech needs to be much more transparent about how microtargeting works, to avoid overblown claims but also counter a potential threat to democracy.
The Trump campaign in 2016 used online ads to try and dissuade Black voters from voting, according to an investigation this week by UK broadcaster Channel 4.
A cache of documents obtained by Channel 4 included a database of some 200 million Americans' Facebook accounts, broken down into characteristics like race, gender, and even conclusions about their personalities.
The database was split into different groups and one group, unsubtly labelled "deterrence," was disproportionately made up of Black users. The idea was to use tailored online ads on platforms like Facebook to dissuade this group from heading to the ballot box. (The Trump campaign has denied this report.)
Trying to sway voters through advertising is not new, but Channel 4's investigation was a reminder of how the Trump campaign made use of a still little-understood type of advertising called microtargeting.
Microtargeting involves using the huge amounts of data consumers give away online about who they are friends with and what they like to target ads at them.
While microtargeting has long been part of what makes the likes of Facebook and Google so profitable, it really came under mainstream scrutiny in 2018 during the data leak involving political consultancy Cambridge Analytica.
Per investigations by The Observer in 2018, Cambridge Analytica used data to build up "psychographic profiles" of people in order to more accurately target them with political ads.
According to Channel 4's investigation this week, Cambridge Analytica was behind the 2016 ads targeting Black voters in Georgia.
And yet experts warn that while microtargeting is troubling, imputing the technology with mysterious abilities to persuade vast numbers of voters may be a distraction from real voter suppression. Ultimately, we need to understand the technology better.
Concerns about microtargeting could be overblown
The very broad strokes of how microtargeting works go like this: Your behavior online generates a wealth of data about what you are like.
This data is analysed by companies to try and draw as many conclusions about you as possible and build up a profile, from basic demographic details like your age right down to subjective things like your personality type.
When advertisers place ads on social media platforms they are able to tailor the intended audience for these ads according to these much finer details. The sell is vast scale and speed.
Felix Simon, a communications expert at the Oxford Internet Institute, told Business Insider that too often media reports on political campaigns using microtargeting take it as read their tactics have been successful in changing people's minds.
Although the Channel 4 documentary rightly pointed out that voter turnout among Black people fell in the districts where the Trump campaign deployed its "deterrence" campaign, Simon said this could be down to correlation rather than causation.
"I think what we see here is first and foremost a form of negative advertising which has a long and dirty history and can have voter suppression as one of its aims," he said. "But that it actually works (and on such a scale as suggested here) is highly doubtful and — based on everything we know about targeted advertising and attempts at persuasion — most likely pales in comparison to very real voter suppression efforts, which include removing polling stations, gerrymandering, or restrictive voting laws."
Simon is broadly skeptical of the so-called "psychographic" microtargeting employed by Cambridge Analytica — i.e. trying to use people's data to make conclusions about their personality and target them accordingly. He believes the media has, in some ways, fallen for these firms' own hype.
"It's [presented as] this almost magical technology which promises so much and which is heavily pushed by the industry in this, which is all these digital campaigning companies and the political data analytics industry. And they make all these big promises," he said.
Dr. Tom Dobber, an expert in political communication at the University of Amsterdam, agreed that the Channel 4 report did not prove the Trump campaign's attempt to influence Black voters had been a success. More generally he does believe microtargeting can be effective — but its efficacy can be blown out of proportion.
"While the effects are reasonably strong, they should not be overestimated. It's not like you can get a staunch Conservative to vote for Labour if you microtarget him long enough. Rather, citizens who are not already set on a party are susceptible and it seems that microtargeting ads is more effective than using untargeted ads," he told Business Insider.
Microtargeting might not be inherently bad
Dobber said the granular nature microtargeting has the potential to be both advantageous and dangerous for democracy.
"There are clear downsides as well as upsides, e.g. sending relevant information to inactive citizens might activate them," he said. "Microtargeting can increase turnout. These are generally good things. But there is clear potential for manipulation and also potential for the amplification of disinformation."
He added: "I suppose it can be used for good when actors operate in good faith, but microtargeting can just as easily be detrimental for society when used in bad faith."
Jamal Watkins, vice president for the NAACP, told Channel 4 that the use of microtargeting to systematically disenfranchise voters was a disturbing part of the documentary's findings.
"We use similar voter file data, but it's to motivate, persuade, encourage folks to participate. We don't actually use the data to say 'who can we deter and keep at home.' That seems fundamentally it's a shift from the notion of democracy," said Watkins.
Part of the problem here is that microtargeting is a new and largely unregulated market, so platforms like Facebook are not beholden to an industry standard for how they decide which ads are are allowed to appear on their platform. Facebook has broadly said it will not fact-check or constrain political speech in ads even if it is demonstrably untrue, although there have been some exceptions.
Tech platforms have also only provided restricted amounts of data to researchers like Simon and Dobber.
"It would be helpful if the large social platforms would give more information about which article is targeted to which groups, on the basis of what data, tailored to which characteristics. Now, social platforms only provide rough estimations on only a few large categories," Dobber said.
Even if it's useless, it's dangerous
To Felix Simon, even if microtargeting is ineffective it poses a potential threat to individuals' privacy because for it to be an economically viable product it requires massive amounts of data, which can in turn be sold for other purposes.
"I think the problem is it's not just used for that [microtargeting]," he said. "Think of a scenario where the personal information they have about you, which could be everything in the US down from the way you vote to where you live, how much you earn, how much you spend on what things, and then that is being used in a context you definitely don't want it to be used, for instance to set the rate of your health insurance," he said.
"That for me is more important, because from what we know there is a lot of shady stuff going on with data being sold without [people's] knowledge, potentially to people we don't want to have our personal data," added Simon.
We learned this week that the Trump campaign may have tried to dissuade millions of Black voters from voting in 2016 through highly targeted online ads.
The investigation, by Channel 4, highlighted a still little-understood online advertising technique, microtargeting.
This targets ads at people based on the huge amount of data available about them online.
Experts say Big Tech needs to be much more transparent about how microtargeting works, to avoid overblown claims but also counter a potential threat to democracy.
The Trump campaign in 2016 used online ads to try and dissuade Black voters from voting, according to an investigation this week by UK broadcaster Channel 4.
A cache of documents obtained by Channel 4 included a database of some 200 million Americans' Facebook accounts, broken down into characteristics like race, gender, and even conclusions about their personalities.
The database was split into different groups and one group, unsubtly labelled "deterrence," was disproportionately made up of Black users. The idea was to use tailored online ads on platforms like Facebook to dissuade this group from heading to the ballot box. (The Trump campaign has denied this report.)
Trying to sway voters through advertising is not new, but Channel 4's investigation was a reminder of how the Trump campaign made use of a still little-understood type of advertising called microtargeting.
Microtargeting involves using the huge amounts of data consumers give away online about who they are friends with and what they like to target ads at them.
While microtargeting has long been part of what makes the likes of Facebook and Google so profitable, it really came under mainstream scrutiny in 2018 during the data leak involving political consultancy Cambridge Analytica.
Per investigations by The Observer in 2018, Cambridge Analytica used data to build up "psychographic profiles" of people in order to more accurately target them with political ads.
According to Channel 4's investigation this week, Cambridge Analytica was behind the 2016 ads targeting Black voters in Georgia.
And yet experts warn that while microtargeting is troubling, imputing the technology with mysterious abilities to persuade vast numbers of voters may be a distraction from real voter suppression. Ultimately, we need to understand the technology better.
Concerns about microtargeting could be overblown
The very broad strokes of how microtargeting works go like this: Your behavior online generates a wealth of data about what you are like.
This data is analysed by companies to try and draw as many conclusions about you as possible and build up a profile, from basic demographic details like your age right down to subjective things like your personality type.
When advertisers place ads on social media platforms they are able to tailor the intended audience for these ads according to these much finer details. The sell is vast scale and speed.
Felix Simon, a communications expert at the Oxford Internet Institute, told Business Insider that too often media reports on political campaigns using microtargeting take it as read their tactics have been successful in changing people's minds.
Although the Channel 4 documentary rightly pointed out that voter turnout among Black people fell in the districts where the Trump campaign deployed its "deterrence" campaign, Simon said this could be down to correlation rather than causation.
"I think what we see here is first and foremost a form of negative advertising which has a long and dirty history and can have voter suppression as one of its aims," he said. "But that it actually works (and on such a scale as suggested here) is highly doubtful and — based on everything we know about targeted advertising and attempts at persuasion — most likely pales in comparison to very real voter suppression efforts, which include removing polling stations, gerrymandering, or restrictive voting laws."
Simon is broadly skeptical of the so-called "psychographic" microtargeting employed by Cambridge Analytica — i.e. trying to use people's data to make conclusions about their personality and target them accordingly. He believes the media has, in some ways, fallen for these firms' own hype.
"It's [presented as] this almost magical technology which promises so much and which is heavily pushed by the industry in this, which is all these digital campaigning companies and the political data analytics industry. And they make all these big promises," he said.
Dr. Tom Dobber, an expert in political communication at the University of Amsterdam, agreed that the Channel 4 report did not prove the Trump campaign's attempt to influence Black voters had been a success. More generally he does believe microtargeting can be effective — but its efficacy can be blown out of proportion.
"While the effects are reasonably strong, they should not be overestimated. It's not like you can get a staunch Conservative to vote for Labour if you microtarget him long enough. Rather, citizens who are not already set on a party are susceptible and it seems that microtargeting ads is more effective than using untargeted ads," he told Business Insider.
Microtargeting might not be inherently bad
Dobber said the granular nature microtargeting has the potential to be both advantageous and dangerous for democracy.
"There are clear downsides as well as upsides, e.g. sending relevant information to inactive citizens might activate them," he said. "Microtargeting can increase turnout. These are generally good things. But there is clear potential for manipulation and also potential for the amplification of disinformation."
He added: "I suppose it can be used for good when actors operate in good faith, but microtargeting can just as easily be detrimental for society when used in bad faith."
Jamal Watkins, vice president for the NAACP, told Channel 4 that the use of microtargeting to systematically disenfranchise voters was a disturbing part of the documentary's findings.
"We use similar voter file data, but it's to motivate, persuade, encourage folks to participate. We don't actually use the data to say 'who can we deter and keep at home.' That seems fundamentally it's a shift from the notion of democracy," said Watkins.
Part of the problem here is that microtargeting is a new and largely unregulated market, so platforms like Facebook are not beholden to an industry standard for how they decide which ads are are allowed to appear on their platform. Facebook has broadly said it will not fact-check or constrain political speech in ads even if it is demonstrably untrue, although there have been some exceptions.
Tech platforms have also only provided restricted amounts of data to researchers like Simon and Dobber.
"It would be helpful if the large social platforms would give more information about which article is targeted to which groups, on the basis of what data, tailored to which characteristics. Now, social platforms only provide rough estimations on only a few large categories," Dobber said.
Even if it's useless, it's dangerous
To Felix Simon, even if microtargeting is ineffective it poses a potential threat to individuals' privacy because for it to be an economically viable product it requires massive amounts of data, which can in turn be sold for other purposes.
"I think the problem is it's not just used for that [microtargeting]," he said. "Think of a scenario where the personal information they have about you, which could be everything in the US down from the way you vote to where you live, how much you earn, how much you spend on what things, and then that is being used in a context you definitely don't want it to be used, for instance to set the rate of your health insurance," he said.
"That for me is more important, because from what we know there is a lot of shady stuff going on with data being sold without [people's] knowledge, potentially to people we don't want to have our personal data," added Simon.
Leaked emails show a high-profile engineer left Amazon after filing sexual harassment claims to HR in 2018. Now she's speaking out about what she calls a 'toxic' work culture for women.
Eugene Kim Oct 3, 2020
Amazon ultimately investigated the matter and found the claims weren't substantiated, and the person she accused of bullying and using sexist language has been promoted since then.
Anandkumar is now speaking out about what she calls a "harassment culture" at Amazon, saying in a series of tweets over the weekend that women feel "helpless" at the company.
Anandkumar is a high-profile engineer in the machine learning space, and has a history of speaking out against gender issues, as she did to help change the name of the artificial conference NIPS to NeurIPS over the former name's sexual connotations.
Anandkumar's allegations are the latest in a series of controversies that highlight Amazon's male-dominated work culture.
Several employees tell Business Insider that the lack of women in the upper ranks is "demoralizing" and shared incidents where they felt they faced sexual discrimination.
A high-profile Amazon executive filed multiple sexual harassment complaints to the company's HR department in 2018 against a male manager before ultimately leaving the company that same year. An in-house investigation did not substantiate her claims, but the former employee is now calling on the company to fix its "harassment culture" — and lift the confidentiality obligations imposed on current and former employees' ability to publicly talk about sexual harassment allegations.
Anima Anandkumar, a principal scientist formerly at the Amazon Web Services cloud unit, made repeated claims of her male colleague verbally and physically threatening her at work, according to internal emails obtained by Business Insider.
Her harassment complaints, filed in early 2018, resulted in an internal investigation led by the human resources department. Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of Amazon AI, also directly responded to some of the claims, according to emails. But the senior male colleague who she accused of bullying and making sexist remarks didn't face any serious consequences, remains at the company, and has been promoted since then, according to internal emails and people familiar with the matter.
Sivasubramanian, a senior executive in charge of running AWS's artificial intelligence team, initially told Anandkumar at the time of the 2018 complaints that he was "quite unhappy" about the male colleague's alleged behavior and he would provide him "aggressive feedback," according to the emails.
Now, Anandkumar, who is currently a director of machine learning research at Nvidia and a computer science professor at Caltech, is speaking out about the sexist work environment she says she saw at Amazon.
In a series of tweets last week, Anandkumar said Amazon has a "toxic work culture" that makes female employees feel "helpless" at work. She said that her "harasser" continues to work at Amazon and was even promoted shortly after she filed her complaints.
"No longer will I be silent about toxic work culture at @awscloud Every woman in my org has since left. Multiple women filed harassment along with me. Nothing happened," Anandkumar tweeted last week.
The bigger goal of Anandkumar's tweets appears to be aimed at making Amazon lift the non-disclosure agreements over personal harassment cases. Alphabet, for example, announced last week it would loosen the NDA restrictions that prevent its employees from publicly discussing sexual harassment claims.
"Sadly @awscloud is a toxic place for #WomenInSTEM Please fix it. Ban NDAs. Make actions taken transparent. #MeToo," she tweeted.
—Prof. Anima Anandkumar (@AnimaAnandkumar) September 26, 2020
The newly public callout by Anandkumar sheds even more light on the male-dominated work culture at Amazon that has come under fire in recent years.
Amazon Studios chief Roy Price stepped down in 2017 following sexual harassment charges, while CEO Jeff Bezos has faced frequent criticism, both internally and externally, for the lack of gender diversity in the company's upper ranks. According to the company's latest figures, men accounted for 72.5% of all global managerial positions at Amazon.
The allegations also come at a time when the broader tech industry is grappling with its macho image, punctuated by recent controversies at companies like Google and Uber. Just last week, Google's parent company Alphabet settled a shareholder lawsuit over sexual harassment cases, and announced sweeping changes over the way it treats sexual discrimination charges.
In an email to Business Insider, Amazon's spokesperson denied Anandkumar's claims, saying the company's investigation found her allegations to be meritless.
"At the time these allegations were raised, Amazon HR conducted a thorough investigation and concluded that the facts did not support the vast majority of Ms. Anandkumar's claims, including the most serious allegations. Multiple witnesses directly refuted Ms. Anandkumar's allegations and in other cases, evidence in email and other records demonstrated that certain claims were simply false," the spokesperson said in a statement.
Sivasubramanian didn't respond to a request for comment.
After the publication of this story, Anandkumar sent the following statement disputing Amazon's findings:
"[Amazon's] HR had a vested interest in protecting my harasser because AWS valued his 100k+ citations in AI more than healthy work culture. The outcome of the investigation was pre-determined. They initially promised me an outside independent investigator would be assigned and that was a lie. They said witnesses I provided were ineligible because they were disgruntled former employees (no evidence whatsoever for that). I told HR that I was traumatized by his physical intimidation and did not clearly recall all of the exact dates and times it happened. They used it against me. His history of physical intimidation is well known in the AI community and they refused to use any of that information."
Amazon's spokesperson denies her claims again in an email to Business Insider:
"Anandkumar's additional claims provided in her statement are false. HR approached this investigation independently and with an unbiased perspective. We value all of our employees, and work hard to foster a culture where inclusion is the norm for each and every one of our 800,000+ employees. We do not tolerate any kind of discrimination in the workplace. We do not tolerate any kind of harassment in the workplace, and always vigorously investigate all claims reported by employees to Amazon Human Resources."
'Need protection'
Anandkumar is a high-profile engineer in the machine learning space, and has often made public speeches about artificial intelligence, including at the TEDx Talks conference. She also has a history of driving change by speaking out against gender issues in tech. In 2018, she was one of the leading voices that helped change the name of NIPS, a prominent artificial intelligence conference, to NeurIPS, citing the former title's sexual connotations.
But her fight for change at Amazon wasn't as successful, despite having made disturbing claims about her colleague.
She accused the male co-worker of allegedly intimidating her in meetings, both physically and verbally, and offending her with sexist remarks about her appearance and female employees in general, according to Anandkumar's complaints seen by Business Insider.
In one of the emails sent to Amazon's HR manager and Sivasubramanian, the executive overseeing the artificial intelligence team, Anandkumar said the colleague harassed her with late night calls and text messages, and that she was "scared" to continue working with him. After requesting a manager change, Anandkumar said she started working from cafes instead of going into the office, so she could avoid the colleague.
"I AM SCARED OF HIM AND NEED PROTECTION FROM HIM," Anandkumar wrote in one of the emails to senior leadership. "He was allowed to screw up my team and intimidate everyone."
At first, Sivasubramanian told Anandkumar that he was "appalled" by her allegations, and that he would take appropriate actions to address the issue, according to one of the emails. It's unclear whether he continued to directly correspond with Anandkumar as the investigation progressed.
"First of all, I want to make sure there is no ambiguity: What [NAME REDACTED] said to you is not OK," Sivasubramanian said in the email. "I have serious issues and need to aggressively coach him."
It's unclear what kind of coaching took place. Amazon didn't share many details after the investigation concluded, and didn't disclose what actions it had taken to address the issue. Anandkumar left Amazon in August 2018. The senior male colleague was later promoted to a VP position.
Amazon's spokesperson told Business Insider that the company was able to confirm some of her allegations and that it made certain arrangements to address those issues.
"We took appropriate action for any findings that were confirmed," the statement said.
Anandkumar accused Amazon for keeping the male colleague on the same project and in the same office space, even after the complaints were filed, although they were ordered not to interact with each other. The company spokesperson confirmed the two were eventually physically separated at work.
In one instance, Anandkumar told the company that the no-contact policy was practically meaningless given they're still working in the same office space, and asked to put the senior male colleague on a leave of absence instead. Amazon later asked the colleague not to attend the meetings with her, after Anandkumar made the request, emails show.
"The integrity of the investigation is seriously compromised if he is allowed to come in [meetings] during the investigation and intimidate his victims," Anandkumar wrote in one of her emails.
Anandkumar shared other details about her discomfort at previous companies, without identifying any company or manager names, in a blog post last year.
'Demoralizing'
Some people who spoke to Business Insider questioned Anandkumar's credibility, pointing to the company's decision to ultimately not punish the senior male colleague. Others said the male colleague has previously made intimidating and condescending remarks, saying there's a lot of discontent even among current team members.
However, current and former Amazon employees told Business Insider that the company still has a long way to go to fix what they perceive as a broader sexist culture.
Several female employees at Amazon told Business Insider accounts of sexism where they felt discriminated against by their male managers. Their stories range from being ignored in meetings or having to tolerate sexist jokes, and often being passed over in promotion opportunities. These people said this part of Amazon's culture could be more prevalent at the company's AWS business, since the business software industry has long been more male-oriented.
In fact, multiple Amazon employees shared their own accounts of sexism in an internal document published in June, in an effort to add "inclusion" to the company's famous leadership principles, as previously reported by Business Insider.
In one case, a male boss allegedly called his female employee a "c***" in front of others at a dinner event. That person is still in charge of a team of over 40 people, although the female employee has filed a complaint with HR, the document said.
One person wrote that a manager berated a female engineer for trying to "lower the bar" when she asked him to interview more women for job openings. Another female engineer was told by a male colleague that Amazon was hiring more women "regardless of their skill sets."
Another person wrote that, in a 2019 leadership training class, only 6 or 7 people out of the 60 participants were women. Meanwhile, one female engineer says she was told by her male manager that she doesn't have what it takes to get promoted, and that she should instead "start looking for a rich husband."
Amazon's lack of diversity in the senior management roles is "demoralizing," several female employees told Business Insider. Until last year, the only female member in CEO Jeff Bezos's 20 or so top executive team, called the "S-team," was human relations chief Beth Galetti. A former employee said that the company's HR team is internally called the "pink ghetto" because it's the only team dominated by women.
Amazon's spokesperson said the company doesn't tolerate any kind of discrimination and stressed that it investigates all claims of harassment reported through HR or anonymous company channels.
"Amazon works hard to foster a culture where inclusion is the norm for each and every one of our 800,000+ employees," the statement said. "Diverse teams help us think bigger, and differently, about the products and services that we build for our customers and the day-to-day nature of our workplace."
Bezos addressed the diversity issue during an internal all-hands meeting in 2017, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by Business Insider. When an employee asked why the S-team has so few female or minority leaders, Bezos said he expects any change to happen "very incrementally over a long period of time" because of the team's low turnover.
Over the past year, Amazon has added three new female executives to Bezos's S-team, including its first black member, Alicia Boler Davis. Amazon also has a more diverse board of directors, with half of them women.
In her blog post last year, Anandkumar wrote that she's much happier at the two organizations she now works for — Nvidia and Caltech. She also said her former colleague at Amazon continues to intimidate her at conferences, but she's determined to not let that affect her work, as she doesn't want others to go through what she did.
"I am not afraid," she wrote in the blog. "And I will keep fighting until my last breath."
Eugene Kim Oct 3, 2020
NVIDIA's director of research Anima Anandkumar Reuters/Han jingyu
Anima Anandkumar, a former executive of the Amazon Web Services cloud unit, submitted multiple sexual harassment claims before she left the company in 2018.
Anima Anandkumar, a former executive of the Amazon Web Services cloud unit, submitted multiple sexual harassment claims before she left the company in 2018.
Amazon ultimately investigated the matter and found the claims weren't substantiated, and the person she accused of bullying and using sexist language has been promoted since then.
Anandkumar is now speaking out about what she calls a "harassment culture" at Amazon, saying in a series of tweets over the weekend that women feel "helpless" at the company.
Anandkumar is a high-profile engineer in the machine learning space, and has a history of speaking out against gender issues, as she did to help change the name of the artificial conference NIPS to NeurIPS over the former name's sexual connotations.
Anandkumar's allegations are the latest in a series of controversies that highlight Amazon's male-dominated work culture.
Several employees tell Business Insider that the lack of women in the upper ranks is "demoralizing" and shared incidents where they felt they faced sexual discrimination.
A high-profile Amazon executive filed multiple sexual harassment complaints to the company's HR department in 2018 against a male manager before ultimately leaving the company that same year. An in-house investigation did not substantiate her claims, but the former employee is now calling on the company to fix its "harassment culture" — and lift the confidentiality obligations imposed on current and former employees' ability to publicly talk about sexual harassment allegations.
Anima Anandkumar, a principal scientist formerly at the Amazon Web Services cloud unit, made repeated claims of her male colleague verbally and physically threatening her at work, according to internal emails obtained by Business Insider.
Her harassment complaints, filed in early 2018, resulted in an internal investigation led by the human resources department. Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of Amazon AI, also directly responded to some of the claims, according to emails. But the senior male colleague who she accused of bullying and making sexist remarks didn't face any serious consequences, remains at the company, and has been promoted since then, according to internal emails and people familiar with the matter.
Sivasubramanian, a senior executive in charge of running AWS's artificial intelligence team, initially told Anandkumar at the time of the 2018 complaints that he was "quite unhappy" about the male colleague's alleged behavior and he would provide him "aggressive feedback," according to the emails.
Now, Anandkumar, who is currently a director of machine learning research at Nvidia and a computer science professor at Caltech, is speaking out about the sexist work environment she says she saw at Amazon.
In a series of tweets last week, Anandkumar said Amazon has a "toxic work culture" that makes female employees feel "helpless" at work. She said that her "harasser" continues to work at Amazon and was even promoted shortly after she filed her complaints.
"No longer will I be silent about toxic work culture at @awscloud Every woman in my org has since left. Multiple women filed harassment along with me. Nothing happened," Anandkumar tweeted last week.
The bigger goal of Anandkumar's tweets appears to be aimed at making Amazon lift the non-disclosure agreements over personal harassment cases. Alphabet, for example, announced last week it would loosen the NDA restrictions that prevent its employees from publicly discussing sexual harassment claims.
"Sadly @awscloud is a toxic place for #WomenInSTEM Please fix it. Ban NDAs. Make actions taken transparent. #MeToo," she tweeted.
—Prof. Anima Anandkumar (@AnimaAnandkumar) September 26, 2020
The newly public callout by Anandkumar sheds even more light on the male-dominated work culture at Amazon that has come under fire in recent years.
Amazon Studios chief Roy Price stepped down in 2017 following sexual harassment charges, while CEO Jeff Bezos has faced frequent criticism, both internally and externally, for the lack of gender diversity in the company's upper ranks. According to the company's latest figures, men accounted for 72.5% of all global managerial positions at Amazon.
The allegations also come at a time when the broader tech industry is grappling with its macho image, punctuated by recent controversies at companies like Google and Uber. Just last week, Google's parent company Alphabet settled a shareholder lawsuit over sexual harassment cases, and announced sweeping changes over the way it treats sexual discrimination charges.
In an email to Business Insider, Amazon's spokesperson denied Anandkumar's claims, saying the company's investigation found her allegations to be meritless.
"At the time these allegations were raised, Amazon HR conducted a thorough investigation and concluded that the facts did not support the vast majority of Ms. Anandkumar's claims, including the most serious allegations. Multiple witnesses directly refuted Ms. Anandkumar's allegations and in other cases, evidence in email and other records demonstrated that certain claims were simply false," the spokesperson said in a statement.
Sivasubramanian didn't respond to a request for comment.
After the publication of this story, Anandkumar sent the following statement disputing Amazon's findings:
"[Amazon's] HR had a vested interest in protecting my harasser because AWS valued his 100k+ citations in AI more than healthy work culture. The outcome of the investigation was pre-determined. They initially promised me an outside independent investigator would be assigned and that was a lie. They said witnesses I provided were ineligible because they were disgruntled former employees (no evidence whatsoever for that). I told HR that I was traumatized by his physical intimidation and did not clearly recall all of the exact dates and times it happened. They used it against me. His history of physical intimidation is well known in the AI community and they refused to use any of that information."
Amazon's spokesperson denies her claims again in an email to Business Insider:
"Anandkumar's additional claims provided in her statement are false. HR approached this investigation independently and with an unbiased perspective. We value all of our employees, and work hard to foster a culture where inclusion is the norm for each and every one of our 800,000+ employees. We do not tolerate any kind of discrimination in the workplace. We do not tolerate any kind of harassment in the workplace, and always vigorously investigate all claims reported by employees to Amazon Human Resources."
'Need protection'
Anandkumar is a high-profile engineer in the machine learning space, and has often made public speeches about artificial intelligence, including at the TEDx Talks conference. She also has a history of driving change by speaking out against gender issues in tech. In 2018, she was one of the leading voices that helped change the name of NIPS, a prominent artificial intelligence conference, to NeurIPS, citing the former title's sexual connotations.
But her fight for change at Amazon wasn't as successful, despite having made disturbing claims about her colleague.
She accused the male co-worker of allegedly intimidating her in meetings, both physically and verbally, and offending her with sexist remarks about her appearance and female employees in general, according to Anandkumar's complaints seen by Business Insider.
In one of the emails sent to Amazon's HR manager and Sivasubramanian, the executive overseeing the artificial intelligence team, Anandkumar said the colleague harassed her with late night calls and text messages, and that she was "scared" to continue working with him. After requesting a manager change, Anandkumar said she started working from cafes instead of going into the office, so she could avoid the colleague.
"I AM SCARED OF HIM AND NEED PROTECTION FROM HIM," Anandkumar wrote in one of the emails to senior leadership. "He was allowed to screw up my team and intimidate everyone."
At first, Sivasubramanian told Anandkumar that he was "appalled" by her allegations, and that he would take appropriate actions to address the issue, according to one of the emails. It's unclear whether he continued to directly correspond with Anandkumar as the investigation progressed.
"First of all, I want to make sure there is no ambiguity: What [NAME REDACTED] said to you is not OK," Sivasubramanian said in the email. "I have serious issues and need to aggressively coach him."
It's unclear what kind of coaching took place. Amazon didn't share many details after the investigation concluded, and didn't disclose what actions it had taken to address the issue. Anandkumar left Amazon in August 2018. The senior male colleague was later promoted to a VP position.
Amazon's spokesperson told Business Insider that the company was able to confirm some of her allegations and that it made certain arrangements to address those issues.
"We took appropriate action for any findings that were confirmed," the statement said.
Anandkumar accused Amazon for keeping the male colleague on the same project and in the same office space, even after the complaints were filed, although they were ordered not to interact with each other. The company spokesperson confirmed the two were eventually physically separated at work.
In one instance, Anandkumar told the company that the no-contact policy was practically meaningless given they're still working in the same office space, and asked to put the senior male colleague on a leave of absence instead. Amazon later asked the colleague not to attend the meetings with her, after Anandkumar made the request, emails show.
"The integrity of the investigation is seriously compromised if he is allowed to come in [meetings] during the investigation and intimidate his victims," Anandkumar wrote in one of her emails.
Anandkumar shared other details about her discomfort at previous companies, without identifying any company or manager names, in a blog post last year.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
'Demoralizing'
Some people who spoke to Business Insider questioned Anandkumar's credibility, pointing to the company's decision to ultimately not punish the senior male colleague. Others said the male colleague has previously made intimidating and condescending remarks, saying there's a lot of discontent even among current team members.
However, current and former Amazon employees told Business Insider that the company still has a long way to go to fix what they perceive as a broader sexist culture.
Several female employees at Amazon told Business Insider accounts of sexism where they felt discriminated against by their male managers. Their stories range from being ignored in meetings or having to tolerate sexist jokes, and often being passed over in promotion opportunities. These people said this part of Amazon's culture could be more prevalent at the company's AWS business, since the business software industry has long been more male-oriented.
In fact, multiple Amazon employees shared their own accounts of sexism in an internal document published in June, in an effort to add "inclusion" to the company's famous leadership principles, as previously reported by Business Insider.
In one case, a male boss allegedly called his female employee a "c***" in front of others at a dinner event. That person is still in charge of a team of over 40 people, although the female employee has filed a complaint with HR, the document said.
One person wrote that a manager berated a female engineer for trying to "lower the bar" when she asked him to interview more women for job openings. Another female engineer was told by a male colleague that Amazon was hiring more women "regardless of their skill sets."
Another person wrote that, in a 2019 leadership training class, only 6 or 7 people out of the 60 participants were women. Meanwhile, one female engineer says she was told by her male manager that she doesn't have what it takes to get promoted, and that she should instead "start looking for a rich husband."
Amazon's lack of diversity in the senior management roles is "demoralizing," several female employees told Business Insider. Until last year, the only female member in CEO Jeff Bezos's 20 or so top executive team, called the "S-team," was human relations chief Beth Galetti. A former employee said that the company's HR team is internally called the "pink ghetto" because it's the only team dominated by women.
Amazon's spokesperson said the company doesn't tolerate any kind of discrimination and stressed that it investigates all claims of harassment reported through HR or anonymous company channels.
"Amazon works hard to foster a culture where inclusion is the norm for each and every one of our 800,000+ employees," the statement said. "Diverse teams help us think bigger, and differently, about the products and services that we build for our customers and the day-to-day nature of our workplace."
Bezos addressed the diversity issue during an internal all-hands meeting in 2017, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by Business Insider. When an employee asked why the S-team has so few female or minority leaders, Bezos said he expects any change to happen "very incrementally over a long period of time" because of the team's low turnover.
Over the past year, Amazon has added three new female executives to Bezos's S-team, including its first black member, Alicia Boler Davis. Amazon also has a more diverse board of directors, with half of them women.
In her blog post last year, Anandkumar wrote that she's much happier at the two organizations she now works for — Nvidia and Caltech. She also said her former colleague at Amazon continues to intimidate her at conferences, but she's determined to not let that affect her work, as she doesn't want others to go through what she did.
"I am not afraid," she wrote in the blog. "And I will keep fighting until my last breath."
Workers are fighting for their right to wear Black Lives Matter gear. Here's why a lawyer says companies' decision to enforce bans is dangerous.
Kate Taylor Oct 3, 2020
However, if these policies are not regularly enforced, employers could be subject to discrimination claims.
"Even though generally, employers are within their legal rights to bar employees from wearing 'Black Lives Matter' masks and shirts, employers should shift the focus from whether I can legally do so to should I do so?" Greene said.
Workers are fighting for their right to wear Black Lives Matter gear on the job. But, can they win in court?
Last week, Ma'Kiya Congious filed a complaint with Texas officials against Whataburger, saying the burger chain pushed her out after she wore a Black Lives Matter mask to work. Congious' attorney says she plans to file a racial-discrimination lawsuit against the burger chain.
Labor union United Food and Commercial Workers Local 21 also filed an unfair labor charge against Kroger-owned supermarket chains QFC and Ralphs in September, saying Seattle-area employees were told to remove Black Lives Matter buttons.
Meanwhile, back in July, Whole Foods workers filed a class action suit against the grocery chain, saying they were prevented from wearing Black Lives Matter masks on the job. The lawsuit now involves 28 Whole Foods and Amazon employees in nine states, some of whom say they were sent home or threatened with termination for wearing BLM gear.
The chains and a number of other companies that have banned employees from wearing BLM apparel at work emphasized that they were not specifically barring workers from wearing BLM masks or buttons. Instead, they said that they did not want workers to wear any messages that were unrelated to the brand at work.
"It's important for our customers to understand the purpose behind this policy," Whataburger said in a statement to Business Insider. "If we allow any non-Whataburger slogans as part of our uniforms, we have to allow all slogans. This could create tension and conflict among our employees and our customers. It is our job as a responsible brand to proactively keep our employees and customers safe."
Do these policies justify workplaces preventing employees from wearing BLM masks or other gear? The answer, according to employment and discrimination attorney Wendy Greene, is complicated.
The messy legality of Black Lives Matter mask bans
Kate Taylor Oct 3, 2020
Employees sued Whole Foods for sending workers home for wearing BLM masks. Erin Clark/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
Workers at chains including Whataburger, Ralphs, and Whole Foods are fighting for their right to wear Black Lives Matter masks and other gear on the job.
Employers have the right to create dress codes that prevent workers from wearing clothing with any sort of messaging, according to employment and discrimination attorney Wendy Greene.
Workers at chains including Whataburger, Ralphs, and Whole Foods are fighting for their right to wear Black Lives Matter masks and other gear on the job.
Employers have the right to create dress codes that prevent workers from wearing clothing with any sort of messaging, according to employment and discrimination attorney Wendy Greene.
However, if these policies are not regularly enforced, employers could be subject to discrimination claims.
"Even though generally, employers are within their legal rights to bar employees from wearing 'Black Lives Matter' masks and shirts, employers should shift the focus from whether I can legally do so to should I do so?" Greene said.
Workers are fighting for their right to wear Black Lives Matter gear on the job. But, can they win in court?
Last week, Ma'Kiya Congious filed a complaint with Texas officials against Whataburger, saying the burger chain pushed her out after she wore a Black Lives Matter mask to work. Congious' attorney says she plans to file a racial-discrimination lawsuit against the burger chain.
Labor union United Food and Commercial Workers Local 21 also filed an unfair labor charge against Kroger-owned supermarket chains QFC and Ralphs in September, saying Seattle-area employees were told to remove Black Lives Matter buttons.
Meanwhile, back in July, Whole Foods workers filed a class action suit against the grocery chain, saying they were prevented from wearing Black Lives Matter masks on the job. The lawsuit now involves 28 Whole Foods and Amazon employees in nine states, some of whom say they were sent home or threatened with termination for wearing BLM gear.
The chains and a number of other companies that have banned employees from wearing BLM apparel at work emphasized that they were not specifically barring workers from wearing BLM masks or buttons. Instead, they said that they did not want workers to wear any messages that were unrelated to the brand at work.
"It's important for our customers to understand the purpose behind this policy," Whataburger said in a statement to Business Insider. "If we allow any non-Whataburger slogans as part of our uniforms, we have to allow all slogans. This could create tension and conflict among our employees and our customers. It is our job as a responsible brand to proactively keep our employees and customers safe."
Do these policies justify workplaces preventing employees from wearing BLM masks or other gear? The answer, according to employment and discrimination attorney Wendy Greene, is complicated.
The messy legality of Black Lives Matter mask bans
Employee lawsuits challenge employers' claims about uniform policies. Associated Press
Greene, a professor at the Drexel Kline School of Law, told Business Insider in July that private companies are typically given "considerable latitude in regulating an employee's dress while working." So, banning any messages on clothing would be allowed in the same way that banning certain colored shirts or jeans at work is considered an employer's legal right.
However, questions around how policies are enforced can create legal problems for employers. According to Greene, any written or informal uniform policies needs to be enforced "evenly and uniformly to prevent claims of differential treatment on the basis of protected classifications like race."
"If an employer disallows Black employees from wearing Black Lives Matter paraphernalia yet permits non-Black employees to wear paraphernalia advancing other social justice causes, the employer can be subject to a race discrimination claim," Greene said.
This alleged unequal treatment is the crux of Whole Foods workers' argument against the grocery chain and parent company Amazon.
Whole Foods workers say Black Lives Matter masks were targeted
Greene, a professor at the Drexel Kline School of Law, told Business Insider in July that private companies are typically given "considerable latitude in regulating an employee's dress while working." So, banning any messages on clothing would be allowed in the same way that banning certain colored shirts or jeans at work is considered an employer's legal right.
However, questions around how policies are enforced can create legal problems for employers. According to Greene, any written or informal uniform policies needs to be enforced "evenly and uniformly to prevent claims of differential treatment on the basis of protected classifications like race."
"If an employer disallows Black employees from wearing Black Lives Matter paraphernalia yet permits non-Black employees to wear paraphernalia advancing other social justice causes, the employer can be subject to a race discrimination claim," Greene said.
This alleged unequal treatment is the crux of Whole Foods workers' argument against the grocery chain and parent company Amazon.
Whole Foods workers say Black Lives Matter masks were targeted
Whole Foods workers have filed a class action lawsuit against the grocery chain. AP Photo/Gerry Broome
According to Whole Foods workers' complaint, the grocery chain's policy against "visible slogans, messages, logos, or advertising" was generally unenforced. Employees said people had worn apparel with cartoon characters, sports logos, and Pride flags to support LGBTQ coworkers without facing repercussions.
"Plaintiffs and other Whole Foods employees expected Whole Foods would support their decision to wear [BLM] masks because Whole Foods has expressed support for inclusivity and equality and because it previously allowed its employees to express support for their LGBTQ+ coworkers through their apparel without discipline," the complaint states.
Workers allege they were sent home when they refused to take off their masks, with Savannah Kinzer claiming she was fired from her job at a Cambridge, Massachusetts Whole Foods for organizing workers to wear BLM masks.
"It is possible it's uncomfortable for people, but it's not political," Kinzer told Business Insider in July. "It's human rights. It is a simple, simple statement: Black lives matter, that's it. They matter."
Whole Foods declined to comment on pending litigation, but denied that any employees were terminated for wearing Black Lives Matter masks or other gear at work.
"It is critical to clarify that no Team Members have been terminated for wearing Black Lives Matter face masks or apparel," a Whole Foods spokesperson said in July. "Savannah Kinzer was separated from the company for repeatedly violating our time and attendance policy by not working her assigned shifts, reporting late for work multiple times in the past nine days, and choosing to leave during her scheduled shifts."
Should companies let workers wear masks?
Greene said that there are bigger questions than simply legality that companies need to consider when it comes to barring workers from wearing Black Lives Matter masks. Enforcing these policies could cause employees and the public to believe that their commitments to combat racism are "insincere and performative."
"Even though generally, employers are within their legal rights to bar employees from wearing 'Black Lives Matter' masks and shirts, employers should shift the focus from whether I can legally do so to should I do so?" Greene said.
"That in mind, employers should assess whether developing grooming policies barring 'Black Lives Matter' masks and shirts in the workplace is in furtherance of or in contradiction to their organizational commitment to racial equity and justice," Greene continued.
Increasingly, employees are not satisfied with their companies staying on the sidelines when it comes to political and social issues. Jacinta Gauda, the principal at The Gauda Group — a communications firm that works on branding, strategy, and diversity and inclusion — told Business Insider that the US has a "generation of workers who will push traditional boundaries and test the company's commitments."
"Increasingly, workers want to be heard, and wearing a mask, t-shirt, or hat with a powerful message gives workers voice," said Gauda. "In today's workplace, it is essential to give all workers a safe, risk-free way to communicate their concerns and experiences around racial issues."
According to Whole Foods workers' complaint, the grocery chain's policy against "visible slogans, messages, logos, or advertising" was generally unenforced. Employees said people had worn apparel with cartoon characters, sports logos, and Pride flags to support LGBTQ coworkers without facing repercussions.
"Plaintiffs and other Whole Foods employees expected Whole Foods would support their decision to wear [BLM] masks because Whole Foods has expressed support for inclusivity and equality and because it previously allowed its employees to express support for their LGBTQ+ coworkers through their apparel without discipline," the complaint states.
Workers allege they were sent home when they refused to take off their masks, with Savannah Kinzer claiming she was fired from her job at a Cambridge, Massachusetts Whole Foods for organizing workers to wear BLM masks.
"It is possible it's uncomfortable for people, but it's not political," Kinzer told Business Insider in July. "It's human rights. It is a simple, simple statement: Black lives matter, that's it. They matter."
Whole Foods declined to comment on pending litigation, but denied that any employees were terminated for wearing Black Lives Matter masks or other gear at work.
"It is critical to clarify that no Team Members have been terminated for wearing Black Lives Matter face masks or apparel," a Whole Foods spokesperson said in July. "Savannah Kinzer was separated from the company for repeatedly violating our time and attendance policy by not working her assigned shifts, reporting late for work multiple times in the past nine days, and choosing to leave during her scheduled shifts."
Should companies let workers wear masks?
Greene said that there are bigger questions than simply legality that companies need to consider when it comes to barring workers from wearing Black Lives Matter masks. Enforcing these policies could cause employees and the public to believe that their commitments to combat racism are "insincere and performative."
"Even though generally, employers are within their legal rights to bar employees from wearing 'Black Lives Matter' masks and shirts, employers should shift the focus from whether I can legally do so to should I do so?" Greene said.
"That in mind, employers should assess whether developing grooming policies barring 'Black Lives Matter' masks and shirts in the workplace is in furtherance of or in contradiction to their organizational commitment to racial equity and justice," Greene continued.
Increasingly, employees are not satisfied with their companies staying on the sidelines when it comes to political and social issues. Jacinta Gauda, the principal at The Gauda Group — a communications firm that works on branding, strategy, and diversity and inclusion — told Business Insider that the US has a "generation of workers who will push traditional boundaries and test the company's commitments."
"Increasingly, workers want to be heard, and wearing a mask, t-shirt, or hat with a powerful message gives workers voice," said Gauda. "In today's workplace, it is essential to give all workers a safe, risk-free way to communicate their concerns and experiences around racial issues."
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