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Almost a year ago, Google took a major step to ensure that its ubiquitous online ad network didn’t put money in the pocket of Steve Bannon, the indicted former adviser to Donald Trump. The company kicked Bannon off YouTube, which Google owns, after he called for the beheading of Anthony Fauci and urged Trump supporters to come to Washington on Jan. 6 to try to overturn the presidential election results.
Google also confirmed to ProPublica that it has at times blocked ads from appearing on Bannon’s War Room website alongside individual articles that violate Google’s rules.
But Bannon found a loophole in Google’s policies that let him keep earning ad money on his site’s homepage.
Until Monday, the home page automatically played innocuous stock content, such as tips on how to protect your phone in winter weather or how to improve the effectiveness of your LinkedIn profile.
The content likely had no interest for War Room visitors, especially since it was interrupted every few seconds by ads. But the ads, supplied through Google’s network, came from such prominent brands as Land Rover, Volvo, DoorDash, Staples and even Harvard University.
Right below that video player was another that featured clips from Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, which routinely portrays participants in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot as patriots and airs false claims about the 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic.
The video player running Google ads amid innocuous clips disappeared from Bannon’s website on Monday, after ProPublica inquired with Google, Bannon and advertisers. The change was not Google’s doing: Google spokesperson Michael Aciman said the player did not break the company’s rules. He said Google’s policies were effective in preventing ads from ending up on sites with “harmful content.”
“We have strict policies that explicitly prohibit publishers from both promoting harmful content and providing inaccurate information about their properties, misrepresenting their identity, or sending unauthorized ad requests,” Aciman said. “These policies exist to protect both users and advertisers from abuse, fraud or disruptive ad experiences, and we enforce them through a mix of automated tools and human review. When we find publishers that violate these policies we stop ads from serving on their site.”
A spokesperson for Bannon, who was indicted this month for stonewalling Congress’ bipartisan investigation into the Jan. 6 insurrection, declined to answer questions for this article.
Zach Edwards, the founder of Victory Medium, a consulting firm that advises companies on online advertising, said the digital ad industry, including Google, is rife with loopholes and bad behavior, and its complexity prevents advertisers from understanding what they’re funding. “A lot of times ad buyers just shrug their shoulders and are like, ‘It’s video ads, what can you do?’” he said.
Of Bannon’s dodge and Google’s acquiescence to it, Edwards added, “Nothing about this is aboveboard.”
The vast majority of online ads aren’t purchased through direct relationships with the sites on which they appear. Instead, brands use automated ad exchanges like Google’s that rely on real-time auctions to automatically place ads in front of people who fit a brand’s target audience. As long as Google keeps the War Room website in its network, and as long as brands don’t specifically block it from their ad buys, Bannon’s site can keep collecting money. Warroom.org draws between 450,000 and 1 million visits a month, according to traffic tracker SimilarWeb.
And Google takes a cut of each dollar from ads it places on the War Room site.
“For most advertisers, having an ad placed on a Steve Bannon-affiliated outlet is the stuff of nightmares,” said Nandini Jammi, the co-founder of Check My Ads, an ad industry watchdog. “The fact that ad exchanges are still serving ads should tell brands that their vendors are not vetting their inventory, and I wouldn’t be surprised if advertisers who have found themselves on War Room request refunds.”
Companies contacted by ProPublica said they didn’t intend to advertise on War Room’s site and would take steps to stop their ads from appearing there. Land Rover called the ad “an error.” Harry Pierre, a spokesperson for Harvard’s Division of Continuing Education, said the school is working with its ad buyer to update its list of unwanted websites. Adobe said its ad was a violation of its brand safety guidelines. “We worked with the ad partner to remove the ads from the site,” a spokesperson said.
DoorDash also blamed a third-party vendor. “DoorDash’s mission is to empower local communities and provide access to opportunity for all, and we stand against the spread of disinformation that undermines those principles,” the company said in a statement.
Spokespeople for Volvo did not respond to requests for comment.
Meanwhile, Google may have banned a different site affiliated with Bannon. Until recently, the site Populist Press earned money via Google’s ad network. The site, styled to imitate the Drudge Report, was prominently linked on the War Room homepage and draws roughly 5 million visits a month, according to SimilarWeb.
According to an online disclosure from a former advertising partner, Populist Press is affiliated with August Partners, a Colorado company registered to Amanda Shea, whose husband, Tim Shea, was a partner of Bannon’s in We Build the Wall initiative. Bannon and allies used We Build the Wall to solicit money to fulfill Trump’s campaign promise of a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. Federal prosecutors accused Bannon, Tim Shea and other associates of misusing the money, and Trump pardoned Bannon before leaving office. An attorney for Tim Shea, who is awaiting trial, declined to comment, and Amanda Shea did not respond to a request for comment.
At some point during the week of Nov. 15, Populist Press stopped showing Google ads — and it stopped being promoted on the War Room homepage. Aciman, the Google spokesperson, declined to comment on whether Google had banned Populist Press, but said that the site “is not monetizing using our services.”
Bannon’s “War Room” podcast draws a massive audience, with more than 100 million total downloads across more than 1,000 episodes, available on platforms including Apple’s. A sort of far-right “Meet the Press,” it’s the go-to talk show for pro-Trump influencers and Republican hopefuls. Frequently using violent imagery, Bannon and his guests promote new ways of trying to overturn the election, such as demanding “audits” of the 2020 ballots. Since February, Bannon has inspired thousands to take over local-level Republican Party committees, unlocking influence over how elections are run from the ground up.
On his podcast in 2020, Bannon called for the beheading of Fauci and FBI director Chris Wray. On the eve of Jan. 6, Bannon said, “We’re on the point of attack” and “all hell will break loose tomorrow.” Bannon was also reportedly involved in the Trump team’s command center on the day of the riot, which is part of congressional investigators’ interest in his testimony and records. Since the insurrection, Bannon has taken up the cause of people held on charges related to the Capitol riot.
In addition to his podcast, Bannon has spun a complex web of political and business ventures. He co-founded a training academy for right-wing nationalists that got mired in a legal dispute with the Italian government over control of a medieval monastery near Rome. A media company he launched with Guo Wengui, a fugitive Chinese billionaire on whose yacht Bannon was arrested in 2020, was part of a $539 million settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission in September for illegally marketing digital currency. Before advising Trump, Bannon had a wide-ranging career in finance and movies, and his pardon from Trump lifted a $1.75 million lien against his house in Laguna Beach, California.
Bannon’s megaphone is not just influential. It’s also lucrative. His show and website have promoted fellow election fraud evangelist Mike Lindell’s MyPillow business, as well as a cryptocurrency investing newsletter called TheCryptoCapitalist. (The marketers of an unproven COVID-19 treatment that Bannon promoted were sued by the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission in April. The chiropractor behind the treatment denies the government’s accusations.) The War Room site also contains ads from MGID, a network that places content ads that look like links to related articles and sometimes promote dubious health or financial products.
It’s not clear how much money Bannon makes from online ads. But industry data shows that the links placed by MGID are much less profitable than the video ads facilitated by Google. (MGID did not respond to a request for comment.)
The issue is that major brands likely have no idea that they’re advertising on the site of one of the biggest perpetrators of bogus election fraud claims. That disconnect between brands and where their ads and money end up is a failure of digital advertising and a concern for consumers, according to industry experts.
“Over the past few years, consumers have become really vocal about buying from brands that are aligned with their values,” said Jammi of Check My Ads. “When they find out a brand is funding toxic content, that matters to them.”
A similar scenario has played out with ads that aired during Bannon’s podcast airing on a right-wing website called Real America’s Voice. In March, for instance, an ad for prescription coupon company GoodRx appeared on Bannon’s show.
“We take the trust and reputation of our brand very seriously and have strict advertising standards in place, which include not participating in heavily editorialized news programming,” the company said in an emailed statement to ProPublica. “This placement was an error in the media buying policies.”
Bannon’s show also airs on Pluto TV, a streaming service owned by ViacomCBS that is available on Roku and other devices. This month, the show on Pluto featured ads for such major companies as Men’s Wearhouse, Lexus and Procter & Gamble, according to monitoring by the liberal watchdog Media Matters. As with the Google video ads on the War Room website, these ads are not placed directly, and companies were at a loss to explain why they had appeared on Bannon’s show. (Bannon’s podcast is available in the Google Podcasts app, but the company does not place ads in it.) A Lexus spokesperson said the company’s ad was briefly on Bannon’s site and taken down. A spokesperson for Procter & Gamble did not respond to a request for comment.
“Our marketing spend follows targeted customers, rather than choosing specific programs we want to appear alongside,” said Mike Stefanov, a spokesperson for Tailored Brands, which owns Men’s Wearhouse. “The team continually refines the criteria used, but the appearance of advertising on a specific program does not necessarily mean the company agrees with or endorses the views espoused.”
“There is no longer any question: These companies knew and lied about their product’s role in the climate crisis, they continue to deceive, and they must be held accountable.”
Fossil fuel executives who testified Thursday at a U.S. House of Representatives hearing focused on decades of coordinated industry misinformation refused to pledge that their companies will stop lobbying against efforts to combat the climate emergency driven largely by their businesses.
That joint refusal came in response to a challenge from Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform—who at the end of the hearing announced subpoenas for documents the fossil fuel companies have failed to provide.
Earlier in the hearing, Maloney had asked if the Big Oil CEOs would affirm that their organizations “will no longer spend any money, either directly or indirectly, to oppose efforts to reduce emissions and address climate change.”
Big Oil CEOs unanimously refuse to pledge to Congress to "no longer spend any money directly or indirectly to oppose efforts to reduce emissions and address climate change".
Advocates for climate action pointed to the moment as yet another example of major polluters impeding planet-saving policy.
“The silence, non-answers, and repeated deflections from Big Oil’s Slippery Six exposed once and for all that the fossil fuel industry won’t back off its commitment to spreading climate disinformation and lobbying against climate action in order to protect their bottom line,” Richard Wiles, executive director of the Center for Climate Integrity, said in a statement.
“For the first time ever, fossil fuel executives were confronted under oath with the evidence of their industry’s decadeslong efforts to deceive the American people about climate change,” Wiles continued. “They not only refused to accept responsibility for lying about the catastrophic effects of their fossil fuels—they refused to stop funding efforts to spread disinformation and oppose climate action.”
“There is no longer any question: These companies knew and lied about their product’s role in the climate crisis, they continue to deceive, and they must be held accountable,” he added. “Today’s hearing and the committee’s ongoing investigation are important steps in those efforts.”
The only real backdrop to today's hearing with Big Oil CEOS is: These companies knew all about climate change in the 1980s and chose to lie about it systematically for decades, which is why we're in our current hideous political fix.
Maloney and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who chairs the panel’s Subcommittee on the Environment, had threatened to subpoena the industry leaders—collectively dubbed the #SlipperySix—if they declined to join the hearing, entitled, “Fueling the Climate Crisis: Exposing Big Oil’s Disinformation Campaign to Prevent Climate Action.”
The historic event included testimony from four industry executives—ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods, BP America CEO David Lawler, Chevron CEO Michael Wirth, Shell Oil president Gretchen Watkins—and leaders from industry trade groups: American Petroleum Institute (API) president Mike Sommers and U.S. Chamber of Commerce president and CEO Suzanne Clark.
Kyle Herrig, president of the watchdog group Accountable.US, warned that “lawmakers should be wary of testimony from executives who have consistently put their industry’s bottom line over the health of the climate and the American people, no matter their rhetoric.”
Yep. We are seeing the fossil fuel savior framework all over the place. We need them, we have always needed them, and we will always need them. https://t.co/SltC52FPoy
Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes, a pair of climate misinformation scholars at Harvard University, have warned of a “fossil fuel savior frame” that “downplays the reality and seriousness of climate change, normalizes fossil fuel lock-in, and individualizes responsibility.”
Both Oreskes and Fossil Free Media director Jamie Henn observed the presence of such framing during the hearing. Henn said that “it’s striking how much all these Big Oil execs come across as hostage-takers: ‘You need us. You can’t live without us. You’ll never escape.”
It’s striking how much all these Big Oil execs come across as hostage takers: “You need us. You can’t live without us. You’ll never escape.” #SlipperySixpic.twitter.com/mT8bPZJu8j
The fossil fuel witnesses’ initial remarks and responses to lawmakers’ questions were full of industry talking points. They advocated for “market-based solutions” like carbon taxes while failing to offer specifics. They also highlighted carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) technology and hydrogen—both of which progressive green groups have denounced as “false solutions”—as key to reaching a “lower-carbon future.”
FACT CHECK: Exxon's CEO just said the International Energy Agency says the world will continue relying on fossil fuels.
That is false.
Earlier this year, the IEA said: "There is no need for investment in new fossil fuel supply in our net zero pathway."
While suggesting a long-term need for oil and gas, the executives claimed to believe in anthropogenic climate change and said fossil fuel emissions “contribute” to global heating. Some critics called them out for using that term, rather than “cause” or “drive.”
First misleading ExxonMobil statement: GHG "can contribute to climate change." No, not "can contribute." They DRIVE climate change, and they come primarily from @exxonmobil 's primary product: oil and gas.https://t.co/BO6oAofbeA
Using the the word “contribute” rather than cause, saidHuffPost environment reporter Chris D’Angelo, “downplays/dismisses the science, which shows they are the primary driver… Frankly, it’s climate denial—the very topic of this hearing.”
After inquiring about how long all four executives had been in their current roles, the panel’s ranking member, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), asked whether they had ever signed off on a climate disinformation campaign. They all said no—which experts and activists promptly disputed.
While progressives on the panel grilled the executives, Republicans repeatedly apologized to the CEOs for Democrats’ supposed “intimidation” efforts. Blasting the GOP lawmakers’ actions as “pathetic,” Henn said that “they really do see themselves as servants to Big Oil.”
.@RepGarretGraves (R-$759,995 oil and gas) literally explains that his state of Louisiana is completely screwed by fossil-fueled global warming but he can't and won't do anything about it because oil & gas is so profitable. "Why would we stop?"#SlipperySixpic.twitter.com/uXzf23E3a9
— Brad Johnson SUBSCRIBE TO HILLHEAT.NEWS (@climatebrad) October 28, 2021
The panel’s GOP members also tried to redirect attention to planet-heating activities of other countries, particularly China, and complained about President Joe Biden’s move to block the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, even inviting Neal Crabtree, a welder who lost his job when the project was canceled, to testify.
Republicans trotting out as a political prop a witness who supposedly lost his job due to climate policy, as if they or Big Oil ever cared about workers. Meanwhile real labor voices are speaking the truth, thank you @steelworkers: https://t.co/Fz0pk6q3wr
“The GOP’s strategy at this hearing is clear: It will not attempt to claim Big Oil *didn’t* mislead on climate,” tweeted climate reporter Emily Atkin of the HEATED newsletter. “Instead, the GOP is claiming Democrats are wasting time by focusing on climate change, and that it isn’t important to ‘everyday Americans.'”
Thanking Atkin for spotlighting the Republicans’ strategy, ClimateVoice noted that new polling shows the U.S. public does care about the issue. According to survey results released this week, a majority of Americans see climate as a problem of high importance to them and support Congress passing legislation to increase reliance on clean electricity sources.
Maloney, in her closing remarks Thursday, lamented that the hearing featured “much of the denial and deflection” seen in recent decades. She also called out the companies for not turning over requested documents, refusing to “take responsibility” for their contributions to the climate crisis, and continuing to fund groups like API. The chair vowed that her committee will continue its investigation.
Originally published on Common Dreams by JESSICA CORBETT and republished under Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
CEO Mark Zuckerberg had repeatedly promised to stop recommending political groups to users to squelch the spread of misinformation
Leaked internal Facebook documents show that a combination of technical miscommunications and high-level decisions led to one of the social media giant’s biggest broken promises of the 2020 election—that it would stop recommending political groups to users.
The Markup first revealed on Jan. 19 that Facebook was continuing to recommend political groups—including some in which users advocated violence and storming the U.S. Capitol—in spite of multiple promises not to do so, including one made under oath to Congress.
The day the article ran, a Facebook team started investigating the “leakage,” according to documents provided by Frances Haugen to Congress and shared with The Markup, and the problem was escalated to the highest level to be “reviewed by Mark.” Over the course of the next week, Facebook employees identified several causes for the broken promise.
The company, according to work log entries in the leaked documents, was updating its list of designated political groups, which it refers to as civic groups, in real time. But the systems that recommend groups to users were cached on servers and users’ devices and only updated every 24 to 48 hours in some cases. The lag resulted in users receiving recommendations for groups that had recently been designated political, according to the logs.
That technical oversight was compounded by a decision Facebook officials made about how to determine whether or not a particular group was political in nature.
When The Markup examined group recommendations using data from our Citizen Browser project—a paid, nationwide panel of Facebook users who automatically supply us data from their Facebook feeds—we designated groups as political or not based on their names, about pages, rules, and posted content. We found 12 political groups among the top 100 groups most frequently recommended to our panelists.
Facebook chose to define groups as political in a different way—by looking at the last seven days’ worth of content in a given group.
“Civic filter uses last 7 day content that is created/viewed in the group to determine if the group is civic or not,” according to a summary of the problem written by a Facebook employee working to solve the issue.
As a result, the company was seeing a “12% churn” in its list of groups designated as political. If a group went seven days without posting content the company’s algorithms deemed political, it would be taken off the blacklist and could once again be recommended to users.
Almost 90 percent of the impressions—the number of times a recommendation was seen—on political groups that Facebook tallied while trying to solve the recommendation problem were a result of the day-to-day turnover on the civic group blacklist, according to the documents.
Facebook did not directly respond to questions for this story.
“We learned that some civic groups were recommended to users, and we looked into it,” Facebook spokesperson Leonard Lam wrote in an email to The Markup. “The issue stemmed from the filtering process after designation that allowed some Groups to remain in the recommendation pool and be visible to a small number of people when they should not have been. Since becoming aware of the issue, we worked quickly to update our processes, and we continue this work to improve our designation and filtering processes to make them as accurate and effective as possible.”
Social networking and misinformation researchers say that the company’s decision to classify groups as political based on seven days’ worth of content was always likely to fall short.
“They’re definitely going to be missing signals with that because groups are extremely dynamic,” said Jane Lytvynenko, a research fellow at the Harvard Shorenstein Center’s Technology and Social Change Project. “Looking at the last seven days, rather than groups as a whole and the stated intent of groups, is going to give you different results. It seems like maybe what they were trying to do is not cast too wide of a net with political groups.”
Many of the groups Facebook recommended to Citizen Browser users had overtly political names.
More than 19 percent of Citizen Browser panelists who voted for Donald Trump received recommendations for a group called Candace Owens for POTUS, 2024, for example. While Joe Biden voters were less likely to be nudged toward political groups, some received recommendations for groups like Lincoln Project Americans Protecting Democracy.
The internal Facebook investigation into the political recommendations confirmed these problems. By Jan. 25, six days after The Markup’s original article, a Facebook employee declared that the problem was “mitigated,” although root causes were still under investigation.
On Feb. 10, Facebook blamed the problem on “technical issues” in a letter it sent to U.S. senator Ed Markey, who had demanded an explanation.
In the early days after the company’s internal investigation, the issue appeared to have been resolved. Both Citizen Browser and Facebook’s internal data showed that recommendations for political groups had virtually disappeared.
But when The Markup reexamined Facebook’s recommendations in June, we discovered that the platform was once again nudging Citizen Browser users toward political groups, including some in which members explicitly advocated violence.
From February to June, just under one-third of Citizen Browser’s 2,315 panelists received recommendations to join a political group. That included groups with names like Progressive Democrats of Nevada, Michigan Republicans, Liberty lovers for Ted Cruz, and Bernie Sanders for President, 2020.
Facebook insists that mainstream news sites perform the best on its platform. But by other measures, sensationalist, partisan content reigns
In early November, Facebook published its Q3 Widely Viewed Content Report, the second in a series meant to rebut critics who said that its algorithms were boosting extremist and sensational content. The report declared that, among other things, the most popular informational content on Facebook came from sources like UNICEF, ABC News, or the CDC.
But data collected by The Markup suggests that, on the contrary, sensationalist news or viral content with little original reporting performs just as well as—and often better than—many mainstream sources when it comes to how often it’s seen by platform users.
Data from The Markup’s Citizen Browser project shows that during the period from July 1 to Sept. 30, 2021, outlets like The Daily Wire, The Western Journal, and BuzzFeed’s viral content arm were among the top-viewed domains in our sample.
Citizen Browser is a national panel of paid Facebook users who automatically share their news feed data with The Markup.
To analyze the websites whose content performs the best on Facebook, we counted the total number of times that links from any domain appeared in our panelists’ news feeds—a metric known as “impressions”—over a three-month period (the same time covered by Facebook’s Q3 Widely Viewed Content Report). Facebook, by contrast, chose a different metric, calculating the “most-viewed” domains by tallying only the number of users who saw links, regardless of whether each user saw a link once or hundreds of times.
By our calculation, the top performing domains were those that surfaced in users’ feeds over and over—including some highly partisan, polarizing sites that effectively bombarded some Facebook users with content.
These findings chime with recent revelations from Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, who has repeatedly said the company has a tendency to cherry-pick statistics to release to the press and the public.
When presented with The Markup’s findings and asked whether its own report’s statistics might be misleading or incomplete, Ariana Anthony, a spokesperson for Meta, Facebook’s parent company, said in an emailed statement, “The focus of the Widely Viewed Content Report is to show the content that is seen by the most people on Facebook, not the content that is posted most frequently. That said, we will continue to refine and improve these reports as we engage with academics, civil society groups, and researchers to identify the parts of these reports they find most valuable, which metrics need more context, and how we can best support greater understanding of content distribution on Facebook moving forward.”
Anthony did not directly respond to questions from The Markup on whether the company would release data on the total number of link views or the content that was seen most frequently on the platform.
The Battle Over Data
There are many ways to measure popularity on Facebook, and each tells a different story about the platform and what kind of content its algorithms favor.
For years, the startup CrowdTangle’s “engagement” metric—essentially measuring a combination of how many likes, comments, and other interactions any domain’s posts garner—has been the most publicly visible way of measuring popularity. Facebook bought CrowdTangle in 2016 and, according to reporting in The New York Times, has since largely tried to downplay data showing that ultra-conservative commentators like The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro produce the most engaged-with content on the platform.
Shortly after the end of the second quarter of this year, Facebook came out with its first transparency report, framed in the introduction as a way to “provide clarity” on “the most-viewed domains, links, Pages and posts on the platform during the quarter.” (More accurately, the Q2 report was the first publicly released transparency report, after a Q1 report was, The New York Times reported, suppressed for making the company look bad and only released later after details emerged.)
For the Q2 and Q3 reports, Facebook turned to a specific metric, known as “reach,” to quantify most-viewed domains. For any given domain, say youtube.com or twitter.com, reach represents the number of unique Facebook accounts that had at least one post containing a link to a tweet or a YouTube video in their news feeds during the quarter. On that basis, Facebook found that those domains, and other mainstream staples like Amazon, Spotify, and TikTok, had wide reach.
When applying this metric, The Markup found similar results in our Citizen Browser data, as detailed in depth in our methodology. But this calculation ignores a reality for a lot of Facebook users: bombardment with content from the same site.
Citizen Browser data shows, for instance, that from July through September of this year, articles from far-right news site Newsmax appeared in the feed of a 58-year-old woman in New Mexico 1,065 times—but under Facebook’s calculation of reach, this would count as one single unit. Similarly, a 37-year-old man in New Hampshire was shown 245 unique links to satirical posts from The Onion, which appeared in his feed more than 500 times—but again, he would have been counted just once by Facebook’s method.
When The Markup instead counted each appearance of a domain on a user’s feed during Q3—e.g., Newsmax as 1,065 instead of 1—we found that polarizing, partisan content jumped in the performance rankings. Indeed, the same trend is true of the domains in Facebook’s Q2 report, for which analysis can be found in our data repository on GitHub.
We found that outlets like The Daily Wire, BuzzFeed’s viral content arm, Fox News, and Yahoo News jumped in the popularity rankings when we used the impressions metric. Most striking, The Western Journal—which, similarly to The Daily Wire, does little original reporting and instead repackages stories to fit with right-wing narratives—improved its ranking by almost 200 places.
“To me these findings raise a number of questions,” said Jane Lytvynenko, senior research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center.
“Was Facebook’s research genuine, or was it part of an attempt to change the narrative around top 10 lists that were previously put out? It matters a lot whether a person sees a link one time or if they see it 20 times, and to not account for that in a report, to me, is misleading,” Lytvynenko said.
Using a narrow range of data to gauge popularity is suspect, said Alixandra Barasch, associate professor of marketing at NYU’s Stern School of Business.
“It just goes against everything we teach and know about advertising to focus on one [metric] rather than the other,” she said.
In fact, when it comes to the core business model of selling space to advertisers, Facebook encourages them to consider yet another metric, “frequency”—how many times to show a post to each user on average—when trying to optimize brand messaging.
Data from Citizen Browser shows that domains seen with high frequency in the Facebook news feed are mostly news domains, since news websites tend to publish multiple articles over the course of a day or week. But Facebook’s own content report does not take this data into account.
“[This] clarifies the point that what we need is independent access for researchers to check the math,” said Justin Hendrix, co-author of a report on social media and polarization and editor at Tech Policy Press, after reviewing The Markup’s data.
“No,” said Sen Bernie Sanders. “Congress should not provide a $10 billion handout to Jeff Bezos for space exploration as part of the defense spending bill. Unbelievable.”
Progressives on Wednesday slammed what they called a proposed $10 billion handout to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos—the world’s first multi-centibillionaire—in the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act as a “giveaway of galactic proportions” in the face of growing wealth inequality and the inability of U.S. lawmakers to pass a sweeping social and climate spending package.
“Jeff Bezos’s business model includes feasting on public subsidies—and the U.S. Senate must not acquiesce to his demands.”
According toDefense News, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) plans to merge the $250 billion U.S. Innovation and Competition Act of 2021 (USICA)—aimed largely at countering the rise of China—with next year’s NDAA, which would authorize up to $778 billion in military spending. That’s $37 billion more than former President Donald Trump’s final defense budget and $25 billion more than requested by President Joe Biden. The NDAA includes a $10 billion subsidy to Bezos’ Blue Origin space exploration company.
“Providing Jeff Bezos with $10 billion of taxpayer money would be an inappropriate giveaway of galactic proportions,” Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU), said in a statement Wednesday.
STATEMENT on Blue Origin subsidy in #NDAA: “Until Jeff Bezos changes the way his employees are mistreated and dehumanized at Amazon and elsewhere, no elected official should support the passage of subsidies for him or any of his projects” –@sappelbaumhttps://t.co/LOppvCfXdcpic.twitter.com/t30afGKQzc
“Jeff Bezos shouldn’t receive taxpayer subsidies for his personal projects—period,” he continued. “In at least two recent years, one of the richest people on the planet paid no income tax; yet he then demands billions in taxpayer funds for a project that’s already been awarded to another company. This is the height of hubris.”
“Rather than waste $10 billion on a redundant space contract for Bezos, that money could be used to adequately fund Social Security Disability, Medicare and Medicaid, and the food stamps that many of his own employees at Amazon and elsewhere have to rely on to make ends meet,” Appelbaum said.
“Jeff Bezos’s business model includes feasting on public subsidies—and the U.S. Senate must not acquiesce to his demands,” he added. “Furthermore, until Jeff Bezos changes the way his employees are mistreated and dehumanized at Amazon and elsewhere, no elected official should support the passage of subsidies for him or any of his projects.”
No. Congress should not provide a $10 billion handout to Jeff Bezos for space exploration as part of the defense spending bill. Unbelievable.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has condemned the NDAA for containing $52 billion in “corporate welfare” for Big Tech. Explaining why he would vote against the NDAA, Sanders said Tuesday that “combining these two pieces of legislation would push the price tag of the defense bill to over $1 trillion—with very little scrutiny.”
“Meanwhile,” he added, “the Senate has spent month after month discussing the Build Back Better Act and whether we can afford to protect the children, the elderly, the sick, the poor, and the future of our planet. As a nation, we need to get our priorities right.”
Originally published in Common Dreams by BRETT WILKINS and republished under Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
If we continue not acting against the real cause of the climate crisis—the capitalist mode of production and the capitalist worldview—they will take it as a social license to carry on with collapse.
This past week’s flurry of announcements over “ambitious action” by governments during the COP26 in Glasgow has been justly received with scepticism by climate justice activists and the general public (and enthusiastic support by the media in general). During this same period important revelations of the massive gap in terms of necessary emission cuts and country’s plans emerged, as the broader rejection of greenwashing became pervasive. The narrative of false solutions and green capitalism doesn’t work. Yesterday, the revelation that over 800 oil & gas wells are being planned for drilling still this year and in 2022, in the report “Drill, Baby, Drill“, makes it clear that the proceedings of COP26 are mostly propaganda, as the only real, mandatory and contractualized plan global capitalism has for the climate crisis is collapse.
The reason why the climate crisis is not being solved is because it will lead to the biggest shift in power in the history of humanity, it will lead to the biggest transfer of wealth and loss of profit in history.
The scenario is the most dire ever. Not only the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is at its highest for millions of years, temperatures keep pushing closer to 1.5ºC and emissions are rising once again after the Covid hiatus. The IPCC scientists have leaked the second draft of Group II’s report, which states that “estimates of committed CO2 emissions from current fossil energy infrastructure are 658 GtCO2 […] nearly the double the remaining carbon budget,” revealing that “others [scientists] stress that climate change is caused by industrial development and more specifically the character of social and economic development produced by the nature of the capitalist society, which they therefore view as ultimately unsustainable.” In a few months, we will understand the level of political and business editing in the final report that finally comes out.
Yet, current infrastructure is not enough for global capitalism. In the “Drill, Baby, Drill” report, made public by the Glasgow Agreement at the COP26 Coalition’s People Summit, a still bigger measure of incoherence appears. There are 816 new oil & gas wells being planned and drilled until the end of the year and in 2022. These are located in 76 countries all around the world, countries whose governments are currently sitting in the halls of the COP26 in Glasgow, to “negotiate” a solution for the climate crisis.
The host UK appears close to the top of desired new wells, with 36, mostly offshore, in the basins of Central Graben, Moray Firth, the North Sea and Shetland. It is very likely that while Boris Johnson was doing his James Bond gag on stage, at least some four wells were being drilled to add to British fossil fuel reserves, making him a sort of meta-Bond villain. The top of the ranking for most wells planned goes to Australia and Russia, with 80 wells each, closely followed by Mexico with 78. Australia, Russia, Mexico, Indonesia, USA, Norway, UK, Brazil and Myanmar plan to drill over 500 oil & gas wells between now and the end of 2022. The report points out that this is very likely an underestimation. The companies most involved in drilling these wells are the gallery of the usual suspects: ENI, Petronas, Shell, Equinor, Total, Pemex, BP, Pertamina, Chevron and ExxonMobil. There are at least 67 wells planned above the Arctic Polar Circle. Total and ExxonMobil are in a contest to drill the deepest well ever in the ocean (Total is going for 3628m deep in Angola, and ExxonMobil is going for 3800m deep in Brazil). Many of these companies are spending millions every year on propaganda for carbon neutrality and other false solutions, blocking real action and expanding their operations.
The report also includes a sample of wells drilled in 2021 so far, with China on top, followed by Turkey, Russia, Norway, Indonesia, Mexico, Pakistan, Australia and Egypt, the host for the next COP.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. It is the way this system operates: just enough propaganda of “ambition” and technofixes to keep fossils flowing as ever, while the climate collapses. The information does provide us with a question: if the on climate change debate is framed by companies and governments around the terms of net-zero, carbon credits, carbon taxes and offsettings, rather than stopping emissions, when will it ever come to the real problem of the climate crisis? Well, never. And that is the purpose.
Governments and companies are actively engaged in not cutting emissions, but also in effectively increasing them. Each and every one of these wells is a public crime against Humanity and all species on this planet, advertised in advance. It is good that we know them, though, for it is better to know fossil capitalism’s plans to collapse us beforehand and in as much detail as possible. That is why the call on the report does not go out to governments and fossil companies to suddenly act after over three decades of expanding fossil use. The call goes out to the climate justice movement and civil society: spread this information far and wide, act on it, campaign on it, block, stop and detain all of these projects. Other millions of fossil and fossil-based projects compose the menu of collapse daily confirmed by governments and companies. They are the legally binding commitment for our collapse and need to be stopped.
The overwhelming agreement on the reason why the climate crisis is not being fixed is becoming as high as the overwhelming scientific agreement on the cause of the climate crisis. The reason why the climate crisis is not being solved is because it will lead to the biggest shift in power in the history of humanity, it will lead to the biggest transfer of wealth and loss of profit in history. That means very little to the majority of the human population, as we will be the beneficiaries of this shift, of this transfer, of this redistribution. If we solve this crisis, we will have the chance to heal our battered planet. That is why their plan means collapse: they refuse to abdicate an inch of their brutal privilege and power. If we continue not acting against the real cause of the climate crisis—the capitalist mode of production and the capitalist worldview—they will take it as a social license to carry on with collapse. Even without social license, their plan will always lead to collapse. It’s not circumstantial, it is the core of this system. We need to collapse them.
Originally published on Common Dreams by JOÃO CAMARGO and republished under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
From the urban sprawl of Houston to the riverways of Virginia, air pollution from industrial plants is elevating the cancer risk of an estimated quarter of a million Americans to a level the federal government considers unacceptable.
Some of these hot spots of toxic air are infamous. An 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River in Louisiana that’s thronged with oil refineries and chemical plants has earned the nickname Cancer Alley. Many other such areas remain unknown, even to residents breathing in the contaminated air.
Until now.
ProPublica undertook an analysis that has never been done before. Using advanced data processing software and a modeling tool developed by the Environmental Protection Agency, we mapped the spread of cancer-causing chemicals from thousands of sources of hazardous air pollution across the country between 2014 and 2018. The result is an unparalleled view of how toxic air blooms around industrial facilities and spreads into nearby neighborhoods.
At the map’s intimate scale, it’s possible to see up close how a massive chemical plant near a high school in Port Neches, Texas, laces the air with benzene, an aromatic gas that can cause leukemia. Or how a manufacturing facility in New Castle, Delaware, for years blanketed a day care playground with ethylene oxide, a highly toxic chemical that can lead to lymphoma and breast cancer. Our analysis found that ethylene oxide is the biggest contributor to excess industrial cancer risk from air pollutants nationwide. Corporations across the United States, but especially in Texas and Louisiana, manufacture the colorless, odorless gas, which lingers in the air for months and is highly mutagenic, meaning it can alter DNA.
In all, ProPublica identified more than a thousand hot spots of cancer-causing air. They are not equally distributed across the country. A quarter of the 20 hot spots with the highest levels of excess risk are in Texas, and almost all of them are in Southern states known for having weaker environmental regulations. Census tracts where the majority of residents are people of color experience about 40% more cancer-causing industrial air pollution on average than tracts where the residents are mostly white. In predominantly Black census tracts, the estimated cancer risk from toxic air pollution is more than double that of majority-white tracts.
After reviewing ProPublica’s map, Wayne Davis, an environmental scientist formerly with the EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, said, “The public is going to learn that EPA allows a hell of a lot of pollution to occur that the public does not think is occurring.”
Our analysis comes at a critical juncture for the fate of America’s air. After decades of improvement, air quality has, by some metrics, begun to decline. In the last four years, the Trump administration rolled back more than a hundred environmental protections, including two dozen air pollution and emissions policies.
The EPA says it “strives to protect the greatest number of people possible” from an excess cancer risk worse than 1 in a million. That risk level means that if a million people in an area are continuously exposed to toxic air pollutants over a presumed lifetime of 70 years, there would likely be at least one case of cancer on top of those from other risks people already face. According to ProPublica’s analysis, 74 million Americans — more than a fifth of the population — are being exposed to estimated levels of risk higher than this.
EPA policy sets the upper limit of acceptable excess cancer risk at 1 in 10,000 — 100 times more than the EPA’s more aspirational goal and a level of exposure that numerous experts told ProPublica is too high. ProPublica found that an estimated 256,000 people are being exposed to risks beyond this threshold and that an estimated 43,000 people are being subjected to at least triple this level of risk. Still, the EPA sees crossing its risk threshold as more of a warning sign than a mandate for action: The law doesn’t require the agency to penalize polluters that, alone or in combination, raise the cancer risk in an area above the acceptable level.
In response to ProPublica’s findings, Joe Goffman, acting assistant administrator for the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, said in an emailed statement, “Toxic air emissions from industrial facilities are a problem that must be addressed.” Under President Joe Biden’s administration, “the EPA has reinvigorated its commitment to protect public health from toxic air emissions from industrial facilities — especially in communities that have already suffered disproportionately from air pollution and other environmental burdens.”
ProPublica’s reporting exposes flaws with EPA’s implementation of the Clean Air Act, a landmark law that dramatically reduced air pollution across America but provided less protection to those who live closest to industrial polluters.
The 1970 law resulted in outdoor air quality standards for a handful of widespread “criteria” pollutants, including sulfur dioxide and particulate matter, which could be traced to exhaust pipes and smokestacks all over the country and were proven to aggravate asthma and lead to early deaths. But 187 other dangerous chemicals, now known as hazardous air pollutants or air toxics, never got this level of attention. At the time, the science demonstrating the harms of these compounds, which primarily impact people in neighborhoods that border industrial facilities — so-called fence-line communities — was still in its early stages. The EPA did not receive enough funding to set the same strict limits, and industry lobbying weakened the agency’s emerging regulations.
In 1990, Congress settled on a different approach to regulating air toxics. Since then, the EPA has made companies install equipment to reduce their pollution and studied the remaining emissions to see if they pose an unacceptable health risk.
The way the agency assesses this risk vastly underestimates residents’ exposure, according to our analysis. Instead of looking at how cancer risk adds up when polluters are clustered together in a neighborhood, the EPA examines certain types of facilities and equipment in isolation. When the agency studies refineries, for example, it ignores a community’s exposure to pollution from nearby metal foundries or shipyards.
Matthew Tejada, director of the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice, told ProPublica that tackling hot spots of toxic air will require “working back through 50 years of environmental regulation in the United States, and unpacking and untying a whole series of knots.”
“The environmental regulatory system wasn’t set up to deal with these things,” he said. “All of the parts of the system have to be re-thought to address hot spots or places where we know there’s a disproportionate burden.”
The Clean Air Act rarely requires industry or the EPA to monitor for air toxics, leaving residents near these plants chronically uninformed about what they’re breathing in. And when companies report their emissions to the EPA, they’re allowed to estimate them using flawed formulas and monitoring methods.
“These fence line communities are sacrifice zones,” said Jane Williams, executive director of California Communities Against Toxics. “Before there was climate denial, there was cancer denial. We release millions of pounds of carcinogens into our air, water and food and act mystified when people start getting sick.”
Brittany Madison is worried about the air. Madison, who is 31, lives in Baytown, Texas, a city next to the Houston ship channel where the skyline is dense with the glittering towers of chemical plants. In the apartment she shares with her 7-year-old son, her 39-year-old sister and her nieces and nephew, the low, steady hum of air purifiers is unremitting. Her 3-year-old niece, K’ryah, has suffered from debilitating asthma attacks since she was born. Even on good days, the family tries to keep K’ryah indoors as much as possible. On bad days, they shut the windows. And about once a month, they rush her to the hospital, where she’s given oxygen and injected with steroids.
Madison, who’s six months pregnant, loves taking long walks and watching the kids at the playground, but lately she’s been spending more and more time inside. Her home lies a few miles north of ExxonMobil Baytown Complex, one of the largest refineries in the world. Over the years, Exxon’s massive petrochemical operation has sent millions of pounds of toxic chemicals into the sky during accidents, unplanned discharges and fires. (ExxonMobil did not respond to requests for comment.) After a particularly smoky fire in 2019, Madison came down with a migraine, her first. Her son, who didn’t know the word for headache, told her that his brain was hurting.
Madison began to wonder if living near all these pipes and tanks and towers had something to do with the health conditions that afflicted her neighborhood. Air toxics are associated with a host of adverse effects that range from headaches and nausea to lung damage, heart failure and death, and they’re especially hazardous for kids and the unborn. A study by the University of Texas School of Public Health found that children living within 2 miles of the Houston ship channel had a higher risk of developing acute lymphocytic leukemia. Madison’s father, who worked at several nearby plants, died from a heart attack at 43. Friends and family have died of cancer. “You wonder what causes it. Is it the air we breathe? Or the food?” Madison asked. “There are just all these different questions that no one has answers to.”
The cancer risks from industrial pollution can be compounded by factors like age, diet, genetic predisposition and exposure to radiation; the knock-on effect of inhaling toxic air for decades might, for example, mean the difference between merely having a family history of breast cancer and actually developing the disease yourself. While the cancer and asthma rates in Houston’s Harris County are comparable with those in the rest of the state, Texas officials have identified cancer clusters in several of the city’s neighborhoods.
Large swaths of the Greater Houston area make up the third-biggest hot spot of cancer-causing air in the country, according to our analysis, after Louisiana’s Cancer Alley and an area around Port Arthur, Texas, which is on the Louisiana border. For many homes closest to the fence lines of petrochemical plants in cities like La Porte and Port Neches, Texas, the estimated excess risk of cancer ranges from three to six times the level that the EPA considers acceptable.
But because of the way that the EPA underestimates risk, the true dangers of living in a toxic hot spot are often invisible to regulators and residents.
The agency breaks things down into the smallest possible categories “to avoid addressing what we call cumulative risk,” said John Walke, an attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council who formerly worked as an EPA lawyer advising the Office of Air and Radiation. “But our bodies do not parse out air pollution according to rule labels or industrial equipment or industrial source categories.” The cancer risk from each facility or type of equipment may be at levels the agency considers “acceptable,” but taken together, the potential harms can be substantial.
The EPA initially sent ProPublica a statement saying that it “ensures that risks from individual source categories are acceptable and that the standards provide an ample margin of safety to protect public health.”
In another statement sent after an interview, the agency added, “We understand that communities often confront multiple sources of toxic air pollution and face cumulative risks greater than the risk from a single source.” The EPA added that it was working both to better harness the science on cumulative risks and “to better understand risks for communities who are overburdened by numerous sources of multiple pollutants.”
Madison can’t help but notice that when her family travels, K’ryah’s asthma improves. “The first chance I get, I’m moving far away from Texas and never looking back,” she said. “I love being outside. I love seeing the stars. I don’t want to feel like someone is pumping gas onto our front porch.”
The locations of the hot spots identified by ProPublica are anything but random. Industrial giants tend to favor areas that confer strategic advantages: On the Gulf Coast, for instance, oil rigs abound, so it’s more convenient to build refineries along the shoreline. Corporations also favor places where land is cheap and regulations are few.
Under federal law, the EPA delegates the majority of its enforcement powers to state and local authorities, which means that the environmental protections afforded to Americans vary widely between states. Texas, which is home to some of the largest hot spots in the nation, has notoriouslylaxregulations.
Between 2008 and 2018, lawmakers cut funding for state pollution-control programs by 35% while boosting the state’s overall budget by 41%, according to a report by the Environmental Integrity Project, an advocacy group founded by former EPA staffers. A Texas Tribune story from 2017 found that during the prior year, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality had levied fines in fewer than 1% of the cases in which polluters exceeded emission limits. Even when penalties are issued, many polluters see these fines as part of the cost of doing business, said Craig Johnston, a former lawyer at the EPA and a professor of environmental law at Lewis and Clark Law School.
Gary Rasp, a TCEQ spokesperson, told ProPublica that the agency “has taken actions to monitor, mitigate, and improve the air quality in fenceline communities.” The agency runs dozens of stationary air toxics monitors across the state, he added, and “by continuously evaluating air monitoring data, which is more accurate than modeling, TCEQ can identify issues.” The agency also inspects industrial facilities and “has an active enforcement program, referring particularly egregious cases to the Texas Office of the Attorney General.”
That the people living inside these hot spots are disproportionately Black is not a coincidence. Our findings build on decades of evidence demonstrating that pollution is segregated: People of color are exposed to far greater levels of air pollution than whites — a pattern that persists across income levels. These disparities are rooted in racist real estate practices like redlining and the designation of low-income neighborhoods and communities of color as mixed residential-industrial zones. In cities like Houston, for example, all-white zoning boards targeted Black neighborhoods for the siting of noxious facilities, like landfills, incinerators and garbage dumps. Robert Bullard, a professor of urban planning and environmental policy at Texas Southern University, has called the practice “PIBBY” or “Place In Blacks’ Back Yard” — a spin on the acronym “NIMBY” (“Not In My Back Yard”).
Many of the neighborhoods that border chemical plants are low-income and lack the same resources, access to health care and political capital that wealthier neighborhoods can bring to fights against intrusive commercial activities. In places like Baytown, working-class people depend on the very companies that sicken them to earn a living. Over the years, the shadow of industry can permanently impair not just a neighborhood’s health but also its economic prospects and property values, fueling a cycle of disinvestment. “Industries rely on having these sinks — these sacrifice zones — for polluting,” said Ana Baptista, an environmental policy professor at The New School. “That political calculus has kept in place a regulatory system that allows for the continued concentration of industry. We sacrifice these low-income, African American, Indigenous communities for the economic benefit of the region or state or country.”
Tejada, the EPA’s director of environmental justice, said that the Biden administration and the EPA are focused on confronting these disparities. “These places didn’t happen by accident. The disproportionality of the impacts that they face, the generations of disinvestment and lack of access are not coincidences. These places were created. And it is the responsibility of everyone, including the government — chiefly the government — to do something about it.”
The federal government has long had the information it would need to take on these hot spots. The EPA collects emissions data from more than 20,000 industrial facilities across the country and has even developed its own state-of-the-art tool — the Risk-Screening Environmental Indicators model — to estimate the impact of toxic emissions on human health. The model, known as RSEI, was designed to help regulators and lawmakers pinpoint where to target further air-monitoring efforts, data-quality inspections or, if necessary, enforcement actions. Researchers and journalists have used this model for various investigations over the years, including this one.
And yet the agency’s own use of its powerful modeling tool has been limited. There’s been a lack of funding for and a dearth of interest in RSEI’s more ambitious applications, according to several former and current EPA employees. Wayne Davis, the former EPA scientist, managed the RSEI program under the Trump administration. He said that some of his supervisors were hesitant about publishing information that would directly implicate a facility. “They always told us, ‘Don’t make a big deal of it, don’t market it, and hopefully you’ll continue to get funding next year.’ They didn’t want to make anything public that would raise questions about why the EPA hadn’t done anything to regulate that facility.”
Nicolaas Bouwes, a former senior analyst at the EPA and a chief architect of the RSEI model, recalled the occasional battle to get colleagues to accept the screening tool, let alone share its findings with the public. “There’s often been pushback from having this rich data sheet too readily available because it could make headlines,” he said. “What I find annoying is that the EPA has the same information at their disposal and they don’t use it. If ProPublica can do this, so can the EPA.”
In its statement, the EPA said that it plans to improve its approach for sharing air toxics data faster and more regularly with the public. “EPA has not published calculated cancer risks using RSEI modeled results,” it continued. “RSEI results are not designed as a substitute for more comprehensive, inclusive, or site specific risk assessments,” but as a potential starting point that should only be used “to identify situations of potential concern that may warrant further investigation.”
Indeed, our map works as a screening tool, not as a site-specific risk assessment. It cannot be used to tie individual cancer cases to emissions from specific industrial facilities, but it can be used to diagnose what the EPA calls “situations of potential concern.”
Our analysis arrives as America faces new threats to its air quality. The downstream effects of climate change, like warmer temperatures and massive wildfires, have created more smoke and smog. The Trump administration diluted, scuttled or reversed dozens of air pollution protections — actions estimated to lead to thousands of additional premature deaths. In 2018, then-EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt created a massive air toxics loophole when he rolled back a key provision of the Clean Air Act, known as “Once In, Always In,” allowing thousands of large polluters to relax their use of pollution-controlling equipment.
Biden has yet to close this loophole, but he has signaled plans to alleviate the disproportionate impacts borne by the people who live in these hot spots. Within his first few days in office, he established two White House councils to address environmental injustice. And in March, Congress confirmed his appointment of EPA administrator Michael Regan, who has directed the agency to strengthen its enforcement of violations “in communities overburdened by pollution.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Environmental advocates say that the Biden administration should lean on the EPA to test the air in toxic hot spots and take action against polluters who are violating their permits. It should also push for new rules that take into account the much greater risks posed when multiple facilities are grouped together in an area. Advocates also say the EPA should reexamine its tolerance of 1 in 10,000 as an acceptable excess cancer risk and extend the limit of 1 in 1 million to all, given how much the knowledge and technology surrounding air toxics has advanced since the 1980s. “We recognize that what was acceptable then is not OK now,” said Emma Cheuse, an attorney and air toxics expert at the advocacy group Earthjustice.
The EPA adopted the 1 in 10,000 threshold based on a 1988 agency report that listed the probability of dying from unusual things like “ignition of clothing,” “venomous plants” or drowning and then choosing a risk level roughly in the middle of the range. EPA’s decision was “essentially arbitrary,” said Patricia Ross McCubbin, a professor of environmental law at Southern Illinois University who’s researched the agency’s risk program.
Tejada said that the potential reevaluation of the EPA’s acceptable risk limit was “a big-time policy question.”
“We want to see progress” on hot spots, Tejada added, but given the complexity of the problems, he warned that progress could take time. “We’re not going to lie to anybody and say, ‘Well, by the end of this administration, everyone’s going to be fine.’ I don’t think anybody would buy that.”
Without stronger protections, many of the people living in fence-line communities worry about becoming collateral damage. For residents of Mossville, Louisiana, it is already too late.
Among the most polluted pockets of the country, the community in southwest Louisiana has all but disappeared amid the steady encroachment of the South African chemical giant Sasol. The company’s most recent construction led to a buyout of more than half of the area’s remaining residents. In the late 1990s, more than 500 people lived in Mossville. Residents say only 50 or so remain.
Mossville was founded by formerly enslaved people in the 1790s, long before the Civil War. Debra Sullivan Ramirez, 67, remembers her childhood there as a kind of idyll. She and her family lived off the land, with its shady swamps and leafy orchards. They grew their own fruits and vegetables, hunted and fished, and strained juice from Mayhaw trees to make jelly. After church on Sundays, Sullivan Ramirez remembers, she would fall asleep on her grandma’s front porch to the soothing hum of the Conoco chemical plant across the street.
In hindsight, there had always been warning signs. Fluorescent ponds. Plumes of yellow smoke. The occasional explosion in the sky. Not to mention all the sickness. Many of her neighbors suffered from respiratory problems and heart disease. Her father had diabetes, which may have been triggered by dioxin, a chemical that attacks the pancreas. Her sister Sandra died of ovarian cancer at 61. Her neighbor Kathy Jones died at 58 from an 8-pound tumor near her kidney.
“It wasn’t one block that didn’t have cancer,” Sullivan Ramirez said.
Over the years, Sullivan Ramirez herself has struggled with nerve degeneration and scleroderma, a rare condition that involves the tightening of the skin and connective tissues. While it can be difficult to link specific cases of disease to pollution exposure, the evidence in Mossville has accumulated: In a 1998 health survey conducted by the University of Texas, 84% of Mossville residents reported having headaches, dizziness, tremors and seizures. An EPA study from the same year found that the average level of dioxins in the blood of Mossville residents was dangerously high — triple that of the general U.S. population. Even small amounts of dioxin, one of the most poisonous chemicals released by facilities, can cause developmental problems, damage the immune system and lead to cancer. A 2007 report found that the types of dioxin compounds in the blood of Mossville residents matched those emitted by local industrial facilities.
In an emailed statement, Sasol noted that its property buyout stemmed from direct requests from Mossville residents and that the company offered owners more than the appraised value of their homes. “Sasol and its predecessor have produced or handled chemicals at our Lake Charles complex for more than 60 years. We understand the science and have controls in place to ensure our operations are safe, protective of the environment, compliant with regulations and sustainable over the long term,” wrote Sarah Hughes, a spokesperson for Sasol. “Sasol is proud of our engagement with our neighbors in Mossville and the positive impact it has had on many of its residents.”
Sullivan Ramirez is wary of too much talk. She knows that the new administration has promised something more for communities like hers, but she doesn’t want to get her hopes up. The presentations from captains of industry, the listening sessions with earnest bureaucrats, the proposals from slick attorneys, the promises tossed off by politicians — over the years, she’s heard it all.
The people of Mossville are right to be skeptical, the EPA’s Tejada acknowledged. “I would be skeptical if I was from Mossville,” he added. “They should be skeptical until we actually show up and do the things that they’ve been asking us to do for a long time. But there’s now a level of commitment to actually tangling with these issues in a really serious, substantive way.”
After years of activism in Mossville, Sullivan Ramirez moved to Lake Charles, just a short drive away. But she worries the industrial sprawl will one day overtake her new home. To Sullivan Ramirez, Mossville is “the key” — a warning of what the future holds for America’s other hot spots if business continues as usual.
“This is the 21st century,” she said. “The act of polluting our lands and robbing our communities — when will enough be enough?”
In wake of what she calls “failed” Cop26 in Glasgow, a fitting gesture of truth
In the video above the real story of NetZero by 2050 is told, without window dressing and in total honesty. Frustration with government responses to global warming are on the rise, as well they should be. The video is a light hearted and yet deadly serious take on the situation and how it is going to affect all of us who live on this planet.
Though delivered in the trademark style of TheJuiceMedia the facts that are contained in the colorful and grimly entertaining clip are 100% accurate. And that is why it is so important to watch, like and retweet.
It has always been the case, sadly, that no Government will take action against the carbon emitting and producing infrastructure that they are beholden to, until that action is demanded by million upon millions of world citizens, in other words the people that are being affected most by the negative effects of climate change that are already surrounding us.
The underlying plea of both activists like Greta and TheJuiceMedia is that we all have to step up and get loud – now, as the plan for NetZero 2050 is more of the same blah blah blah that Governments have been spewing for more than 30 years.
As a member of Congress, Jared Polis was one of the loudest Democrats demanding President Donald Trump release his tax returns.
At a rally in Denver in 2017, he warned the crowd that Trump “might have something to hide.” That same year, on the floor of the House, he introduced a resolution to force the president to release the records, calling them an “important baseline disclosure.”
But during Polis’ successful run for governor of Colorado in 2018, his calls for transparency faded. The dot-com tycoon turned investor broke with recent precedent and refused to disclose his returns, blaming his Republican opponent, who wasn’t disclosing his.
Polis may have had other reasons for denying requests to release the records.
Despite a net worth estimated to be in the hundreds of millions, Polis paid nothing in federal income taxes in 2013, 2014 and 2015. From 2010 to 2018, his overall rate was just 8.2% — less than half of the 19% paid by a worker making $45,000 in 2018.
The revelations about Polis are contained in a trove of tax information obtained by ProPublica covering thousands of the nation’s wealthiest people. The Colorado governor is one of several ultrarich politicians who, the data shows, have paid little or no federal income taxes in multiple years, exploited loopholes to dodge estate taxes or used their public offices to fight reforms that would increase their tax bills.
The records show that rich Democrats and Republicans alike have slashed their taxes using strategies unavailable to most of their constituents. Among them are governors, members of Congress and a cabinet secretary.
Richard Painter, the chief White House ethics lawyer during the George W. Bush administration, said the tax avoidance of these top politicians is “very, very worrisome” since both parties “spend like crazy” and depend on taxes to fund their priorities, from the military to Medicare to Social Security.
“They have the power to decide how much the rest of us pay and the power to spend the money, and then they’re not paying their fair share?” Painter said. “That should be troubling to voters, both conservative and liberal. It should be troubling for everyone.”
West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice, for example, is a Republican coal magnate who has made the Forbes list of wealthiest Americans. Yet he’s paid very little or no federal income taxes for almost every year since 2000.
California Rep. Darrell Issa, one of the richest people in Congress, was one of the few Republicans to break with his party during the 2017 tax overhaul to fight for a deduction that — unbeknownst to the public — helped him avoid millions in taxes.
And the tax records of Republican Sen. Rick Scott of Florida and Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, showed that both employed a loophole, which was accidentally created by Congress, to escape estate and gift taxes.
As ProPublica has revealed in a series of articles this year, these tactics, if sometimes aggressive, are completely legal. And they’re not universal among wealthy politicians. ProPublica reviewed tax data for a couple dozen wealthy current and former government officials. Their data shows that many of them paid relatively high tax rates while employing more modest use of the fairly standard deductions of the rich.
The politicians who paid little or exploited loopholes either defended their practices as completely proper or declined to comment.
“The Governor has paid every cent of taxes he owes, he has championed tax reform and tax fairness to fix this broken system for everybody, to report otherwise would be inaccurate,” Polis’ spokesperson wrote in an email.
During the late 1990s dot-com era, Polis earned a reputation as a boy wonder. He turned his parents’ small greeting card company into a website, bluemountain.com, which was among the first to enable users to send free virtual cards. He and his family sold the site in 1999 for $780 million.
With the windfall from the sale, Polis continued to start new ventures and invest, but he also began laying the groundwork for a career in politics. He landed in the governor’s office in 2019 when he was just 43.
One of his tools for raising his profile was philanthropy. His generous donations to charity became a theme of both his 2008 run for Congress and his 2018 run for Colorado’s highest office.
Philanthropy also helped keep his tax rate enviably low. In many years, the deductions he claimed for his charitable giving were large enough to wipe out half the income he would have owed taxes on. His giving allowed him, in essence, to take some of the money he would have paid into the public coffers and donate it instead to causes of his choosing.
But an examination of Polis’ philanthropy shows that while he has given to a wide variety of causes, some of his donations served to promote him, blurring the lines between charity and campaigning.
According to the tax filings of his charity, the Jared Polis Foundation, the organization spent more than $2 million from 2001 to 2008 on a semiannual mailer sent to “hundreds of thousands of households throughout Colorado” that was intended to build “on a foundation of familiarity with Jared Polis’ name and his support of public education.” It was one of the charity’s largest expenditures.
A 2005 edition of the mailer reviewed by ProPublica had the feel of a campaign ad. It was emblazoned with the title “Jared Polis Education Report,” included his name six times on the cover and featured photos of Polis, a former state board of education member, surrounded by smiling school children.
The newsletters were discontinued just as he was elected. Because the mailers did not explicitly advocate for his election, they would have been legally allowed as a charitable expenditure.
A decade later, when he ran for governor in a race that he personally poured more than $20 million into, Polis featured his philanthropy in his campaign. In one ad, he used testimonials from an employee and a graduate of a business training charity he founded for military veterans.
Polis’ spokesperson, Victoria Graham, defended the mailers, saying they were intended “to promote innovations and successful models in public education and to raise awareness for the challenges facing public education.” She also pointed to a range of other philanthropy Polis was involved in, from founding charter schools, which she noted were not named after him, to distributing computers to organizations in need.
“His philanthropy is not and has never been motivated by receiving a tax write-off, and to state otherwise is not only inaccurate but fabricating motives and intent and cynical in its view of charity,” Graham said.
While Polis’ charitable giving has helped keep the percentage of his income he pays in taxes low, he has also been able to keep his total taxable income relatively small by using another strategy common among the wealthy: investing in businesses that grow in value but produce minimal income.
It sounds counterintuitive, but it’s a basic principle of the U.S. tax system — one that typically benefits wealthy people who can afford not to take income. Investments only trigger income taxes when they produce “realized” gains, such as dividends from a stock holding, the sale of an asset or profits from a company. But an investment’s growth in value, while it makes its owner richer, is not taxable.
Polis acknowledged his use of the strategy in 2008 after he released tax information during his first run for Congress and faced criticism for paying so little in taxes. “I founded several high-growth companies, and we would manage those for growth rather than for profit,” he said. “When I make money, I pay taxes. When I don’t make money, I don’t.”
In one of the recent years Polis paid no income taxes, his losses were larger than his income. In two of the years, it was about a million dollars. From 2010 to 2018, when he paid an overall rate of just 8.2%, including payroll taxes, his income averaged $1.5 million.
During that period of low taxes and relatively low income, Polis’ estimated net worth rose sharply. Members of Congress only have to report the value of each of their assets in ranges, so assigning a precise number is impossible. But the nonprofit data site OpenSecrets, which makes estimates by taking the midpoint of the ranges, shows Polis’ wealth growing from $143 million in 2010 to $306 million in 2017, making him the third richest-member of the House at the time. (Graham said congressional disclosure forms are confusingly formatted, potentially causing certain assets to be counted more than once, “so these numbers are likely wildly off.” She did not provide alternative net worth figures.)
One of Polis’ primary vehicles for building his fortune, while avoiding taxable income, appears to have been a family office, Jovian Holdings. The board of directors included his father, sister and a rather surprising outsider: Arthur Laffer. The famed conservative economist’s Laffer Curve provided the Reagan administration with the intellectual basis for arguing that cutting taxes would increase tax revenue. (Polis’ sister is a ProPublica donor.)
The term family office has a mom-and-pop feel, but it is actually part of the infrastructure of protecting the fortunes of the ultrawealthy, from crafting investment and tax strategy to succession and estate planning to concierge services. Depending on how they’re organized, for instance as a business, their costs — the salaries of the staff, rent — can be deductible.
One of the executives at Polis’ family office, according to her LinkedIn profile, is a seasoned tax expert who specializes in “maximizing cost savings both operationally and with all taxing authorities.” She removed that detail around the time ProPublica approached Polis about his taxes.
Unlike ordinary investors, Polis was able to claim millions in deductions for some of the costs of his money management, specifically his family office, which contributed to lowering his tax burden. Ironically, the investment apparatus that helped Polis avoid taxable income became a tax break.
ProPublica discussed the scenario, without naming Polis, with Bob Lord, tax counsel for the advocacy group Americans for Tax Fairness. He said the public appears to be essentially subsidizing Polis’ investing while getting little in return. With a typical business, he said, you get the tax break but also relatively quickly make taxable income.
The costs of a family office are “being taken even though the income may be way out in the future. It’s just a giveaway,” Lord said. “What is the public getting from it? This really, really rich politician gets to shelter his income while his investments grow and doesn’t pay tax on it until he sells.”
Deferring paying taxes is a valuable perk. But the strategy, Lord said, may allow Polis an even more lucrative outcome. Now that Polis has made his fortune, he may be able to largely dodge the tax system forever. Should he die before selling his investments, his heirs would never owe income taxes on the growth.
Graham acknowledged that the tax system unfairly benefits the wealthy but said Polis is not purposely avoiding income that would result in taxes.
“The Governor has long championed tax reforms precisely because the income tax is inadequate and a mismatched way to tax most wealthy people who do not have a regular income but who make money in other ways and should be taxed,” she said. “Since 2006, Governor Polis has paid over $20 million in taxes on the money he earned on his gains and he has championed tax reforms that would lower the tax burden on middle-income earners and eliminate loopholes to ensure higher earners pay their share.”
ProPublica’s data shows that at least two federal officials have already taken steps to preserve their family fortunes for their heirs, exploiting loopholes that divert revenue from the federal government.
Scott, the Florida senator who ran one of the world’s largest health care companies, and DeVos, Trump’s education secretary and believed to be the richest member of his cabinet, have both stored assets in grantor retained annuity trusts — a form of trust used to avoid gift and estate taxes.
GRATs, as they’re commonly known, were accidentally created by Congress in 1990. Lawmakers were trying to close another estate tax loophole and in doing so unintentionally paved the way for another one. The lawyer who pioneered the trusts estimated in 2013 that they had cost the federal government about $100 billion over the prior 13 years.
To use this tax-avoidance technique, you put an asset, like stocks or real estate, into a trust assigned to your heirs. The trust pays you back the starting value of the asset (plus some interest). If the original asset rises in value, the gains can go to your heirs tax-free.
GRATs have become widely used among the superrich. A ProPublica investigation found that more than half of the nation’s richest individuals have employed them and other trusts to avoid estate taxes.
It’s unclear from ProPublica’s data how much DeVos, 63, and Scott, 68, were able to transfer tax-free.
DeVos and her husband employed a GRAT from at least 2000 to 2003. DeVos’ father was a wealthy industrialist. Her husband was the president of Amway, a multilevel marketing company that focuses on health, beauty and home products. Her family is believed to be worth billions.
Her causes both before and during her time in government depended on tax dollars. As a donor and fundraiser for Republican causes, she pushed for charter schools and government subsidies to allow parents to send their kids to private schools. As education secretary, she pushed to send millions of federal dollars intended for public schools to private and religious schools instead.
Scott, one of the wealthiest senators, with a net worth likely in the hundreds of millions, used a GRAT for much longer, from at least 2001 through 2009. His tax data shows the assets in the trust — stakes of a private investment fund and family partnership he and his wife created — receiving millions in income.
When he was in the private sector, Scott benefited from federal programs like Medicare, which are funded by taxes. He built and ran Columbia/HCA, a massive chain of for-profit hospitals. After a fraud investigation became public, he resigned and the company paid $1.7 billion to settle allegations it overbilled government health programs. Scott has previously emphasized that he was never charged, though he acknowledged the company made mistakes.
Scott declined to comment. Nick Wasmiller, a spokesman for DeVos, said she “pays her taxes in full as required by law. Your ‘reporting’ is not only factually wrong but also doubles-down on the criminal actions that underpin ProPublica’s political campaign to prop up the Biden Administration’s failing agenda.”
California Congressman Darrell Issa was one of a handful of Republicans who bucked his party in 2017 and voted against Trump’s tax overhaul.
Issa said he opposed the legislation because it all but eliminated the deduction taxpayers could take on their federal returns for state and local taxes. That provision was particularly contentious in high tax blue states like California, but most Republicans from his state still fell in line. The other GOP congressman in the San Diego area, for example, voted yes.
Limiting the write-off, known as the SALT deduction, was one of the few progressive changes in the Trump tax law. The deduction had long disproportionately benefited the wealthiest because they pay the most in state and local taxes. According to one projection, if the cap were removed from the deduction, households with income in the top 1% would reap the most benefit, paying $31,000 less a year on average — amounting to more than half of the total taxes avoided through the write-off. The top 25% of households would average less than $3,000 in savings a year, and the savings drop precipitously from there, with most households deriving no benefit.
In interviews and public statements, Issa said in fighting to preserve the deduction, he was defending the interests of middle-class taxpayers. “I didn’t come to Washington to raise taxes on my constituents,” he said at the time, “and I do not plan to start today.”
It’s true that more than 40% of taxpayers in Issa’s former district, a relatively affluent swath of Southern California, were able to make at least some use of the deduction.
But the 68-year-old congressman, who made a fortune in the car alarm business, was in the top echelon of its beneficiaries. Between 2003 and 2017, his tax data shows, Issa generally paid a relatively high tax rate but was able to claim more than $51 million in write-offs thanks to the SALT deduction, an average of more than $3 million a year.
By contrast, households in his district that made between $100,000 and $200,000 and took the SALT deduction claimed an average of $14,843 in 2017.
Issa’s spokesman, Jonathan Wilcox, declined to say if the SALT deduction’s impact on the congressman’s taxes factored into his decision to advocate for it.
“So much stupid,” Wilcox said. “Be sure to write back if you ever do better than trolling for garbage.”
Gov. Jim Justice is believed to be the richest person in West Virginia, controlling vast reserves of valuable steelmaking coal and owning The Greenbrier luxury resort. He made an appearance in 2014 on the Forbes list of 400 wealthiest Americans. Estimates of his net worth have ranged from the hundreds of millions to well over a billion.
Nonetheless, he’s paid little or no federal income taxes for almost every year between 2000 and 2018, ProPublica’s trove of tax records shows. In 12 of those years he paid nothing, and in all but two of those years, his rate didn’t exceed 4%.
His largest tax payment came in 2009, when his family sold off much of its mining holdings to a Russian company for more than half a billion dollars. That year, after deductions, his tax rate rose to a modest 13.4%.
In more recent years, Justice, 70, has reported tens of millions in losses each year. That not only helped him to minimize his federal income taxes, it also allowed him to apply those losses to his profits from previous years — and get refunds for the taxes he initially paid in those years.
Justice’s income was low enough in 2018 for his family to qualify for and receive a $2,400 coronavirus stimulus check, aid meant for low- and middle-income Americans.
The recent years of large losses reported on Justice’s tax returns have coincided with real signs of financial problems. The coal industry’s fortunes have rapidly declined. He’s been hounded for unpaid bills and loans. The Russian company that bought much of his coal empire sued him and got him to buy back the assets — at a much discounted price but attached to significant debt. Forbes knocked him off its wealth ranking, citing escalating battles with two major lenders over unpaid debt. Justice’s representatives have said he pays what he owes, and his business empire is in good shape.
But even before his empire began showing significant cracks, Justice was reporting losses or little income for a man so wealthy. From 1996 to 2008, Justice, who received a coal and farming fortune from his father, who died in 1993, either reported losses to the IRS or just a few hundred thousand dollars in income.
The disconnect could be explained by the generous deductions afforded to coal business owners.
For example, owners are allowed a depletion deduction, which allows them to take 10% of the revenue from coal they extract and write it off against their profit. This spin on depreciation can have outsized benefits because unlike normal depreciation — in which the write-offs are based on how much you paid for an asset — the write-off amount here faces no such limit, and can therefore exceed the initial investment. The deduction has been criticized by environmentalists and congressional Democrats as an overly generous giveaway.
Another benefit coal owners get is the ability to immediately expense much of their mine development costs on their taxes instead of being forced to stretch such deductions over a longer period of time. Justice has said that in the 15 years after his father’s death, he oversaw “a massive expansion of multiple businesses which included significant coal reserve expansion” — development that could have provided him with a significant stockpile of such write-offs. (ProPublica has previously reported on other generous write-offs. Sports team owners, for example, are allowed to deduct the value of their intangible assets — such as media deals and franchise rights — as wasting assets, even as they rise in value.)
Experts said this could explain how Justice could have reported negative income of $15 million in 2008, a year in which Mechel, the Russian company that subsequently bought much of his family’s coal empire, said that business alone produced about $94 million in EBITDA — a common measure of a business’ profitability before taxes and some other expenses.
Justice declined to answer a list of specific questions about his taxes. In a statement, his lawyer, Steve Ruby, said Justice “has paid millions upon millions of dollars in state and federal income taxes and has always followed the law. In many years, his businesses have suffered losses as the result of weak coal prices combined with substantial outlays to save jobs at local businesses that other companies were abandoning.
“When many other coal producers were filing for bankruptcy, the Justice companies persevered and refused to take the easy way out through a bankruptcy proceeding, a decision that contributed to those losses. Like any other taxpayer, Gov. Justice does not owe income taxes in years in which his income is negative,” the statement read.
Ruby confirmed that Justice received coronavirus stimulus checks but said he did not cash them.
Like Scott and DeVos, Justice has used GRATs to sidestep estate and gift taxes, his returns and court records suggest.
In 2008, the year before he sold much of his coal empire to the Russian company, two GRATs appeared on his returns for the first time. And when the Russian company sued Justice, it also sued him in his capacity as the trustee for those GRATs. Justice had placed at least some of the coal assets into the trusts before the sale, according to the lawsuit.
Ruby’s statement did not address Justice’s use of GRATs.
These Billionaires Received Taxpayer-Funded Stimulus Checks During the Pandemic
In March 2020, as the first wave of coronavirus infections all but shut down the U.S. economy, Congress responded with rare speed, passing a $2.2 trillion relief package called the CARES Act. The centerpiece of the law was an emergency payment to over 150 million American households that needed help.
Congress used a simple filter to determine who was eligible for assistance: The full $1,200 was limited to single taxpayers who’d reported $75,000 a year or less in income on their previous tax return. Married couples got $2,400 if they had reported less than $150,000 in income. Money was sent automatically to those who qualified.
Ira Rennert, worth $3.7 billion according to Forbes, did not appear to need the cash infusion offered by the CARES Act. After all, his 62,000-square-foot Hamptons home is one of the largest in the country, so he was unlikely to get cabin fever during lockdown, let alone have trouble buying food. Nevertheless, Rennert, who made his fortune as a corporate raider in the ’80s and ’90s, got a $2,400 check from the government.
George Soros, the prominent hedge fund manager and philanthropist who’s worth $8.6 billion, didn’t need the CARES cash, either. Neither did his son, Robert, himself worth hundreds of millions. But they, too, both got checks. (Both returned the checks, according to their representatives.)
ProPublica, using its trove of IRS records, identified at least 18 billionaires who received stimulus payments, which were funded by U.S. taxpayers, in the spring of 2020. Hundreds of other ultrawealthy taxpayers also got checks.
The wealthy taxpayers who received the stimulus checks got them because they came in under the government’s income threshold. In fact, they reported way less taxable income than that — even hundreds of millions less — after they used business write-offs to wipe out their gains.
ProPublica found 270 taxpayers who collectively disclosed $5.7 billion in income, according to their previous tax return, but who were able to deploy deductions at such a massive scale that they qualified for stimulus checks. All listed negative net incomes on tax returns.
Consider two stimulus recipients with similarly huge incomes in 2018. Timothy Headington is an oil mogul, real estate developer and executive producer of such films as “Argo” and “World War Z,” and he’s worth $1.4 billion. He had $62 million in income in 2018, but after $342 million in write-offs, his final result was negative $280 million. The same was true of Rennert, whose $64 million in income that year was erased by $355 million in deductions, for a final total of negative $291 million.
Figures like these reveal a basic truth about the U.S. income tax system. Most people earn the overwhelming majority of their income via wages and take deductions where they can. But the income of the ultrawealthy as revealed on their taxes tells, at best, a partial story. As ProPublica reported earlier this year, the wealthiest taxpayers often have great flexibility in when and how they take taxable income, allowing them to pay a minuscule portion of their wealth growth in taxes. For the ultrawealthy, wages are to be avoided, carrying as they do the burden of not only income tax but also of payroll taxes.
Wages rarely made up a significant portion of income for the 270 wealthy stimulus check recipients identified by ProPublica. In total, only $82 million, or 1.4%, of the $5.7 billion in income taken in by the group came in the form of wages.
The ultrawealthy have other tax advantages. Many can tap a particularly generous vein of deductions: businesses they own. These can wipe out all of their income, even for years to come, unlike other deductions, like those for charitable giving. Certain industries, like real estate or oil and gas, are a well-known source of tax benefits that can generate paper losses even for a successful business.
The amount of stimulus aid that went to ultrawealthy taxpayers was a negligible piece of the trillions spent via the CARES Act. But the fact that billionaires were able to qualify shows that when legislators rely on income tax returns to determine eligibility for aid, there can be surprising results. Asked what he thought about billionaires receiving stimulus checks, Senate Finance Committee chair Ron Wyden, D-Ore., responded, “The tax code is simply not equipped to tax billionaires fairly, or even ensure they pay anything at all.”
ProPublica reached out to every stimulus-check recipient mentioned in this article. Rennert and Headington did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesman for George Soros, who has advocated for higher taxes for the wealthy, said, “George returned his stimulus check. He certainly didn’t request one!” Robert Soros did the same, a spokesperson said. (The Soros-funded Open Society Foundations have donated to ProPublica.)
Billionaires often reap sizable tax deductions from owning sports teams, as a ProPublica story this year detailed. A number of sports team owners were among the recipients of stimulus payments. Terrence Pegula, who is worth $5.7 billion and owns both the NFL’s Buffalo Bills and the NHL’s Buffalo Sabres, was one. Also getting a check was Glen Taylor, worth $2.8 billion, who earlier this year struck a deal to sell Minnesota’s NBA and WNBA teams for $1.5 billion. Pegula and Taylor did not respond to requests for comment.
Some taxpayers had enough in deductions to wipe out even hundreds of millions in income. Robert Dart is a scion of the Dart family, which owns Dart Container Corp., the maker of the iconic red Solo cup. In 2018, he reported income exceeding $300 million, but deductions left him with a final result of negative $39 million.
Dart and his brother renounced their U.S. citizenship decades ago to take advantage of a then-existing tax break available for expatriates. Dart filed his U.S. tax return from an address in the Cayman Islands, but got a stimulus payment just the same. (The IRS declined to comment.)
In response to questions, the general counsel for Dart Container wrote, “Mr. Dart believes that people in his position should not have received COVID stimulus funds. Mr. Dart did not request any COVID stimulus funds. Instead, those funds were directly deposited into his account by the U.S. Treasury without his consent as Congress determined that taxpayers with resident alien status were eligible for such payments. Mr. Dart has returned the COVID stimulus funds he received to the U.S. Treasury pursuant to instructions provided by the IRS.”
Some of the ultrawealthy have received government benefits on more than one occasion. Take Joseph DiMenna, a partner in Zweig-DiMenna, a pioneering hedge fund. An art collector and polo aficionado, he owns a club that holds charity polo matches for anti-poverty causes. In 2017, he received a special payout from his fund of $1.1 billion. But in 2018, without such a massive payout, business deductions swung his income back to where it had been in the years before his big payday: less than $0. That entitled him to a stimulus check. In both 2015 and 2016, DiMenna’s negative income also entitled him to $2,000 in refundable child tax credits, meant to support middle-class families with child care expenses. DiMenna did not respond to a request seeking comment.
Others among the superrich also received stimulus payments the last time Congress offered them when millions of Americans were struggling. The 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act offered a $400 tax credit for individuals and $800 for married couples. It was called “Making Work Pay.”
Forrest Preston, the founder of Life Care Centers of America, one of the largest long-term care companies in the U.S., is worth $1.2 billion. In 2009, he got his $400 boost. The next year, he posted an income of $112 million. By 2018, however, his income had gone negative again, entitling him to a $1,200 payment in 2020.
The same year he received his stimulus check, Preston’s company successfully lobbied to win a tax break for the nursing home industry. Preston did not respond to a request for comment.
Taylor, the Minnesota Timberwolves owner, is another two-time stimulus recipient, in 2009 and again in 2020. So was Woodley Hunt, the senior chairman of Hunt Companies, a family-owned firm that is one of the country’s largest owners of multifamily properties. Hunt did not respond to a request seeking comment.
For former Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld, a big salary was a key part of the $400 million he earned in the five years before the firm’s historic collapse in 2008. But in recent years, he’s been running a company called Matrix Investment Partners that he set up to invest his own money. The tax losses generated by that company were one reason he got a stimulus check. Reached by phone and asked whether he wanted to comment, Fuld said, “I’m not interested. Thank you.”
Another CARES Act beneficiary was Erik Prince, who, before deductions, had $5.3 million in income in 2018. Prince founded Blackwater, a private military company that received hundreds of millions in government contracts. He has denounced excess government spending, saying we are being “bled dry by debt.” Prince didn’t respond to a request for comment.
A proposal in the Democrats’ (once $3.5 trillion, now under $2 trillion) Build Back Better legislation, currently the subject of fevered negotiations, would curb the ability of wealthy taxpayers to report negative income. It would do so by restricting the ability to use business losses to wipe out other types of income, like capital gains or dividends. Instead, business deductions would only offset business income.
The idea, which builds on a provision of the 2017 Trump tax bill, is one of the few tax provisions to have survived the recent negotiations — at least, for now. First proposed by House Democrats in September, it was then projected to produce $167 billion in revenue over the next 10 years. The provision was also included in a version of the legislation released on Oct. 28.
Not included in last week’s draft was a provision that would have directly affected the ability of billionaires to manipulate their incomes. A number of the billionaires who received stimulus checks were able to report negative incomes to the IRS despite getting richer. A “billionaire income tax” proposed by Wyden, would tax increases in wealth. Under the current system, gains are taxed only when they are “realized,” such as when someone sells stock.
Leaked internal documents suggest Facebook – which recently renamed itself Meta – is doing far worse than it claims at minimizing COVID-19 vaccine misinformation on the Facebook social media platform.
Online misinformation about the virus and vaccines is a major concern. In one study, survey respondents who got some or all of their news from Facebook were significantly more likely to resist the COVID-19 vaccine than those who got their news from mainstream media sources.
As a researcher who studies social and civic media, I believe it’s critically important to understand how misinformation spreads online. But this is easier said than done. Simply counting instances of misinformation found on a social media platform leaves two key questions unanswered: How likely are users to encounter misinformation, and are certain users especially likely to be affected by misinformation? These questions are the denominator problem and the distribution problem.
The COVID-19 misinformation study, “Facebook’s Algorithm: a Major Threat to Public Health”, published by public interest advocacy group Avaaz in August 2020, reported that sources that frequently shared health misinformation — 82 websites and 42 Facebook pages — had an estimated total reach of 3.8 billion views in a year.
At first glance, that’s a stunningly large number. But it’s important to remember that this is the numerator. To understand what 3.8 billion views in a year means, you also have to calculate the denominator. The numerator is the part of a fraction above the line, which is divided by the part of the fraction below line, the denominator.
Getting some perspective
One possible denominator is 2.9 billion monthly active Facebook users, in which case, on average, every Facebook user has been exposed to at least one piece of information from these health misinformation sources. But these are 3.8 billion content views, not discrete users. How many pieces of information does the average Facebook user encounter in a year? Facebook does not disclose that information.
Without knowing the denominator, a numerator doesn’t tell you very much. The Conversation U.S., CC BY-ND
Market researchers estimate that Facebook users spend from 19 minutes a day to 38 minutes a day on the platform. If the 1.93 billion daily active users of Facebook see an average of 10 posts in their daily sessions – a very conservative estimate – the denominator for that 3.8 billion pieces of information per year is 7.044 trillion (1.93 billion daily users times 10 daily posts times 365 days in a year). This means roughly 0.05% of content on Facebook is posts by these suspect Facebook pages.
The 3.8 billion views figure encompasses all content published on these pages, including innocuous health content, so the proportion of Facebook posts that are health misinformation is smaller than one-twentieth of a percent.
Is it worrying that there’s enough misinformation on Facebook that everyone has likely encountered at least one instance? Or is it reassuring that 99.95% of what’s shared on Facebook is not from the sites Avaaz warns about? Neither.
Misinformation distribution
In addition to estimating a denominator, it’s also important to consider the distribution of this information. Is everyone on Facebook equally likely to encounter health misinformation? Or are people who identify as anti-vaccine or who seek out “alternative health” information more likely to encounter this type of misinformation?
Another social media study focusing on extremist content on YouTube offers a method for understanding the distribution of misinformation. Using browser data from 915 web users, an Anti-Defamation League team recruited a large, demographically diverse sample of U.S. web users and oversampled two groups: heavy users of YouTube, and individuals who showed strong negative racial or gender biases in a set of questions asked by the investigators. Oversampling is surveying a small subset of a population more than its proportion of the population to better record data about the subset.
The researchers found that 9.2% of participants viewed at least one video from an extremist channel, and 22.1% viewed at least one video from an alternative channel, during the months covered by the study. An important piece of context to note: A small group of people were responsible for most views of these videos. And more than 90% of views of extremist or “alternative” videos were by people who reported a high level of racial or gender resentment on the pre-study survey.
While roughly 1 in 10 people found extremist content on YouTube and 2 in 10 found content from right-wing provocateurs, most people who encountered such content “bounced off” it and went elsewhere. The group that found extremist content and sought more of it were people who presumably had an interest: people with strong racist and sexist attitudes.
The authors concluded that “consumption of this potentially harmful content is instead concentrated among Americans who are already high in racial resentment,” and that YouTube’s algorithms may reinforce this pattern. In other words, just knowing the fraction of users who encounter extreme content doesn’t tell you how many people are consuming it. For that, you need to know the distribution as well.
Superspreaders or whack-a-mole?
A widely publicized study from the anti-hate speech advocacy group Center for Countering Digital Hate titled Pandemic Profiteers showed that of 30 anti-vaccine Facebook groups examined, 12 anti-vaccine celebrities were responsible for 70% of the content circulated in these groups, and the three most prominent were responsible for nearly half. But again, it’s critical to ask about denominators: How many anti-vaccine groups are hosted on Facebook? And what percent of Facebook users encounter the sort of information shared in these groups?
Without information about denominators and distribution, the study reveals something interesting about these 30 anti-vaccine Facebook groups, but nothing about medical misinformation on Facebook as a whole.
These types of studies raise the question, “If researchers can find this content, why can’t the social media platforms identify it and remove it?” The Pandemic Profiteers study, which implies that Facebook could solve 70% of the medical misinformation problem by deleting only a dozen accounts, explicitly advocates for the deplatforming of these dealers of disinformation. However, I found that 10 of the 12 anti-vaccine influencers featured in the study have already been removed by Facebook.
Consider Del Bigtree, one of the three most prominent spreaders of vaccination disinformation on Facebook. The problem is not that Bigtree is recruiting new anti-vaccine followers on Facebook; it’s that Facebook users follow Bigtree on other websites and bring his content into their Facebook communities. It’s not 12 individuals and groups posting health misinformation online – it’s likely thousands of individual Facebook users sharing misinformation found elsewhere on the web, featuring these dozen people. It’s much harder to ban thousands of Facebook users than it is to ban 12 anti-vaccine celebrities.
This is why questions of denominator and distribution are critical to understanding misinformation online. Denominator and distribution allow researchers to ask how common or rare behaviors are online, and who engages in those behaviors. If millions of users are each encountering occasional bits of medical misinformation, warning labels might be an effective intervention. But if medical misinformation is consumed mostly by a smaller group that’s actively seeking out and sharing this content, those warning labels are most likely useless.
Trying to understand misinformation by counting it, without considering denominators or distribution, is what happens when good intentions collide with poor tools. No social media platform makes it possible for researchers to accurately calculate how prominent a particular piece of content is across its platform.
Facebook restricts most researchers to its Crowdtangle tool, which shares information about content engagement, but this is not the same as content views. Twitter explicitly prohibits researchers from calculating a denominator, either the number of Twitter users or the number of tweets shared in a day. YouTube makes it so difficult to find out how many videos are hosted on their service that Google routinely asks interview candidates to estimate the number of YouTube videos hosted to evaluate their quantitative skills.
As the societal impacts of social media become more prominent, pressure on the big tech platforms to release more data about their users and their content is likely to increase. If those companies respond by increasing the amount of information that researchers can access, look very closely: Will they let researchers study the denominator and the distribution of content online? And if not, are they afraid of what researchers will find?
Above: Photo Collage / Lynxotic / Greta Thunberg / Instagram
Political failures and frustration rising
It all started in September 2021 when Greta went to the Youth for Climate Summit in Rome. Her now legendary “blah blah blah” speech spawned 1000’s Memes and remixes and began a new barrage of media savvy Guerrilla marketing for the planet…
Fortunately for the rest of us, Greta is back, Big Time. I seems as if she’s decided to vent in a Creative and, at times, incredibly hilarious way.
Next, footage of the 18 year old activist went viral, as she was shouting in a crowd, “shove your climate crisis up your arse” The climate activist joked that she would adopt a “net zero” approach to her cursing.
She posted a response to her five million followers on Twitter: “I am pleased to announce that I’ve decided to go net-zero on swear words and bad language.
In the event that I should say something inappropriate I pledge to compensate that by saying something nice” A follower asked Thunberg:
“would you commit to reaching net-zero bad language by 2050?”
She replied: “No, by 2052 with a 39.78% reduction by 2034”
A seasoned spokes-person with a challenge ahead
Greta was brilliantly skewering companies, individuals and those who claim they are being environmentally friendly, simply because they pay for carbon credits to offset the carbon they are emitting.
More recent quotes include: “It is not a secret that COP26 is a failure,” she told the thousands of people at the protest. “This is no longer a climate conference. This is now a global greenwashing festival.” It’s as if her frustration has reached a boiling point, along with many of us, and in her words; “Hope always comes from the people”
According to the SEC, Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina, then chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, had material nonpublic information about coronavirus impact. He and his brother-in-law dumped stock before the market dropped in March 2020.
After Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina dumped more than $1.6 million in stocks in February 2020 a week before the coronavirus market crash, he called his brother-in-law, according to a new Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
They talked for 50 seconds.
Burr, according to the SEC, had material nonpublic information regarding the incoming economic impact of coronavirus.
The very next minute, Burr’s brother-in-law, Gerald Fauth, called his broker.
ProPublica previously reported that Fauth, a member of the National Mediation Board, had dumped stock the same day Burr did. But it was previously unknown that Burr and Fauth spoke that day, and that their contact came just before Fauth began the process of dumping stock himself.
The revelations come as part of an effort by the SEC to force Fauth to comply with a subpoena that the agency said he has stonewalled for more than a year, and which was filed not long after ProPublica’s story.
In the filings, the SEC also revealed that there is an ongoing insider trading investigation into both Burr and Fauth’s trades.
It had previously been reported that federal prosecutors had decided not to charge Burr.
Burr’s spokesperson did not immediately respond to questions. Fauth’s lawyer and the SEC did not respond to questions. Fauth hung up on a ProPublica reporter.
According to the SEC, Fauth has cited a medical condition for why he cannot comply with the subpoena, even as he has been healthy enough to continue his duties at the National Mediation Board. In its filings, the SEC accuses Fauth of engaging in “a relentless battle” to dodge the subpoena.
In 2017, President Donald Trump appointed Fauth to the three-person board, a federal agency that facilitates labor-management relations within the nation’s railroad and airline industries. President Joe Biden reappointed him to the board.
On the day he received the call from Burr, Fauth sold between $97,000 and $280,000 worth of shares in six companies — including several that were hit particularly hard in the market swoon and economic downturn. According to the SEC, the first broker he called after hearing from Burr was out of the office, so he immediately called another broker to execute the trades.
In its filings, the SEC also alleges, for the first time, that Burr had material nonpublic information about the economic impact of the coming coronavirus crisis, based on his role at the time as chairman of the intelligence committee, as a member of the health committee and through former staffers who were directing key aspects of the government response to the virus.
The week after the trades, the market began its crash, falling by more than 30% in the subsequent month.
Burr came under scrutiny after ProPublica reported that he sold off a significant percentage of his stocks shortly before the market tanked, unloading between $628,000 and $1.72 million of his holdings on Feb. 13 in 33 separate transactions. The precise amount of his stock sales, more than $1.6 million, is also a new detail from this week’s SEC filings. In his roles on the intelligence and health committees, Burr had access to the government’s most highly classified information about threats to America’s security and public health concerns.
Before his sell-off, Burr had assured the public that the federal government was well prepared to handle the virus. In a Feb. 7 op-ed that he co-authored with another senator, he said “the United States today is better prepared than ever before to face emerging public health threats, like the coronavirus.”
That month, however, according to a recording obtained by NPR, Burr had given a VIP group at an exclusive social club a much more dire preview of the economic impact of the coronavirus, warning it could curtail business travel, cause schools to be closed and result in the military mobilizing to compensate for overwhelmed hospitals.
Burr defended his actions, saying he relied solely on public information, including CNBC reports, to inform his trades and did not rely on information he obtained as a senator.
Alice Fisher, Burr’s attorney, told ProPublica at the time that “Sen. Burr participated in the stock market based on public information and he did not coordinate his decision to trade on Feb. 13 with Mr. Fauth.”
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
“Institutions around the world must step up now and commit to joining the divest-invest movement before it is too late—for them, for the economy, and for the world.”
Over the past decade, nearly 1,500 investors and institutions controlling almost $40 trillion in assets have committed to divesting from fossil fuels—a remarkable achievement that climate campaigners applauded Tuesday, while warning that further commitments and action remain crucial.
“Divestment has helped rub much of the shine off what was once the planet’s dominant industry. If money talks, $40 trillion makes a lot of noise.”
“Amidst a depressing era in the race against climate change—with killer fires and titanic storms, political stalemate, and corporate greenwashing—the fossil fuel divestment movement is a source for tremendous optimism,” states a new report—entitledInvest-Divest 2021: A Decade of Progress Toward a Just Climate Future—published Tuesday.
“Ten years in, the divestment movement has grown to become a major global influence on energy policy,” the publication continues. “There are now 1,485 institutions publicly committed to at least some form of fossil fuel divestment, representing an enormous $39.2 trillion of assets under management. That’s as if the two biggest economies in the world, the United States and China, combined, chose to divest from fossil fuels.”
The paper—a joint effort between the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, Stand.earth, C40, and the Wallace Global Fund—comes on the eve of the United Nations Climate Conference in Glasgow, and notes that the divestment movement “has grown so large that it is now helping hold fossil fuel companies accountable for the true cost of their unregulated carbon pollution.”
🚨 Today a new report “Invest-Divest '21: A Decade of Progress Towards a Just Climate Future”. Divestment of €33,7 trillion (!) from fossil fuels, this is more than the economies of the U.S. & China combined. A game-changing new milestone! ➡️https://t.co/j8ISxNUwgw (1/2) #COP26pic.twitter.com/URV3KDfOiD
Since the movement’s first summary report in 2014, the amount of total assets publicly committed to divestment has grown by over 75,000%. The number of institutional commitments to divestment has grown by 720% in that time, including a 49% increase in just the three years since the movement’s most recent report. The true amount of money being pulled out from fossil fuels is almost certainly larger since not all divestment commitments are made public.
The movement has now expanded far beyond its origins as a student-driven effort on college campuses. Divestment campaigners now target cities, states, foundations, banks, investment firms, and any player who participates in the global investment pool.
“Major new divestment commitments from iconic institutions have arrived in a rush over just a few months in late 2021,” the report notes, “including Harvard University, Dutch and Canadian pension fund giants PME and CDPQ, French public bank La Banque Postale, the U.S. city of Baltimore, and the Ford and MacArthur Foundations.”
Underscoring the paper’s assertion, ABP, Europe’s largest pension fund announced Tuesday that it would stop investing in fossil fuel producers.
“Divestment remains a critical strategy for the climate movement,” the publication states. “It must be combined with an accelerated push for investment in a just transition to a clean, renewable energy future if the world is to avoid a future of worsening human injustice and irreversible ecological damage. Financial arguments against divest-invest no longer hold water.”
Bill McKibben, co-founder of the climate action group 350.org, wrote in a Tuesday New York Times op-ed that “divestment has helped rub much of the shine off what was once the planet’s dominant industry. If money talks, $40 trillion makes a lot of noise.”
“This movement will keep growing, and keep depriving Big Oil of both its social license and its access to easy capital,” McKibben said in a separate statement introducing the new report.
Huge new report today: Divestment commitments have now hit $39.42 trillion, or more than the combined GDP of US and China. Such thanks to the millions of people who made this happenhttps://t.co/pI0YFmAw93
The report’s authors contend that institutional investors must agree to three principles “if they want to be on the right side of history and humanity”:
Immediately and publicly commit to fully divesting from and stopping all financing of coal, oil, and gas companies and assets;
Immediately invest at least 5% of their assets in climate solutions, doubling to 10% by 2030—including investments in renewable energy systems, universal energy access, and a just transition for communities and workers—while holding companies accountable to respecting Indigenous and other human rights and environmental standards; and
Adopting net-zero plans that both immediately cut investments in fossil fuels and ensure that all other assets in their portfolio develop transition plans that reduce absolute emissions by 50% before 2030.
“Institutional investors everywhere are beginning to come to terms with the danger that fossil fuels pose to their investment portfolios, their communities, and their constituencies,” the report states. “This realization is important but it is not enough. Institutions around the world must step up now and commit to joining the divest-invest movement before it is too late—for them, for the economy, and for the world.”
“Societies, economies, and the climate are all changing,” the paper concludes. “The financial world will have to change with them.”
We went wild when we got our first divestment commitment: Unity College’s $13.5 million endowment.
The idea that the movement has now grown to 1,485 institutions representing $39.2 TRILLION is mind-blowing. https://t.co/mTFxihBKBl
Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr., president and CEO of Hip Hop Caucus, said in a statement that “the climate crisis is here, and so are climate solutions. We know communities of color are disproportionately impacted by the climate crisis here in the U.S. and across the world. In order to create a just future, we must divest from fossil fuels and invest in communities on the frontlines of the climate crisis.”
“It is not enough to divest from only some fossil fuels or with only some of your portfolio—all investors must immediately divest all fossil fuels from all of their portfolio, while investing in climate solutions.”
Yearwood added that “over 10 years the divest-invest movement has become one of the most powerful global forces in a just transition to a clean energy future.”
Ellen Dorsey, executive director of the Wallace Global Fund, said that “the activist-driven divestment movement has yielded unprecedented and historic results in moving tens of trillions of dollars out of the industry driving the climate crises and exposing its failing business model.”
“But investors need to do more,” she argued. “It is not enough to divest from only some fossil fuels or with only some of your portfolio—all investors must immediately divest all fossil fuels from all of their portfolio, while investing in climate solutions with at least 5% of their portfolios, scaling to 10% rapidly.”
“Mission investors have a unique role to play to ensure the energy transition is a just one and that all people have access to safe, clean and affordable energy by 2030,” Dorsey added. “To do anything less does not address the scale or pace of this climate crisis.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by BRETT WILKINS and republished under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
Small businesses and individuals say that in order to sell their products online in the U.S., they have to be on Amazon and—given the millions of products on its virtual shelves at any moment—they have to get a high ranking from Amazon’s product search engine or buy sponsored listings.
Amazon transitioned from digital retailer to sales platform in 2000, when it took a page from eBay and started allowing individuals and companies to sell through its website. This led to explosive sales growth (though the company reported only small profits overall, choosing to reinvest its profits for most of its existence). Amazon encouraged these “third-party sellers” with add-on services like storage, shipping, and advertising. Third-party sellers now account for 58 percent of sales on Amazon.
Even as sellers saw their revenues grow, they started to suspect that Amazon was using their nonpublic sales information to stock and sell similar products, often for less money.
Indeed, Amazon has been investing in creating products sold under its own brand names since at least 2007. Since 2017, it has dramatically expanded its catalog of private-label brands (which are trademarked by Amazon and its partners) and its list of exclusive products (developed by third-party companies who agree to sell them only on Amazon). The company refers to both as “our brands” in various parts of its website.
We found that Amazon has now registered trademarks for more than 150 private-label brands, and market research firm TJI Research estimated the number of brands developed by others but sold exclusively on Amazon.com at 598 in 2019. Some of its house brand names signal to buyers that they are part of the company—such as Amazon Basics, Amazon Essentials, and Amazon Commercial.
But hundreds of others carry labels that do not clearly indicate that they belong to the online retail giant—including Goodthreads, Lark & Ro, Austin Mill, Whole Paws, Afterthought, Truity, find., Fetch, Mr. Beams, Happy Belly, Mama Bear, Wag, Solimo, and The Portland Plaid Co.
Amazon says it sold $3 billion in private-label goods in 2019, representing just one percent of sales on the platform, but does not specify which brands are included in that estimate. Analysts with SunTrust Robinson Humphrey estimated that Amazon sold five times as much, $15.6 billion of private-label goods in 2019, including brands owned by Whole Foods, and that the figure will reach $31 billion by 2022.
The result is that sellers now not only compete against each other for placement in Amazon search results but also increasingly against Amazon’s own in-house brands and exclusives. According to a to a 2021 report by JungleScout, 50 percent of sellers say Amazon’s products directly compete with theirs.
We sought to investigate how Amazon treats its own products in search results. These are proprietary devices, private labels, and exclusive-to-Amazon brands it considers “our brands.”
To do so, we started by developing a list of 3,492 popular product searches, ran those searches on desktop (without logging in), and analyzed the first page of results.
We found that in searches that contained Amazon brand and exclusive products, the company routinely put them first, above those from competing brands with better ratings and more reviews on Amazon.
Furthermore, we trained supervised machine learning classifiers and found that being an Amazon brand or exclusive was a significantly more important factor in being selected by Amazon for the number one spot than star ratings (a proxy for quality), review quantity (a proxy for sales volume), and any of the other four factors we tested. We did not analyze the potential effect of price on ranking because unit sizes were not standard, affecting price. In addition, similar products can vary by factors that affect price, such as materials and workmanship, for which we also could not control.
Importantly, we found that knowing only whether a product was an Amazon brand or not could predict whether the product got the top spot 70 percent of the time.
In a nationally representative survey we commissioned, only 17 percent of respondents said they expect the determining factor behind whether Amazon places a product first is whether it owns the brand. About half (49 percent) said they thought the products Amazon placed in the number one spot were the best-selling, best-rated, or had the lowest price. The remaining 33 percent said they didn’t know how Amazon ranked products.
We found that Amazon disproportionately placed its own products in the top search result. Despite making up only 5.8 percent of products in our sample, Amazon gave its own products and exclusives the number one spot 19.5 percent of the time overall. By comparison, competing brands (those that are not Amazon brands or exclusive products) were given the number one spot at a nearly identical rate but comprised more than 13 times as many products at 76.9 percent.
Most of the Amazon brand and exclusive products that the company put in the number one spot, but not all—83.9 percent—were labeled “featured from our brands” and carried the phrase “sponsored result” in the source code (as well as being part of a grid labeled “search results” in the source code). They were not marked “sponsored” to shoppers.
In a short, written statement, Amazon spokesperson Nell Rona said that the company does not favor its brands in search results and that it considers “featured from our brands” listings as “merchandising placements” and not “search results,” despite their presence in the search results grid. Rona said these listings are not advertisements, and declined to answer dozens of other questions.
Overall, 37.4 percent of Amazon brand or exclusive products in search results in our sample were neither labeled as “our brands” nor carried a name widely associated with the company, such as AmazonBasics or Whole Foods. That left buyers unaware that they were buying an Amazon brand or exclusive-to-Amazon product.
Nearly nine-in-10 U.S. adults who responded to our survey were unable to identify Amazon’s highest-selling private label brands (Pinzon, Solimo, and Goodthreads), and only 51 percent were aware that Whole Foods is an Amazon-owned brand.
Rona said Amazon identifies its products by including the words “Amazon brand” on the products page, among a list of the item’s features, and sometimes in the listing title. We only found this to be the case in 23 percent of products in our sample that were Amazon-owned brands.
Comparing product pages three months apart, we found that they were less dynamic than they used to be. The default seller among products with multiple merchants only changed in 23.5 percent of products in our data. This was significantly less often than a comparable study from five years ago.
Background
Amazon and third-party sellers have a tense symbiosis. Amazon founder and chairman Jeff Bezos has acknowledged the importance of sellers to the company’s bottom line but also calls them competitors. Amazon provides shipping, inventory management, and other services, he wrote, that “helped independent sellers compete against our first-party business” to begin with. Sellers say Amazon’s fees cut deep into their margins but they can’t get the same volume of sales anywhere else.
Antitrust regulators in Europe, Asia, and North America have been examining Amazon’s treatment of third-party sellers.
The European Commission announced an antitrust investigation in 2019, alleging Amazon used third-party seller data to inform its own sales decisions. The commission also announced a separate investigation in 2020 into whether Amazon gives preference to its own listings and to third-party sellers that use its shipping services over other sellers. Last year, India’s antitrust regulator announced an investigation into alleged anti-competitive practices by Amazon, including preferential treatment for some sellers. And in June 2021, U.S. lawmakers introduced the American Choice and Innovation Online Act, which prohibits large platforms from advantaging themselves in their own marketplaces or using nonpublic data generated by business conducted on their platform. Authorities in Germany and Canada are investigating Amazon’s selling conditions for third-party sellers, and the attorney general for Washington, D.C., filed a lawsuit in May 2021 that accuses Amazon of overly restrictive requirements for third-party sellers.
Also last year, U.S. lawmakers pressed Bezos on his treatment of third-party sellers during a congressional hearing that was part of an antitrust investigation into the four major tech companies. Rep. Lucy McBath, a Democrat from Georgia, told Bezos, “We’ve interviewed many small businesses, and they use the words like ‘bullying,’ ‘fear,’ and ‘panic’ to describe their relationship with Amazon.” The resulting report produced by the subcommittee indicated Amazon was well aware of its power over third-party sellers, citing an internal Amazon document that “suggests the company can increase fees to third-party sellers without concern for them switching to another marketplace.”
Journalists and researchers have documented instances of Amazon promoting its house brands over competitors’. In 2016, Capitol Forum, a subscription news service focused on antitrust issues, examined hundreds of listings and found that Amazon “prioritizes its own clothing brands on the promotional carousel labeled ‘Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought’ ” on product pages. Capitol Forum said Amazon did not respond to its request for comment.
A study titled “When the Umpire is also a Player: Bias in Private Label Product Recommendations on E-commerce Marketplaces,” presented at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency in March 2021, examined how Amazon’s private-label brands performed in “related products” recommendations on product pages for backpacks and batteries. The researchers said they found that “sponsored recommendations are significantly more biased toward Amazon private label products compared to organic recommendations.”
In June 2020, ProPublica reported that Amazon was reserving the top spot in search results for its own brands across dozens of search terms, labeling it “featured from our brands” and shutting others out. An Amazon spokesperson told ProPublica at the time that the move was a “normal part of retail that’s happened for decades.”
Our investigation is the first study to use thousands of search queries to test how Amazon’s house brands rank in search results—and to use machine learning classifiers to determine whether sales or quality appeared to be predictive of which products Amazon placed first in search results.
In addition, we used a multipronged approach to identify Amazon house brands and exclusives, building a data set of 137,428 unique products on Amazon, which is available in our GitHub. We were unable to find any such publicly accessible dataset when we began our investigation.
Methodology: Data Collection
Sourcing Product Search Queries
To measure how Amazon’s search engine ranked Amazon’s own products relative to competing brands, we needed a list of common queries that reflect what real people search. We built the dataset from top searches from U.S. e-commerce retailers, using two sources.
The first was autocomplete queries on Amazon.com’s and Walmart.com’s product search bars. We cycled through each letter of the alphabet (A–Z) as well as numbers ranging from 0 to 19 and saved the suggested search queries presented by the autocomplete algorithm. This process yielded 7,696 queries from Amazon.com and 3,806 queries from Walmart.com.
We then gathered the most popular searches reported by Amazon via its Seller Central hub. We collected the top 300 searches between Q1 and Q3 2020 for the Amazon categories “Softlines,” “Grocery,” “Automotive,” “Toys,” “Office Products,” “Beauty,” “Baby,” “Electronics,” and “Amazon.com.” This provided 2,700 unique searches.
Combining the autocomplete queries and seller-central queries resulted in 11,342 unique “top search” queries.
Collecting Search Results
We created a Firefox desktop emulator using Selenium. The emulator visited Amazon.com and made each of the 11,342 searches on Jan. 21, 2021. The search emulator was forwarded through IP addresses in a single location, Washington, D.C., in order to reduce variation in search results (which typically vary by location).
We saved a screenshot of the first page of search results as well as the HTML source code. (Examples of screenshots and source code for search results are available on GitHub.)
In the source code of product search result pages, Amazon titles some listings with the data field “s-search-result.” This is what we are calling search results in our data. Amazon does serve other products on the search results page in advertising and other promotional carousels, including “editorial picks” and “top rated from our brands,” but those do not appear in every result (at most a third of our sample), and they are not part of the grid that Amazon labels search results.
On desktop, the majority of Amazon-labeled “search results” in our data were delivered in uniform 60-product positions (four per column for 15 rows, though Amazon narrows the width to three columns on smaller screens). Some searches returned fewer than 60 products, but none returned more. A minority (about one in 10) of searches in our data returned 22 products or fewer, delivered in a single column, one item per row. This happened for some electronics searches but never in other search categories.
Because we were seeking to analyze how Amazon ranks its own products relative to competing brands’ products, we further limited our analysis to search results that contained Amazon brands and exclusives on the first page. Of the 11,342 top searches, slightly less than three in 10 (30.8 percent) contained this type of product on the first page. We used the resulting 3,492 top searches for our analysis.
Identifying Amazon’s Brands and Exclusives
We were unable to find a public database of Amazon brand and exclusive products, so we had to build one.
We started with the search pages themselves. On many (but not all), Amazon provides a filter on the left-hand side, allowing shoppers to limit the search to “our brands,” which Amazon says lists only its private label products and “a curated selection of brands exclusively sold on Amazon.”
We collected each of those “our brand” results for each query, saving a screenshot and the source code, also on Jan. 21, 2021.
We then discovered an undocumented API that yields all Amazon “our brands” products for any given search. We ran all 11,342 search terms through this API and saved those responses as well. (API responses are available on GitHub.)
Both the search emulator and API requests were forwarded through IP addresses in Washington, D.C.
Strangely, Amazon does not identify proprietary electronics, including Kindle readers and Ring doorbells, when a shopper filters a search result to list only Amazon’s “our brands.” To identify those, we also gathered products Amazon listed as best sellers in the category “Amazon Devices & Accessories.”
Together, all three sources yielded a dataset of 137,428 unique products, identified by their 10-character ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number). This dataset of Amazon’s proprietary devices, private label, and exclusive products is available on GitHub.
It is the largest and most comprehensive open access dataset of Amazon brand and Amazon-exclusive products we’ve seen, and yet we know it is not complete. Amazon told Congress in July 2019 that at that time it sold approximately 158,000 products from its own brands.
Collecting Product Pages
In addition to the above, we collected the individual product pages for the 125,769 products that appeared in the first page of our 3,492 top searches in order to analyze the buy box information. The buy box displays the price, return policy, default seller, and default shipper for a product.
To gather the product pages, we used Amazon Web Services and the same Selenium emulator we made for collecting the search result pages. The emulator visited the hyperlink for each product and saved a screenshot and the source code.
We collected these pages on Feb. 3–6 and Feb. 17–18, a few weeks after we scraped the search result pages. To determine the effects of the delay, we analyzed how often a subsample of buy boxes’ default sellers and shippers flipped between Amazon and third parties after a similar lag and found they remained largely unchanged (see more in Limitations).
Product Characteristics
We asked up to four questions of every product listing in order to identify certain characteristics and used this to produce the categories we used in our analysis.
is_sponsored: Is the listing a paid placement?
is_amazon: Is the listing for an Amazon brand or exclusive?
is_shipped_by_amazon: Does the default seller of the product (the “buy box”) use Amazon to ship the listed product?
is_sold_by_amazon: Is the default seller of the product Amazon?
Sponsored products (is_sponsored) are the most straightforward: Amazon labels them “sponsored.” If a product in the Amazon-labeled search results is not sponsored, we consider it “organic.” We only identified products with subsequent features if they were organic.
We identified an organic product as an Amazon brand or exclusive (is_amazon) when it matched one of the 137,428 Amazon ASINs we collected. If it didn’t match, we considered it a “competing brand.”
We identified a product as is_amazon_sold if the “sold by” text in the buy box contained “Amazon,” “Whole Foods,” or “Zappos” (which is owned by Amazon). If it didn’t, we identified the product as “Third-Party Sold.”
We identified a product as is_amazon_shipped if the buy box shipper information contained “Amazon” (including “Amazon Prime,” “Amazon Fresh,” and “Fulfilled by Amazon”), “Whole Foods,” or “Zappos” (which is owned by Amazon). If it didn’t contain Amazon, we identified products as “Third-Party Shipped.”
We use these features to train and evaluate predictive classifiers (see Random Forest Analysis) as well as produce product categories in our ranking analysis (see the following section).
Most of the categories have a direct relationship with the features they are named after.
We categorized products as “Sponsored” if we identified them as is_sponsored. Similarly, we categorized products as “Amazon Brands” and exclusives if they are organic and is_amazon, and “Competing Brands” if the products are organic and not is_amazon.
We categorized organic products as entirely “Unaffiliated” if they did not meet the criteria for is_amazon, is_amazon_sold, and is_amazon_shipped. In other words, these are competing brands that are sold and shipped by third-party sellers.
The features and categories we identified are hierarchical and overlap. Their relationships are summarized in the diagram below.
Data Analysis
Ranking Analysis: Who Comes Out on Top?
We analyzed the rate of products that received the top search result relative to the proportion of products of the same category that appeared in our sample. We found that Amazon brands and exclusives were disproportionately given the number one search result relative to their small proportion among all products.
We used two straightforward measures for our analysis. First, we calculated a population metric using the percentage of products belonging to each category among products from all the search pages. To do this, we divided the number of products per category that occupy search result slots compared to all product slots in our sample. This included duplicates.
We then calculated an incidence rate for how frequently Amazon gave products in each category the coveted first spot in search results. We did this by dividing the number of searches in each category in the top spot by the total number of searches in our sample (with at least one product). (A table of each of these metrics by category appears in our GitHub and in “Supplementary datasets.”)
We chose to focus on that top left spot because Amazon changes the number of items across the first row based on screen size, and some searches return only a single item per row, so the top left spot is the only one to remain the same across all search results in our data.
In a majority of the searches in our data, 59.7 percent, Amazon sold the top spot to a sponsored product (17.3 percent of all product slots). The bulk of our analysis concerns the remaining 40.3 percent.
When we looked at all searches, Amazon gave its own products the number one spot 19.5 percent of the time even though this category made up only 5.8 percent of products in our sample.
Amazon gave competing brands the number one spot at a nearly identical rate (20.8 percent of the time), but these cover more than 13 times the proportion of products in our sample (76.9 percent).
Amazon gave entirely unaffiliated products (competing brands that were sold and shipped by third-party sellers) the top spot 4.2 percent of the time, but these products made up 5.8 percent of all products in our sample.
The only organic (nonsponsored) category that Amazon placed in the number one spot at a rate that was greater than the proportion of its products in the sample was its own brands and exclusives.
About eight in 10 (83.9 percent) of the Amazon brands or exclusives that Amazon placed in the top spot were labeled “featured from our brands.” These are identified as part of Amazon’s “search results” and are not marked “sponsored.” However, the source code for those labeled results contained information that was the same as sponsored product listings (data-component-type=”sp-sponsored-result”). These Amazon brand and exclusive brand products were not labeled as “sponsored” for shoppers.
Where Are Products Placed?
In addition to the top spot, we calculated how often Amazon placed each type of product in each search result position down the page (1–60). All searches have a number one spot but do not always return 60 results, so we always calculated this rate using the number of searches with that product spot as the denominator. Sponsored results that are part of search results are counted in the denominator of the rates.
(As mentioned earlier, we did not include promotional and advertising carousels and modules because these are not part of the grid labeled “search results” in the metadata and none appeared in the same place in a majority of search results.)
Amazon placed its own products and exclusives in the number one spot 3.5 times more frequently than in any other position on the search page.
It placed competing brands (including those it sells itself) everywhere except the top (1) and bottom (15) rows of the search page. Competing brands appeared only sparsely where sponsored products were common in search results (rows 4–5 and 8–9). The company placed entirely unaffiliated products—meaning a competitor’s brand that was both sold and shipped by a third party—primarily in the lower rows (9–13).
In 59.7 percent of searches in our sample, Amazon gave the number one spot to sponsored products. When Amazon returned a 15th row, it always listed sponsored products there, too.
Not Always Labeled
Amazon only identified 42 percent of its brands and exclusives to the shopper with a disclosure label (e.g., “featured from our brands,” “Amazon brand,” or “Amazon exclusive”). Of the Amazon brand and exclusive products in our sample, 28.8 percent were from a brand many people (but not all) would understand to be a private Amazon label, such as “Whole Foods,” “Amazon Basics,” or “Amazon Essentials.” Some were both labeled and from a better-known Amazon brand. For the remaining 37.4 percent, we found that buyers were not informed that they would be purchasing an Amazon brand or exclusive.
When the same product that is an Amazon brand or exclusive appeared more than once in the same search, we considered it labeled if any of the listings were labeled. This gives Amazon the benefit of the doubt by assuming that a customer will understand that the disclaimer applies to duplicate listings. Therefore, our metrics for disclosure are the lower bound.
Duplicates
Amazon gave its own products more than one spot in search results in roughly one in 10 (9.2 percent of) searches, not including other potential duplicates in promotional carousels. It did not give competing brands’ products more than one spot for organic search results.
Survey Results
We commissioned the market research group YouGov to conduct a nationally representative survey of 1,000 U.S. adults on the internet, to contextualize our findings. It revealed that 76 percent of respondents correctly identified Amazon Basics as being owned by Amazon and 51 percent correctly identified Whole Foods.
The vast majority of respondents, however, could not identify the company’s top-selling house brands that did not contain the words “Amazon” or “Whole Foods” in their name. Ninety percent did not recognize Solimo as an Amazon brand, and 89 percent did not know Goodthreads is owned by Amazon. Other top-selling brands, like Daily Ritual, Lark & Ro, and Pinzon were not recognized by 94 percent of respondents as Amazon brands.
We also asked respondents what trait defines the top-ranked products in Amazon search results. Few expected it to be based solely on being an Amazon brand. More than 21 percent of respondents thought the top-ranked product would be “the best seller,” 17 percent thought it was “the best rated,” 11 percent thought it was “the lowest price,” and 33 percent of respondents were “not sure.” Only 17 percent thought the number one listed item was “a product from one of Amazon’s brands.”
Quality and Sales Factors
We compared the star ratings (a rough proxy for quality) and number of reviews (a rough proxy for sales volume) of the Amazon Brands that the company placed in the number one spot on the product search results page with other products on the same page.
We found that in two-thirds (65.3 percent) of the instances where Amazon placed its own products before competitor brands, the products that were Amazon brands and exclusives had lower star ratings than competing brands placed lower in the search results. Half of the time (51.7 percent) that the company placed its own products first, these items had fewer reviews than competing products the company chose to place lower on the search results page.
One in four (28.0 percent of) top-placed Amazon brands had both lower star ratings and fewer reviews than products from competing brands on the same page.
When we evaluated several predictive models, we found that features like star ratings and the number of reviews were not the most predictive features among products Amazon placed in the number one spot.
Random Forest Analysis
We tried to determine which features differentiate the first organic product on search results from the second organic product on the same page.
To do this, we created a categorical dataset of product comparisons and used it to train and evaluate several random forest models.
The product comparisons looked at differences in features that we had access to, and that seemed relevant to product rankings (like stars and reviews). We found that being an Amazon brand or exclusive was by far the most important feature, of the seven we tested, in Amazon’s decision to place a product in the number one versus number two spot in product search results.
How We Created Product Comparisons
We took our original dataset of 3,492 search results with at least one Amazon brand or exclusive, filtered out sponsored products, and generated a dataset of product comparisons. Each product comparison is between the number one product and number two product on the same search page. The random forest used these attributes to predict a yes or no (boolean) category: which product among the pair was given the top search result (placed_higher).
The product comparisons encode the differences in star ratings (stars_delta) and number of reviews (reviews_delta); whether the product appeared among the top three clicked products from one million popular searches in 2020 from Amazon Seller Central (is_top_clicked); and whether the product was sold by Amazon (is_amazon_sold), shipped by Amazon (is_amazon_shipped), or was an Amazon brand or exclusive (is_amazon). We also used a randomly generated number as a control (random_noise). Distributions of each of these features is available on GitHub.
While we had access to price information, we did not analyze its potential effect on ranking because price was not standardized per unit. We also had access to each product’s “best sellers rank” for the time period we collected product pages, but the same product could have various different rankings in different Amazon categories (e.g., #214 in Beauty & Personal Care and #3 in Bath Salts), making consistent comparisons impossible.
This produced a dataset of 1,415 product comparisons. (To see exactly how we created our training and validation dataset, see our GitHub.)
By creating this dataset of product comparisons, we were able to compare two products with one model and control for which features led to higher placement.
Why Random Forest?
A random forest combines many decision tree models, a technique we used in a previous Markup investigation into Allstate’s price increases. Decision trees work well at predicting categories with mixed data types, like those from our product comparisons.
Decision trees can, however, memorize or “overfit” the training data. When this happens, models can’t make good predictions on new data. Random forests are robust against overfitting and work by training a forest full of decision trees with random subsets of the data. The forest makes predictions by having each tree vote.
We used grid search with five-fold cross-validation to determine optimal hyperparameters (parameters we control versus those that arise from learning cycles): 500 decision trees in each forest, and a maximum of three questions each decision tree can ask the data. By asking more questions, each tree becomes deeper. But that also means that the trees are more likely to memorize the data. The more trees we train, the more resources it takes to run our experiment. Grid search trains and evaluates models with an exhaustive list of combinations of these hyperparameters to determine the best configuration.
Evaluating the Models
Our model correctly picked Amazon’s number-one-ranked product 73.2 percent of the time when all seven features were considered.
We systematically removed each feature and retrained and reevaluated the model (called an ablation study) in order to isolate the importance of each individual feature. We used the accuracy of the model trained on all seven features as a baseline to compare each newly evaluated model (see results in Change of Accuracy in table above).
When we did this, we saw that removing information about whether a product was an Amazon brand or exclusive (is_amazon) reduced the model’s ability to pick the right product by 9.7 percentage points (to 63.5 percent). This drop in performance was far greater than any other individual feature, suggesting that being an Amazon brand or exclusive was the most predictive feature among those we tested in determining which products Amazon placed in the first organic spot of search results.
To demonstrate the influence of Amazon brands and exclusives in another way, we trained a model with only is_amazon, and it correctly predicted the number one product 70.7 percent of the time. Every other standalone feature performed significantly worse, only picking the correct product between 49.3 (random_noise) and 61.5 (is_sold_by_amazon) percent of the time.
To a lesser extent, the number of reviews (reviews_delta) were also predictive of a product getting the number one spot. Removing this feature reduced the model’s performance by 3.3 percentage points.
The other six features were less informative when it came to getting the number one spot versus the number two spot. Performance of the random forest for every possible permutation of features is available in our GitHub.
These findings were consistent with ranking the feature importance from the random forest model trained on all features. This third approach also suggests that is_amazon is the most predictive feature for the random forest.
When we compared additional product pairs with the number one spot and those of lower-ranked products beyond just the number two spot, is_amazon remained the most predictive feature out of those we tested (results in our GitHub).
We used predictive models to show that being an Amazon brand or exclusive was the most influential feature among those we tested in determining which products Amazon chose to place at the top of search results.
Limitations
Search Data Limitations
The two datasets we created are small in comparison to the full catalog of products for sale on Amazon.com, for which there are no reliable estimates. However, we sought to examine searches and products that generate significant sales, not every product or every search.
We collected search data on desktop, so our analysis only applies to desktop searches. Amazon’s search results may differ on mobile, desktop, and the Amazon app.
Amazon’s search results can also vary by location. One example is the distance of the closest Whole Foods store and its inventory, which would affect any given person’s search for certain items. We collected the data using I.P. addresses in Washington, D.C., so our results are specific to that city.
And, according to an Amazon-authored report for IEEE Internet Computing, a journal published by a division of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Amazon personalizes offerings to buyers according to similar items they have already purchased or rated (called item-to-item collaborative filtering). Our searches were not made in the same session nor were we logged into an Amazon account with user history, so our results were not personalized. In the absence of personalization, Amazon defaults to “generally popular items.” This also means that we did not capture search results or product pages for Amazon Prime subscribers.
Product Page Data Limitations
Some products that compete with Amazon brand and exclusive products are sold by numerous sellers, including Amazon itself. A 2016 ProPublica investigation revealed that of a sample of 250 products, Amazon took the buy box for itself or gave it to vendors that paid for the “Fulfilled by Amazon” program in 75 percent of cases. The same year, researchers at Northeastern University tracked 1,000 best-selling products over six weeks and found that buy box winners changed for seven out of 10 products in their study.
For our main analysis, we did not seek to analyze which specific seller won the buy box but rather whether the seller or shipper during our snapshot was Amazon or a third party.
We captured product pages and their subsequent buy boxes in a snapshot of time between Feb. 3–6 and 17–18. Due to a technical problem, there was a two- to four-week delay between when we collected the searches and when we collected the product pages. This means that the seller and shipper of those products are only representative of searches made during that time and could have changed from the time we collected the searches to when we collected the product pages.
When we collected product pages in February, about 3.9 percent of them were no longer available or the product had been removed from the Amazon Marketplace altogether since we gathered the search pages in January. We removed these products from any calculations involving the seller or shipper.
To test the reliability of our product page data, we took a random sample, on May 13, 2021, of 2,500 of the 125,769 products we had collected in February 2021 and reran the product page scraper.
Some of the product pages were missing data: 6.1 percent were sold out, 1.6 percent were removed from Amazon’s marketplace, and another 3.4 percent no longer displayed a default seller who won the buy box. In these latter cases, Amazon provided a button to “See All Buying Options.” The missing data did not overall favor or disfavor Amazon but rather was consistent with the proportion of Amazon-sold products (30.2 compared to 27.1 percent) from the sample of products we recollected.
The remaining 2,103 products that had legible buy boxes (the vast majority) were largely unchanged. Only 16.1 percent of products changed default sellers. This included changes between Amazon and third-party sellers.
Product sellers changed from a third party to Amazon in 1.6 ± 0.5 percent of products, and from Amazon to a third party in 3.1 ± 0.7 percent of products (margins of error calculated with 95 percent confidence).
When it came to who shipped the product, the shipper went from a third party to Amazon in 2.9 ± 0.7 percent of products, and from Amazon to a third party in 6.6 ± 1.1 percent of products.
Because the buy box remained largely unchanged during a 12-week gap in this representative subsample of our data, we find that our buy box findings are reliable, despite the three- to four-week gap between when we gathered search results and product pages.
This seemed to signal a change from previous research. So we went further to determine whether the buy box had become more stable since the 2016 Northeastern University study. That study was limited to products with multiple sellers. When we did the same, it brought the sample size down to 1,209. Looking only at products with multiple sellers, we found Amazon changed the buy box seller for only 23.5 percent of products. In addition, among products with multiple sellers, Amazon gave itself the buy box for 40.0 percent of them.
For products with multiple sellers, the winning sellers changed from Amazon to a third party in 2.1 ± 0.8 percent of products and from a third party to Amazon in 4.4 ± 1.1 percent of products. Third-party sellers changed among themselves in 31.4 percent of products sold by third-party sellers. No individual third-party seller won more than 0.06 percent of the products with more than one seller.
Shippers changed from Amazon to a third-party in 2.3 ± 0.8 percent of products and from a third party to Amazon in 7.8 ± 1.5 percent of products.
Reviewing the product pages three months apart, we found that the default seller Amazon chose for the buy box when multiple merchants were available has become significantly less likely to change from five years ago.
Limitations Identifying Amazon Brands and Exclusive Products
Amazon’s “our brands” filter is incomplete. For instance, it listed only 70.3 percent of products that were tagged “featured from our brands” on the search page. In addition, Amazon did not include its proprietary electronics in the “our brands” filtered results when we gathered the data. The company declined to answer questions about why these were not included.
Because of this, we had to use three methods to collect our product database of Amazon brands and exclusives, and it’s possible we missed some products, particularly proprietary electronics.
Black Box Audit
Our investigation is a black box audit. We do not have access to Amazon’s source code or the data that powers Amazon’s search engine. There are likely factors Amazon uses in its ranking algorithm to which we do not have access, including return rates, click-through rates, and sales. We have some data from Amazon’s Seller Central hub about popular products and clicks, but this data is itself limited and did not cover all of the products in our searches.
For these reasons, our investigation focuses on available and clear metrics: how high categories of products are placed compared to their proportion of results, how well users review highly ranked products relative to other products, and how many reviews a product has garnered, which is a crude indication of sales.
Amazon’s Response
Amazon did not take issue with our analysis or data collection and declined to answer dozens of specific questions.
In a short, prepared statement sent via email, spokesperson Nell Rona said that the company considers “featured from our brands” listings as “merchandising placements,” and as such, the company does not consider them “search results.” Rona said these listings are not advertisements, which by law would need to be disclosed to shoppers. We found these listings were identified as “sponsored” in the source code and also part of a grid marked “search results” in the source code.
“We do not favor our store brand products through search,” Rona wrote.
“These merchandising placements are optimized for a customer’s experience and are shown based on a variety of signals,” Rona said. None of these were explained beyond “relevance to the customer’s shopping query.”
Regarding disclosing to customers about Amazon brands, Rona said they are identified as “Amazon brand” on the products page, and some carry that wording in the listing. We found this to be the case in only 23 percent of products that were Amazon-owned brands.
She said brands that are exclusive to Amazon would not carry that wording since they are not owned by Amazon.
Rona supplied a link to an Amazon blog post that mentions that its branded products made up about one percent of sales volume for physical goods and $3 billion of sales revenue in 2019. It is unclear whether brands exclusive to Amazon are included in those figures.
Conclusion
Our investigation revealed that Amazon gives its own products preference in the number one spot in search results even when competitors have more reviews and better star ratings. We also found that reviews and ratings were significantly less predictive of whether a product would get the number one spot than being an Amazon brand or exclusive.
In addition, we found that Amazon placed its own products and exclusives in the top spot in higher proportion than it appeared in the sample, a preference that did not exist for any other category. In fact, it placed its own brands and exclusives in the top spot as often as competing brands—about 20 percent of the time—although the former made up only six percent of the sample and the latter 77 percent.
Almost four in 10 products that we identified as Amazon brands and exclusives in our sample were neither clearly labeled as an Amazon brand nor carried a name that most people recognize as an Amazon-owned brand, such as Whole Foods. In our survey, almost nine-in-10 U.S. adults did not recognize five of Amazon’s largest brands.
We also found that the default seller among products with multiple merchants changed for just three in 10 products over three months, a significantly lower rate of change than a similar study found five years ago.
Amazon’s dominance in online sales—40 percent in the United States—means the effect of giving its own products preference on the search results page is potentially massive, both for its own business as well as the small businesses that seek to earn a living on its platform.
Appendix
Supplementary Search Dataset and Analysis
When first exploring this topic and before hitting on our top searches dataset, we had created a generic dataset that returned similar findings. We replaced it as the main dataset because our top searches dataset was closer to real searches made by users. We include it here as a secondary dataset.
Generic Searches
We created a search dataset from products listed in each of the 18 departments found on Amazon’s “Explore Our Brands” page.
Three annotators looked through 1,626 products listed on those pages and generated between one and three search queries a person might use if searching for that product. These were meant to represent generic searches for which we know Amazon brands are competing against others.
We generated 2,558 search terms. We randomly sampled 1,600 and collected these searches using the same method and during the same time period we used to collect top searches. A quarter of the search results (24 percent) did not contain Amazon Brands, so we discarded them, leaving 1,217 generic searches, our supplementary dataset.
Generic Search Findings
In the generic searches, Amazon Brands constituted a slightly larger percentage of the overall product sample (8.2) than our top searches database (5.8). The percentage of the time Amazon gave its own products the number one spot also increased, to roughly one in four of our generic searches from one in five for our top searches.
Competing brands constituted a similar proportion of products in both of our datasets. However, Amazon placed competing brands in the number one spot even less often (10.8) in these generic searches than it had for top searches (20.8).
Entirely unaffiliated products made up even less of the pool of products in our generic searches (3.0) than top searches (5.8), and Amazon also gave them the top spot even less frequently, 1.5 percent of the time compared to 4.2 percent for top searches.
The results from this additional dataset show a similar pattern to our main dataset, whereby Amazon prioritizes its own products at the top of search results.
Counting Carousels
As mentioned earlier, we did not include sponsored or promotional carousels in our analysis.
If we were to consider sponsored or promotional carousels, the percentage of organic products from top searches would drop from 87 to 68 percent. This also means that sponsored products would increase from 17 percent to 32 percent. There were a total of 49,686 products in these carousels.
Acknowledgements
We thank Christo Wilson of Northeastern University, Juozas “Joe” Kaziukėnas of Marketplace Pulse, Rebecca Goldin of Sense About Science and George Mason University, Kyunghyun Cho of New York University, and Michael Ekstrand of Boise State University for reviewing all or parts of our methodology. We also thank Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth College for reviewing our survey design.
Scammers Are Using Fake Job Ads to Steal People’s Identities
It has become a ubiquitous internet ad, with versions popping up everywhere from Facebook and LinkedIn to smaller sites like Jobvertise: Airport shuttle driver wanted, it says, offering a job that involves picking up passengers for 35 hours a week at an appealing weekly pay rate that works out to more than $100,000 a year.
But airports aren’t really dangling six-figure salaries for shuttle drivers amid some sudden resurgence in air travel. Instead, the ads are cybercriminals’ latest attempt to steal people’s identities and use them to commit fraud, according to recent warnings from the FBI, the Federal Trade Commission and cybersecurity firms that monitor such threats. The U.S. Secret Service, which investigates financial crimes, also confirmed that it has seen a “marked increase” in sham job ads seeking to steal people’s personal data, often with the aim of filing bogus unemployment insurance claims.
“These fraudsters, they’re like a virus. They continue to mutate,” said Haywood Talcove, chief executive of the government division of LexisNexis Risk Solutions, one of several contractors helping state and federal agencies combat identity theft. (ProPublica subscribes to public records databases provided by LexisNexis.)
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This particular mutation is an emerging threat, Talcove and others said. The numbers are small so far, but they’re rapidly increasing. In March, LexisNexis detected around 2,900 ads touting unusually generous pay, using suspicious email domains and requiring that one verify one’s identity upfront. The total had grown to 18,400 by July, and then to 36,350 as of this month. Talcove said these figures are based on a small sample of job ads and that the real number is likely much higher.
This form of scam is surging at a moment when targets for job application fraud abound. Millions of Americans are quitting jobs and looking for new ones. An all-time high percentage of workers — 2.9% — quit their jobs in August, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. Meanwhile, huge numbers of laid-off workers are still looking for work, making for a historic churn in the labor market.
The ads reflect a tactical adjustment by cybercriminals. A massive wave of unemployment insurance fraud during the pandemic prompted authorities to heighten identity verification requirements. In most U.S. states, cybercriminals can no longer simply input stolen identity information into government websites and frequently collect unemployment insurance aid. Now, applicants whose names are used to apply for unemployment benefits often need to verify on their phones that they’re the ones seeking assistance, a process similar to two-factor authentication.
That means scammers may need help from their victims — and sometimes they go to elaborate lengths to mislead them. Some fraudsters recreate companies’ hiring websites. One fake job application site uses Spirit Airlines’ photos, text, font and color code. The phony site asks applicants to upload a copy of both sides of their driver’s license at the outset of the process and sends them an email seeking more information from a web address that resembles Spirit’s, with an extra “i” (spiiritairline.com). Spirit Airlines did not respond to requests seeking comment.
Other job scams are less elaborate and have more visible signs of inauthenticity. One fake ad for airport shuttle drivers on Facebook was posted by a woman who purported to be working at Denver International Airport. Diligent readers may have noticed that the only location linked from the woman’s Facebook profile was a Nigerian city called Owerri. (A spokesperson for the Denver airport reported the profile to Facebook after an inquiry by ProPublica, and the ad is no longer active.)
In other instances, unsolicited job offers simply land in applicants’ inboxes after they’ve uploaded their résumés to real job search sites, which scammers can access if they pose as potential employers. Jeri-Sue Barron has received a slew of emails since the start of the pandemic informing her that she was preapproved for a variety of jobs she hadn’t even applied for. Barron, a retiree in suburban Dallas, had uploaded her résumé to several job hunting sites in hope of finding some part-time work to supplement her Social Security income. She then received multiple job offers with nary a request for an interview. One email originated from a school in India’s Kerala state; another came from a Croatian website she’d never heard of. “They started coming in from places that were weird,” said Barron. “You almost don’t want to find out the next stage.” She ignored the offers.
As with fake unemployment claims more broadly, the fraud is being facilitated by an underground infrastructure, including online forums where cybercriminals share advice on how to perfect their techniques. A person using the handle “cleverinformation” on a U.K. forum called Carder put together a how-to video that recommends posting fake job ads using a generic job application that can be modified to collect personal data. In September, someone going by “mrdudemanguy” on another forum, known as Dread, offered this advice to a person seeking stolen identities: “Pretend to be a local business and post some job ads. When they send in their résumé, call them and ask some basic job application questions. Make them think they’ve got the job as long as they can do a background check. For the background check request they send you photos or scans of ID documents.”
In response to a query from ProPublica, mrdudemanguy did not answer questions about sharing fake ads and instead focused on explaining the source of his recommended technique and its success. “I have not tried this method myself,” he wrote. “It’s just a method that I know other people do and it does work. It can be done in any part of the world, the country does not matter. As long as the job ad looks legitimate, a person looking for a job will be likely to apply.” Questions sent to cleverinformation yielded a similar response. “It’s effective,” the person said, noting that it’s an underused technique. The person added: “Trying to start a group chat where we share our knowledge.”
The ubiquitous ad for airport shuttle drivers was discussed in a similar forum. One version of it was posted in a Telegram channel of a Nigerian scam group called Yahoo Boys Community, along with instructions on what to tell applicants to get them to share their Social Security number, photographs of their driver’s license and other personal details. The post urged the group’s 5,000 members to ask applicants generic questions via email and offer them the gig — but only if they first shared their personal documents to land the plum job. “Once the client gives you the details, buzz me on WhatsApp and let start work on it Asap,” read the July message, whose initiator could not be identified.
Job application scams have been around in various forms for years. Some entice applicants to buy equipment or software from the scammers in preparation for a nonexistent job. Others try to trick victims into working for free or reshipping goods bought with stolen credit cards. But, according to law enforcement agencies, using fake job ads to steal identities and using them to cash in on government benefits is a new wrinkle.
Alexandra Mateus Vásquez fell for one such scam in December 2020. An aspiring painter, Vásquez was thinking of quitting her sales job at a suburban mall near New York City. She applied for a graphic designer position at the restaurant chain Steak ‘n Shake via the widely used job website Indeed. She was elated when what appeared to be a Steak ‘n Shake representative invited her via Gmail to participate in an email screening test for the job.
Conducting an interview via email initially struck Vásquez as odd, but she proceeded because the questions seemed standard. They included queries like “How do you meet tough deadlines?” according to emails she shared with ProPublica, and she provided earnest answers. Hours later she received an email offering her the job and asking for her address and phone number so a formal offer letter could be dispatched. The offered pay was attractive: $30 per hour. When the letter arrived, it sought her Social Security number, too. Vásquez provided all the requested information.
Soon Vásquez was invited for a background check, via online chat, with a supposed hiring manager. She found herself trading messages with an account that had a blurry photograph of an old man and the name “Iran Coleman” attached to it. (Several other applicants described similar experiences in a discussion about the Steak ‘n Shake job on the hiring site Glassdoor.)
The person claiming to be the Steak ‘n Shake’s hiring manager requested copies of Vásquez’s personal records to verify her identity. She shared photographs of her New York state ID and her green card but grew suspicious when the person asked for her credit card number, too. As Vásquez hesitated, she got a call from ID.me, an identity verification vendor used by 27 states to safeguard their unemployment insurance programs. The company asked if she was applying for jobless aid in California. That’s when she realized she was being scammed. “I was so disappointed,” Vásquez said. “I really believed that that position was real.”
Steak ‘n Shake did not respond to messages seeking comment. (ProPublica was able to reach Iran Coleman, the purported Steak ‘n Shake manager cited in the scam. He said the Louisville Steak ‘n Shake he used to manage is closed and he hasn’t worked there since at least 2014. He said he hadn’t updated his cursory LinkedIn profile, which lists him as a Steak ‘n Shake restaurant manager, in years. Coleman said he now manages three Waffle House restaurants. “I feel for that person,” he said of Vásquez when informed of her experience.)
Vásquez reported the incident to the police and contacted the Social Security Administration, which informed her that it had denied multiple requests to create an account in her name. (A spokesperson for the agency said privacy laws preclude it from discussing individual cases.) She then gave up on her job search. “I started doubting if all the jobs I’m applying for are real,” she said. Vásquez recently launched a website to begin selling paintings online and still hopes to become a design professional.
Blake Hall, chief executive of ID.me, said the company has rolled out language on its systems that informs users when their identities are being used to apply for unemployment insurance benefits and warns them not to proceed if they are being offered a job. Hall said it’s ultimately up to users to heed such warnings. “We will do as much as we can to make it clear that they’ve been scammed,” he said, “but ultimately protecting somebody from themself is a really tall order.” He compared his company to a goalkeeper who also needs help from other members of the team, in this case the job websites where criminals post fake ads.
The Better Business Bureau said in an alert last month that Indeed, LinkedIn and Facebook topped the list of online platforms where users reported spotting fraudulent job advertisements that duped them.
Indeed removes tens of millions of job listings that do not meet its quality guidelines each month, according to a company spokesperson, and it declines to list employers’ jobs if they do not pass those guidelines. In July, the site published a blog post detailing how to spot scam job ads. “Indeed puts job seekers at the heart of everything we do,” the spokesperson said.
LinkedIn removed 10 fake airport shuttle job postings after they were pointed out by ProPublica. A spokesperson said that posting bogus job ads is a “clear violation” of LinkedIn’s terms of service and said the company is investing in new ways of spotting them, such as hiring more human reviewers and expanding a work-email verification system for potential employers.
Facebook took down some of the airport shuttle posts after ProPublica alerted the service, but the company did not respond to questions about its processes for spotting and removing fake ads.
In recent months, the social media platform has also been plagued with fraudulent pages masquerading as state unemployment agencies. Some states complained to the U.S. Department of Labor that Facebook was slow to act on their requests to remove such pages, according to a March email from the department to state workforce agencies disclosed under a public records request. A Department of Labor official said that in March the agency set up a new process for states to report fake unemployment insurance websites to Facebook and that “to date, Facebook has been responsive in taking down fraudulent pages” reported by states.
New ones, however, keep popping up: A fake version of California’s Employment Development Department Facebook page was live as of Oct. 12. The agency confirmed the page was not its own, and it was removed from Facebook shortly after ProPublica’s inquiry.
Even if online platforms clean up their job postings, other identity theft scams are proliferating. On Oct. 15, the FBI issued an alert warning about fake websites that cybercriminals created to resemble the state unemployment websites of Illinois, Maryland, Nevada, New Mexico and Wisconsin. Criminals use the sites to steal victims’ sensitive personal information, according to the FBI.
Organizers of the deadly assault on the U.S. Capitol say that several congressional Republicans and White House officials helped plan former President Donald Trump’s coup attempt.
In response to new reporting that several congressional Republicans and White House officials were “intimately involved” in planning the January 6 Capitol attack—part of former President Donald Trump’s far-reaching election subversion plot—Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Sunday night demanded the expulsion of any lawmaker who aided and abetted the violent assault on U.S. democracy.
“Any member of Congress who helped plot a terrorist attack on our nation’s Capitol must be expelled,” tweeted Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). “This was a terror attack. 138 injured, almost 10 dead. Those responsible remain a danger to our democracy, our country, and human life in the vicinity of our Capitol and beyond.”
Any member of Congress who helped plot a terrorist attack on our nation’s capitol must be expelled.
This was a terror attack. 138 injured, almost 10 dead. Those responsible remain a danger to our democracy, our country, and human life in the vicinity of our Capitol and beyond. https://t.co/D0qLlaFjTh
Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) tweeted in response to the Rolling Stone report that her “resolution to investigate and expel the members of Congress who helped incite the deadly insurrection on our Capitol,” House Resolution 25, “is just waiting for a vote.”
My resolution to investigate and expel the Members of Congress who helped incite the deadly insurrection on our Capitol is just waiting for a vote.
On Sunday night, the magazine detailed “explosive allegations” about the January 6 riot, wherein a right-wing mob fueled by Trump’s lie that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen stormed the halls of Congress in an attempt to prevent lawmakers from certifying President Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory.
Amid an ongoing probe led by the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack, Rolling Stone has spoken with two unnamed individuals who were “involved in organizing the main event aimed at objecting to the electoral certification, which took place at the White House Ellipse,” and who are cooperating with the panel’s investigators. According to the magazine:
These two sources also helped plan a series of demonstrations that took place in multiple states around the country in the weeks between the election and the storming of the Capitol. According to these sources, multiple people associated with the March for Trump and Stop the Steal events that took place during this period communicated with members of Congress throughout this process.
Among other things, the magazine reported that prior to January 6:
The two sources say they engaged in “dozens” of planning conversations, in which Reps. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.), Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) participated or “had top staffers join”;
The two sources say they “interacted with members of Trump’s team.” That includes former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, “who they describe as having had an opportunity to prevent the violence,” as well as Katrina Pierson, a former member of Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns whom one organizer called “our go-to girl” and “our primary advocate”;
Gosar, “who has been one of the most prominent defenders of the Jan. 6 rioters,” allegedly “dangled the possibility of a ‘blanket pardon’ in an unrelated ongoing investigation to encourage them to plan the protests.”
Both organizers received “several assurances” about the “blanket pardon” from Gosar, one source told Rolling Stone.
“Our impression was that it was a done deal,” said the source, “that he’d spoken to the president about it in the Oval… in a meeting about pardons and that our names came up. They were working on submitting the paperwork and getting members of the House Freedom Caucus to sign on as a show of support.”
“I was just going over the list of pardons and we just wanted to tell you guys how much we appreciate all the hard work you’ve been doing,” Gosar said, according to the organizer.
The magazine has separately obtained documentary evidence that on January 6, both organizers were in contact with Boebert and Gosar, whose office is being investigated by the House select committee.
In addition, Rolling Stone reported, “both Brooks and Cawthorn spoke with Trump at the Ellipse on Jan. 6. In his speech at that event, Brooks, who was reportedly wearing body armor, declared, ‘Today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass.’ Gosar, Greene, and Boebert were all billed as speakers at the ‘Wild Protest,’ which also took place on Jan. 6 at the Capitol.”
One of the leading organizers of the latter event was Ali Alexander, leader of Stop the Steal, a key group promoting efforts to challenge Biden’s victory. In a since-deleted livestream broadcast, Alexander said that Gosar, Brooks, and Biggs helped develop the strategy for the so-called “Wild Protest.”
At a December 2020 Stop the Steal event in Phoenix, Alexander called Gosar, one of the main speakers, “my captain,” and he also heaped praise on Biggs, describing him as “one of the other heroes.”
Both sources maintain that ahead of January 6, “the plan they had discussed with other organizers, Trump allies, and members of Congress was a rally that would solely take place at the Ellipse, where speakers—including the former president—would present ‘evidence’ about issues with the election. This demonstration would take place in conjunction with objections that were being made by Trump allies during the certification on the House floor that day,” Rolling Stonereported.
During his speech at the Ellipse, however, Trump encouraged his supporters to make their way to the Capitol, and before he had finished talking, the barricades were being stormed.
According to the two organizers, Alexander had agreed to not hold his “Wild Protest” at the Capitol, but when it appeared that the event may materialize, Meadows—one of four Trump allies subpoenaed by the House select committee—was made aware of concerns about the potential for violence.
Although there were earlier indications that the Trump administration and members of Congress “played some role in the Jan. 6 events and similar rallies that occurred in the lead-up to that day,” Rolling Stone noted, “the two sources say they can provide new details about the members’ specific roles in these efforts.”
“The sources plan to share that information with congressional investigators right away,” according to the magazine. “While both sources say their communications with the House’s Jan. 6 committee thus far have been informal, they are expecting to testify publicly.”
Just hours after the violent right-wing attack they helped foment through baseless allegations of voter fraud was contained, 147 GOP lawmakers—including more than two-thirds of House Republicans plus several Senate Republicans—voted in the early morning of January 7 to overturn election results in key states, attempting to disenfranchise millions of voters in the process.
Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) on Sunday urged people to “never forget” Trump’s failed coup attempt.
291 days ago terrorists ransacked the US Capitol and *hours later* 138-of-202 (68%) House republicans voted to make trump a dictator. They tried to finish the rioters’ job and end democracy. Never forget it.
Yale historian Timothy Snyder, meanwhile, warned that “a failed coup is a trial run for a successful coup.”
“Instead of just a person who makes a disorganized attempt,” said the expert on authoritarianism, “we now have that person, plus institutional machinery, time to plan, and the Big Lie.”
Since last year’s election, GOP lawmakers at the state level have weaponized lies about electoral fraud to legitimize anti-democratic electoral review mechanisms and a nationwide campaign of voter suppression, prompting University of Pennsylvania political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. to declare in a recent essay that maintaining Democratic majorities in both chambers of Congress is necessary to prevent 2022 or 2024 from marking “the end of the proceduralist democracy to which we’ve been accustomed.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by KENNY STANCIL and republished under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
“This industry is rotten at its core,” said one critic, “and the clearest proof of that is what it’s doing to our children.”
Internal documents dubbed “The Facebook Papers” were published widely Monday by an international consortium of news outlets who jointly obtained the redacted materials recently made available to the U.S. Congress by company whistleblower Frances Haugen.
“It’s time for immediate action to hold the company accountable for the many harms it’s inflicted on our democracy.”
The papers were shared among 17 U.S. outlets as well as a separate group of news agencies in Europe, with all the journalists involved sharing the same publication date but performing their own reporting based on the documents.
According to the Financial Times, the “thousands of pages of leaked documents paint a damaging picture of a company that has prioritized growth” over other concerns. And the Washington Postconcluded that the choices made by founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, as detailed in the revelations, “led to disastrous outcomes” for the social media giant and its users.
From an overview of the documents and the reporting project by the Associated Press:
The papers themselves are redacted versions of disclosures that Haugen has made over several months to the Securities and Exchange Commission, alleging Facebook was prioritizing profits over safety and hiding its own research from investors and the public.
These complaints cover a range of topics, from its efforts to continue growing its audience, to how its platforms might harm children, to its alleged role in inciting political violence. The same redacted versions of those filings are being provided to members of Congress as part of its investigation. And that process continues as Haugen’s legal team goes through the process of redacting the SEC filings by removing the names of Facebook users and lower-level employees and turns them over to Congress.
One key revelation highlighted by the Financial Times is that Facebook has been perplexed by its own algorithms and another was that the company “fiddled while the Capitol burned” during the January 6th insurrection staged by loyalists to former President Donald Trump trying to halt the certification of last year’s election.
CNNwarned that the totality of what’s contained in the documents “may be the biggest crisis in the company’s history,” but critics have long said that at the heart of the company’s problem is the business model upon which it was built and the mentality that governs it from the top, namely Zuckerberg himself.
On Friday, following reporting based on a second former employee of the company coming forward after Haugen, Free Press Action co-CEO Jessica J. González said “the latest whistleblower revelations confirm what many of us have been sounding the alarm about for years.”
“Facebook is not fit to govern itself,” said González. “The social-media giant is already trying to minimize the value and impact of these whistleblower exposés, including Frances Haugen’s. The information these brave individuals have brought forth is of immense importance to the public and we are grateful that these and other truth-tellers are stepping up.”
While Zuckerberg has testified multiple times before Congress, González said nothing has changed. “It’s time for Congress and the Biden administration to investigate a Facebook business model that profits from spreading the most extreme hate and disinformation,” she said. “It’s time for immediate action to hold the company accountable for the many harms it’s inflicted on our democracy.”
“Kids don’t stand a chance against the multibillion dollar Facebook machine, primed to feed them content that causes severe harm to mental and physical well being.”
With Haugen set to testify before the U.K. Parliament on Monday, activists in London staged protests against Facebook and Zuckerberg, making clear that the giant social media company should be seen as a global problem.
Flora Rebello Arduini, senior campaigner with the corporate accountability group, was part of a team that erected a large cardboard display of Zuckerberg “surfing a wave of cash” outside of Parliament with a flag that read, “I know we harm kids, but I don’t care”—a rip on a video Zuckerberg posted of himself earlier this year riding a hydrofoil while holding an American flag.
While Zuckerberg refused an invitation to tesify in the U.K. about the company’s activities, including the way it manipulates and potentially harms young users on the platform, critics like Arduini said the giant tech company must be held to account.
“Kids don’t stand a chance against the multibillion dollar Facebook machine, primed to feed them content that causes severe harm to mental and physical well being,” she said. “This industry is rotten at its core and the clearest proof of that is what it’s doing to our children. Lawmakers must urgently step in and pull the tech giants into line.”
Happening now: we are outside UK parliament with a visual protest against Facebook’s treatment of children and its business model which puts profit before public safety. (1/7) #PeopleVsBigTechpic.twitter.com/37UA18PL3r
“Right now, Mark [Zuckerberg] is unaccountable,” Haugen told the Guardian in an interview ahead of her testimony. “He has all the control. He has no oversight, and he has not demonstrated that he is willing to govern the company at the level that is necessary for public safety.”
Correction: This article has been updated to more accurately reflect the context of the comments made by Jessica González of Free Press, who responded to the revelations of a second whistleblower not those of Frances Haugen.
Originally published on Common Dreams by JON QUEALLY and republished under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
Many merchants sell the exact same item, including Amazon, which picks a winner–often itself
When you shop on Amazon for a widely available product—a pair of Crocs, say, or Greenies dog treats—Amazon will pick among the merchants that offer the item and give one of them the sale when you hit “Add to Cart” or “Buy Now.”
In e-commerce, this is called winning the buy box. Amazon said its “featured merchant algorithm” picks the winner, instantly weighing available sellers’ past performance, price, delivery speed, and other factors.
Researchers at Northeastern University studying price changes on Amazon found that the merchant that won the buy box—which Amazon calls its “featured offer”—changed for seven in 10 products over a six-week period in 2016.
Five years later, we found that’s no longer the case.
When The Markup compared snapshots of 1,200 popular products 12 weeks apart, we found that the buy box was much less dynamic. The seller changed for fewer than three in 10 products in our sample.
The products we analyzed all appeared on Amazon’s first search results page of popular searches, meaning they receive prominent exposure to customers. We collected the data from an I.P. address in Washington, D.C.
Among the competing sellers for commonly available goods is Amazon itself. And when Amazon gave itself the buy box on products that other merchants also sold, it remained the buy box seller 12 weeks later for 98 percent of those products.
Overall, Amazon dominated the buy box when multiple sellers were available. We found that Amazon chose itself as the winning merchant of the “featured offer” for about 40 percent of products, while the next highest seller got the buy box in just half of one percent of popular products in our sample.
It’s hard to say why Amazon is changing the buy box winner less frequently than five years ago, said Christo Wilson, an associate computer science professor and one of the Northeastern University researchers who completed the 2016 study.
“The negative take,” he said, would be that “the market is becoming less competitive or that it’s easier for an incumbent to just sort of squat and remain stable.”
Amazon spokesperson Nell Rona declined to answer questions for this story. During congressional inquiry Amazon officials said the company doesn’t favor itself in the buy box or consider its profits in that decision.
They did acknowledge, however, that whether a product could be delivered quickly for free to Prime members is a factor in picking the seller for the buy box. Merchants typically pay extra fees for Amazon’s shipping service—Fulfillment by Amazon—to get that designation.
We found that the merchant Amazon selected for the buy box for almost every product—nine-in-10 of them—used Amazon’s shipping service. When we checked again three months later, less than 8 percent of products had changed shippers from Amazon to a third-party or vice versa.
The European Commission announced an investigation last November into whether Amazon’s criteria for the buy box results in preferential treatment for Amazon’s retail offers or sellers that use Amazon’s shipping service, which the commission said would be an abuse of Amazon’s dominant market position under E.U. antitrust rules.
In a May 2021 lawsuit, the Washington, D.C., attorney general wrote that “Amazon’s selection methods for the Buy Box winner consider factors that further reinforce Amazon’s online retail sales market dominance,” such as whether the seller uses Fulfillment by Amazon. In a court filing, Amazon responded that the lawsuit “fails to allege essential elements of an antitrust claim and, in any event, the conduct it attacks has been held by courts to be procompetitive.” The suit is ongoing.
Wilson said automated pricing algorithms may be playing a role in what The Markup found. It may also be a broader shift on the marketplace away from sellers competing to sell the same product to sellers developing their own branded products that only they are allowed to sell.
That shifts the competition away from the buy box to the search rankings, he said.
The Markup also found that Amazon gave its house brands and exclusive products a leg up in search results, above competitors with higher star ratings and more reviews, which are an indication of sales. Wilson reviewed our methodology for this investigation.
It was while testing the accuracy of findings for our main investigation that we discovered the stability of the buy box. There was a two- to four-week delay between when The Markup gathered search results and product pages. We gathered a sub-sample of listings a second time 12 weeks later to examine the effects of the delay and found they were minuscule.
“I would have thought that given that these [are] identical products and given that they are competing with similar costs, that there would be a little bit more turnover,” said Florian Ederer, an associate professor of economics at the Yale School of Management.
Shoppers can click on a link that will allow them to see more offers for a product, in addition to the one featured in the buy box. But e-commerce experts say most don’t bother: They estimate that more than 80 percent of sales on Amazon go through the buy box.
“Amazon talks about its marketplace as though it were a market,” said Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the small business advocacy group Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which has been critical of Amazon’s size and effect on retail competition in the U.S.
“This is not a market,” she added. “This is an artificial environment that Amazon controls, and it’s set up certain parameters that lead to certain outcomes.”
New Zealand officials on Thursday heralded passage of a groundbreaking law requiring financial institutions to disclose climate-related risks.
“This is a landmark day,” Commerce and Consumer Affairs Minister David Clark said in a speech to Parliament.
At issue is the Financial Sector (Climate-related Disclosures and Other Matters) Amendment Bill, which had its third reading Thursday.
A summary of the measure from the Business Ministry touts the bill as a step toward making the country’s “financial system more resilient” and reaching New Zealand’s goal of net zero CO2 emissions by 2050. According to the ministry, the goals of the bill are to:
ensure that the effects of climate change are routinely considered in business, investment, lending, and insurance underwriting decisions;
help climate reporting entities better demonstrate responsibility and foresight in their consideration of climate issues; and
lead to more efficient allocation of capital, and help smooth the transition to a more sustainable, low emissions economy.
A joint statement Thursday from Clark and Climate Change Minister James Shaw frames the bill, which will require the annual disclosures starting in 2023, as the first of its kind across the globe.
“This bill will require around 200 of the largest financial market participants in New Zealand to disclose clear, comparable, and consistent information about the risks, and opportunities, climate change presents to their business,” Clark said in the statement. “In doing so, it will promote business certainty, raise expectations, accelerate progress and create a level playing field.”
Shaw, for his part, said the measure would “encourage entities to become more sustainable by factoring the short, medium, and long-term effects of climate change into their business decisions.”
“New Zealand is a world-leader in this area and the first country in the world to introduce mandatory climate-related reporting for the financial sector,” added Shaw. “We have an opportunity to pave the way for other countries to make climate-related disclosures mandatory.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by ANDREA GERMANOS and republished under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
The latest federal data, said Rep. Rashida Tlaib, should put “an end to the false myth that unemployment insurance benefits keep people from working.”
Republican lawmakers argued, and many of their Democratic counterparts accepted, that slashing federal jobless aid would lead to robust growth in employment. However, data released Friday shows that while eight million people were booted from expanded unemployment insurance programs last month, employers added just 194,000 jobs—the weakest monthly increase this year.
“194,000 jobs is equal to less than 3% of the people who were removed from the UI rolls in September.”
“I hope this puts an end to the false myth that UI benefits keep people from working,” said Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.). “They don’t.”
“We can’t build back better by adopting GOP talking points and putting them into policy,” she added. “This was the wrong call a month ago and it’s the wrong call today.”
According to the right-wing theory, the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) and Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) benefits introduced in the early stages of the coronavirus crisis were keeping people from taking jobs, so removing a key source of income from millions of people would force them to return to the labor market in droves.
This “starve people back to work” strategy, as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) called the UI cuts, “did not work to say the least,” said policy analyst Matt Bruenig, founder of the People’s Policy Project, a left-wing think tank.
The September jobs report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Bruenig noted in a Friday blog post, showed “the worst month of job growth since [Joe] Biden became president and the second-worst since May of last year when the pandemic labor market recovery began.”
Citing the BLS data, Bruenig wrote that “194,000 jobs is equal to less than 3% of the people who were removed from the UI rolls in September. At this rate, it would take 3.5 years for jobs added to equal the number of people who lost their pandemic UI benefits.”
“The management of UI in the last six months,” he stressed, “has been a complete disaster.”
Last month’s nationwide assault on unemployed workers was preceded by state-level attacks on jobless benefits. Over the summer, 26 states—all but Louisiana led by Republican governors—prematurely ended federally expanded UI programs in a coercive bid to boost employment.
In a sign of things to come, the right-wing plan failed then as well. August job growth, Bruenig pointed out in an earlier blog post, was more than twice as fast in states that retained unemployment benefits.
Despite mounting evidence against cuts, the Democratic-controlled federal government refused to intervene to preservepandemic-era UI before it expired on September 6, although Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) recently unveiled a bill to extend the benefits until next February.
Echoing Bruenig and Tlaib, Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) on Friday said that “back in June I led my colleagues sounding the alarm on Republican governors terminating unemployment aid early. We feared their cruelty would hurt job growth and sadly our fears were right.”
Back in June I led my colleagues sounding the alarm on republican governors terminating unemployment aid early. We feared their cruelty would hurt job growth and sadly our fears were right. https://t.co/VKR1qVjsVlpic.twitter.com/HOkgDNc2ah
The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) on Friday attributed September’s weak job growth to the impact of the ultra-contagious Delta variant and encouraged widespread vaccination to support economic recovery amid the ongoing pandemic.
Experts at the progressive think tank also urged policymakers to pursue changes that would permanently increase the bargaining power of workers.
“This is yet another sign that the strong wage growth we have seen in some industries this year is not a permanent shift in worker bargaining power, but a temporary result of the (very) unique circumstances of this recovery,” tweeted EPI president Heidi Shierholz. “For sustained strong job growth for working people, we need things like the PRO Act, minimum wage increases, etc.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by KENNY STANCIL and republished under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
The Food to Families program, touted by Ivanka Trump, gave tens of millions of dollars to unqualified firms and was also used to promote then-President Trump.
A $6 billion federal program created to provide fresh produce to families affected by the pandemic was mismanaged and used by the Trump administration for political gain, a new congressional report has found.
As a ProPublica investigation revealed last spring and as the new report further details, the Farmers to Families Food Box program gave contracts to companies that had no relevant experience and often lacked necessary licenses. The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, which released its report last week, found that former President Donald Trump’s administration did not adequately screen contractor applications or identify red flags in bid proposals.
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One company that received a $39 million contract was CRE8AD8 LLC (pronounced “Create a Date”), a wedding and event planning firm. The owner compared the contract to his usual work of “putting tchotchkes in a bag.”
In response to the report, the firm’s CEO said in a statement, “We delivered far more boxes/pounds than many other contractors and as a for-profit company, we’re allowed to make a profit.”
The congressional report also highlighted the application of an avocado grower who was initially awarded a $40 million contract before it was canceled after a review. Under the section of the application that required applicants to list references, the farmer wrote, “I don’t have any.”
The Food to Families program was created by the Department of Agriculture in the early days of the pandemic to give away produce that might have otherwise gone to waste as a result of disruptions in distribution chains. The boxes included produce, milk, dairy and cooked meats — and many also included a signed letter from then-President Trump.
The program was unveiled in May 2020 by Ivanka Trump. “I’m not shy about asking people to step up to the plate,” the president’s older daughter said in an interview to promote the initiative.
According to congressional investigators, Ivanka Trump was involved in getting the letter from her father added to the boxes. The USDA told contractors that including the letter was mandatory. Food bank operators told the investigators the letter concerned them because it didn’t appear to be politically neutral.
On the first day of the Republican National Convention in August 2020, President Trump and his daughter headlined a nearby event to announce an additional $1 billion for the food box program. Then-Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue also spoke at the event and encouraged attendees to reelect the president.
A federal ethics office later found that Perdue’s speech violated a federal law that prohibits officials from using their office for campaign purposes. The USDA at the time disputed the notion that Perdue was electioneering, saying that Perdue’s comments merely “predicted future behavior based on the president’s focus on helping ‘forgotten people.’”
The yearlong congressional investigation also identified problems with the deliveries themselves, including food safety issues, failed deliveries and uneven food distribution. Some contractors also forced recipient organizations to accept more food than they could distribute or store.
Committee chair Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., said in a statement that the mismanagement of the program is another example of the previous administration’s failures.
“The Program was marred by a structure that prioritized industry over families, by contracting practices that prioritized cutting corners over competence, and by decisions that prioritized politics over the public good,” he said.
