But is it really necessary for you to know that I am female, love only cats (no dogs) and just got engaged?
No? Good, cause none of that is true. (Except the female part) That’s only one example of the odd twists that can come with the current trend of people going viral when they show “realness” and vulnerability.
Heard of acting? That’s what Meryl Streep does when she plays a person that never went to Yale and is not a rich famous actor, wink wink.
I suppose, as with so many online phenomena these days, it’s TikTok leading the way. No longer a place for young girls to dominate using only dancing, beauty and feminine wiles, it’s now a place where less objectively attractive people can blow up by showing, ostensibly, who they are.
This trend towards realness has, based on informal research, also spilled over into places like LinkedIn, Medium and even Twitter.
On the whole, I think it’s a great thing. If Meryl Streep was only able to play herself, movies would be much less interesting, no doubt!
And maybe at least half of all the realness really is real. Just take it with a grain of salt if you see posts of someone getting engaged 3 times. In the same week.
All kidding aside this trend is part of a bigger, important evolution in digital communication
The evolution from journalistic norms, such as never referring to yourself directly but only as “your scribe”, “the writer”, “your correspondent” or just “one”, as in “one can only wonder…” to today’s norm of writing like the whole world wants to read your diary….
These journalistic conventions seem archaic and even ridiculous when the formerly forbidden “I” is commonplace and the authenticity of direct TikTok style casual presentation is already dominant and growing as a trend.
But the overall shift has more than just a style preference behind it, if you ask this writer (me).
It’s also far more than just the outgrowth of armies of non-journalists communicating spontaneously in every format and on every platform.
It’s really the early beginnings of what has become a common topic of late: the transition to the so-called Metaverse.
Not the Zuckerbergian Metaverse where people run around without legs and have joyless celebrations of themselves.
But rather, the real life cyber world where billions are on their phones communicating in various ways basically all the time. Even while jaywalking.
And as we do this more in every imaginable format, the desire to see “beautiful” landscape photos that have been photoshopped to death, instagram style, is eventually diminished to zero.
And what follows in a new hunger for the “real” or at least the honest seeming portrayal of the real (hi there Meryl!) and content that pushes an entirely different layer of psychological buttons.
As I mentioned above, dear reader, I love this! In spite of the fact that it leads to really scary TikToks (just check out the posts of some of the people that follow you on Tiktok (to see what I mean, the ones that follow 8753 people and get followed by like, 23 have nice videos…) where the frightening reality that’s out there (the banality of empirical unattractiveness you might call it) is already on full display, and how.
But that’s just the price to pay for a deeper and more authentic experience. And for the benefit of the real and valuable advice and knowledge you can get directly from “non-professional” actors who are not acting (presumably). We are reaping the profits of real life experiences, in exchange for nothing more than our attention, and clicks, likes and follows. And I say, Amen to that, bro.
“This is a bill to reduce gas prices and hold Big Oil accountable,” said Rep. Ro Khanna, who led the measure in the U.S. House.
Congressional Democrats on Thursday introduced the bicameral Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax to target price gouging by profit-gorging fossil fuel companies amid Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
“We need to curb profiteering by Big Oil and provide relief to Americans at the gas pump—that starts with ensuring these corporations pay a price when they price gouge.”
“This is a bill to reduce gas prices and hold Big Oil accountable,” declared Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who’s leading the measure in the U.S. House.
“As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sends gas prices soaring,” said Khanna, “fossil fuel companies are raking in record profits. These companies have made billions and used the profits to enrich their own shareholders while average Americans are hurting at the pump.”
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) introduced the legislation in the upper chamber along with co-sponsors including Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
The proposal followed President Joe Biden’s announcement earlier this week of a ban on U.S. imports of Russian fuels and amid swelling accusations that Big Oil has been taking advantage of the crisis in Ukraine to “pad their bottom line with war-fueled profits.”
The Democrats’ proposal aims to get some relief for Americans, who are facing average gas prices of $4.31 a gallon.
Big oil companies, specifically those that produce or import at least 300,000 barrels of oil per day, are targeted under the measure. They would face a per-barrel tax—whether the oil is domestically produced or imported—equal to 50% of the difference between the current price of a barrel of oil and the average price per barrel between 2015 and 2019.
The measure exempts smaller companies, which, according to a statement from the lawmakers, account for roughly 70% of the domestic production. This approach is meant to deter the larger multinational producers from simply raising prices.
The tax imposed on the energy firms would be quarterly. Consumers would receive quarterly rebates, with the relief phasing out for single filers earning more than $75,000 annually and joint filers earning more than $150,000 annually. The lawmakers project the tax to raise $45 billion per year at $120 per barrel of oil, delivering to single filers $240 annually and joint filers $360 annually.
Last year, oil & gas companies made $174 billion in profits. This year they're on track to make more. We cannot allow big oil to use Ukraine & "inflation" as an excuse to rip-off Americans. I'm proud to join @SenWhitehouse to introduce a windfall profits tax. Let's get it done.
“While Putin’s war is causing gas prices to go up, Big Oil companies are raking in record profits,” Warren said in a statement. “We need to curb profiteering by Big Oil and provide relief to Americans at the gas pump—that starts with ensuring these corporations pay a price when they price gouge, and using the revenue to help American families,” she said.
A number of social justice and climate groups heaped praise on the legislative proposal.
According to Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity, “The oil and gas industry got the world into this mess by lobbying and lying to keep us hooked on fossil fuels. Now they’re using the war in Ukraine to distract us from the fact that they are ripping off hard working Americans with high gas prices as they reap record earnings.”
“It’s time we stop allowing Big Oil to use its record profits, earned on the backs of hard-working American families, to reward wealthy shareholders and CEOs, and instead make them pay a fair share to lower the cost for consumers,” he added.
Collin Rees, U.S. program director at Oil Change International, welcomed the proposal as precisely the opposite of what the fossil fuel lobby has called for to counter Putin’s power, namely expanded domestic fossil fuel production.
“The so-called ‘solutions’ to the energy crisis being put forward by Big Oil companies and the American Petroleum Institute would do nothing but further line their own pockets and lock in a climate-wrecking, fossil-fueled future,” he said. “What’s needed now is immediate relief for American consumers, which is what this commonsense windfall profits tax bill would provide.”
The bill also drew plaudits from Lukas Ross, program manager at Friends of the Earth, which released an analysis Thursday along with BailoutWatch finding that Big Oil CEOs have “absolutely” used the spiked in fuel prices triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to “price-gouge and profiteer.”
In a statement responding to the new legislation, Ross said: “All-American oil oligarchs are profiteering off the war in Ukraine while sacrificing our communities and climate. The windfall profits tax will require Big Oil to pay their fair share while putting billions of dollars back into the pockets of taxpayers.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by ANDREA GERMANOS and republished under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
These sanctions are aimed at generating opposition from both Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle and everyday Russians. As a scholar who studies regime change, I believe the risk is that they will actually drive the Kremlin’s weak opposition further into obscurity.
A ‘punishment logic’
Economic sanctions follow a “punishment logic”: Those feeling economic pain are expected to rise up against their political leaders and demand a change in policies.
In authoritarian regimes like Putin’s, where average citizens are the most likely to suffer, sanctions usually do more to hurt the opposition than help it.
How Putin has quelled dissent
Putin has used a variety of tools to try to quell domestic opposition over the past two decades.
Some of these were subtle, such as tweaking the electoral system in ways that benefit his party. Others were less so, including instituting constitutional changes that allow him to serve as president for years to come.
Despite a clampdown on activism, Russians have repeatedly proved willing to take to the streets to make their voices heard. Thousands demonstrated in the summer and fall of 2020 to support a governor in the Far East who had beaten Putin’s pick for the position only to be arrested, ostensibly for a murder a decade and a half earlier. Thousands more came out last spring to protest against Navalny’s detention.
Putin has even begun facing challenges from traditionally subservient political parties, such as the Communist Party and the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party.
Flickers of opposition
Importantly, Putin has occasionally shown a willingness to back down and change his policies under pressure. In other words, as much as Putin has limited democracy in Russia, opposition has continued to bubble up.
The result is a president who feels compelled to win over at least a portion of his domestic audience. This was clear in the impassioned address Putin made to the nation setting the stage for war. The fiery hourlong speech falsely accused Ukrainians of genocide against ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine. “How long can this tragedy continue? How much longer can we put up with this?” Putin asked his nation.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine, Russians have continued to show their willingness to stand up to Putin. Thousands have gathered to protest the war in Ukraine, despite risking large fines and jail time.
Despite these public showings, the liberal opposition to Putin is undoubtedly weak. In part, this is because Putin controls state television, which nearly two-thirds of Russians watch for their daily news. Going into this war, half of Russians blamed the U.S. and NATO for the increase in tensions, with only 4% holding Russia responsible.
Putin has already shown he can use his information machine to convert past Western sanctions into advantage. After the West sanctioned Russia for its 2014 takeover of Crimea, Putin deflected blame for Russians’ economic pain from himself to foreign powers. The result may have fallen short of the classic “rally around the flag” phenomenon, but on balance Putin gained politically from his first grab on Ukraine. More forceful economic sanctions this time around may unleash a broader wave of nationalism.
And former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev reacted to the country’s expulsion from the Council of Europe by suggesting Russia might go back on its human rights promises.
Another casualty of the war
This has already begun.
In the first week of the war, Russian authorities arrested more than 7,000 protesters. They ramped up censorship and closed down a longtime icon of liberal media, the Ekho Moskvy radio station. The editor of Russia’s last independent TV station, TV Dozhd, also announced he was fleeing the country.
Russia already ranked near the bottom – 150 out of 180 – in the latest Reporters Without Borders assessment of media freedom. And a new law, passed on March 4, 2022, punishes the spread of “false information” about Russia’s armed forces with up to 15 years in jail.
Ultimately, the opposition seen on the streets in Russia today and perhaps in the coming weeks may be the greatest show of strength that can be expected in the near future.
Even in the best of circumstances, economic sanctions can take years to have their desired effect. For Ukrainians, fighting a brutal and one-sided war, the sanctions are unlikely to help beyond bolstering morale.
The danger is that these sanctions may also make average Russians another casualty in Putin’s war.
Above: Photo Collage – Rolling Stone / Lynxotic / Various
The U.S. senator from Vermont called for “serious sanctions on Putin and his oligarchs” in response to the Kremlin’s latest moves.
Sen. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday called for the U.S. and its allies to impose heavy sanctions on Russian President Vladimir Putin and other oligarchs in the country as he condemned Moscow’s escalating military aggression toward Ukraine.
“Vladimir Putin’s latest invasion of Ukraine The U.S. senator from Vermont called for “serious sanctions on Putin and his oligarchs” in response to the Kremlin’s latest moves.is an indefensible violation of international law, regardless of whatever false pretext he offers,” Sanders (I-Vt.) said in a statement. “There has always been a diplomatic solution to this situation. Tragically, Putin appears intent on rejecting it.”
In addition to backing sanctions, Sanders said preparations must be made to accommodate refugees displaced by the conflict and called for investments in a global clean energy transition to fight the climate crisis and disempower “authoritarian petrostates” worldwide.
Sanders’ remarks came after U.S. President Joe Biden—in concert with officials in the United Kingdom and the European Union—moved to impose new economic sanctions on Russia following the Kremlin’s deployment of troops into two breakaway territories in eastern Ukraine, which Putin on Monday formally recognized as independent.
To prevent Putin’s effort to expand his country’s presence in the Donbas region from descending into a broader military conflict, peace advocates in the U.S. and abroad continue to urge the Biden administration to double-down on diplomatic efforts, as Common Dreamsreported earlier Tuesday.
“The United States,” said Sanders, “must now work with our allies and the international community to impose serious sanctions on Putin and his oligarchs, including denying them access to the billions of dollars that they have stashed in European and American banks.”
“The U.S. and our partners must also prepare for a worse scenario by helping Ukraine’s neighbors care for refugees fleeing this conflict,” Sanders continued, alluding to the possibility that Russian lawmakers’ approval of the use of military force outside the country could lead to a full-fledged war.
In the wake of recent developments in Ukraine, oil prices surged to nearly $100 per barrel on Tuesday, the highest in more than seven years, and European gas futures spiked by as much as 13.8%.
While the U.S. fossil fuel industry is expected to benefit from Germany halting approval of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline due to Russia’s recent actions, people in Europe—already struggling with skyrocketing energy bills—are bracing for even higher costs in the case that Moscow restricts gas exports.
“In the longer term,” said Sanders, “we must invest in a global green energy transition away from fossil fuels, not only to combat climate change, but to deny authoritarian petrostates the revenues they require to survive.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by KENNY STANCIL and republished under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
“This money belongs to the people of Afghanistan, not to the United States,” said an Afghan protest organizer in Kabul over the weekend.
With the people of Afghanistan facing one of the most severe humanitarian crises in the world, U.S.-based peace activists—who largely blame the policies of their own government for inflicting pain on millions of innocent Afghans—are using Valentine’s Day on Monday to demand the Biden administration return billions of dollars of seized assets to the war-torn country before more lasting harm and “cruelty” is done.
Under the banner of “Love to Afghanistan,” nationwide actions were scheduled for the weekend and localized vigils organized set for Monday (Feb. 14) by Peace Action, World Beyond War, and other humanitarian groups who argue that $7 billion frozen by the U.S. government and subsequently seized by an executive order issued Friday by President Joe Biden rightfully belongs to the Afghan people, who without it face an economy on the brink of collapse and a healthcare system and federal infrastructure without adequate support amid the Covid-19 pandemic and a worsening food crisis.
The Biden plan to confiscate $7 Billion of the Afghan people’s assets is unjust. Afghans need food & a functioning economy. Urge #Congress to reverse this policy.#LoveToAfghanistan#UnFreezeAfghanistan Call Congress from Congress Square Park . Noon. Portland, ME. Valentine's Day! pic.twitter.com/9tXwxrmKOe
After 20 years of war in Afghanistan, Peace Action welcomed the withdrawal of troops from the country and an end to the war.
Yet when the United States military pulled out of Afghanistan, the Biden administration also responded by choking off assets to Afghan banks and the economy by freezing the reserves of the Afghan Central Bank held in the U.S. They also imposed sanctions on those doing business with Afghanistan and cut aid. Jobs and income disappeared, people cannot afford to buy food and mass starvation is now occurring.
The Afghan people are suffering now more than ever. Hunger could kill more now than in two decades of war. This humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan is in the words of the International Red Cross a “human-made catastrophe.” “Human-made” largely by coercive U.S. economic policies.
In Decemebr, 46 members of Congress wrote a letter demanding the U.S. unfreeze assets that had been locked following the U.S. military withdrawal earlier in 2021. But instead of heeding that call, Biden on Friday took the step of more permanently seizing the funds that otherwise would be under control of Afghanistan’s central bank, the Da Afghanistan Bank (DAB), which now operates under the authority of the Taliban government.
Biden’s executive order includes setting aside half of the funds, $3.5 billion, for possible settlement claims by families who lost loved ones in the 9/11 attacks of 2001, but critics have said the Afghan people—who had nothing to do with the crimes of that day twenty years ago—should not be punished for the acts of Al Qaeda jihadists, most them Saudis and Egyptians.
Millions of Afghans are starving, due to US crimes, and now instead of getting back what is their’s, their money is being used as reparations for a crime they never committed & have been punished for for 20 years.
Promoting the “Love to Afghanistan” events in an op-ed for Common Dreamslast week, peace activist Jean Athey, coordinator of the Montgomery County Peace Action group in Maryland, said the economic war against the Afghan has the potential to be just as deadly as the 20 years of war and occupation they have just endured. Explaining the current situation and the “liquidity crisis” gripping the country, she wrote:
The government has almost no money and cannot pay workers, who cannot buy food for their families. Most have received no payment for months. In addition, Afghans have limited access to their own funds in banks. International commerce has halted.
Given U.S. sanctions and the liquidity crisis, even international humanitarian relief organizations have great difficulty operating in Afghanistan, despite U.S. government assurances. Relief efforts designed to stave off starvation—although critically important right now—cannot endure for long since no one is willing to provide assistance indefinitely to a country of almost 40 million people. The country needs a functioning government and economy, and needs access to the international financial system.
“Political backbone” is now required of the Biden administration, argued Athey, who said the president should not be scared of predictable GOP attacks or media hit pieces about somehow appeasing the Taliban by giving the everyday people back money the money that rightfully belongs to them. “The lives of one million children are more important than a negative headline in a tabloid. The U.S. should unfreeze Afghan government assets and lift sanctions hindering the recovery of the Afghan economy and humanitarian relief efforts. We must end the U.S. economic war on Afghanistan.”
On Saturday, the DAB demanded the funds ostensibly stolen by the U.S. government be returned and called the move by Biden an “injustice against the people of Afghanistan.”
Also in Saturday, protests in Kabul decried the theft of the money.
“This money belongs to the people of Afghanistan, not to the United States. This is the right of Afghans,” Abdul Rahman, a civil society activist and the demonstration’s organizer, told the Dawn newsaper.
A spokesperson for the Taliban government, Mohammad Naeem, also decriedthe move in a post on social media Saturday.
“The theft and seizure of money held by the United States of the Afghan people represent the lowest level of human and moral decay of a country and a nation,” Naeem tweeted, added that while victory and defeat are evident throughout history, “the greatest and most shameful defeat is when moral defeat combines with military defeat.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by JON QUEALLY and republished under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
“A large across-the-board increase in interest rates is a cure worse than the disease,” says economist Joseph Stiglitz. “That might dampen inflation if it is taken far enough, but it will also ruin people’s lives.”
As the U.S. Federal Reserve mulls hiking interest rates in the coming weeks in an effort to curb inflation, progressive economists are warning against such a move—arguing that it will hurt workers and fail to address the real source of rising prices: unmitigated corporate power.
“The last thing average working people need is for the Fed to raise interest rates and slow the economy further.”
“A large across-the-board increase in interest rates is a cure worse than the disease,” Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics and Columbia University professor, wrote Monday in Project Syndicate. “We should not attack a supply-side problem by lowering demand and increasing unemployment. That might dampen inflation if it is taken far enough, but it will also ruin people’s lives.”
Josh Bivens, director of research at the Economic Policy Institute, echoed Stiglitz’s message, writing Monday: “The inflation spike of 2021 has been bad for typical families and is a real policy challenge. But it remains the case that an overreaction to it could end up causing the most damage of all.”
Stiglitz and Bivens’ essays came three days after Robert Reich, professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, made a similar warning.
Fed policymakers are poised to raise interest rates at their March meeting and then continue raising them, in order to slow the economy. They fear that a labor shortage is pushing up wages, which in turn are pushing up prices—and that this wage-price spiral could get out of control.
It’s a huge mistake. Higher interest rates will harm millions of workers who will be involuntarily drafted into the inflation fight by losing jobs or long-overdue pay raises. There’s no “labor shortage” pushing up wages. There’s a shortage of good jobs paying adequate wages to support working families. Raising interest rates will worsen this shortage.
Although Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell “has expressed concern about wage hikes pushing up prices,” Reich wrote, “there’s no ‘wage-price spiral.'”
“To the contrary, workers’ real wages have dropped because of inflation,” he added. “Even though overall wages have climbed, they’ve failed to keep up with price increases—making most workers worse off in terms of the purchasing power of their dollars.”
Reich conceded that “wage-price spirals used to be a problem” but argued that’s no longer the case “because the typical worker today has little or no bargaining power.”
Declining union membership and corporations’ increased mobility—both key pillars in the ruling class’ highly effective assault on workers that has been carried out on a bipartisan basis for more than four decades—”have shifted power from labor to capital,” wrote Reich. “Increasing the share of the economic pie going to profits and shrinking the share going to wages… ended wage-price spirals.”
It is “totally wrong” to contend that inflation is being fueled by rising wages stemming from a so-called “tight” labor market, Reich argued. He continued:
The January jobs report shows that the U.S. economy is still 2.9 million jobs below what it had in February 2020. Given the growth of the U.S. population, it’s 4.5 million short of what it would have by now had there been no pandemic.
Consumers are almost tapped out. Not only are real (inflation-adjusted) incomes down, but pandemic assistance has ended. Extra jobless benefits are gone. Child tax credits have expired. Rent moratoriums are over. Small wonder consumer spending fell 0.6% in December, the first decrease since last February.
“Given all this, the last thing average working people need is for the Fed to raise interest rates and slow the economy further,” Reich added. “The problem most people face isn’t inflation. It’s a lack of good jobs.”
When it comes to what is causing inflation, Reich blamed “continuing worldwide bottlenecks in the supply of goods, and the ease with which big corporations (with record profits) are passing these costs to customers in higher prices.”
Corporate greed has played a large role in why people are paying higher prices for food and gas, as Common Dreams has reported and a majority of the public appears to understand, based on recent polling. Amid a public health crisis that has claimed the lives of more than 900,000 people in the U.S. and 5.7 million people globally, price-gouging corporations are enjoying mega-profits not seen since 1950.
While pandemic profiteering is evident, the question remains as to what made global supply chains so fragile to disruption in the first place—leading to prolonged shortages of key inputs and increased shipping costs that have been accompanied by price hikes.
According to Rakken Mabud, chief economist and managing director of policy and research at the Groundwork Collaborative, the answer lies in offshoring, financialization, deregulation, just-in-time logistics, and other profit-maximizing policies associated with neoliberalization and globalization.
Mabud made that case last week when testifying at a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing. She and David Dayen, executive editor of The American Prospect, expanded on that argument in a recent essay introducing a new series on the supply chain crisis.
As a number of economists have warned recently, policymakers on the verge of making life-altering decisions with respect to interest rates may be doing so based on faulty data or misconceptions.
“Among the biggest job gains in January were workers who are normally temporary and paid low wages (leisure and hospitality, retail, transport and warehousing),” Reich cautioned. “This January employers cut fewer of these low-wage temp workers than in most years, because of rising customer demand and the difficulties of hiring during Omicron. Due to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ ‘seasonal adjustment,’ cutting fewer workers than usual for this time of year appears as ‘adding lots of jobs.'”
Stiglitz, meanwhile, noted that “the inflation rate has been volatile. Last month, the media made a big deal out of the 7% annual inflation rate in the United States, while failing to note that the December rate was little more than half that of the October rate.”
“Moreover, given that a large proportion of today’s inflation stems from global issues—like chip shortages and the behavior of oil cartels—it is a gross exaggeration to blame inflation on excessive fiscal support in the U.S.,” Stiglitz continued.
While “the U.S. has slightly higher inflation than Europe,” he added, “it also has enjoyed stronger growth. U.S. policies prevented a massive increase in poverty that might have occurred otherwise. Recognizing that the cost of doing too little would be huge, U.S. policymakers did the right thing.”
Stiglitz wrote that his “biggest concern is that central banks will overreact, raising interest rates excessively and hampering the nascent recovery. As always, those at the bottom of the income scale would suffer the most in this scenario.”
“What we need instead,” he argued, “are targeted structural and fiscal policies aimed at unblocking supply bottlenecks and helping people confront today’s realities.”
For instance, wrote Stiglitz, “food stamps for the needy should be indexed to the price of food, and energy (fuel) subsidies to the price of energy.”
“Beyond that, a one-time ‘inflation adjustment’ tax cut for lower- and middle-income households would help them through the post-pandemic transition,” he added. “It could be financed by taxing the monopoly rents of the oil, technology, pharmaceutical, and other corporate giants that made a killing from the crisis.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by KENNY STANCIL and republished under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
The wealth-hoarding by ultrarich families would be equivalent to over four Build Back Better plans
Over the next few decades, the richest American families could avoid paying about $8.4 trillion in taxes, or more than four times the cost of the stalled Build Back Better package, according to a report released Wednesday.
“We can fix our broken estate and gift tax system… or we can trust our democracy to a handful of trillionaire trust fund babies.”
The new analysis details how loopholes have made the payment of estate, gift, and generation-skipping taxes—collectively called wealth-transfer taxes—effectively optional for the “ultrawealthy” and thereby accelerate the “accumulation of dynastic wealth.”
“Ultrarich families use dynasty trusts—the term for a variety of wealth-accumulating structures that remain in place for multiple generations—to ensure their fortunes cascade down to children, grandchildren, and beyond undiminished by wealth-transfer taxes,” the report explains.
Some U.S. states, such as South Dakota, have even changed their laws on dynasty trusts to attract wealthy residents, as Chuck Collins of the Institute for Policy highlighted last year.
The new report notes that U.S. lawmakers aren’t planning to address the issue, even if the Senate passes a version of a House-approved package:
The Build Back Better (BBB) legislation now before Congress—otherwise a vehicle for significant progressive tax reform—does nothing to directly reverse this toxic accumulation of dynastic wealth. Moreover, some dynasty trust reforms that were included in the bill passed by the House Ways and Means Committee in September 2021 were stripped out before the House voted on the measure in November.
The BBB bill needs full support from Senate Democrats to pass. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.)—one of the primary reasons the legislation hasn’t reached President Joe Biden’s desk—said Tuesday that it is “dead.”
However, Americans for Tax Fairness still uses the whittled-down BBB package to illustrate just how much money wealthy Americans can hoard for their families in the years ahead thanks to the U.S. tax system.
“The tax savings for the richest families could be about $8.4 trillion over the next 24 years or so if the current 40% estate tax rate remains in place,” the report states. “That’s the equivalent of more than four Build Back Better plans costing $1.75 trillion each over 10 years.”
The report adds that “about half of the $8.4 trillion is equivalent to the cost of the expanded child tax credit, which was included in the House-passed BBB bill and is estimated to reduce childhood poverty by 40%, for 24 years at $160 billion a year.”
There's no denying our economy and democracy are rigged in favor of the ultra-wealthy.
When the richest 100 Americans have 60,000 times more political power than the bottom 90% of people— it's time to get dynastic wealth under control. https://t.co/U1s6HmY1XC
“This hoarding of wealth is inexcusable,” declared the report’s principal author, Bob Lord, who practiced estate law for 30 years before joining Americans for Tax Fairness as tax counsel.
“The BBB legislation now before the U.S. Senate should be amended to close loopholes in the three components of America’s wealth transfer tax system: the estate, gift, and generation-skipping tax,” he asserted. “Effective reforms have already been developed—all that’s needed is for Congress to recognize the urgency to act now.”
The group’s new analysis and call for action come after Americans for Tax Fairness estimated last month that the 10 wealthiest billionaires in the United States have become approximately $1 billion richer collectively every day of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Wednesday’s report contains a warning about that group of ultra-billionaires, mentioning by name Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk of Telsa and SpaceX.
“As much as familiar fortunes have blossomed in the low-regulation, low-tax, wealth-worshiping environment of the previous 40 years,” the report says, “the next 40 and beyond could see the rise of economic dynasties that will make the old money look small.”
Along with closing dynasty-trust tax loopholes, Americans for Tax Fairness urges reforms that would “curb the year-to-year accumulation of wealth in existing trusts.” Specifically, it calls for a new income-tax bracket “on undistributed trust income in excess of $250,000 that is five percentage points higher than the maximum income-tax bracket for individuals.”
Noting a proposal from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), the group also encourages U.S. lawmakers to “impose an annual 2% wealth tax on the portion of a dynasty trust’s holdings that exceed $50 million, and an additional 1% on dynasty trust accumulations in excess of $1 billion.”
“The choice is clear,” according to the report. “We can fix our broken estate and gift tax system and stop the concentration of an ever-larger share of America’s wealth inside enormous dynasty trusts, or we can trust our democracy to a handful of trillionaire trust fund babies.”
“Fortunately, we know what needs to be done,” the report concludes. “The sole remaining challenge is to summon the courage to stand up to the holders of dynastic wealth and their enablers.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by JESSICA CORBETT and republished under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
Starbucks on Tuesday reported a 31% increase in profits during the final three months of 2021, but the massive Seattle-based coffee chain nevertheless announced plans to further hike prices this year, drawing outrage from critics who say the company is pushing higher costs onto consumers to pad its bottom line.
“Corporations are jacking up prices on consumers and using concerns about inflation as cover to do so.”
Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson—who saw his compensation soar by 39% to $20.4 million in 2021—told investors during the company’s earnings call Tuesday that “supply-chain disruptions” and rising labor costs are to blame for the coming price increases, of which he suggested there will be several.
“We have additional pricing actions planned through the balance of this year, which play an important role to mitigate cost pressures including inflation,” said Johnson, who also touted the company’s “strong revenue growth” in the quarter.
Starbucks’ revenue grew to $8.1 billion at the tail-end of 2021, a 19% jump compared to the previous year.
To progressive observers, Starbucks’ announcement of price hikes fits a pattern of U.S. corporations—in sectors across the economy—raising costs for consumers while raking in record profits, boosting executive pay, and squeezing regular employees. Starbucks employees nationwide are increasingly fighting back against their low wages and poor working conditions by launching union drives.
Historian Andy Lewis argued that Starbucks’ explanation for the impending price increases amounts to nothing more than “word salad to hide corporate greed.”
The consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, for its part, responded with outrage to Starbucks increasing prices for customers after giving its CEO a nearly 40% raise last year.
During testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Wednesday, Rakeen Mabud of the Groundwork Collaborative noted that “in sector after sector, in company after company, corporations are jacking up prices on consumers and using concerns about inflation as cover to do so.”
“We see that in Kimberly-Clark taking advantage of the pandemic to raise prices on masks,” the economist said. “We see Proctor & Gamble using the fact that they sell essential goods that families depend on like diapers to raise prices in this moment of crisis. And we even see companies like McDonald’s raising prices on consumers even as they enjoy massive increases in sales.”
“So in short,” Mabud added, “this is a really broad-based problem—it’s unfortunately not limited to a specific sector of the economy.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by JAKE JOHNSON and republished under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
Data-driven personalized ads are the lifeblood of the internet. To a growing number of lawmakers, they’re also nefarious
Earlier this month, the European Union Parliament passed sweeping new rules aimed at limiting how companies and websites can track people online to target them with advertisements.
Targeted advertising based on people’s online behavior has long been the business model that underwrites the internet. It allows advertisers to use the mass of personal data collected by Meta, Google, and other tech companies as people browse the web to serve ads to users by sorting them into tens of thousands of hyperspecific categories.
But behavioral advertising is also controversial. Critics argue that the practice enables discrimination, potentially only offering certain groups of people economic opportunities. They also say serving people ads based on what big tech companies assume they’re interested in potentially leaves people vulnerable to scams, fraud, and disinformation. Notoriously, the consulting firm Cambridge Analytica used personal data gleaned from Facebook profiles to target certain Americans with pro-Trump messages and certain Britons with pro-Brexit ads.
The 2016 U.S. presidential election and the Brexit vote, according to Jan Penfrat, a senior policy adviser at European digital rights group EDRi, were “wake-up calls” to the Europe Union to crack down. Lawmakers in the U.S. are also looking into ways to regulate behavioral advertising.
What Will the European Parliament’s New Regulations Do?
There’s been a long back and forth about how much to crack down on targeted advertising in the Digital Services Act (DSA), the EU’s big legislative package aimed at regulating Big Tech.
Everything from a total ban on behavioral advertising to more modest changes around ad transparency has at some point been on the table.
The bill also includes a ban on so-called dark patterns —“design choices that steer people into decisions they may not have made under normal conditions—such as the endless clicks it takes to opt out of being tracked by cookies on many websites.”
That measure is critical, according to Alexandre de Streel, the academic director of the think tank Centre on Regulation in Europe, because of how tech companies responded to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the EU’s 2016 tech regulation.
In a study on online advertising for the Parliament’s crucial Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection, de Streel and nearly a dozen other experts documented how “dark patterns” had become a major tool used by websites and platforms to persuade users to provide consent for sharing their data. Their recommendations for the DSA—which included more robust enforcement of the GDPR, stricter rules about obtaining consent, and the dark patterns ban—were included in the final bill.
“We are going in the right direction if we better enforce the GDPR and add these amendments on ‘dark patterns,’ ” De Streel told The Markup.
German member of European Parliament Patrick Breyer joined with more than 20 other MEPs and more than 50 public and private organizations last year to form the Tracking Free Ads Coalition. Though its push for a total ban on targeted advertising failed, the coalition was behind many of the more stringent restrictions. Breyer told The Markup the new rules were “a major achievement.”
“The Parliament stopped short of prohibiting surveillance advertising, but giving people a true choice [of whether to be targeted] is a major step forward, and I think the vast majority of people will use this option,” he said.
Despite passing the European Parliament, the DSA is far from settled. Due to the EU’s unique law-making process, the legislation must now be negotiated with the European Commission and the bloc’s 27 countries. The member states, as represented by the European Council, have adopted an official position considerably less aggressive—opting for only improved transparency on targeted advertising—and, according to Breyer, are “traditionally very open to [industry] lobbying.”
Whether the DSA’s wins against targeted advertising survive this process “will depend to a large degree on public pressure,” said Breyer.
How Has Big Tech Responded?
So far, Big Tech companies have publicly tread lightly in response to the European push to limit targeted advertising.
In response to The Markup’s request for comment, Google spokesperson Karl Ryan said that Google supports the DSA and that it shares “the goal of MEPs to continue to make the internet safer for everyone….”
“We will now take some time to analyze the final Parliament text to understand how it could impact us and our different users,” he said.
Meta did not respond to a request for comment.
But privately, over the last two years, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft have ramped up lobbying efforts in Brussels, spending more than $20 million in 2020.
The advertising industry, meanwhile, has been public in its opposition. In a statement on the recent vote, Interactive Advertising Bureau Europe director of public policy Greg Mroczkowski urged policymakers to reconsider.
“The use of personal data in advertising is already tightly regulated by existing legislation,” Mroczkowski said, apparently referencing the GDPR, which regulates data privacy in the EU generally. He further noted that the new rules “risk undermining” existing law and “the entire ad-supported digital economy.”
On Wednesday, the Belgian Data Protection Authority found IAB Europe–which developed and administered the system for companies to obtain consent for behavioral advertising while complying with GDPR—in violation of that law. In particular, the authority found that the pop-ups that ask for people’s consent to process their data as they visit websites failed to meet GDPR’s standards for transparency and consent. The pop-up posed “great risks to the fundamental rights” of Europeans, the ruling said. The authority ordered IAB to delete data collected under its Transparency and Consent Framework and has six months to comply.
“This decision is momentous,” Johnny Ryan, a senior fellow at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, told The Markup. “It means that digital rights are real. And there is a significance for the United States, too, because the IAB has introduced the same consent spam for the CCPA and CPRA [California Consumer Privacy Act and California Privacy Rights Act].”
In a statement to Tech Crunch, IAB Europe said it “reject[s] the finding that we are a data controller” in the context of its consent framework and is “considering all options with respect to a legal challenge.” Further, it said it is working on an “action plan to be executed within the prescribed six months” to bring it within GDPR compliance.
Google and Meta may be preparing for whichever way the wind is blowing.
A handful of European companies like internet security company Avast, search engine DuckDuckGo (which is a contributor to The Markup), and publisher Axel Springer see tighter rules around data privacy as a means to push the industry toward contextual ads or tech that matches ads based on a website’s content, and to therefore break the Google-Meta duopoly over online advertising.
What’s Happening in the U.S.?
On Jan. 18, Reps. Anna Eshoo (D-CA) and Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) and Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) introduced legislation to Congress to prohibit advertisers from using personal data to target advertisements—particularly using data about a person’s race, gender, and religion. Exceptions would be made for “broad” location information and contextual advertising.
“The hoarding of people’s personal data not only abuses privacy, but also drives the spread of misinformation, domestic extremism, racial division, and violence,” Booker said in a statement announcing the bill in January.
While there is bipartisan desire to rein in Big Tech, there is no consensus on how to do it. The bill most likely to pass the divided Congress is designed to stop Amazon, Apple, Google, and other tech giants from privileging their own products. Congressional action on targeted advertising does not appear likely.
Still, it is possible the Federal Trade Commission will take action.
Last summer, President Biden issued an executive order directing the FTC to use its rulemaking authority to curtail “unfair data collection and surveillance practices.” In December, the FTC sought public comment for a petition by nonprofit Accountable Tech to develop new data privacy rules.
Meanwhile, many U.S. digital rights activists, such as nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, are hopeful that new rules in Europe will force changes globally, as occurred after the GDPR. “The EU Parliament’s position, if it becomes law, could change the rules of the game for all platforms,” wrote EFF’s international policy director Christopher Schmon.
It’s still early days, but many see the tide turning against targeted advertising. These types of conversations, according to Penfrat at EDRi, were unthinkable a few years ago.
“The fact that a ban on surveillance-based advertising has been brought into the mainstream is a huge success,” he said.
A 2020 Markup investigation found the company pursuing similar goals in other states
A pair of newly public documents filed with a California administrative law judge show experts accusing the company of systematically overcharging customers it believed to be the most loyal around $1 billion over the past decade.
This practice of charging higher premiums to customers an insurance company suspects are unlikely to defect to a competitor is termed “price optimization” and was the subject of a 2020 Markup investigation that found Allstate was attempting to use a new pricing algorithm for auto insurance in Maryland that would have unfairly targeted its highest-paying customers—and that the algorithm had been approved in several other states.
Nearly every state, including California, bars insurers from setting car insurance rates on factors apart from the actual risk the drivers pose. Insurance regulators in 18 states and Washington, D.C., have explicitly declared price optimization illegal.
The new documents, which were initially filed in late October by the California Department of Insurance and Consumer Watchdog, a consumer advocacy group allowed by the state to intervene in the case and provide expertise, consist of written testimony from insurance industry experts who examined how Allstate set its prices.
They allege that Allstate was engaging in price optimization by giving smaller than appropriate discounts to the least-price-sensitive among its customers with clean driving records who held multiple policies with the company or who had several decades of driving experience.
Edward Cimini Jr., a senior casualty actuary with the California Department of Insurance, said he reviewed internal Allstate documents, documents the company submitted to the state describing its auto insurance pricing plan, and depositions of company employees and found that Allstate gave smaller discounts to drivers with more than 39 years of experience, a group he said is unlikely to shop around. “Since Allstate’s selections were not based on underlying costs, the final rates that Allstate charged these policyholders were actuarily unsound and unfairly discriminatory,” he said.
Allan Schwartz, an actuarial consultant hired by Consumer Watchdog to review Allstate’s pricing practices, estimated that Allstate overcharged California drivers who were owed discounts “about $1 billion.”
“Those policyholders were known by Allstate to have a lower elasticity of demand and were more likely to renew with Allstate even though they were charged premiums in excess of those based upon an actuarially sound estimate of the cost of risk transfer,” he said.
The company denies the allegations. “Allstate does not employ, and has never employed, price optimization in determining premiums in California because Allstate does not take into account an individual’s or class’s willingness to pay a higher premium relative to other individuals or classes,” Allstate spokesperson Ben Corey wrote in an email to The Markup.
In its court filings, Allstate points out that in 2011 the California Department of Insurance reviewed and approved the 2011 plan without highlighting the issues now raised in the long-running class action that triggered this hearing.
The company was sued in 2015 over alleged price optimization practices in California. Allstate moved to have the case thrown out, arguing in part that it wasn’t a matter for civil courts but rather for the state department of insurance. In 2016, the United States District Court for the Northern District of California put the case on hold and referred it to the authority of the Commissioner of the California Department of Insurance for its opinion, which triggered the administrative law proceeding. Last week, the parties agreed to enter voluntary mediation.
Two years ago, The Markup published an investigation revealing that a new method of calculating rates for car insurance customers that Allstate was trying to implement across the country attempted to charge higher rates to customers who were already paying a lot for their car insurance—essentially creating a “suckers list” of big spenders and squeezing even more money out of them.
The investigation was based on details the insurer provided to regulators in Maryland as part of its 2014 filing there that revealed the current and proposed rate for policyholders in the state. Using statistical regressions, we found that the rating factor, called CGR, would charge more—and severely limit discounts—to big spenders. Maryland regulators rejected Allstate’s plan over price optimization concerns. We found Allstate was using similar algorithms in 10 other states, but we were not able to determine if they worked exactly the same way in those states because we lacked the data we had in Maryland. Allstate did not answer our questions about the algorithms.
Consumer Watchdog founder Harvey Rosenfield, who has long been critical of Allstate’s pricing practices, said that the company found a different method of achieving the same goals in California, which only allows insurers to use a limited number of approved factors—like driving record, type of car, or number of years behind the wheel—to determine how much customers have to pay in premiums.
“What we’re contending is they took their knowledge of price elasticity and figured out a pretty straightforward way of doing it without saying so,” Rosenfield said. “Their actuaries selected relativities to set people’s premiums that punished people who Allstate knew were inelastic, who fit the profile of being less sensitive to price changes. They charged those people more.”
California isn’t the only place where Allstate has faced litigation over its use of price optimization. Shortly after the publication of The Markup’s Maryland investigation, the company was hit with a class action lawsuit in Texas that directly referenced The Markup’s reporting. That suit alleges that the company was “charging higher premiums to its more tenured policyholders than it charges otherwise identically-situated newer policyholders for the same or materially the same coverages.”
Early in 2020, as the pandemic gripped the nation, JPMorgan Chase offered to help customers weather the crisis by taking a temporary pause on mortgage, auto and credit card payments. Chase’s CEO, Jamie Dimon, sounded sympathetic about a year later as he offered broader reflections on what was ailing the country. “Americans know that something has gone terribly wrong,” he wrote in a letter to shareholders. “Many of our citizens are unsettled, and the fault line for all this discord is a fraying American dream — the enormous wealth of our country is accruing to the very few. In other words, the fault line is inequality.”
But even as those words were published, the bank had quietly begun to unleash a lawsuit blitz against many of its struggling customers. Starting in early 2020 and continuing to today, Chase has filed thousands of lawsuits against credit card customers who have fallen behind on their payments.
Chase had stopped pursuing credit card lawsuits in 2011, in the wake of the last major economic downturn, after regulators found that the company was filing tens of thousands of flimsy suits, sometimes overstating what customers owed. Rather than being backed by extensive billing records to document the debts, according to the regulators, the suits were typically filed with a short affidavit from one of a half-dozen Chase employees in one office in San Antonio who vouched for the accuracy of the bank’s information in thousands of suits.
Chase “filed lawsuits and obtained judgments against consumers using deceptive affidavits and other documents that were prepared without following required procedures,” the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau concluded in 2015. At times, Chase employees signed affidavits “without personal knowledge of the signer, a practice commonly referred to as ‘robo-signing.’” According to the CFPB’s findings, there were mistakes in about 10% of cases Chase won and the judgments “contained erroneous amounts that were greater than what the consumers legally owed.”
Chase neither admitted nor denied the CFPB’s findings, but it agreed, as part of a consent order, to provide significant evidence to make its cases in the future. The company also agreed it would provide “relevant information and documentation maintained by [Chase] to support their claims” in cases — the vast majority of those it filed — in which customers did not respond to the lawsuit.
But that provision expired on New Year’s Day 2020. And since then the bank has gone back to bringing lawsuits much as it did before 2011, according to lawyers who have defended Chase customers.
“From what I can see, nothing has changed,” said Cliff Dorsen, a consumer-rights attorney in Georgia who represents Chase credit card customers.
Chase declined to make executives available for interviews. It said in a statement that the timing of the resumption of its credit card lawsuits was just a coincidence. “We have engaged with our regulators throughout this process,” said Tom Kelly, a bank spokesperson. “We continue to meet the requirements of the consent order.” (Kelly said Chase also filed some credit card lawsuits in 2019.)
Kelly declined to say how many suits it has filed in its blitz of the past two years, but civil dockets from across the country give a hint of the scale — and its accelerating pace. Chase sued more than 800 credit card customers around Fort Lauderdale, Florida, last year after suing 70 in 2020 and none in 2019, according to a review of court records. In Westchester County, in New York’s suburbs, court records show that Chase has sued more than 400 customers over credit card debt since 2020; a year earlier, the equivalent figure was one.
A similar surge is occurring in Texas, according to January Advisors, a data-science firm. Chase filed more than 1,000 consumer debt lawsuits around Houston last year after filing only seven in 2020, the analytics firm’s review of court records in Harris County shows. Chase instigated 141 consumer debt cases in Austin last year after filing only one such case in 2020, according to January Advisors, which is conducting research for a nationwide study ofdebt collection cases.
Today, just as it did before running afoul of the CFPB, Chase is mass-producing affidavits from the same San Antonio office where low-level employees generated hundreds of thousands of affidavits in the past, according to defense attorneys and court documents. Those affidavits are often the main piece of evidence that Chase uses to win its case while detailed customer records — and any errors they may contain — remain out of sight.
“Our clients deserve to see everything that Chase has in its files,” Dorsen said. “Instead, Chase gives us these affidavits and says: ‘You can trust us about the rest.’”
Before the robo-signing scandal a decade ago, Chase recovered about a billion dollars a year with its credit card collections business, according to the CFPB. Why would Chase stop suing customers for years, forgoing billions of dollars, only to ramp up its suits once key provisions of the CFPB settlement had expired?
Craig Cowie thinks he has an answer. “Chase did not think it could make money if it had to sue customers and abide by the CFPB settlement,” said Cowie, who worked as an enforcement attorney at the CFPB during the Obama administration and now teaches at the University of Montana Law School. “That’s the only explanation that makes sense for why the bank would have held back.”
Cowie, who did not work on the CFPB’s case against Chase, said he doesn’t know why the agency agreed to a time limit on some settlement provisions. He pointed out that such agreements are negotiated and the CFPB cannot just dictate the terms. The agency may have felt it had to let some provisions of the settlement expire to get Chase to agree to the deal, Cowie said.
The CFPB declined to comment.
For its part, Chase said it waited years to restart its lawsuits because it took that long to get the system working right. “We rebuilt the litigation program slowly and methodically to make sure we had the right controls in place,” said its spokesperson, Kelly.
At the time, the CFPB had found numerous flaws in Chase’s suits. The agency concluded that Chase used “unfair” legal tactics when it promised that its credit card account information was reliable and mistake-free. It wasn’t simply a matter of errors in calculating how much was owed; in some cases the company even got the customer’s name wrong. Chase would sometimes pass accounts with errors — including instances where customers had been victims of credit card fraud, others who had tried to settle their debts and even some who had died — on to outside debt collectors, who might then take action based on that information.
Once Chase won a victory in court, the bank could seek to garnish a customer’s wages or raid their bank accounts, and those customers would pay a further price: a stain on their credit report that could make it harder to “obtain credit, employment, housing, and insurance,” the CFPB wrote.
Those sued by Chase, then and now, might spot errors if the company provided full records in its court filings, consumer advocates say. Instead, Chase typically submits copies of a few credit card statements along with a two-page affidavit attesting that the bank’s records were accurate and complete.
Consumer advocates say they do not expect that the majority of Chase’s credit card records are tainted with errors. But if today’s error rate is the same 10% that the CFPB estimated in the past and the Chase lawsuit push continues, thousands of customers may be sued for money they don’t owe. And there is no easy way to check when Chase keeps so many of its records out of sight.
Chase said that its current system for processing credit card lawsuits is sound and reliable. “We quality-check 100% of our affidavits today,” the company said in a statement.
Credit card customers do not respond to collections lawsuits in roughly 70% of cases, according to research from The Pew Charitable Trusts. In those instances, the customer typically loses by default.
In the small percentage of cases where a customer gets a lawyer or otherwise fights back, Chase still has the advantage because it can access all of the customer’s account records easily, according to consumer lawyers. (The bank typically closes accounts of customers who have failed to pay their debts, leaving them unable to access their records online.) Chase usually shares the complete credit card account file only after a legal fight, according to attorneys and pleadings from across the country. “Chase has all the evidence and we have to beg to get it,” said Jerry Jarzombek, a consumer-rights attorney in Fort Worth, Texas, who is defending several Chase customers.
The result leaves many defendants in a bind: They don’t have enough information to know whether they should dispute the company’s claims. “Chase wants us to believe its records are reliable so we don’t need to see them,” Jarzombek said. “Well, I’m sorry. I’ve dealt with Chase for decades. I’d prefer to see what evidence they’ve actually got.”
The robo-signing scandal exposed Chase’s affidavit-signing assembly line. Before the settlement, Chase had about a half-dozen employees churning through affidavits stacked a foot high or taller, according to the former Chase executive who brought the practices to light at the time. Kamala Harris, who was then California’s attorney general and is now vice president, likened the process to anaffidavit mill.
The current operation involves roughly a dozen “signing officers” working from the same San Antonio offices as before and performing many of the same tasks, according to Chase employees and outside lawyers who have represented the company.
Chase used to prepare affidavits “in bulk using stock templates,” according to the 2015 CFPB findings. That is again happening today, according to two of Chase’s outside lawyers who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the process.
The lawyers said they typically send their affidavit requests in batches. The requests already contain the basic details of the customer’s account when they arrive in Chase’s San Antonio office, they said. An affidavit request that is sent one day can typically be processed and returned the next business day, the lawyers said.
Chase affidavits contain stock language that the “signing officer” has “personal knowledge of and access to [Chase’s] books and records.” That “personal knowledge” is limited, said one signing officer who declined to be named. Chase does not expect signing officers to perform a forensic review of an account but rather to follow computer prompts to complete the affidavit, said the employee. “We just work with what’s on the screen.”
Chase declined to discuss its process for creating affidavits, but the bank said it satisfies the rules set by courts in the places where it operates. “Judges, clerks and other judiciary staff are well versed in the court rules and laws in their jurisdictions,” said the statement by the bank’s spokesperson, Kelly. “Through our counsel, we provide the information those parties require in matters before them.”
Courts around the country have grown too accepting of what big banks and debt collectors say, according to consumer advocates. And the justice they dispense can feel as cursory and hurried as the suits that Chase files.
In Texas a decade ago, lawmakers pushed most credit card cases into the state’s version of small claims courts, known as justice courts. The rules of evidence are more lax there and the judge might not even be a lawyer. A retired basketball player presides over one suchcourtroom in Houston. “One of these judges said to me: ‘What’s the point of seeing a bunch of evidence? We already know these people borrowed the money,’” said Jarzombek, the Fort Worth attorney. “I said: ‘Why even have a trial, then? Let the banks take whatever they want.’”
In Houston, where Chase has more than 1,000 consumer credit suits on the docket, only one defendant in those cases has fought to a trial on her own, according to court records.
That person’s experience is instructive. Like many, Melissa Razo struggled financially during the early pandemic. A former restaurant manager, the 42-year-old Razo had gone back to school, the University of Houston, to study psychology, and she supported herself by doing typing for an online transcription service. That work suddenly dried up when the pandemic hit, and Razo began missing credit card payments. Her debt escalated. Chase sued her in January 2021, claiming she owed a total of about $8,500 on two credit cards.
Razo had a previous court experience stemming from an acrimonious divorce, where she had learned that a plaintiff needs facts and evidence to win. “Nothing I presented was good enough,” she recalled of the divorce case.
Using what she’d learned, Razo prepared for her day in court against Chase. She could not access her account anymore, she said, because the bank had shut it down. So in late June, as her hearing date approached, Razo pulled together as many of her credit card statements as she could find. They told a story of grocery runs and shopping at Target and Goodwill, along with missed payments and penalties.
Razo presumed Chase would have to back up its claims just as she had been expected to do in divorce court. She expected the company’s lawyers would have five years of statements and documents to show that she owed exactly what they said she owed. This was a trial, after all.
The trial lasted perhaps a minute, according to Razo. It boiled down to two questions. Was Razo present? the judge asked over Zoom. When she announced herself, the judge asked if she had a Chase credit card. Yes, Razo said, that was true. Then, she said, the judge ruled in favor of Chase.
Chase declined to comment on the case. The judge was not authorized to speak about the matter, according to a court clerk. And the justice courts do not transcribe their hearings, so ProPublica could not verify what was said. (The court’s docket did confirm that a judgment was entered in Chase’s favor after a judge trial.)
Razo’s courtroom experience, though, sounds typical, according to Rich Tomlinson, a lawyer with Lone Star Legal Aid. “I can’t recall ever seeing a live witness in a debt case,” said Tomlinson, who has represented hundreds of debtors in his career. “These trials are not like Perry Mason. They’re not even Judge Judy.”
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
From ‘metaverse’ to ‘NFT’ – here’s a wrap-up of the key buzzwords that shaped 2021 in the tech industry.
These subjects were the talk of the town in 2021, as the tech industry transitions into a new age.
A DAO tried to buy a rare copy of the U.S. Constitution, whilst NFTs took the art world by storm.
This year, tech CEOs drew inspiration from a 1990s sci-fi novel, Reddit investors’ lexicon seeped into the mainstream as “diamond hands” and “apes” shook Wall Street, and something called a DAO tried to buy a rare copy of the U.S. Constitution.
If you’re still drawing a blank as 2021 wraps up, here’s a short glossary:
Metaverse
The metaverse broadly refers to shared, immersive digital environments which people can move between and may access via virtual reality or augmented reality headsets or computer screens. read more
Some tech CEOs are betting it will be the successor to the mobile internet. The term was coined in the dystopian novel “Snow Crash” three decades ago. This year CEOs of tech companies from Microsoft to Match Group have discussed their roles in building the metaverse. In October, Facebook renamed itself Meta to reflect its new metaverse focus.
Web3
Web3 is used to describe a potential next phase of the internet: a decentralized internet run on the record-keeping technology blockchain.
This model, where users would have ownership stakes in platforms and applications, would differ from today’s internet, known as Web2, where a few major tech giants like Facebook and Alphabet’s Google control the platforms.
Social audio
Tech companies waxed lyrical this year about tools for live audio conversations, rushing to release features after the buzzy, once invite-only app Clubhouse saw an initial surge amid COVID-19 lockdowns. read more
NFT
Non-fungible tokens, which exploded in popularity this year, are a type of digital asset that exists on a blockchain, a record of transactions kept on networked computers. read more
In March, a work by American artist Beeple sold for nearly $70 million at Christie’s, the first ever sale by a major auction house of art that does not exist in physical form.
Decentralization
Decentralizing, or the transfer of power and operations from central authorities like companies or governments to the hands of users, emerged as a key theme in the tech industry.
Such shifts could affect everything from how industries and markets are organized to functions like content moderation of platforms. Twitter, for example, is investing in a project to build a decentralized common standard for social networks, dubbed Bluesky.
A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) is generally an internet community owned by its members and run on blockchain technology. DAOs use smart contracts, pieces of code that establish the group’s rules and automatically execute decisions.
In recent months, crowd-funded crypto-group ConstitutionDAO tried and failed to buy a rare copy of the U.S. Constitution in an auction held by Sotheby’s.
Stonks
This deliberate misspelling of “stocks,” which originated with an internet meme, made headlines as online traders congregating in forums like Reddit’s WallStreetBets drove up stocks including GameStop and AMC. The lingo of these traders, calling themselves “apes” or praising the “diamond hands” who held positions during big market swings, became mainstream.
GameFi
GameFi is a broad term referring to the trend of gamers earning cryptocurrency through playing video games, where players can make money through mechanisms like getting financial tokens for winning battles in the popular game Axie Infinity.
Altcoin
The term covers all cryptocurrencies aside from Bitcoin, ranging from ethereum, which aims to be the backbone of a future financial system, to Dogecoin, a digital currency originally created as a joke and popularized by Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
FSD BETA
Tesla released a test version of its upgraded Full Self-Driving (FSD) software, a system of driving-assistance features – like automatically changing lanes and make turns – to the wider public this year.
The name of the much-scrutinized software has itself been contentious, with regulators and users saying it misrepresents its capabilities as it still requires driver attention.
Fabs
“Fabs,” short for a semiconductor fabrication plant, entered the mainstream lexicon this year as a shortage of chips from fabs were blamed for the global shortage of everything from cars to gadgets.
Net zero
A term, popularized this year thanks to the COP26 U.N. climate talks in Glasgow, for saying a country, company, or product does not contribute to global greenhouse gas emissions. That’s usually accomplished by cutting emissions, such as use of fossil fuels, and balancing any remaining emissions with efforts to soak up carbon, like planting trees. Critics say any emissions are unacceptable.
Above: Collage by Lynxotic, Original Photo by Unsplash
“Wall Street’s toxic fossil fuel investments threaten the future of our planet and the stability of our financial system and put all of us, especially our most vulnerable communities, at risk.”
Fueling fresh calls for swift, sweeping action by President Joe Biden and financial regulators, a report published Tuesday reveals that if the planet-heating pollution of the 18 largest U.S. asset managers and banks is compared to that of high-emissions countries, Wall Street is a top-five emitter.
“Financial regulators have the authority to rein in this risky behavior, and this report makes it clear that there is no time to waste.”
The new report—entitled Wall Street’s Carbon Bubble: The global emissions of the U.S. financial sector—was released by the Center for American Progress (CAP) and Sierra Club. The analysis was done by South Pole, which replicated an approach it used earlier this year for a U.K.-focused effort commissioned by Greenpeace and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).
Though likely a “gross underestimate,” as Sierra Club put it, because the analysis relies on public disclosures that exclude key data, the researchers found that “just the portions of the portfolios of the eight banks and 10 asset managers studied in this report financed an estimated total of 1.968 billion tons CO2e based on year-end disclosures from 2020.”
Putting that CO2e—or carbon dioxide equivalent, which is used to compare emissions from various greenhouse gases—figure into context, the report notes:
If the financial institutions (FIs) in this study were a country, they would have the fifth largest emissions in the world, falling just short of Russia;
Financed emissions from the 18 institutions covered in this report are equivalent to 432 million passenger vehicles driven for one year;
Financed emissions from the eight banks studied in this report are equivalent to 80 million homes’ energy use for one year; and
Financed emissions from the 10 asset managers studied in this report are equivalent to three billion barrels of oil consumed.
The banks analyzed are Bank of America, Bank of New York (BNY) Mellon, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, State Street, and Wells Fargo.
The asset managers included are BNY Mellon Investment Management, BlackRock, Capital Group, Fidelity Investments, Goldman Sachs Asset Management, JPMorgan Asset Management, Morgan Stanley Investment Management, PIMCO, State Street Global Advisors, and the Vanguard Group.
When Wall Street is factored into the list of the world’s top 10 countries responsible for the most annual greenhouse gas emissions, it falls after China, the United States, India, and Russia but ranks ahead of Indonesia, Brazil, Japan, Iran, and Germany, according to Climate Watch data.
As the new publication warns:
The findings of this report make clear that the U.S. financial sector is a major contributor to climate change. Given that the indirect emissions of the U.S. financial sector are just below the total emissions of Russia, it should be considered a high-carbon sector and treated as such. Therefore, if President Biden and his administration do not put in place measures to mitigate U.S.-financed emissions, the United States will almost certainly fall far short of its targets to achieve a 50% to 52% reduction from 2005 levels in 2030 and net-zero emissions economy-wide by no later than 2050.
The implications of falling short would be dire. Continued unfettered emissions supported by the financial industry would mean that the deadly wildfires, droughts, heatwaves, hurricanes, floods, and other extreme weather events that Americans and communities around the world are already experiencing will only become worse, and efforts to mitigate emissions will only become more challenging and costly.
Representatives from the groups behind the report echoed its call to action in a statement Tuesday.
“Climate change poses a large systemic risk to the world economy. If left unaddressed, climate change could lead to a financial crisis larger than any in living memory,” said Andres Vinelli, vice president of economic policy at CAP. “The U.S. banking sector is endangering itself and the planet by continuing to finance the fossil fuel sector.”
Vinelli added that “because the industry has proven itself to be unwilling to govern itself,” regulators including the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency “must urgently develop a framework to reduce banks’ contributions to climate change.”
Ben Cushing, Sierra Club’s Fossil-Free Finance campaign manager, agreed that “regulators can no longer ignore Wall Street’s staggering contribution to the climate crisis.”
“The U.S. banking sector is endangering itself and the planet by continuing to finance the fossil fuel sector.”
“Wall Street’s toxic fossil fuel investments threaten the future of our planet and the stability of our financial system and put all of us, especially our most vulnerable communities, at risk,” he said. “Financial regulators have the authority to rein in this risky behavior, and this report makes it clear that there is no time to waste.”
The report comes as financial institutions worldwide face mounting criticism for their contributions to the climate emergency—including at the COP26 climate summit in Scotland last month—and as the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is pushing model legislation that opposes fossil fuel divestment.
More than three dozen climate advocacy groups argued Monday that “what ALEC claims to be discriminatory action”—referring to divestment from major polluters—”is instead prudent action to ensure the stability of our financial system and economy.”
“We know from the Great Recession that the financial sector won’t take responsibility,” the organizations noted. “It’s up to regulators to protect people from the impact on climate and financial risk of fossil fuel investment.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by JESSICA CORBETT and republished under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
Elon Musk believes he is saving the world: are others worthy to claim the same?
Tesla is a luxury car company with an impeccable green pedigree. Even with attempts at a car with mainstream entry level pricing, owning a Tesla is still beyond the reach of many.
Yet the belief in it’s sustainable energy mission, and the far reaching master plan to back it up, make this fact, for many, “forgivable” at least, and in many ways even a boon.
After all, surviving in the face of an extinction level threat of our own making, has to be for a reason. The reason is the beauty and luxurious success of being alive. These are the twin messages that Elon Musk created that led to a business triumph that is about more than money and power.
Apple makes expensive luxury gadgets that facilitate communication, education and entertainment. It could be argued that these, no less than a pleasurable acceleration of a Tesla in “Ludicrous Mode”, are essential to our continued survival and are desperately needed to help us meet the ever growing challenges of our world and its future.
Apple, since the premature demise of Steve Jobs, has not had the same kind of heroic branding of Tesla’s sustainable energy mission. But the iPhone company should be seen in the same light. The many tools for communication and education make Apple just as important as Tesla in creating a more positive future.
With the ongoing success of Apple’s brand, and the rapid and accelerating expansion of its hardware, software and services, the company will undoubtedly have a central role to play in our success or failure as a species going forward. Apart from the mundane marketplace triumphs, there is a deeper story of a mission that should not be overlooked.
Bad guys make good guys look even better
Look at Zuckerberg and Bezos. Would anyone ever mistake either for a savior? Does anyone believe that Zuckerberg wants to build the metaverse to save the world?
Or that Bezos has ambitions toward space travel for anything other than self-aggrandizement and commercial exploitation?
No one does, of course not. Steve Jobs and Elon Musk can (could) emanate natural sincerity and engender the belief that they are on a “holy” mission. And perhaps that ring of truth succeeds because of it’s honestly and authenticity.
Bill Gates just wants to sell you overpriced, inferior software. And lock you into a never ending billing cycle.
America has had a sad history, for the last century, of celebrating charlatans and hucksters like Zuckerberg, Bezos and Gates, and misunderstanding Steve Jobs until he was gone. But it was his vision, finally, that brought Apple to the pinnacle of business success where it stands today.
Elon Musk’s ‘saving the world ethos’ is important to recognize, acknowledge and adopt. We need more visionaries with an explicit aim to improving and uplifting not just winning a battle between equality corrupt adversaries.
Apple is the Tesla of communication and it’s innovative DNA inspired and created by Steve Jobs is just as essential to building a sustainable, and better, world as Tesla & Musk.
The days of celebrating empty, temporary monetary “success” achieved by scurrilous business models must end, now.
The future heroes of sustainable tech, blockchain innovation, Web3 and, yes, even the metaverse must be lauded, supported and acknowledged as they emerge, while the truth of the shortcomings of evil men must be taught to every child.
Because the choice is not between Coke vs. Pepsi, Tesla vs. Ford or Apple vs. Microsoft. The choice is between Utopia or Oblivion. And there is no third way forward.
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?
Digital rights advocates on Tuesday welcomed Facebook’s announcement that it plans to jettison its facial recognition system, which critics contend is dangerous and often inaccurate technology abused by governments and corporations to violate people’s privacy and other rights.
“Corporate use of face surveillance is very dangerous to people’s privacy.”
Adam Schwartz, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) who last month called facial recognition technology “a special menace to privacy, racial justice, free expression, and information security,” commended the new Facebook policy.
“Facebook getting out of the face recognition business is a pivotal moment in the growing national discomfort with this technology,” he said. “Corporate use of face surveillance is very dangerous to people’s privacy.”
The social networking giant first introduced facial recognition software in late 2010 as a feature to help users identify and “tag” friends without the need to comb through photos. The company subsequently amassed one of the world’s largest digital photo archives, which was largely compiled through the system. Facebook says over one billion of those photos will be deleted, although the company will keep DeepFace, the advanced algorithm that powers the facial recognition system.
Facebook has announced they will be deleting over a billion face recognition templates as they shut down their entire face recognition system. This is great news for Facebook users, and for the global movement pushing back on this technology. https://t.co/0ErdCBhkCT
In a blog post, Jerome Presenti, the vice president of artificial intelligence at Meta—the new name of Facebook’s parent company following a rebranding last week that was widely condemned as a ploy to distract from recent damning whistleblower revelations—described the policy change as “one of the largest shifts in facial recognition usage in the technology’s history.”
“The many specific instances where facial recognition can be helpful need to be weighed against growing concerns about the use of this technology as a whole,” he wrote.
Facial recognition technology, which has advanced in accuracy and power in recent years, has increasingly been the focus of debate because of how it can be misused by governments, law enforcement, and companies. In China, authorities use the capabilities to track and control the Uighurs, a largely Muslim minority. In the United States, law enforcement has turned to the software to aid policing, leading to fears of overreach and mistaken arrests.
Concerns over actual and potential misuse of facial recognition systems have prompted bans on the technology in over a dozen U.S. locales, beginning with San Francisco in 2019 and subsequently proliferating from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon.
Caitlin Seeley George, campaign director at Fight for the Future, was among the online privacy campaigners who welcomed Facebook’s move. In a statement, she said that “facial recognition is one of the most dangerous and politically toxic technologies ever created. Even Facebook knows that.”
"Facial recognition is one of the most dangerous and politically toxic technologies ever created. Even Facebook knows that," @caitlinseeley of @fightfortheftr told ABC News, "and even as algorithms improve, facial recognition will only be more dangerous." https://t.co/XBZGfyE6mp
— Evan Greer is on Mastodon and Bluesky (@evan_greer) November 2, 2021
Seeley George continued:
From misidentifying Black and Brown people (which has already led to wrongful arrests) to making it impossible to move through our lives without being constantly surveilled, we cannot trust governments, law enforcement, or private companies with this kind of invasive surveillance.
“Even as algorithms improve, facial recognition will only be more dangerous,” she argued. “This technology will enable authoritarian governments to target and crack down on religious minorities and political dissent; it will automate the funneling of people into prisons without making us safer; it will create new tools for stalking, abuse, and identity theft.”
Seeley George says the “only logical action” for lawmakers and companies to take is banning facial recognition.
So Facebook is deleting one billion facial recognition scans, but it's keeping DeepFace, the model that is trained on all those faces. Note that "the company has also not ruled out incorporating facial recognition into future products." Very meta. 👀 https://t.co/8ntPg5Hyf9
Amid applause for the company’s announcement, some critics took exception to Facebook’s retention of DeepFace, as well as its consideration of “potential future applications” for facial recognition technology.
Originally published on Common Dreams by BRETT WILKINS and republished under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
Meet the researchers making science more sustainable.
The lab is quietly bustling with scientists intent on their work. One gestures to an item on her bench – a yellow container, about the size of a novel. It’s almost full to the brim with used plastic pipette tips – the disposable attachments that stop pipettes being cross-contaminated. She stares down at it, despondently. “And this is just from today.”
We’re at the Francis Crick Institute, a towering biomedical research facility in the heart of London. The scientist in question is Marta Rodriguez Martinez, a Postdoctoral Training Fellow. Every day in her lab, pipette tips, petri dishes, bottles and more are used and discarded. The scale of the waste is immense – research by the University of Exeter estimates that labs worldwide generate 5.5 million tonnes of plastic waste each year.
Newsletter:
Alongside her research, Rodriguez Martinez doubles as a sustainability rep, tirelessly working to reduce the plastic waste her lab produces. The Crick’s sustainability team consult her about the unique behaviours of scientists. In return, she encourages colleagues to stop using unnecessary plastic and teaches them about sustainable alternatives.
It’s a difficult task, but one she feels passionate about. “We have in our heads that plastic is a one-use material, but it is not. Plastic can be autoclaved, it can be washed. Most plastics we use in the lab could be re-used as efficiently as glass.”
The Crick is taking behaviour change seriously. Alongside reps like Rodriguez Martinez, it offers sustainability workshops and waste training to employees. A pipette-tip audit is underway, which will show which products come with the lowest excess plastic. It’s also developing an interactive dashboard for teams to see how their waste compares to other labs’.
But behaviour change is only the beginning. Rodrigo Ponce-Ortuño oversees the Crick’s contract with an eco-friendly waste-management company. He points out that the journey of plastic lab equipment stretches far beyond its short service on the workbench.
Take media bottles – the plastic containers that hold nutrients to grow cells and bacteria. “It’s just glucose that goes into the bottles,” Ponce-Ortuño explains. The liquid is non-hazardous, but in his experience, recycling companies are wary of the scientific jargon on the labelling.
“If it just said sugar, it would be fine,” he says. Instead, many companies reject the waste because they don’t understand the chemistry. But, by using contractors with the right expertise, the Crick now sends all its media bottles for recycling.
For Rodriguez Martinez, this is a milestone. “I use maybe four media bottles a week, and there are 1,200 scientists here. That we can rinse them and have a contractor recycle them is a big success.”
This tactic – of building companies’ confidence in handling lab equipment – has led to other successes, too. Cooling gel packs, polystyrene boxes and the bulky pallets used to transport products are all collected for re-use. Boxes for pipette tips are also collected – after they’ve been stacked and re-used in the labs themselves.
In fact, the Crick’s labs send no waste at all to landfill. Hazardous waste is safely incinerated, but anything else that can’t be recycled goes through a process called energy-from-waste, where electricity, heat or fuel is harvested from the material as it’s disposed of.
And they’re just as keen to reduce the amount of plastic coming in. The institute recently held a green procurement fair, where suppliers had to meet a set of sustainability criteria to attend. “Normally when you buy a product, you look at the quality and the price,” says Rodriguez Martinez. “We want to add sustainability to that equation.”
The team know that change won’t happen overnight. They need to win people over with practical measures to reduce plastics – without reducing the quality of science. So the institute is discussing best practice with other laboratories, to grow the movement for low-plastic research.
“We’re trying to educate people into a more sustainable science,” says Rodriguez Martinez.
Wellcome, which publishes Mosaic, is one of the six founding partners of the Francis Crick Institute.
The lab is quietly bustling with scientists intent on their work. One gestures to an item on her bench – a yellow container, about the size of a novel. It’s almost full to the brim with used plastic pipette tips – the disposable attachments that stop pipettes being cross-contaminated. She stares down at it, despondently. “And this is just from today.”
We’re at the Francis Crick Institute, a towering biomedical research facility in the heart of London. The scientist in question is Marta Rodriguez Martinez, a Postdoctoral Training Fellow. Every day in her lab, pipette tips, petri dishes, bottles and more are used and discarded. The scale of the waste is immense – research by the University of Exeter estimates that labs worldwide generate 5.5 million tonnes of plastic waste each year. Newsletter:
Alongside her research, Rodriguez Martinez doubles as a sustainability rep, tirelessly working to reduce the plastic waste her lab produces. The Crick’s sustainability team consult her about the unique behaviours of scientists. In return, she encourages colleagues to stop using unnecessary plastic and teaches them about sustainable alternatives.
It’s a difficult task, but one she feels passionate about. “We have in our heads that plastic is a one-use material, but it is not. Plastic can be autoclaved, it can be washed. Most plastics we use in the lab could be re-used as efficiently as glass.”
The Crick is taking behaviour change seriously. Alongside reps like Rodriguez Martinez, it offers sustainability workshops and waste training to employees. A pipette-tip audit is underway, which will show which products come with the lowest excess plastic. It’s also developing an interactive dashboard for teams to see how their waste compares to other labs’.
But behaviour change is only the beginning. Rodrigo Ponce-Ortuño oversees the Crick’s contract with an eco-friendly waste-management company. He points out that the journey of plastic lab equipment stretches far beyond its short service on the workbench.
Take media bottles – the plastic containers that hold nutrients to grow cells and bacteria. “It’s just glucose that goes into the bottles,” Ponce-Ortuño explains. The liquid is non-hazardous, but in his experience, recycling companies are wary of the scientific jargon on the labelling.
“If it just said sugar, it would be fine,” he says. Instead, many companies reject the waste because they don’t understand the chemistry. But, by using contractors with the right expertise, the Crick now sends all its media bottles for recycling.
For Rodriguez Martinez, this is a milestone. “I use maybe four media bottles a week, and there are 1,200 scientists here. That we can rinse them and have a contractor recycle them is a big success.”
This tactic – of building companies’ confidence in handling lab equipment – has led to other successes, too. Cooling gel packs, polystyrene boxes and the bulky pallets used to transport products are all collected for re-use. Boxes for pipette tips are also collected – after they’ve been stacked and re-used in the labs themselves.
In fact, the Crick’s labs send no waste at all to landfill. Hazardous waste is safely incinerated, but anything else that can’t be recycled goes through a process called energy-from-waste, where electricity, heat or fuel is harvested from the material as it’s disposed of.
And they’re just as keen to reduce the amount of plastic coming in. The institute recently held a green procurement fair, where suppliers had to meet a set of sustainability criteria to attend. “Normally when you buy a product, you look at the quality and the price,” says Rodriguez Martinez. “We want to add sustainability to that equation.”
The team know that change won’t happen overnight. They need to win people over with practical measures to reduce plastics – without reducing the quality of science. So the institute is discussing best practice with other laboratories, to grow the movement for low-plastic research.
“We’re trying to educate people into a more sustainable science,” says Rodriguez Martinez.
Wellcome, which publishes Mosaic, is one of the six founding partners of the Francis Crick Institute.
This article first appeared on Mosaic and is republished here under a Creative Commons licence (CC BY 4.0).
“Oil and gas executives have lied to the American people for decades about their industry’s role in causing climate change. It’s time they were held accountable.”
Democratic leaders on the U.S. House Oversight and Reform Committee sent letters Thursday inviting the heads of key fossil fuel companies and lobbying groups to testify before the panel about the industry’s contributions to climate disinformation in recent decades.
Applauded by advocates of holding polluters and their business partners accountable for fueling the worsening climate emergency, the letters come amid concerns about how corporate lobbyists may influence a bipartisan infrastructure bill and the Build Back Better package—especially in the wake of a damning exposé on ExxonMobil earlier this summer.
Reps. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who respectively chair the House panel and its Environment Subcommittee, wrote that “we are deeply concerned that the fossil fuel industry has reaped massive profits for decades while contributing to climate change that is devastating American communities, costing taxpayers billions of dollars, and ravaging the natural world.”
“We are also concerned that to protect those profits, the industry has reportedly led a coordinated effort to spread disinformation to mislead the public and prevent crucial action to address climate change,” the pair continued.
They also expressed concern that such “strategies of obfuscation and distraction continue today,” noting that “fossil fuel companies increasingly outsource lobbying to trade groups, obscuring their own roles in disinformation efforts.”
“One of Congress’s top legislative priorities is combating the increasingly urgent crisis of a changing climate,” the lawmakers added. “To do this, Congress must address pollution caused by the fossil fuel industry and curb troubling business practices that lead to disinformation on these issues.”
ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods, BP America CEO David Lawler, Chevron CEO Michael Wirth, Shell president Gretchen Watkins, American Petroleum Institute (API) president Mike Sommers, and U.S. Chamber of Commerce president and CEO Suzanne Clark (pdfs) now have a week to inform Democrats if they plan to willingly testify at the panel’s October 28 hearing.
This is a historic opportunity to do something about the damage the fossil fuel industry has done to our planet and our health and I intend to make the most of it.
Pointing to industry leaders’ past behavior, Accountable.US president Kyle Herrig said that “these polluters have long proven they’re more concerned with boosting their executives’ bottom lines than with protecting the climate. The only question is: will they defend their harmful actions before Congress? Or will they again refuse to answer to the American people?”
The Democrats also requested information from the firms, including internal communications and memos about climate science and related marketing as well as plans to reduce planet-heating emissions across the industry. If the letter recipients refuse to participate or turn over those materials, the panel’s leaders may issue subpoenas.
Richard Wiles, executive director of the Center for Climate Integrity, celebrated the letters in a statement that acknowledged other efforts to hold the industry accountable, including more than two dozen lawsuits filed by state and local governments in recent years.
“We applaud Chairs Maloney and Khanna for demanding that these executives answer for their history of climate deception,” he said. “Oil and gas executives have lied to the American people for decades about their industry’s role in causing climate change. It’s time they were held accountable. If the executives refuse to testify voluntarily, they should be subpoenaed.”
In a video released earlier this month, Khanna vowed that the panel’s probe of the fossil fuel industry’s role in climate disinformation “will be like the Big Tobacco hearings” of the 1990s.
Harvard University researcher Geoffrey Supran—whose academic publications include the first peer-reviewed analysis of ExxonMobil’s 40-year history of climate communications—said at the time that “it’s no surprise that Big Oil and Big Tobacco have used the same propaganda playbook to confuse the public and undermine political action, because they rely on many of the same PR firms and advertising agencies to do their dirty work.”
Ad and PR agencies are under mounting pressure to ditch fossil fuel clients for good, thanks in part to the Clean Creatives campaign supported by Fossil Free Media, both of which welcomed the letters.
YES! I think this is a landmark day in the climate fight.
These sorts of hearings ended Big Tobacco's stranglehold over our political process. They need to do the same for Big Oil.
“This is a landmark day in the climate fight,” said Fossil Free Media director Jamie Henn, noting the impact of the tobacco hearings. “For decades, the fossil fuel industry has polluted our political process along with polluting our atmosphere. Exposing the industry’s disinformation is a critical step in holding it accountable for the damage it has done and clearing the way for meaningful change.”
Clean Creatives campaign director Duncan Meisel suggested that “this investigation is the beginning of the end of misleading fossil fuel advertising and PR in the United States.”
“For too long, this industry has used fake front groups, advanced greenwashing, and straight up deception to delay climate action, every time with the willing help of some of the biggest ad and PR firms in the world,” he said. “Reps. Khanna and Maloney are following in the footsteps of congressional investigations that devastated the reputations of tobacco companies and their advertisers. Fossil fuel companies and their agencies are now on notice that they are next.”
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.
“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).
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).
While still CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos testified in Congress by video conference on July 29, 2020. Now, there are at least Five members of a congressional committeealleging that he and other executives may have lied under oath andmisled lawmakers.
In a press release by the House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee the lawmakers state that they are giving Amazon a “Final Chance to Correct the Record Following a Series of Misleading Testimony and Statements”.
CurrentAmazon CEO Andy Jassy, who, in July, succeeded Bezos is being asked to respond to the discrepancies, including information found by The Markup published in a recent article
