Mark Zuckerberg denies Facebook is a “right-wing echo chamber,” but the facts tell a different story

Facebook’s pro-conservative bias has turned the platform into a cesspool of hate and lies

Molly Butler/Media Matters | Trump photo via Donald Trump Facebook

WRITTEN BY PARKER MOLLOY
PUBLISHED 09/09/20 

In a new interview with Mike Allen of Axios, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg defended the social media platform from accusations of being a “right-wing echo chamber,” explained why the site doesn’t treat anti-vaccination content the same way it treats COVID-19 misinformation, and contemplated whether history will look back on the company as “an accelerant of social destruction.” But contrary to what Zuckerberg said, Facebook is a right-wing echo chamber, even if he doesn’t like that characterization.

During the most recent episode of Axios on HBO, host Mike Allen confronted Zuckerberg with some uncomfortable truths about what sort of content is currently thriving on his platform. Zuckerberg’s counter-argument was not especially strong.

MIKE ALLEN (HOST): President Obama very effectively leveraged Facebook for two elections, but now that’s flipped. And Facebook, the reality is, is a real right-wing echo chamber. If you look at some of the loudest voices on Facebook, it’s your Breitbart, and it’s Sarah Palin, and it’s Franklin Graham, and that part of the spectrum has figured out Facebook in this moment. Your liberal friends must hate it.

MARK ZUCKERBERG (FACEBOOK CEO): Well, look, I think your characterization, frankly, is just wrong. I don’t think that the service is a right-wing echo chamber, to use your words. I think that everyone can use their voice and can find media that they trust that reflects the opinions and the life experiences that they’re having. Some people, I think, had found before that their experiences weren’t being covered by traditional media and now are able to find voices and follow them that resonate more with their life experience. It’s not clear to me that that’s a bad thing. But look, I mean, the stories that get the most reach on a day-to-day basis are the same things that people talk about in the mainstream. They’re not highly partisan political issues. It’s just meaningful news that’s happening on a day-to-day basis.

But Zuckerberg’s denial that the platform presents “highly partisan” stories in a right-wing media echo chamber is simply false. New York Times technology columnist Kevin Roose has been documenting Facebook’s best-performing content. Day after day, the results tell a tough truth: Facebook is overflowing with right-wing content.

Since July 2018, Media Matters has published multiple studies countering claims that conservatives were somehow being censored on Facebook, finding each time that the opposite was actually the case. In fact, Axios itself reported in September 2019 that tech companies have secret data showing that conservative pages outperform liberal ones.
Media Matters’ coverage illustrates just how much of a right-wing echo chamber Facebook has become.
In August, Media Matters published a 19-month timeline of Facebook’s failures and reported that a pro-Trump PAC was being allowed to run hundreds of ads lying about Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s policy positions. Facebook also refused to take action for months on a manipulated video made to look like Biden was introducing a singer in blackface.
We’ve found that on certain topics, such as reproductive rights, immigration, and trans issues, right-wing outlets have dominated the conversation on Facebook entirely, even when the information they publish is misleading or outright false.
Despite bans on promoting anti-LGBTQ conversion therapy, the QAnon conspiracy movement, misleading claims about voting, and misinformation about the census, Facebook has struggled with enforcement and continued to enable such dangerous right-wing content to spread on its platform.
Earlier this year, Facebook teamed up with Fox News for a coronavirus town hall, despite Fox’s long record of COVID-19 misinformation. (This follows last year’s exclusive interview between Zuckerberg and Fox anchor Dana Perino.)

Even worse, the social media giant has actively worked with far-right outlets to run its news and fact-checking programs. Last year, Facebook partnered with far-right haven of misinformation Breitbart as a trusted partner for Facebook News. And Facebook has continued to allow one of The Daily Caller’s subsidiaries to participate in its independent fact-checking program, despite the right-wing website continuing to receive money from Trump and GOP groups.

At another point in the interview, Zuckerberg claims that he believes the site’s moderation policies are set and applied “evenly and fairly” to all users. But this is another lie.

In August, BuzzFeed News reported that Facebook had repeatedly sidestepped its own policies to intervene “exclusively” on behalf of conservative publishers by removing fact checks from right-wing content found to be false by the company’s independent fact-checking partners. The Facebook pages for far-right media figures and groups such as Breitbart, Diamond and Silk, Charlie Kirk, and PragerU all benefited from Facebook’s internal help. Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s vice president of global public policy and a former member of President George W. Bush’s administration, was reported to have been involved in this operation. Facebook reportedly fired one employee who collected evidence of the preferential treatment the platform gave exclusively to conservative pages.

Since 2016, Facebook has taken an increasingly conservative bent, with much of the internal activism reportedly the result of Kaplan and Katie Harbath, Facebook’s public policy director for global elections and former chief digital strategist for the Republican National Committee. In January, Facebook hired former Fox & Friends senior producer Jennifer Williams to head video strategy for Facebook News, joining the company’s extensive staff of former figures from right-wing media and Republican politics. In February, The Washington Post published a bombshell report detailing some of their behind-the-scenes conservative advocacy at Facebook.

Zuckerberg may disagree with the characterization of Facebook as a right-wing echo chamber, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Conservatives are thriving on Facebook, and they’re able to do this thanks to inconsistently applied policy enforcement, internal ideological advocacy, and general right-wing favoritism.

SHOCK! FOX IS ANTI-UNION

Fox's Brian Kilmeade: Workers who build cars should not be paid “union wages”

WRITTEN BY MEDIA MATTERS STAFF

PUBLISHED 09/10/20 6:45 AM EDT

Citation From the September 10, 2020, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends

BRIAN KILMEADE (CO-HOST): He (BIDEN) is in Michigan, where he said he looks to have a secure lead, but he puts a bunch of cars behind him and a handful of people, and he said something that he could have said in his basement.

But the problem is he says "it's union workers." No one is anti-union. But if union wages are going to be the -- how we build cars, they are going to be too expensive to build here for Americans to build here to buy them here. That's why so often people build it out of the country or picked a right-to-work states in order to build them down south and North Carolina and South Carolina. So it's a disingenuous thing altogether.

Lou Dobbs claims mail-in voting is a plot by the postal workers union to steal the election

WRITTEN BY MEDIA MATTERS STAFF

PUBLISHED 09/08/20 6:12 PM EDT

  

From the September 8, 2020, edition of Fox Business' Lou Dobbs Tonight 

LOU DOBBS (HOST) Well, who decided, just who decided that these ballots would be in the mail to whomever without any control and at the complete, complete control of the postal union workers who support left-wing radical Dem candidates? I mean, how could this happen? 

TOM FITTON (JUDICIAL WATCH PRESIDENT): The postal office on a good day can't get the mail to where it's supposed to be. There's at least an 8-10% failure rate in terms of getting first-class mail there on time. So what's going to happen is the ballots will get there late. No one will know when they will be mailed. They could be mailed after the deadline, which is an illegal way to undo the election, and you can bet there will be leftist judges waiting to force officials to overrule Republicans who object to changing the rules after the fact. It's going to be like Florida in 2000, Lou. Remember the first count had Bush winning, so the Democrats wanted a second count, and Bush was winning, and they kept on wanting to recount until they got to victory.

DOBBS: Well, it sounds like this is going to be up to the postal service's management of their unions to decide the -- I mean, we'll turn over to the AFL-CIO to get their judgment on who won.

 

FISA Court Decides FBI, NSA Surveillance Abuses Should Be Rewarded With Fewer Restrictions On Searching 702 Collections

Legal Issues

from the hey-we've-got-terrorists-to-catch-and-whatnot dept

Wed, Sep 9th 2020 10:44am — Tim Cushing

A heavily-redacted opinion has been released by the FISA Court. Even with the redactions, it's clear the NSA and FBI have continued to abuse their Section 702 privileges. But rather than reject the government's arguments or lay down more restrictions on the use of these collections, the court has decided to amend the rules to make some of these abuses no longer abuses, but rather the new normal. This means there are now fewer protections shielding Americans from being swept up by the NSA collections or targeted using this data by the FBI.

Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center has a good rundown of the abuses and the court's response. She points out in her Twitter thread that some of this can be traced back to the reforms enacted by the USA Freedom Act, which codified some restrictions but didn't go far enough to prevent future abuses or mandate better reporting of rule breaking by these agencies.

The opinion [PDF] notes the NSA found it too difficult to comply with a Section 702 requirement that at least one end of targeted communications involve someone outside of the United States. When faced with following this requirement and possibly losing access to communications it wanted, it simply chose to ignore the requirement.

On some prior occasions when NSA had tasked apparently [redacted] it violated its current targeting procedures [redacted] apparently in order to avoid loss of foreign-intelligence information. See Preliminary Notice of Compliance Incident Regarding [redacted] Certain Upstream Acquisitions, Feb. 21, 2019. Of course, the proper course would have been to seek amendment of the procedures earlier, rather than unilaterally deciding to deviate from them. Indeed, the Court's October 3, 2019, Order required the government to provide additional information about the disposition of information that was improperly acquired as a result of that incident.  

That's the problems with the "upstream" collection. The "downstream" collection has similar problems.

The Notice filed on August 23, 2019, explains that [redacted] post-tasking checks for selectors for certain [redacted] would not result in useful information regarding the location of the targets who use those facilities. See August 23, 2019, Notice, at 2-3. In anticipation of tasking such facilities, the proposed NSA targeting procedures have been revised to require [redacted] post-tasking checks only "in those cases in which [NSA]is technically capable of' performing them.

The courts says all of this is fine. It doesn't want the NSA to lose access to foreign intelligence information by tossing out stuff it can't be sure originated outside of the United States. It also doesn't want the NSA to lose similar information on the downstream side by tossing out anything whose origin can't be determined. So the court says it's the thought that counts and allows the NSA to disregard these requirements whenever they pose problems to analysts.

The Court expects that [redacted] post-tasking checks will be employed whenever feasible. On that understanding, and in view of the increased frequency with which acquired communications will be reviewed for indications that a target is in the United States when the [redacted] checks are not feasible, this revision does not impede the Court's finding that the 2019 NSA Targeting Procedures are "reasonably designed to ... ensure" that acquisitions are "limited to targeting persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States."

The court also addresses the NSA's information sharing with the FBI. And it comes to the conclusion that in close cases, the FBI should just get the info and determine on its own whether it's been legally acquired.

Under these provisions, NSA has some discretion in determining what information is "reliable" or "useful," and therefore must be passed to the FBI. The Court expects NSA to make such determinations on an individualized, case-by-case basis, by assessing the totality of information available about a particular target or selector. In close cases, the Court expects NSA to err on the side of providing information to the FBI, rather than withholding it, so that the FBI is better able to make informed and accurate decisions under its targeting procedures.

The FISA court notes this could result in abuse by the FBI but says that risk is worth taking since it would result in more efficient surveillance efforts.

One can conceive of circumstances in which omitting an FBI [redacted] under this provision could result in erroneous approval [redacted]. On the other hand, it seems likely that, in the vast majority of the situations in which the provision would be relied upon, the FBI would simply be avoiding duplicative effort that would not yield relevant new information.

This permission slip by the FISA Court is being handed out despite the FBI reporting recent violations of its Section 702 privileges.

In July 2019, an oversight review of [redacted] discovered 87 queries of raw FISA-acquired information in [redacted] that were not reasonably likely to retrieve foreign-intelligence information or evidence of a crime, including:

- queries of college students participating in a "Collegiate Academy"; and

- queries of individuals who had visited the FBI office (e.g., for maintenance).

The court says the FBI also abused access to run searches on a person filing a complaint and to vet potential informants.

The FBI also reported searching unminimized Section 702 collections 16,000 times -- all supposedly considered likely to "return foreign-intelligence information or evidence of a crime." The court says the FBI can really only justify seven of the 16,000 searches.

There's even more violations listed in the order, but at the end of it, all Judge James Boasberg has to say is that everyone involved did a pretty good job and just needs to try a bit harder in the future. And since trying hard is hard, he's made things easier by loosening a few restrictions. This obviously won't stop the never ending run of surveillance abuses. But it will designate fewer of them as "abuses," so things will at least look like they're improving, even if nothing has really changed.

GO HERE TO SEE PDF POSTED FISA DOCUMENT

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200907/14044545258/fisa-court-decides-fbi-nsa-surveillance-abuses-should-be-rewarded-with-fewer-restrictions-searching-702-collections.shtml

 

America Needs To Stop Pretending The Broadband 'Digital Divide' Isn't The Direct Result Of Corruption

Broadband

from the we-didn't-get-here-by-accident dept

Fri, Sep 4th 2020 6:45am — Karl Bode

Last week, a tweeted photo of two kids huddled on the ground outside of a Taco Bell -- just to gain access to a reliable internet connection -- made the rounds on social media. The two found themselves on the wrong side of the "digital divide," forced to sit in the dirt just to get online, just 45 minutes from the immensely wealthy technology capital of the United States:

This is in Salinas, CA— just south of the Bay Area. Small children sitting outside a Taco Bell to be able to get WiFi so they can attend school. When we think about remote learning, we need to stop thinking of it through the lens of people with money and safe housing. pic.twitter.com/bLU1kIR9D7

— Stephanie Hurlburt (@sehurlburt) August 26, 2020

America's broadband access and affordability issues have long been a problem. But they're taking on greater urgency in the COVID-19 era, with millions of Americans being forced to learn, teach, work, and socialize from home. In that climate, it didn't take long for the photo to garner attention and public sympathy, resulting in outlets like CNN reporting that the local school district wound up giving the family a mobile hotspot so they could actually do homework at home:

"The district gave the family a hotspot so the students could access classroom instructions from their home, according to Gebin...In a statement, a spokesperson for Taco Bell Corp. told CNN that "the photo of two young girls outside of a Salinas, CA Taco Bell is a tough reminder of basic inequalities facing our communities."

While a kind gesture, the episode is fairly representative of our relationship to the digital divide and America's patchy, expensive broadband networks. As in, we've let telecom giants dictate state and federal policy for 30 years, resulting in geographic monopolies where the primary objective is maintaining the status quo (high prices, little competition, zero real accountability for market failure). Then, in the rare instance where the problem can hold our attention for more than thirty seconds, we throw a band aid on the byproduct of this corruption and pat ourselves on the back for a job well done.

Granted CNN, like so many major news outlets, covers this problem in a way that implies that expensive, mediocre, patchy broadband networks are just some thing that magically happened, and not the obvious byproduct of state and federal corruption. The kind of corruption that usually involves companies like AT&T burying competition crushing language in unrelated ordinances, literally writing state laws banning creative local community broadband alternatives, or convincing the FCC to effectively self-immolate upon request, gutting not only the agency's authority over telecom, but most meaningful consumer protections.

American broadband doesn't suck because America is big, or because we haven't thrown enough money at the problem (giants like AT&T have received countless billions in tax breaks, subsidies, and regulatory favors, usually in exchange for bupkis). American broadband sucks because giant monopolies literally write state and federal telecom law, and have completely corrupted the legislative process from the town level on up.

It takes thirty seconds watching state and federal legislatures before it becomes clear that the majority of our lawmakers have prioritized Verizon, Comcast, and AT&T campaign contributions above anything even vaguely resembling the public interest. It's simply undeniable, and it should be the bedrock upon which all U.S. broadband policy conversations and news coverage is built upon. Fail to acknowledge this reality and you're allowing the problem to perpetuate. There's an entire cottage industry of telecom-linked think tankers, economists, and consultants whose mortgage payments depend on pretending American broadband isn't a monopolized mess. It's hard to look at coverage from the likes of CNN and not come away realizing how effective they've been at shaping the discourse.

Despite its reputation as a haven for "the socialisms," California is certainly no exception to this corruption (just ask the EFF). Several recent legislative proposals have been pushed to help lessen the digital divide, including expanding fiber networks, funding "middle-mile" broadband projects, and boosting the standard speed of what's considered broadband in California from a pathetic 6 Mbps down, 1 Mbps up -- to 25 Mbps in both directions. But more than a few consumer advocates have been complaining to me that the broadband speed bill was never even allowed to come to a vote despite widespread support. Why? AT&T didn't like it:

"Senate bill 1130, authored by senator Lena Gonzalez (D – Los Angeles), would have raised the bar to symmetrical 25 Mbps down/25 Mbps up speeds. The California senate approved it in June, but it died in the assembly as democratic leaders refused to allow a full floor vote on it.

Had they done so, SB 1130 would have easily won the majority needed to pass. That wasn’t acceptable to assembly speaker Anthony Rendon (D- Los Angeles). Backed up by majority floor leader Ian Calderon (D- Los Angeles), Rendon pulled the bill, caving in to pressure – and loads of money – from AT&T and a solid line of cable companies, including Comcast and Charter Communications. Frontier Communications was against it too, but the relative pittance it directly puts in legislative pockets – $61,000 over the years versus $7.4 million from AT&T alone – doesn’t buy much influence. AT&T’s indirect payoffs to Californian democrats and republicans are more than five times that."

This isn't some one-off. Unless beneficial telecom legislation can somehow garner massive public attention (difficult to do since telecom wonkery doesn't generate ad impressions), it's trivially easy for a giant like AT&T to covertly kill pretty much any legislation that even remotely challenges the status quo, attempts something new, or opens the door to more serious competition. As such it's not particularly surprising that AT&T-owned CNN examines the lack of broadband as a heart-warming fable -- without explaining to its readers/viewers why U.S. broadband has been mired in mediocrity for the better part of a generation.

42 million Americans lack broadband, nearly double the FCC's official, rose-colored-glasses estimates. Another 83 million or so live under a monopoly, ensuring they see terrible customer service, high prices, and little effort to seriously improve. Millions more live under duopolies where their only choice is either Comcast or a phone company that hasn't updated its DSL lines since 2002. It's the result of corruption. It's the end result of a wholesale failure in ethical governance. Ignoring this reality, denying this reality, or painting this American failure as just quirky happenstance -- ensures we'll never set about truly fixing it.

 ELON MUSK 

POSTMODERN ROBBER BARON IN SPACE

Astronomers Say Space X Astronomy Pollution Can't Be Fixed

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the blinded-by-the-light dept

Tue, Sep 8th 2020 2:09pm — Karl Bode

We recently noted how the Space X launch of low orbit broadband satellites is not only creating light pollution for astronomers and scientists, but captured U.S. regulators, eager to try and justify rampant deregulation, haven't been willing to do anything about it. While Space X's Starlink platform will create some much needed broadband competition for rural users, the usual capacity constraints of satellite broadband mean it won't be a major disruption to incumbent broadband providers. Experts say it will be painfully disruptive to scientific study and research, however:

While Space X says it's taking steps to minimize the glare and "photo bombing" capabilities of these satellites (such as anti-reflective coating on the most problematic parts of the satellites), a new study suggests that won't be so easy. The joint study from both the National Science Foundation's NOIRLab and the American Astronomical Society (AAS) found that while Space X light pollution can be minimized somewhat, it won't be possible to eliminate:

"Changes are required at both ends: constellation operators and observatories. SpaceX has shown that operators can reduce reflected sunlight through satellite body orientation, Sun shielding, and surface darkening. A joint effort to obtain higher-accuracy public data on predicted locations of individual satellites (or ephemerides) could enable some pointing avoidance and mid-exposure shuttering during satellite passage. Observatories will need to adopt more dynamic scheduling and observation management as the number of constellation satellites increases, though even these measures will be ineffective for many science programs."

Granted, in March, Space X boss Elon Musk predicted there would be no impact whatsoever from his Starlink project:

"I am confident that we will not cause any impact whatsoever in astronomical discoveries. Zero. That's my prediction. We'll take corrective action if it's above zero."

The report, which was first spotted by Ars Technica, notes that enough data has been collected to clearly indicate the impact is well above zero. Worse, they note that companies have only just started launching low-orbit satellite constellations. OneWeb and Space X have only just begun their efforts, and Amazon is expected to join the fray in a major way. Collectively, these launches will create some significant problems for scientists around the planet, the report concludes:

"If the 100,000 or more LEOsats proposed by many companies and many governments are deployed, no combination of mitigations can fully avoid the impacts of the satellite trails on the science programs of current and planned ground-based optical-NIR [near-infrared] astronomy facilities. Astronomers are just beginning to understand the full range of impacts on the discipline. Astrophotography, amateur astronomy, and the human experience of the stars and the Milky Way are already affected."

While Space X's lower altitude satellite are problematic, higher altitude satellites being eyed by the likes of Amazon are notably worse, the experts found. In a press release the groups detailed several ways of minimizing the impact of low-orbit satellite constellations (including launching less of them). But that's going to require a lot of collaboration between researchers and industry. Collaboration that would be easier if we had U.S. regulators actually interested in helping coordinate that collaboration.

Our 'Collusion Reading Diary' is Now a Lawfare E-book

By David Priess, Tia Sewell

 Tuesday, September 8, 2020, 10:55 AM

• 
  
• • Google+
  • Reddit
  • LinkedIn

The U.S. Capitol Dome in Washington, D.C. (Architect of the U.S. Capitol)

A new Lawfare Institute e-book, "A Collusion Reading Diary" is now available on Kindle.

After the Senate Intelligence Committee released the final volume of its bipartisan report on Russian interference in the 2016 election, our team read through the 966-page document and serially generated summaries on each section of the report. This “reading diary,” which was originally published here on the site, encapsulates what the committee found about the engagements between the Trump campaign and the Russian government in 2016.

Whether one describes this activity as collusion or not, there’s a lot of it. The Senate Intelligence Committee’s report describes hundreds of actions by Trump, his campaign, and his associates in the run-up to the 2016 election that involve some degree of participation by Trump or his associates in Russian activity. In this piece, our team attempts to summarize, precisely and comprehensively, what the eight Republicans on the committee, along with their seven Democratic colleagues, report that the president, members of his campaign and his associates actually did.

The text was written by Todd Carney, Samantha Fry, Quinta Jurecic, Jacob Schulz, Tia Sewell, Margaret Taylor and Benjamin Wittes and edited by Lawfare. It is available here.

Contents:

• Introduction

• A. Paul Manafort

• B. Hack and Leak

• C. The Agalarovs and the June 9, 2016 Trump Tower Meeting

• D. Trump Tower Moscow

• E. George Papadopoulos

• F. Carter Page

• G. Trump's Foreign Policy Speech at the Mayflower Hotel

• H. Maria Butina and Alexander Torshin

• I. Allegations, and Potential Misinformation, About Compromising Information

• J. Influence for Hire

• K. Transition

• L. Other Incidents and Persons of Interest

• Conclusion

READ ONLINE

A Collusion Reading Diary: What Did the Senate Intelligence Committee Find?

https://www.lawfareblog.com/collusion-reading-diary-what-did-senate-intelligence-committee-find

 

Emails Show How Trump Official at HHS Tried to Get Fauci to Downplay Covid-19 Threat to School Children

"This sort of story will be recalled years from now as an example of the government interfering with science, with predictably disastrous results."

by

Andrea Germanos, staff writer COMMON DREAMS

Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. Anthony Fauci as President Donald Trump dismisses a question during an unscheduled briefing after a Coronavirus Task Force meeting at the White House on April 5, 2020, in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Eric Baradat/AFP via Getty Images)

Reporting from Politico Wednesday revealed that a Trump-allied official within the Department of Health and Human Services tried to censor Dr. Anthony Fauci from communicating to the press dangers the coronavirus may pose to school children.

According to Politico, the messaging directives came from Paul Alexander, a Trump administration appointee at the Department of Health and Human Services. Alexander is a senior adviser to Michael Caputo, a Trump ally and assistant HHS secretary for public affairs.

Politico obtained multiple emails from Alexander that reflect his responses to what Fauci—director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)—planned on telling outlets including Bloomberg and HuffPost. They included messages that "are couched as scientific arguments" but "often contradict mainstream science," according to the reporting.

Some unproven theories that HHS adviser Paul Alexander pressed to include in Dr. Fauci's talking points:

- There is "zero" risk for kids to get Covid
- Kids shouldn't wear masks
- Testing asymptomatic people "makes no logical sense."https://t.co/83qdJV5lZ8

— Sarah Owermohle (@owermohle) September 9, 2020

The outlet cited as one example an Aug. 27 email in which Alexander wrote that he continues "to have an issue with kids getting tested and repeatedly and even university students in a widespread manner…and I disagree with Dr. Fauci on this. Vehemently."

Over @HHSGov officials have been trying to tell #AnthonyFauci what he can/cannot say, so that he won't allow his knowledge of science to interfere w/@WhiteHouse messaging. But as all of us who know Tony will tell you, nobody can muzzle Dr. Fauci.https://t.co/0njinMVtG8

— Laurie Garrett (@Laurie_Garrett) September 9, 2020

In another email from Tuesday, Alexander suggested children have "essentially zero" risk if they are exposed to the coronavirus and pushed Fauci's press team to make sure Fauci told MSNBC that children should not wear masks at school. From Politico:

"Can you ensure Dr. Fauci indicates masks are for the teachers in schools. Not for children," Alexander wrote. "There is no data, none, zero, across the entire world, that shows children especially young children, spread this virus to other children, or to adults or to their teachers. None. And if it did occur, the risk is essentially zero," he continued — adding without evidence that children take influenza home, but not the coronavirus.

Alexander's repeated efforts at push Fauci to parrot the adminsitration's anti-science line, however, may have been for naught.

"No one tells me what I can say and cannot say," Fauci said. "I speak on scientific evidence."

It did not, however, mark Alexander's first attempts at controlling the narrative from federal health experts.

The Washington Post reported in July that he made similar efforts with CDC officials. In a June email to CDC officials, Alexander wrote that the agency's warning about Covid-19 impacts on women "reads in a way to frighten women . . . as if the President and his administration can't fix this and it is getting worse."

Virologist Dave O'Connor weighed in on the new reporting on Twitter, writing, "This sort of story will be recalled years from now as an example of the government interfering with science, with predictably disastrous results."

Shannon Watts, founder of gun control advocacy group Moms Demand Action, also shared Politico's new reporting, and had harsh words for the Trump administration.

"They don't care if our kids die. They don't care if we die," wrote Watts. "They just want power."

Canada is wrong to welcome the UAE-Israel deal

Far from bringing ‘peace,’ normalization is on track to accelerate military spending and militarism in the Middle East

Michael Bueckert / September 9, 2020 CANADIAN DIMENSION


The first direct El-Al flight to the United Arab Emirates departs Ben Gurion Airport, August 31, 2020. In this photo, National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien (right), Senior Advisor Jared Kushner (middle) and a delegation of Israeli officials headed by Meir Ben-Shabbat (left) travel to Abu-Dhabi to advance the Abraham Accord. Photo by Matty Stern/US Embassy Jerusalem/Flickr.


When the “Abraham Agreement” between the United States, Israel, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) was announced on August 13, it was widely celebrated in pro-Israel circles as an “historic peace deal” and the start of a “New Middle East.”

While the exact details of the agreement have not yet been finalized, at a high level the UAE and Israel agreed to establish full bilateral economic and diplomatic ties (a process known as “normalization”), and agreed that together with the US they would launch a “Strategic Agenda for the Middle East to expand diplomatic, trade, and security cooperation.” It was also announced that Israel would “suspend” its plans to annex portions of the West Bank to focus on normalization.

Like many countries, Canada welcomed the deal as a “positive step toward peace and security in the region,” with Minister of Foreign Affairs François-Philippe Champagne noting that he was “pleased” with the suspension of Israel’s annexation plans.

However, Canada’s optimistic reaction is a mistake. Far from ushering in peace and security, the deal is bound to increase militarism in the region while cementing the status-quo apartheid reality of the Palestinian people.
A no peace “peace deal”

What makes the celebration over the UAE-Israel “peace deal” so misplaced is that peace has nothing to do with it. While it is true that the UAE will become only the third Arab country to recognize Israel (following Egypt in 1979 and Jordan in 1994), unlike those nations, the UAE does not share a border with Israel, and the UAE and Israel have never been at war.

Far from being enemies, Israel and the UAE have been quietly cultivating unofficial relations for years, including in defence cooperation, intelligence, surveillance, and trade in weapons. Together with the US, they are interested in counterbalancing the influence of Iran in the region by expanding military cooperation, and the UAE sees the deal as a way to fulfill its aspiration to become a regional power. In recent years, the UAE has contributed to brutal military offensives, particularly in Yemen and Libya where it has been involved in air strikes and arming militias—with horrific results.

Indeed, the largest benefactor from this deal is likely to be the international arms trade. The UAE is a major purchaser of US weapons, on which it spends an estimated $20 billion out of its annual defence budget of $23 billion. For its part, Israel looks forward to greater access to the UAE arms market that normalization will provide.

Reports also suggest that a potential US sale of F-35 warplanes to the UAE may be the central motivator behind normalization. For years, the US has been looking to sell F-35s and armed drones to the UAE, but such a sale has been opposed by Israel on the grounds that it could erode its “qualitative military edge.” UAE believes the normalization deal will allow it to go ahead with its purchase of the F-35s, and although Israel still publicly opposes any sale, behind the scenes Israeli officials are looking to approve the sale in return for compensation from the US (most likely in terms of military aid).

As researcher Anthony Fenton points out, Canadian weapons manufactures will also likely benefit from such a sale.

It is also important to note that the UAE-Israel agreement has been accompanied by instances of state repression against those who criticize the deal, including by the UAE, Jordan, and Egypt. Most outrageously, an Israeli newspaper reported that the UAE threatened to immediately expel 250,000 Jordanian workers over a single critical tweet from Jordan’s Prince Ali bin Hussein, who promptly deleted it.




US Special Representative for Iran Brian Hook met with His Highness Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation of the United Arab Emirates Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates on June 27, 2020. Photo courtesy of UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs/Flickr.


Selling out Palestine

If the UAE-Israel deal is not about peace, there is at least one reason why so many have rushed to celebrate it: with the UAE, Israel believes that it has found a shortcut to normalizing relations in the region while circumventing the issue of Israel’s occupation of Palestine.

Since Israel was established in 1948, most Arab states have refused to enter into normalized relations with Israel pending a just resolution for the Palestinians. This was the case for the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative led by Saudi Arabia, which insisted that a Palestinian state must be created before normalization could take place.

The UAE-Israel deal contradicts this longstanding position, effectively “decoupling” the Arab-Israel conflict from the Israel-Palestine conflict.

For this reason, the deal is widely recognized by the Israeli leadership as confirmation that they do not need to give up occupied territory. As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boasted about the deal, Israel has “not withdrawn from so much as one square meter.”

Unsurprisingly, Palestinians of all backgrounds have expressed outrage over the deal. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called it a “betrayal of Jerusalem, Al-Aqsa and the Palestinian cause,” and the Palestinian Authority recalled its ambassador to UAE. Hamas xcondemned the deal as “a reward for the Israeli occupation’s crimes,” and a “stabbing in the back of our people.”
Is annexation dead?

The UAE has boasted that its deal has stopped Israel’s annexation plans and saved the two-state solution in Israel-Palestine—insisting that it has received assurances from Israel on this. However, this is wishful thinking. The deal has not stopped the threat of annexation. What Israel has actually agreed to is a temporary “suspension” or pause on any formal announcement.

As a matter of fact, Netanyahu has repeatedly said that annexation remains on the table. This has been echoed by both Israeli officials and key US figures, the latter including US Senior Presidential Advisor Jared Kushner, who noted that “President Trump likes to keep his options open,” and US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman who described the suspension of annexation as a “temporary halt,” and clarified that “it’s not off the table permanently.”

At a more fundamental level, Israel’s annexation plans remain consistent with Trump’s so-called “Deal of the Century,” which gives a greenlight to substantial annexation while locking Palestinians into non-state Bantustans. As Netanyahu was quick to remind us: “this plan has not changed.”

Simply put, the Israelis could revive their annexation plans at any time. In the meantime, Netanyahu is pushing the creation of 3,500 new settlement homes in the contentious E-1 area (which is splitting the West Bank into two pieces), and Alternate Prime Minister Benny Gantz is preparing to approve the creation of 5,000 new settlement homes throughout the West Bank. As Hagai El-Ad of Israeli NGO B’Tselem warns, the “Israeli state has [already] effectively annexed Palestinian lives,” making the significance of any formal announcement secondary to Israel’s real actions on the ground.

Without any progress for justice for the Palestinians, or for stability in the region, Canada is wrong to applaud the UAE-Israel agreement. Far from bringing “peace,” normalization is on track to accelerate military spending and militarism in the Middle East, emboldening a group of countries who have consistently violated human rights in the region. Moreover, the deal completely avoids the core issue of Israel’s occupation of Palestine and lessens the incentive for Israel to respect Palestinian human rights.

The truth is that there is no shortcut to peace, and there will be no progress without the Palestinians. Instead of easing diplomatic restrictions on Israel, the international community should be imposing economic and diplomatic sanctions on Israel as an incentive to dismantle the occupation and come to the negotiating table. As such, the UAE’s opportunistic path is not likely to end division and conflict in the region and may in fact intensify and prolong it. This is not something that Canada should encourage.

Michael Bueckert is Vice President of Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME). He has a PhD in Sociology and Political Economy from Carleton University. Follow him on Twitter @mbueckert.