It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Wednesday introduced a bill to extend enhanced coronavirus pandemic unemployment benefits until Feb. 1, 2022. If the bill is passed, the benefits, which expired earlier this month, would be retroactive to Sept. 6.
It's unlikely Ocasio-Cortez will have success since the political will simply doesn't appear to be there. President Biden said it was "appropriate" for the benefits to end in September, as Congress planned, and even when the White House offered states with high jobless rates the option to repurpose federal relief money to extend the aid, none of them did. Meanwhile, other profile congressional Democrats, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), have mostly remained quiet on the issue.
Possible I missed something but appears that AOC is the only member in either l House or Senate pushing for renewal of UI benefits that have expired for +10 million. (Sanders, eg, has been silent.) AOC also privately asked the WH for months to extend them https://t.co/PFodUsoRrg
Ocasio-Cortez seems aware that there's not a lot of momentum behind her effort. But after expressing disappointment in lawmakers from both parties for allowing the benefit strategy to run its course, she said she "simply could not allow this to happen without at least trying."
As pandemic roils economy, more US
workers call it a day
Agence France-Presse September 15, 2021 Like millions of Americans, Antonio Fernandez, 64, was forced into early retirement(AFP)
Prior to the coronavirus pandemic, Antonio Fernandez, 64, had envisioned staying in his job at Chevron in Houston for perhaps another five years.
"I probably think I had five more years to work, at least," Fernandez said of his role with the oil giant. "I wasn't looking forward to being retired."
But as with so many other things, the pandemic is remaking the playbook for when to retire in the United States.
Retiring older had been a clear trend in the pre-pandemic era of the world's largest economy, sometimes due to preference, but often out of necessity.
Some have opted to stay employed into their 70s to maintain benefits in a country where healthcare costs are notoriously high. In other cases, people were forced to keep working after their savings were hit by the 2008 financial crisis.
But since the spring of 2020, millions over the age of 65 have exited the workforce, often earlier than expected.
In June alone, more than 1.7 million more older workers than expected retired, said Teresa Ghilarducci, a scholar on labor and retirement at the New School For Social Research in New York.
After being laid off last fall, Fernandez applied for other jobs, but was not successful.
"I have mixed feelings," he told AFP, adding that the company mainly kept on lower-paid staff, a shift from its approach to earlier rounds of downsizing.
"In the end, even though it does not feel fair, it's not a bad outcome for those like me fortunate enough to have enough years of service and being relatively close to retirement to receive a lump sum pension boosted by the low interest rates."
Not ready to leave -
Departing early was also a difficult for Brenda Bates.
After 43 years of work at a nursing facility in Florida, her job became much more taxing during the pandemic when she was required to wear a mask and goggles.
Bates suffered a transient ischemic attack, a stroke-like incident with lingering effects. After struggling for breath during a swim, Bates discussed options with her husband.
"We made the decision to do it for my health," Bates said.
"Before the pandemic I thought I would work at least till I was 65 to get Medicare," she told AFP. "I love my job so I expected to stay as long as I really wanted to."
Bates is far from alone in departing earlier than she expected.
Whether due to fears of an unsafe workplace or job loss amid the economic upheaval, "millions of older workers are simply retiring and often earlier than they are ready," Ghilarducci said.
"It's scary," said Bates, who now works as an independent contractor for a company that does placement for senior living.
"You're giving up a very good salary and all your benefits. One day you have nothing left."
While most of the departures involve workers 65 and older, more workers over 55 without a college degree are also leaving jobs, Ghilarducci said.
Retirements of Black workers without a college diploma increased by 9.2 percent, while white workers with the same education profile saw a 7.5 percent rise, she said.
One risk from the early retirements is an uptick of poverty among the senior population.
At the same time, some older workers are actually in a relatively good position to retire -- at least compared to earlier crises.
"During the global financial crisis there was obviously a very large number of people that had lost their entire retirement savings, and 10 years after they could not retire," said Jacob Kirkegaard, a fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
"Right now the situation is exactly the opposite," said Kirkegaard, noting that the stock market has risen during the pandemic, along with housing prices, which sank after the 2008 market crash.
But the worker exodus is exacerbating bottlenecks in some cases because some who have left are "very experienced, highly skilled people," Kirkegaard said. "They're not available anymore."
The crisis of right-wing lawlessness that no one is talking about John Stoehr September 15, 2021 President Trump supporters wearing faith in God and Trump shirts at the rally in the Bojangle's Coliseum.
(Jeffery Edwards / Shutterstock.com)
So, again, with feeling: Anti-vaccine GOP leaders are lawless. Their followers are often criminal. (I mean this literally.) I'm going to keep repeating myself no matter how many times they claim to be "fighting for their freedom." I'm going to keep calling on the government to put an end to lawlessness no matter how much they hew and cry about "tyranny." Criminals are "free" to break the law, too. Then they are found and punished. The president was right to say the unvaccinated are the problem. His mandate forces tens of millions of them to get vaccinated. They are literally robbing the rest of us of our freedom.
This is important to point out, because the discourse so far keeps framing the question as one between freedom and government, as if government and freedom were opposites. Sure, they are opposites — if you are a conservative. That the discourse is framing them as antipodes is a consequence of the last half-century being dominated by the Republican Party's preferred ways of looking at the world. "Negative liberty," as Isaiah Berlin put it, is only one meaning of liberty, and it is, furthermore, often the narrowest, brittlest and dumbest.
The government can violate individual freedom. When it does, its efforts must be opposed. But that doesn't make it the opposite of freedom. Why? Because the government is us. Good or bad, right or wrong, what the government does in our name, we do to ourselves. This democratic meaning of government, and the implications for freedom inherent in it, is as complex as the multi-racial republic we live in. But conservatives dislike complexities. They complicate preferred pieties. It's easier to think of the absence of government as the presence of freedom. That's also easily the worst worldview in a pandemic that has killed the equivalent of more than 226 9/11's.
The discourse is moving in the right direction. Pundits of high perch like David Leonhardt are making room for other kinds of freedom, like the freedom from a disease that's holding back our lives, our economy and our country. As the Times columnist said recently, freedom isn't doing whatever you want, whenever you want, consequence-free.
There are two ways to think about freedom, right? One is, does someone have the freedom not to get a vaccine shot? That's a legitimate question. The other is, do we as Americans have the freedom to go out and know that we are less vulnerable to a deadly virus? That is also a form of freedom.
And that's why I think that the sort of pro-freedom case for vaccine mandates is actually stronger than the anti-freedom case. Americans deserve the freedom to go to school without fear, they deserve to have the freedom to go to school without health risks, they deserve the ability to go to football games and go to Broadway plays.
This still plays into the Republicans' hand, though. It's not enough to let these dual freedoms — one positive and one negative, one for vaccine mandates and one against them — hang in the air as if they are not being felt by real people. Fact is, one of these freedoms is robbing the other. Republican lawlessness is making that possible. Republican followers are committing crimes (minor ones, so far). We need less talk about abstract freedoms and more about concrete law and order.
The Post's Greg Sargent reported recently on a new memo circulated by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. It advises Democrats in swing districts to take aim at Republicans for prolonging the pandemic and damaging the economy. Greg quoted the memo: "House Republicans have lied about its impact" and "dangerously rejected medical guidance to wear masks and social distance," the memo says, adding that "extremist Republicans" have "even encouraged Americans to consume horse and cattle dewormer."
This is good, but it needs to go farther. We need more Democrats, especially moderate Democrats, talking about the real crisis we are facing. It is not the covid. We have a vaccine for that. It works. If everyone did their part and got fully vaccinated, the pandemic would be over. Therefore, the real crisis isn't medical — it is behavioral. The real crisis is widespread lawlessness and criminality concentrated in a political party wrapping itself in "freedom" and the American flag.
If I were a moderate Democrat from a swing district hoping to keep my seat in the coming midterms, I would be tapping into a deep well of rhetoric that's been long perfected by the GOP — law and order. I wouldn't be mincing words about whose freedoms deserve protecting. I would be making it plain that law-abiding citizens who did their part to end this pandemic have the right to call on the government to put an end to a crisis of lawlessness and criminality that's plaguing society. I would do it with the same righteousness as any Republican would if the topic were Black and brown people protesting in the streets. Report Advertisement
I would do it knowing I was absolutely right. Anti-vaxxers are calling themselves 'purebloods' -- a term that draws 'parallels with Nazi doctrine': report
Vice News on Wednesday reported on a new trend among some in the anti-vaccine community who are now referring to themselves as "purebloods."
The publication notes that the term is what the villainous Death Eaters in J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter" books refer to themselves as, and that Rowling created the term with the intention of "drawing parallels with the Nazi doctrine of the 'master race.'"
While it's unclear when anti-vaxxers started calling themselves "purebloods," it seems the term really took off when conservative TikToker influencer Lyndsey Marie used it in a video over the weekend in which she said, "From now on, I refuse to be referred to as 'unvaccinated'... I want everyone to now call me Pureblood."'
That video has since gone on to get around 250,000 views and has been shared roughly 5,000 times across the platform, Vice writes.
The term was such a hit that Marie is now selling merchandise with the slogan, "PUREBLOOD; Unmasked, Unvaxxed, Unafraid."
While Marie may claim to be "unafraid" of the novel coronavirus, it doesn't chance the fact that more than 650,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic and the virus was the third-leading cause of death last year, trailing only heart disease and cancer.
SCHADENFREUDE
Israel’s Top COVID Truther Claimed COVID That Killed Him Was ‘Poison’ Attack
Jamie Ross, Noga Tarnopolsky Tue, September 14, 2021 Hai Shoulian/Facebook
One of Israel’s top anti-vaxx activists has died of COVID-19, two days after posting a final message to his followers that ordered them to “keep fighting” against the shot that could have saved his life.
Hai Shoulian, 57, spent much of the pandemic organizing protests against coronavirus rules—including mask mandates and Israel’s vaccine-passport scheme, the Green Pass. He lost his life to COVID-19 on Monday morning after spending 10 days at Tel Aviv’s Wolfson Medical Center.
His brother, Avi, told The Daily Beast that his family felt like they had been torn apart, as he headed to his brother’s funeral on Tuesday. “Our dad used to say that every table has four legs and we were four, that was our family motto,” he said, tearfully. “And since yesterday we’re three.”
Avi said his brother’s death certificate lists the coronavirus as the cause of death. He said he decided to speak to the media to encourage his brother’s followers to take the vaccine “and save their lives.” The brother added: “I wish I managed to convince him to save his own life.”
In his last Facebook post, Hai Shoulian complained about how awful his symptoms were, but remained defiant against the vaccine.
In a video showing him receiving oxygen support, he wrote: “I’m in a very bad shape, it is serious... If I take the oxygen out I can’t walk three meters. I can’t talk or respond to people. It took me about an hour to figure out who I am. Where am I and what am I doing here... Lack of oxygen is a terrible thing.”
Despite his condition, he managed a final stand against Israel’s Green Pass, saying: “It has nothing to do with the coronavirus. It has nothing to do with vaccines. It has to do with coercion... Keep fighting.”
The anti-vaxxer’s traditional name, Hai, is intended to protect its bearer—it means “alive” in Hebrew. In his final message, he signed off: “I believe that I will make it through this, with God’s help. In my estimation it will take another two weeks, maybe three.”
Two days later, he died from the virus.
When he first fell sick last week, Shoulian claimed that police had poisoned him after he was arrested during a protest against the Green Pass. “I’m telling you, this is an attempt to wipe me out and if something happens to me know that’s exactly what happened,” he said.
Shoulian went bankrupt at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, according to his younger brother. He blames that for his brother’s decision to become a prominent anti-vaccine campaigner. “If his business had been in good shape, I still think he probably wouldn’t have gotten vaccinated,” Avi said, “but he wouldn’t have been out on the street protesting. He’d have been busy with work.”
Despite the cause listed on his brother’s death certificate, Avi tried to convince the police to order an autopsy of Shoulian’s body to rule out foul play, saying: “Another thing I suspect—and it is only a suspicion—is that he could have been poisoned not by the police but by someone else.”
Shoulian is survived by his mother, three children from a first marriage, his second wife, Yulia Kaprera, and her young son, who is entering the first grade.
National case numbers have been rising in Israel since the end of July. Only 17 percent of eligible Israelis remain unvaccinated, but they account for 65 percent of all cases of serious COVID illness, according to statistics released by the Israeli ministry of health on Tuesday. Veronica Wolski, QAnon supporter at center of ivermectin firestorm, dies of COVID-related pneumonia at Chicago hospital
Veronica Wolski, QAnon supporter at center of ivermectin firestorm, dies of COVID-related pneumonia at Chicago hospital John Keilman, Chicago Tribune Mon, September 13, 2021
Veronica Wolski, the QAnon adherent whose recent hospitalization made her a cause celebre for the controversial medication ivermectin, died in the intensive care unit of Amita Health Resurrection Medical Center early Monday, a hospital spokeswoman said. She was 64.
Wolski’s cause of death was pneumonia due to COVID-19 infection with hypothyroidism as a contributing factor, a spokeswoman for the Cook County medical examiner’s office said Monday morning.
For more than a week, her supporters besieged Resurrection with demands that Wolski be given ivermectin. The medication is typically used to treat diseases caused by parasitic worms, but some have hailed it as a COVID-19 cure despite a lack of definitive scientific proof or government authorization.
The Chicago hospital said last week that its doctors and clinicians, following the guidance of the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, do not use ivermectin for COVID-19 cases. The hospital had declined to comment on Wolski’s diagnosis, citing federal privacy laws.
Over the weekend, some of Wolski’s supporters tried to get the hospital to discharge her. A video posted Sunday night to the Telegram channel of right-wing attorney Lin Wood shows him demanding over the phone that the hospital release Wolski to a person holding her medical power of attorney.
“There’s an ambulance waiting for her outside, there’s a medical doctor waiting for her to treat her,” he said. “If you do not release her, you’re going to be guilty of murder. Do you understand what murder is?”
Another video posted on Wood’s channel shows a Chicago police officer outside the hospital speaking with a person demanding, unsuccessfully, to be allowed inside to perform a wellness check. A hospital spokeswoman said police “(assisted) in maintaining the order outside the hospital with a small group of individuals.”
Wolski’s family could not be reached for comment Monday. A person who answered the door at her Northwest Side home said no one was available for an interview.
Wolski was well-known for her political activism. She gained attention in 2016 by standing on a pedestrian bridge over the Kennedy Expressway with banners supporting presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.
“It’s like having a Bernie rally,” she told the Tribune at the time. “To have thousands of people, like-minded, you just feel like a community. And these are my people.”
She referred to then-candidate Donald Trump as “a goof” during the interview, but at some point she became a massive Trump supporter and a believer in the QAnon conspiracy theory. Her bridge messages began to say things such as “Q Sent Me” and “COVID fraud.”
Joseph Uscinski, a University of Miami political science professor who studies conspiracy theories, said that kind of evolution is not unusual for people who hold the worldview that the system is rigged. QAnon originated on internet message boards but many of its tenets reflect conspiracy beliefs that are decades if not centuries old, he said.
“Once they’re at that point and say everything is corrupt and rigged, it’s very easy to say modern medicine is rigged, politics are rigged, the media is rigged, because they’re seeing all those things through the exact same lens,” he said.
Wolski’s Telegram channel includes numerous posts showing scorn for masks, vaccines and other mainstream approaches to avoiding COVID-19. In late July, she posted a video in which she described suffering from a prolonged fever, body aches and violent coughing fits that she attributed to a cold.
She says in the video that she felt better after taking a five-day course of ivermectin. Photos and videos posted over the next three weeks show her returning to the overpass she dubbed “The People’s Bridge.”
But her channel also shows that by Aug. 20 she was in the emergency department. None of the subsequent posts included a request for ivermectin, though one uploaded Aug. 24 displays the hospital’s location and asks for “a medical person to help get me out of here.”
Some of Wolski’s supporters soon began to seek ivermectin treatment on her behalf, boosted by a social media appeal from Wood. Resurrection officials said last week they had received hundreds of calls and emails about Wolski.
Ivermectin has become a popular alternative treatment for COVID-19 despite warnings from the government and numerous medical authorities that it hasn’t been proven to be effective and, in its more potent veterinary form, can even be lethal.
Some COVID patients and their families have sued hospitals when doctors have declined to offer ivermectin. In May, a DuPage County judge ordered Elmhurst Hospital to allow a comatose patient, Nurije Fype, to receive the medication after none of its physicians agreed to administer it.
An outside doctor gave Fype the drugs, and according to social media accounts account run by her daughter, she improved and eventually returned home.
Following Wolski’s death, social media platforms overflowed with thousands of messages of mourning and anger, and by mid-day her name was a national trending topic on Twitter. In a Telegram post viewed more than 230,000 times, Wood expressed sadness and issued a vague call for “non-violent civil disobedience.”
The only indication of that at the hospital Monday morning was a sign mounted along West Talcott Avenue that read, “R.I.P Veronica Wolski / Say her name!” At the bridge, someone left flowers and a blue rubber bracelet inscribed with the QAnon saying, “(The) storm is upon us.”
Wicker Park resident Jason Warth arrived with an American flag he mounted in Wolski’s honor on the bridge’s safety fence. Though he knew her only from social media, he said he respected her determined spirit.
“She was kind of a one-of-a-kind patriot who had the time and energy and opportunity to do what she did,” he said. “As for whether it’s a sad story, I guess it depends on perspective. To me, it’s a patriotic story of a woman who loved her country. … It’s a sad ending but not a sad story.”
QAnon Anti-Vaxxer Whose Followers Harassed Hospital for Ivermectin Dies of COVID-19
QAnon influencers led a harassment campaign on behalf of Veronica Wolski, accusing hospital staff of “murder” when they wouldn't give her the unapproved drug.
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An anti-vaccine activist and QAnon believer at the center of a harassment campaign against a Chicago hospital that refused to treat her with ivermectin, has died from complications due to COVID-19.
Veronica Wolski, who became famous for promoting anti-vax and QAnon conspiracies from a bridge in Chicago, was admitted to Amita Resurrection Hospital in Chicago three weeks ago after contracting COVID-19.
Last week, a campaign backed by QAnon influencers Lin Wood and Michael Flynn urged people to call the hospital and harass the staff with the demand that Wolski be given ivermectin, a drug typically used as a horse dewormer that has not been approved as a treatment for COVID-19.
The hospital said last week that it was flooded with hundreds of phone calls and emails as a result of the campaign. A hospital spokesperson confirmed to VICE News that the patient had passed away but declined to comment further.
That campaign continued right until Wood announced Wolski’s death in the early hours of Sunday morning. Hours before he announced her passing on his Telegram channel, Wood posted a video of himself calling the hospital and telling the person he spoke to that they will be charged with murder unless they give Wolski ivermectin.
“Veronica is being murdered at Amita Resurrection Hospital,” Wood wrote in a post moments before posting the video.
On Sunday night police were called to the hospital following reports of a disturbance. In a video posted online, a woman who Wood said had been given Wolski’s power of attorney, is seen confronting a police officer and demanding that she be allowed into the hospital and perform a “wellness check” on Wolski.
The officer told the woman the hospital was not going to allow that to happen.
As well as offering his sympathies to Wolski’s family, the pro-Trump lawyer used the annoucement of her death as an opportunity to urge his followers to continue harassing healthcare workers.
“Now on Earth, it is our responsibility to ensure that these medical murders stop NOW and the perpetrators be brought to justice,” Wood wrote, before adding: “Now, we go to war.”
In the Telegram channel Wolski once ran, her supporters posted hundreds of messages of sympathy but also urged others to spam the social media account of Amita Health with messages about her “murder.”
Across other QAnon channels where Wolski is being hailed as a martyr, a patriot, and a hero, a common refrain is that she was “kidnapped and murdered” by the hospital and that this “medical tyranny” must end now.
“RIP one of the biggest Patriots of current times. I called that extermination camp Amita many times last night, and police district 16 to report attempted murder,” one typical commenter wrote.
How Russia “ground down” Ukrainians
Russia's narrative of its own national diversity and peaceful coexistence of languages and cultures is not quite consistent with reality
Speaking at the MGIMO University on September 1, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said: "We have never tried to grind down the traditions, culture, language of those peoples who have inhabited the territory of our country since the Russian Empire, then the Soviet Union, and now the Russian Federation.” But then why is the vast majority of languages in Russia endangered? And where have millions of Ukrainians disappeared?
mid.ru
The territory of Russia covers one-eighth of the entire land surface on Earth, with the population constituting 1.9% of the world’s, while languages spoken in Russia account for about 2% of all the world’s languages. At the same time, over 90% of these languages (121 out of 131) are threatened to a varying extent, according to UNESCO assessment. The report says 19 languages are “vulnerable,” while the rest are in an even more critical situation.
In late 2019, a post by a High School of Economics Professor Gasan Guseynov made quite a splash in Russia, where he wrote that in the capital of a multinational country “hosting hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Tatars,” nothing is available in languages other than Russian. Perhaps that is why, Guseynov wrote, it seems to some Russians that Russian speakers in Ukraine are unable to learn Ukrainian. The professor was soon fired.
Despite Russia’s rhetoric about its multinational nature and multilingualism, the presidential Hotline only accepts questions in Russian, while letters to Ukrainian political prisoners in Russian prisons won’t be delivered if written in any other language. Federal TV and radio broadcast entirely in Russian as well. It is the only available language of vocational and higher education, including the Single State Exam in secondary school. National languages, on the other hand, have not been mandated in schools since 2018. In September 2019, Albert Razin, a Russian scientist, set himself on fire in defense of the Udmurt language (the number of speakers dropped by a third from 2002 to 2010 alone), protesting against the innovation. The government turned a blind eye to the dramatic move.
According to a 2010 census, some 552,000 Udmurts were living in Russia, along with 1.9 million Ukrainians, making the latter the third-largest ethnic group in the Russian Federation, after Russians and Tatars. They also make up for the world’s largest Ukrainian diaspora. Somewhat fewer (1.3 million) people of Ukrainian descent reside in Canada.
Getty images
However, overseas it is much easier than in the “sisterly” Russia to remain a Ukrainian, as noted by Forbes. Families are welcome to baptize a child either in a Ukrainian Orthodox or Catholic Church. The child is free to attend a Ukrainian kindergarten, and then, they can learn their native language and history in a municipal secondary school. There are 12 schools like that in Toronto and suburbs, and 25 in the Province of Ontario. In Russia, on the other hand, there are no government schools where Ukrainian is the language of command. Any attempts to open them, as explained by Mykhailo Ratushnyk, head of the Ukrainian World Coordinating Council, immediately get into the FSB focus, with its operatives starting to intimidate the initiators.
“Over the past 20 years, the Ukrainian diaspora in Russia has been under enormous pressure from the government, both at official and unofficial everyday levels,” was mentioned at the V All-Ukraine Research Conference in 2013.
Needless to say, it has become very inconvenient to be a Ukrainian in Russia since 2014.
“If we speak about Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars, they are almost the most disempowered people in Russia. It is simply dangerous to be a Ukrainian or a Crimean Tatar. Going to a Ukrainian church, studying the language (you can do it in Kuban, but as a “Russian dialect,” “Kuban-speak”) – it is all informally prohibited, said Director of the Oleksandr Nykonorov Foreign Policy Research Center and co-coordinator of the “Kuban with Ukraine” CommitteeSerhii Parkhomenko.
On the other hand, being a Ukrainian had become dangerous in Russia long before 2014.
According to a 1926 census, Ukrainians were the second-largest ethnic group in Russia. Back then, it was 7.8 million people. By the next census, the number more than halved – in 1939, there were just 3.3 million Ukrainians in Soviet Russia. Over the past century, Ukrainians in Russia remained at a quarter of the previous number. Given the circumstances, it would be fair to call it “cultural genocide.”
Kuban
This genocide was most severe in the 1930s when forcible suppression of Ukrainians and their culture started in regions with a historically high Ukrainian population, particularly Kuban.
The first general census of the Russian Empire of 1897 recorded more than 900,000 Ukrainian speakers in Kuban (62% of the total population). Manifestations of the Ukrainian culture were so strong in Kuban that soon after the revolution in the Russian Empire, Kuban People’s Republic emerged, and its Legislative Council in 1918 adopted a resolution to join the Ukrainian National Republic in the form of a Federation. The merger never happened due to aggression by Soviet Russia. In 1920, Kuban People's Republic was destroyed by the Bolsheviks. However, insurgent units operated in the Kuban area until 1925.
The Soviet census of 1926 showed there were 915,000 Ukrainians in Kuban. At the time of a 2010 census, there were 84,000 left.
In 1992, film director Valentin Sperkach shot a documentary entitled Cuban Cossacks. For Two Hundred Years Now..., which tells the story of Zaporizhia Cossacks moving to Kuban and the genocide of Ukrainians in Russia.
Kuban on the map of Ukraine, released in Vienna in 1919 or 1920 by the "Christoph Raiser and Sons" Publishing House. Artist "Verte", idea by G. Gasenko
Its characters open up about their experiences: “Why am I registered as Russian, not Ukrainian... Because we were being strangled, so help us God!.. The entire Krasnodar Krai was made Russian... We were Ukrainians, and now we no longer know who we are. Shapeshifters... In school, I studied in Ukrainian. And we spoke Ukrainian. And since 1933, everything has come to naught.”
On December 14, 1932, the Central Committee of the CPSU (b) and the SNC of the USSR adopted a resolution "On Grain Procurement in Ukraine, the North Caucasus, and the Western region," which radically changed approaches to national policy: the fight against “Petliura's Ukrainization" in the Ukrainian SSR and against any manifestations of Ukrainization in the North Caucasus. The next day, the ban on the use of the Ukrainian language in education, office work, and press was extended to other regions of Soviet Russia with a highly dense Ukrainian population.
This was accompanied by repressions. According to one of the characters of Sperchak's documentary, his family was saved from deportation after his father forbade him to enroll in a Cossack culture club at school. The families of all kids who had signed up were deported.
Far East
Another powerful Ukrainian center outside Ukraine, besides Kuban, was Green Ukraine – a territory in the southern part of the Far East. Based on various estimates, Ukrainians constituted a third to a half of the population in the Far East. In some areas, they even accounted for 60–80% of the population.
“This is a big Malorossiya village. The main and oldest street is Mykolska. Along the entire street, on both sides, white huts are lined up, occasionally still covered with straw... people from the Great Russian counties are barely noticeable among those from Poltava, Chernihiv, Kyiv, Volyn, and other Ukrainians – they vanish among the primary Malorossiya element... People sport Ukrainian clothes. You can hear the joyful, populous, and lively Malorossiya speech everywhere” correspondent Ivan Illich-Svitych wrote, describing the city of Ussuriysk in 1905.
From June 1917 to January 1918, the Provisional Far Eastern Ukrainian National Committee, which was the main executive body of the Ukrainian Far Eastern Republic, was located here in Ussuriysk. Ukrainians also tried to form their state in the Far East.
Throughout its existence, the state-building movement in Green Ukraine focused on unification with the Ukrainian People's Republic. The Second All-Ukraine Congress of the Far East, held in Khabarovsk in January 1918, appealed to the government of the Ukrainian People's Republic, demanding that the Russian government recognize Green Ukraine as part of the Ukrainian state.
“Of course, the conditions were hardly auspicious – civil war between the Red and the White armies was already underway in the Far East. Both of them were very negative, even hostile, towards Ukrainians – not only towards their aspiration for independence, but even towards their cultural needs,” said Viacheslav Chornomaz, researcher of the Ukrainian diaspora in the Far East and its representative, editor of the encyclopedia Green Ukraine. Ukrainian Far East.”
But as soon as the 1930s, the Far East turned into a “desert of Ukrainian culture,” said Chornomaz. Ukrainians had no opportunity to preserve their identity.
Siberia
The third center was the Ukrainian communities of Grey Ukraine – the territory of Ukrainian colonization in Siberia. After the February Revolution of 1917, the Ukrainians of Grey Ukraine established their own self-government and military units in Siberia. At the First Ukrainian Congress of Siberia in Omsk in July-August 1917, the Main Ukrainian Council of Siberia was elected.
Seryi Klyn. Cossacks of the Hetman Petro Sahaidachny squad. In 1917-1920, a movement for Ukrainian state autonomy was launched Seryi Klyn.
Ukrainian state movement in Siberia stretched across the regions of Western Siberia, where Ukrainians accounted for the majority of the population. At the time of the Ukrainian governmental movement in Grey Ukraine, Ukrainian press was available, Ukrainian unions and associations were created, and even Ukrainian national rallies were held, flying blue and yellow flags.
After termination of the Ukrainian statehood in Grey Ukraine and the occupation of Western Siberia by the Bolsheviks, the Ukrainian population, which constituted about 40% of the 1.5 million people of Grey Ukraine, was destroyed or assimilated.
Volga Region and Others
In addition to Green and Grey Ukraine, there was also the so-called Yellow Ukraine, an ethnic Ukrainian territory in the Volga region where the presence of Ukrainians was so massive that the German Republic of the Volga region created by the Bolsheviks had three official languages – German, Russian, and Ukrainian – enshrined in the constitution. Moscow, however, never approved the constitution, and the autonomy was soon abolished.
In 1926, Ukrainians made up more than 70% of the population of the Taganrog area but in 1939, the Soviet census showed that most Ukrainians in that region had mysteriously “disappeared.” While Ukrainians accounted for about 40% of the population in the Belgorod region in the 1897 census, the area has become practically mono-ethnic today: 94.4% of the population are Russians.
Today’s Russia
In the aughts, Ukrainian social, cultural, and religious activists in Russia faced attacks, assaults, attempted and completed assassinations. Ukrainian organizations and establishments that emerged on the wave of democratic reforms were eliminated.
In 2003, the vicar of the Moscow parish of St. Ignatius the Godbearer, Bishop Oleksandr Simchenko of Antioch (UGCC) was first assaulted by a group of unidentified men while on an Ivano-Frankivsk – Moscow train. The priest spent several weeks in hospital but no criminal inquiry was opened. After that, he was assaulted five more times. The perpetrators were never found.
In 2002, Volodymyr Poburynnyi, a businessman, philanthropist, and member of the "Dream" Ukrainian Cultural Society was killed in Ivanovo region.
In April 2004, Anatolii Kryl, leader of the Ukrainian choir “Horlytsia” and doctor by profession, was killed in Vladivostok.
In July 2006, Natalia Kovaliova, head of the Audit Commission of the Federal National and Cultural Autonomy of Ukrainians in Russia (FNCAUR), survived an assassination attempt in Tula. Two men attacked her, inflicting multiple grave injuries. A metal rod, found near the crime scene, was used to smash her face, break her teeth, and almost knock out her right eye. The woman suffered a fractured skull and intracranial bleeding.
In December 2006, her husband, Volodymyr Senyshyn, member of the Council of the Union of Ukrainians in Russia and head of the Tula regional organization Parents' Roof, was killed in Tula.
In 2008, the Ukrainian Educational Center was terminated in Moscow.
In 2010, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation revoked registration of one of the two largest public associations of the Ukrainian minority, the Federal National and Cultural Autonomy of Ukrainians in Russia.
In 2010, due to a criminal case, the only official library of Ukrainian literature in Russia was shut down to visitors (and eventually closed altogether in 2018).
In 2012, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation ruled to close the second all-Russian public organization of the Ukrainian minority, the Union of Ukrainians in Russia.
Roman Tsymbaliuk / hyser
Roman Tsymbaliuk, an UNIAN staff writer in Moscow, said: “Even before the invasion, the Russian authorities had done everything possible to destroy the Ukrainian movement in the Russian Federation.”
Center for Strategic Communications and Information Strategy
How the fall of the Soviet Union 30 years
ago still haunts Ukraine
As western Ukrainians clash with their eastern counterparts, the divides that Soviet authoritarianism masked are reasserting themselves.
“Russia was robbed,” wrote Vladimir Putin in a 5,000-word essay on “the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians”. Modern Ukraine, Putin argued, “was shaped… on the lands of historical Russia” by the Bolsheviks, who had no regard for the history of Russia.
Putin’s argument is hardly new. Regime figures alternately argue that Ukraine is not a genuine sovereign state; that only its Ukrainian-speaking west is rightfully divided from Russia; or that Ukrainians and Russians are essentially one people, artificially separated. That line of thinking was taken to its extreme in 2014, when Moscow annexed Russian-speaking Crimea, in its view righting a historical wrong. The transfer of the territory from Russia to Ukraine in 1956 had been under the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev; a nominal change at the time that became consequential when the USSR collapsed 30 years ago this December.
The argument is premised on a supposed division between different language groups. In the west of the country, annexed to the USSR in 1940 from Poland, Ukrainian is spoken. In the east and centre of the country, historically part of the Russian empire, Russian is much more common. It is that distinction which Russia plays on to undermine its neighbour’s statehood. The parts of Ukraine that interest the Kremlin are the east and centre: the Crimean peninsula, the borderlands of the Donbass, the Black Sea coast. “Kyiv does not need Donbass,” Putin wrote in his article.
Now geography is reasserting itself in the territories of the former empire, nowhere more so than in Ukraine, where a war continues to be waged between Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed separatists in the country’s east.
***
Lviv, in western Ukraine, only feels like a Soviet city during the drive in. Crumbling abandoned factories line the streets on the outskirts that ring the city. The same blocks of flats that can be seen across the territory of the former socialist empire line the city’s wide boulevards.
Approach the city centre, though, and the urban fabric changes completely. Reinforced concrete gives way to elegant sandstone buildings along cobbled streets. Mid-rise art deco buildings painted in elegant pastels are ornamented with cherubs and sculptures of toned men and women. Trams rattle along the winding roads. This is no longer Lvov, the city’s name in Russian, but Lemberg, as it was known in German under the Austro-Hungarian empire – more Vienna than Volgograd.
The city’s identity has been shaped by the succession of flags that have flown over the town hall. After the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire following the First World War, it came under Polish rule with the re-establishment of Polish statehood. At the outbreak of the Second World War, eastern Poland was annexed to the USSR, under the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Occupied by the Nazis in 1941, it was back under Soviet control by 1944. Although Lviv is at the centre of what the US historian Timothy Snyder called the “bloodlands” of Europe, it experienced relatively little fighting and, unlike other Polish cities, most of its architecture survived the war. Since 1991, it has been part of independent Ukraine.
In the city’s ethnic make-up, the lines were blurred, as so often in central Europe. Gravestones in the Lychakiv cemetery pay tribute to Lviv’s diverse history. Modern inscriptions in Ukrainian stand next to tombs of Poles and Austrians as well as Soviet-era plaques in Russian celebrating heroes who died defending the socialist motherland from the fascists. The city’s modern homogeneity is a historical anomaly, a product of the Holocaust, which emptied Lviv of its Jews, and of postwar population transfers between Soviet Ukraine and Poland.
This is central, not eastern Europe. Western Ukrainians think of themselves as different from homo sovieticus. “The Austro-Hungarian empire was freer than the Russian empire. People have freedom in their blood here,” one local official told me.
***
An 11-hour journey south on a clattering Soviet-era night train leads to the port of Odessa. At 9:30pm, the night train heaves out of Carpathia on its way to the Black Sea. Passengers pour glasses of vodka and cut slices of sausage in anticipation of the night ahead. I fall asleep as the train leaves behind Lviv’s Austro-Hungarian architecture. Seven hours and a few sudden stops and starts later, I wake as the morning sun peeks behind the window shutters.
The setting as the train pulls into Odessa could be anywhere in the old USSR: grey concrete walls, wheel-less Ladas propped up on breeze blocks, abandoned factories. The train finally arrives at the Black Sea, a giant banner atop the Stalin-era station welcoming visitors to the “hero city of Odessa”, an honour bestowed upon it by the Soviet government for its resistance to the Nazis’ Romanian allies.
Odessa, founded by the Russian empress Catherine the Great on the site of an Ottoman fort in the late 18th-century, has for centuries been as cosmopolitan a city as Lviv. Under the tsars and then the Soviets, Greeks, Armenians and Moldovans mingled with Russians and Ukrainians, forging the city’s reputation for easy-going cosmopolitanism underpinned by a commercial spirit.
Most of all, it was the Jews who made Odessa’s reputation. The city was, at its peak, more than 40 per cent Jewish, the community centred on the neighbourhood of Modovanka, whose gangsters the writer Isaac Babel immortalised in his Odessa Tales. During the tsarist era, rampant anti-Semitism and frequent pogroms, such as that of 1905, are believed to have killed about 400. This undermined the image of Odessan liberalism which would later come to dominate the popular image of the city, as the historian Charles King wrote in Genius and Death in a City of Dreams.
Odessa formed some of the most consequential Jewish politicians of the 20th century, from Leon Trotsky, who studied in the city, to Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the father of Revisionist Zionism, whose experience of Odessan anti-Semitism convinced him that Jews would never be welcome within gentile nations and needed a state of their own. “Wasn’t it a mistake on God’s part to put the Jews in Russia, where they suffer as if they’re in hell?” asks the mobster Benya Kirk in the Odessa Tales.
Babel, executed in 1940 by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, did not live to see how much worse life would get for Ukraine’s Jews. As in Lviv, the Holocaust emptied Odessa of the vast majority of its Jewish population, though they retained their cultural imprint on the city. Yiddish-inflected Russian still marks out the city’s distinctive dialect and its famous dry wit.
***
Odessa and Lviv embody the divisions in Ukraine perhaps better than any other cities in the territory that Kyiv controls. Ukrainophone, ex-Austro-Hungarian, central European Lviv contrasts with Odessa, founded by a tsarina, whose reputation was made in the Soviet era.
Ukraine’s linguistic divide is played up by outsiders who know little of the country, says Vladislav Davidzon, the author of From Odessa with Love. He argues that most Ukrainians, equally comfortable in both languages, do not see much political significance in their choice of tongue. Ethnic or linguistic divisions do not map well along political lines. “It’s absolutely true that Russian is the language of Ukraine’s neighbour and historical occupier – but this country has the lowest rate of people speaking the state language of any country in Europe.” (Just 55 per cent of Ukrainians speak Ukrainian at home, according to a 2019 survey by Pew Research.)
But real differences do exist. They revolve around, in particular, views of history. Especially since the 2014 Ukrainian Revolution, which ousted the pro-Russian leader Viktor Yanukovych, a revived Ukrainian nationalism, seeking to distance Ukraine from its Soviet past, lionises figures such as Stepan Bandera, a Second World War-era Ukrainian nationalist leader who pledged allegiance to Hitler. That reading of history appeals to Ukrainians in the west of the country but grates with those living further east.
Signs of the rehabilitation of Bandera and his Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), responsible for wartime anti-Jewish pogroms and the ethnic cleansing of Poles, are manifold in Lviv. A large thoroughfare in Lviv is named Bandera Street. There is also a monument to Bandera and a Heroes of the UPA street. This expression of nationalism, largely embraced at the national level, alienates those in the east who are more comfortable with the Soviet legacy. It also serves to frighten some Ukrainians from ethnic or religious minority groups, according to Eduard Dolinsky, the director general of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee. “A monument to Bandera is disgusting and a mockery. It’s a monument to a killer on the grave of his victims.” Vasyl Filipchuk, a former Ukrainian diplomat, argues that western Ukraine’s post-communist rehabilitation of Bandera is one of the biggest obstacles to the creation of a consensual national narrative. It is not surprising that Odessans, coming from a city with impeccably maintained Soviet war memorials such as the Monument to the Unknown Sailor, feel unsettled in Lviv, he says.
***
In May 2014, Odessa was the site of one of the most contentious episodes of the early stages of the Ukrainian Revolution (when pro-EU, anti-Russian protests led to the overthrow of the Ukrainian government). As protesters and pro-Russian counter-demonstrators clashed in the streets, the latter retreated into the Trade Unions House. Shortly afterwards, a fire broke out. Although it is still unclear how the fire started – or which side caused it – the flames quickly spread, killing 46 pro-Russian activists. (Two of the opposing protesters were also killed.)
The episode was seized upon by the Russian state to allege that “Ukrainian nationalists” had massacred peaceful demonstrators expressing their desire not to give up close ties to Russia. It became one of the foundational myths of the pro-Russian separatist movement. Putin’s article this year raised the prospect of similar massacres being committed by “the followers of Bandera” in other Russian-speaking Ukrainian cities.
In the long search for a post-communist national narrative, in common with many of the other newly independent Soviet states, Ukrainian authorities looked to the past to write a new story for their country. Even if the war united many Ukrainians against Russia, the country’s recent embrace of western Ukrainian nationalism risks alienating those who have a different reading of the past. Thirty years after the Soviet Union fell, the divisions its authoritarianism masked continue to perturb Ukraine.
COACHING IS ABUSIVE
US gymnasts slam FBI, USA Gymnastics, Olympic committee over Nassar abuse
Issued on: 15/09/2021 -
US gymnasts (L-R) Simone Biles, McKayla Maroney, Aly Raisman and Maggie Nichols at a hearing of the Senate Judiciary hearing about the FBI's handling of sexual abuse by former team doctor Larry Nassar
SAUL LOEB POOL/AFP
Washington (AFP)
US gymnasts Simone Biles, McKayla Maroney, Aly Raisman and Maggie Nichols excoriated USA Gymnastics, the US Olympic Committee and the FBI in powerful Senate testimony on Wednesday for failing to take immediate action over sexual abuse allegations against team doctor Larry Nassar.
"We have been failed and we deserve answers," said the 24-year-old Biles, a seven-time Olympic medalist and the most decorated gymnast in world championships history.
While condemning the inaction of the FBI, the gymnasts had harsh words for the leadership of USA Gymnastics and the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC).
"We suffered and continue to suffer because no one at the FBI, USAG or USOPC did what was necessary to protect us," Biles said.
Maroney, who won a team gold medal at the 2012 London Olympics, said she reported the abuse by USA Gymnastics doctor Nassar to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2015.
"They allowed a child molester to go free for more than a year," the 25-year-old Maroney told the Senate Judiciary Committee. "They had legal, legitimate evidence of child abuse and did nothing."
Nassar, 58, is serving a life sentence after pleading guilty in late 2017 and early 2018 to sexually assaulting women and girls while working as a sports medicine doctor at USA Gymnastics and Michigan State University (MSU).
Hundreds of women -- including Olympians, gymnasts and collegiate athletes -- have accused Nassar of sexually abusing them over the course of his more than two-decade career.
US Olympic gymnast Simone Biles testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the FBI handling of the investigation of sexual abuse by former USA Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar
SAUL LOEB POOL/AFP
Biles, Maroney, Raisman and Nichols were invited to testify before the Senate committee about the "FBI's dereliction of duty in the Nassar case."
Nichols, who won a gold medal at the 2015 World Artistic Gymnastics Championships, said she reported Nassar's abuse to USA Gymnastics leadership in 2015.
"I am haunted by the fact that even after I reported my abuse so many women and girls had to suffer at the hands of Larry Nassar," Nichols said.
"USA Gymnastics and the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee have all betrayed me and those who were abused by Larry Nassar," the 24-year-old Nichols said.
FBI Director Christopher Wray and Michael Horowitz, the Justice Department Inspector General, are scheduled to testify before the Senate panel later Wednesday in a separate session.
Horowitz's office was the author of a damning report published in July that looked into the FBI's handling of accusations against Nassar.
It found that despite the "extraordinarily serious nature of the allegations," senior officials in the Indianapolis Field Office of the FBI failed to respond with the "utmost seriousness and urgency that they deserved."
US Olympic gymnast Aly Raisman testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the FBI handling of the investigation of sexual abuse by former USA Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar
POOL GETTY IMAGES/AFP
USA Gymnastics reported Nassar to the FBI in July 2015, but he continued to see patients at MSU until a newspaper exposed him in September 2016.
Simone Biles testifies before Congress on FBI's handling of Larry Nassar's abuse allegations
Gymnasts Simone Biles, Aly Raisman, McKayla Maroney and Maggie Nichols gave powerful testimonies before a Senate committee against former USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar on Wednesday.
In a cascade of raw emotion, the athletes called out the FBI, Justice Department and others for failing to protect them and others against the sexual abuse they were exposed to at the hands of Nassar.
“There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way it treats its children,” Biles said in her opening statement. “It is the power of that statement that compels me to be in front of you today. I don’t want another young gymnast, Olympic athlete, or any individual to experience the horror that I and hundreds of others have endured before, during, and continuing to this day in the wake of the Larry Nassar abuse.”
During Maroney’s opening statement, the decorated gymnast called out the FBI’s handling of her claims.
“After telling my entire story of abuse to the FBI in the summer of 2015, not only did the FBI not report my abuse, but when they eventually documented my report, 17 months later, they made entirely false claims about what I said,” she said.
Raisman said that she felt “pressured by the FBI to consent to Nassar’s plea deal” and that it took over 14 months for them to get back to her after she made several requests to be interviewed.
“In 2015, it was known that at least six national team athletes had been abused by Nassar,” Raisman said. “There was even one of the athletes that was abused on film. Given our abuser’s unfettered access to children, stopping him should have been a priority. Instead, the following occurred: The FBI failed to interview pertinent parties in a timely manner. It took over 14 months for the FBI to contact me despite my many requests to be interviewed by them.”
Maroney said that the FBI committed “an obvious crime” and that action needs to be taken.
“They had legal, legitimate evidence of child abuse and did nothing. If they’re not going to protect me, I want to know who are they trying to protect?” she said.
“What’s even more upsetting to me is that we know that these FBI agents have committed an obvious crime. They falsified my statement, and that is illegal in itself. Yet no recourse has been taken against them. The Department of Justice refused to prosecute these individuals. Why?” she asked. “Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco couldn’t bring herself to be here today. It’s the Department of Justice’s job to hold them accountable.”
Nichols, who was the first to report the abuse, said that it took the FBI more than a year to contact her after she initially reported it.
“The cover-up of my abuse and the FBI’s failure to interview me for more than a year after my complaint are well documented in the OIG report. After I reported my abuse to USA Gymnastics, my family and I were told by their former president, Steve Penny, to keep quiet and not say anything that could hurt the FBI investigation. We now know there was no real FBI investigation occurring. While my complaints [were] with the FBI, Larry Nassar continued to abuse women and girls,” she said.
United States gymnasts from left, Aly Raisman, Simone Biles, McKayla Maroney and Maggie Nichols leave after testifying at a Senate Judiciary hearing about the Inspector General’s report on the FBI’s handling of the Larry Nassar investigation on Capitol Hill, Wednesday, Sept. 15, 2021, in Washington. Nassar was charged in 2016 with federal child pornography offenses and sexual abuse charges in Michigan. He is now serving decades in prison after hundreds of girls and women said he sexually abused them under the guise of medical treatment when he worked for Michigan State and Indiana-based USA Gymnastics, which trains Olympians.
SAUL LOEB AP
TJ MACIAS is a Real-Time national sports reporter for McClatchy based out of the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex. Formerly, TJ covered the Dallas Mavericks and Texas Rangers beat for numerous media outlets including 24/7 Sports and Mavs Maven (Sports Illustrated). Twitter: @TayloredSiren
New company documents show Facebook knows Instagram is toxic for teen girls Facebook company documents obtained by the Wall Street Journal demonstrate that Instagram's parent company knows the app can be toxic for teenage girls.
CNNWire By Charles Riley, CNN Business
Wednesday, September 15, 2021
NEW YORK -- Instagram says it's looking at new ways to discourage users from focusing on their physical appearance after The Wall Street Journal revealed that Facebook researchers have repeatedly found that the photo-sharing platform is toxic for teen girls.
The newspaper reported on Tuesday that researchers at Facebook, which purchased Instagram in 2012, have been conducting studies for the past three years into how the app affects its millions of young users. The research shows the platform can damage mental health and body image, especially among teen girls. Facebook executives have often played down mental health concerns in public.
"We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls," said one internal presentation slide obtained by The Journal, summarizing research about teen girls who experience the issues. Among teens who reported suicidal thoughts, 13% of British users and 6% of American users traced the desire to kill themselves to Instagram, one presentation showed, according to The Journal.
Karina Newton, head of public policy at Instagram, wrote in a statement posted on Tuesday that referenced the newspaper article that while Instagram can be a place where people have "negative experiences," the app also gives a voice to marginalized people and helps friends and family stay connected.
Newton said that Facebook's internal research demonstrated the company's commitment to "understanding complex and difficult issues young people may struggle with, and informs all the work we do to help those experiencing these issues."
According to the Wall Street Journal, Facebook researchers concluded that some problems with teen mental health were specific to Instagram, and not social media more broadly, especially when it comes to "social comparison." That's when users focus on how their wealth, appearance or success stacks up against other people on the platform.
The research has been reviewed by top Facebook executives, according to The Journal, and was cited in a 2020 presentation given to CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Newton said in her blog post on Tuesday that Instagram is "increasingly focused on addressing negative social comparison and negative body image." One idea is to prompt users to look at different topics when they repeatedly view content of that kind.
"We're cautiously optimistic that these nudges will help point people towards content that inspires and uplifts them, and to a larger extent, will shift the part of Instagram's culture that focuses on how people look," she said.
That might not be enough to appease critics. Facebook reaffirmed in July in that it was moving forward with plans to build an Instagram for kids under the age of 13 despite significant opposition from parents and lawmakers in Washington.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, said Tuesday that The Journal's report demonstrates that Facebook has known for years of Instagram's "damaging effect on young people," and that its own employees' warnings were "shoved aside in favor of growth."
"I'm appalled and alarmed by Facebook's targeting of teens with dangerous products while hiding the science of its toxic impact," he said on Twitter. "Through hearings and legislation my Commerce subcommittee will act to protect children and support parents."
If you are struggling with thoughts of suicide, or worried about a friend or loved one, help is available. Call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 [TALK], or text TALK to 741-741 for free confidential emotional support 24 hours a day 7 days a week.
