CEO Mark Zuckerberg had repeatedly promised to stop recommending political groups to users to squelch the spread of misinformation
Leaked internal Facebook documents show that a combination of technical miscommunications and high-level decisions led to one of the social media giant’s biggest broken promises of the 2020 election—that it would stop recommending political groups to users.
The Markup first revealed on Jan. 19 that Facebook was continuing to recommend political groups—including some in which users advocated violence and storming the U.S. Capitol—in spite of multiple promises not to do so, including one made under oath to Congress.
The day the article ran, a Facebook team started investigating the “leakage,” according to documents provided by Frances Haugen to Congress and shared with The Markup, and the problem was escalated to the highest level to be “reviewed by Mark.” Over the course of the next week, Facebook employees identified several causes for the broken promise.
The company, according to work log entries in the leaked documents, was updating its list of designated political groups, which it refers to as civic groups, in real time. But the systems that recommend groups to users were cached on servers and users’ devices and only updated every 24 to 48 hours in some cases. The lag resulted in users receiving recommendations for groups that had recently been designated political, according to the logs.
That technical oversight was compounded by a decision Facebook officials made about how to determine whether or not a particular group was political in nature.
When The Markup examined group recommendations using data from our Citizen Browser project—a paid, nationwide panel of Facebook users who automatically supply us data from their Facebook feeds—we designated groups as political or not based on their names, about pages, rules, and posted content. We found 12 political groups among the top 100 groups most frequently recommended to our panelists.
Facebook chose to define groups as political in a different way—by looking at the last seven days’ worth of content in a given group.
“Civic filter uses last 7 day content that is created/viewed in the group to determine if the group is civic or not,” according to a summary of the problem written by a Facebook employee working to solve the issue.
As a result, the company was seeing a “12% churn” in its list of groups designated as political. If a group went seven days without posting content the company’s algorithms deemed political, it would be taken off the blacklist and could once again be recommended to users.
Almost 90 percent of the impressions—the number of times a recommendation was seen—on political groups that Facebook tallied while trying to solve the recommendation problem were a result of the day-to-day turnover on the civic group blacklist, according to the documents.
Facebook did not directly respond to questions for this story.
“We learned that some civic groups were recommended to users, and we looked into it,” Facebook spokesperson Leonard Lam wrote in an email to The Markup. “The issue stemmed from the filtering process after designation that allowed some Groups to remain in the recommendation pool and be visible to a small number of people when they should not have been. Since becoming aware of the issue, we worked quickly to update our processes, and we continue this work to improve our designation and filtering processes to make them as accurate and effective as possible.”
Social networking and misinformation researchers say that the company’s decision to classify groups as political based on seven days’ worth of content was always likely to fall short.
“They’re definitely going to be missing signals with that because groups are extremely dynamic,” said Jane Lytvynenko, a research fellow at the Harvard Shorenstein Center’s Technology and Social Change Project. “Looking at the last seven days, rather than groups as a whole and the stated intent of groups, is going to give you different results. It seems like maybe what they were trying to do is not cast too wide of a net with political groups.”
Many of the groups Facebook recommended to Citizen Browser users had overtly political names.
More than 19 percent of Citizen Browser panelists who voted for Donald Trump received recommendations for a group called Candace Owens for POTUS, 2024, for example. While Joe Biden voters were less likely to be nudged toward political groups, some received recommendations for groups like Lincoln Project Americans Protecting Democracy.
The internal Facebook investigation into the political recommendations confirmed these problems. By Jan. 25, six days after The Markup’s original article, a Facebook employee declared that the problem was “mitigated,” although root causes were still under investigation.
On Feb. 10, Facebook blamed the problem on “technical issues” in a letter it sent to U.S. senator Ed Markey, who had demanded an explanation.
In the early days after the company’s internal investigation, the issue appeared to have been resolved. Both Citizen Browser and Facebook’s internal data showed that recommendations for political groups had virtually disappeared.
But when The Markup reexamined Facebook’s recommendations in June, we discovered that the platform was once again nudging Citizen Browser users toward political groups, including some in which members explicitly advocated violence.
From February to June, just under one-third of Citizen Browser’s 2,315 panelists received recommendations to join a political group. That included groups with names like Progressive Democrats of Nevada, Michigan Republicans, Liberty lovers for Ted Cruz, and Bernie Sanders for President, 2020.
Facebook insists that mainstream news sites perform the best on its platform. But by other measures, sensationalist, partisan content reigns
In early November, Facebook published its Q3 Widely Viewed Content Report, the second in a series meant to rebut critics who said that its algorithms were boosting extremist and sensational content. The report declared that, among other things, the most popular informational content on Facebook came from sources like UNICEF, ABC News, or the CDC.
But data collected by The Markup suggests that, on the contrary, sensationalist news or viral content with little original reporting performs just as well as—and often better than—many mainstream sources when it comes to how often it’s seen by platform users.
Data from The Markup’s Citizen Browser project shows that during the period from July 1 to Sept. 30, 2021, outlets like The Daily Wire, The Western Journal, and BuzzFeed’s viral content arm were among the top-viewed domains in our sample.
Citizen Browser is a national panel of paid Facebook users who automatically share their news feed data with The Markup.
To analyze the websites whose content performs the best on Facebook, we counted the total number of times that links from any domain appeared in our panelists’ news feeds—a metric known as “impressions”—over a three-month period (the same time covered by Facebook’s Q3 Widely Viewed Content Report). Facebook, by contrast, chose a different metric, calculating the “most-viewed” domains by tallying only the number of users who saw links, regardless of whether each user saw a link once or hundreds of times.
By our calculation, the top performing domains were those that surfaced in users’ feeds over and over—including some highly partisan, polarizing sites that effectively bombarded some Facebook users with content.
These findings chime with recent revelations from Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, who has repeatedly said the company has a tendency to cherry-pick statistics to release to the press and the public.
When presented with The Markup’s findings and asked whether its own report’s statistics might be misleading or incomplete, Ariana Anthony, a spokesperson for Meta, Facebook’s parent company, said in an emailed statement, “The focus of the Widely Viewed Content Report is to show the content that is seen by the most people on Facebook, not the content that is posted most frequently. That said, we will continue to refine and improve these reports as we engage with academics, civil society groups, and researchers to identify the parts of these reports they find most valuable, which metrics need more context, and how we can best support greater understanding of content distribution on Facebook moving forward.”
Anthony did not directly respond to questions from The Markup on whether the company would release data on the total number of link views or the content that was seen most frequently on the platform.
The Battle Over Data
There are many ways to measure popularity on Facebook, and each tells a different story about the platform and what kind of content its algorithms favor.
For years, the startup CrowdTangle’s “engagement” metric—essentially measuring a combination of how many likes, comments, and other interactions any domain’s posts garner—has been the most publicly visible way of measuring popularity. Facebook bought CrowdTangle in 2016 and, according to reporting in The New York Times, has since largely tried to downplay data showing that ultra-conservative commentators like The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro produce the most engaged-with content on the platform.
Shortly after the end of the second quarter of this year, Facebook came out with its first transparency report, framed in the introduction as a way to “provide clarity” on “the most-viewed domains, links, Pages and posts on the platform during the quarter.” (More accurately, the Q2 report was the first publicly released transparency report, after a Q1 report was, The New York Times reported, suppressed for making the company look bad and only released later after details emerged.)
For the Q2 and Q3 reports, Facebook turned to a specific metric, known as “reach,” to quantify most-viewed domains. For any given domain, say youtube.com or twitter.com, reach represents the number of unique Facebook accounts that had at least one post containing a link to a tweet or a YouTube video in their news feeds during the quarter. On that basis, Facebook found that those domains, and other mainstream staples like Amazon, Spotify, and TikTok, had wide reach.
When applying this metric, The Markup found similar results in our Citizen Browser data, as detailed in depth in our methodology. But this calculation ignores a reality for a lot of Facebook users: bombardment with content from the same site.
Citizen Browser data shows, for instance, that from July through September of this year, articles from far-right news site Newsmax appeared in the feed of a 58-year-old woman in New Mexico 1,065 times—but under Facebook’s calculation of reach, this would count as one single unit. Similarly, a 37-year-old man in New Hampshire was shown 245 unique links to satirical posts from The Onion, which appeared in his feed more than 500 times—but again, he would have been counted just once by Facebook’s method.
When The Markup instead counted each appearance of a domain on a user’s feed during Q3—e.g., Newsmax as 1,065 instead of 1—we found that polarizing, partisan content jumped in the performance rankings. Indeed, the same trend is true of the domains in Facebook’s Q2 report, for which analysis can be found in our data repository on GitHub.
We found that outlets like The Daily Wire, BuzzFeed’s viral content arm, Fox News, and Yahoo News jumped in the popularity rankings when we used the impressions metric. Most striking, The Western Journal—which, similarly to The Daily Wire, does little original reporting and instead repackages stories to fit with right-wing narratives—improved its ranking by almost 200 places.
“To me these findings raise a number of questions,” said Jane Lytvynenko, senior research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center.
“Was Facebook’s research genuine, or was it part of an attempt to change the narrative around top 10 lists that were previously put out? It matters a lot whether a person sees a link one time or if they see it 20 times, and to not account for that in a report, to me, is misleading,” Lytvynenko said.
Using a narrow range of data to gauge popularity is suspect, said Alixandra Barasch, associate professor of marketing at NYU’s Stern School of Business.
“It just goes against everything we teach and know about advertising to focus on one [metric] rather than the other,” she said.
In fact, when it comes to the core business model of selling space to advertisers, Facebook encourages them to consider yet another metric, “frequency”—how many times to show a post to each user on average—when trying to optimize brand messaging.
Data from Citizen Browser shows that domains seen with high frequency in the Facebook news feed are mostly news domains, since news websites tend to publish multiple articles over the course of a day or week. But Facebook’s own content report does not take this data into account.
“[This] clarifies the point that what we need is independent access for researchers to check the math,” said Justin Hendrix, co-author of a report on social media and polarization and editor at Tech Policy Press, after reviewing The Markup’s data.
As a member of Congress, Jared Polis was one of the loudest Democrats demanding President Donald Trump release his tax returns.
At a rally in Denver in 2017, he warned the crowd that Trump “might have something to hide.” That same year, on the floor of the House, he introduced a resolution to force the president to release the records, calling them an “important baseline disclosure.”
But during Polis’ successful run for governor of Colorado in 2018, his calls for transparency faded. The dot-com tycoon turned investor broke with recent precedent and refused to disclose his returns, blaming his Republican opponent, who wasn’t disclosing his.
Polis may have had other reasons for denying requests to release the records.
Despite a net worth estimated to be in the hundreds of millions, Polis paid nothing in federal income taxes in 2013, 2014 and 2015. From 2010 to 2018, his overall rate was just 8.2% — less than half of the 19% paid by a worker making $45,000 in 2018.
The revelations about Polis are contained in a trove of tax information obtained by ProPublica covering thousands of the nation’s wealthiest people. The Colorado governor is one of several ultrarich politicians who, the data shows, have paid little or no federal income taxes in multiple years, exploited loopholes to dodge estate taxes or used their public offices to fight reforms that would increase their tax bills.
The records show that rich Democrats and Republicans alike have slashed their taxes using strategies unavailable to most of their constituents. Among them are governors, members of Congress and a cabinet secretary.
Richard Painter, the chief White House ethics lawyer during the George W. Bush administration, said the tax avoidance of these top politicians is “very, very worrisome” since both parties “spend like crazy” and depend on taxes to fund their priorities, from the military to Medicare to Social Security.
“They have the power to decide how much the rest of us pay and the power to spend the money, and then they’re not paying their fair share?” Painter said. “That should be troubling to voters, both conservative and liberal. It should be troubling for everyone.”
West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice, for example, is a Republican coal magnate who has made the Forbes list of wealthiest Americans. Yet he’s paid very little or no federal income taxes for almost every year since 2000.
California Rep. Darrell Issa, one of the richest people in Congress, was one of the few Republicans to break with his party during the 2017 tax overhaul to fight for a deduction that — unbeknownst to the public — helped him avoid millions in taxes.
And the tax records of Republican Sen. Rick Scott of Florida and Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, showed that both employed a loophole, which was accidentally created by Congress, to escape estate and gift taxes.
As ProPublica has revealed in a series of articles this year, these tactics, if sometimes aggressive, are completely legal. And they’re not universal among wealthy politicians. ProPublica reviewed tax data for a couple dozen wealthy current and former government officials. Their data shows that many of them paid relatively high tax rates while employing more modest use of the fairly standard deductions of the rich.
The politicians who paid little or exploited loopholes either defended their practices as completely proper or declined to comment.
“The Governor has paid every cent of taxes he owes, he has championed tax reform and tax fairness to fix this broken system for everybody, to report otherwise would be inaccurate,” Polis’ spokesperson wrote in an email.
During the late 1990s dot-com era, Polis earned a reputation as a boy wonder. He turned his parents’ small greeting card company into a website, bluemountain.com, which was among the first to enable users to send free virtual cards. He and his family sold the site in 1999 for $780 million.
With the windfall from the sale, Polis continued to start new ventures and invest, but he also began laying the groundwork for a career in politics. He landed in the governor’s office in 2019 when he was just 43.
One of his tools for raising his profile was philanthropy. His generous donations to charity became a theme of both his 2008 run for Congress and his 2018 run for Colorado’s highest office.
Philanthropy also helped keep his tax rate enviably low. In many years, the deductions he claimed for his charitable giving were large enough to wipe out half the income he would have owed taxes on. His giving allowed him, in essence, to take some of the money he would have paid into the public coffers and donate it instead to causes of his choosing.
But an examination of Polis’ philanthropy shows that while he has given to a wide variety of causes, some of his donations served to promote him, blurring the lines between charity and campaigning.
According to the tax filings of his charity, the Jared Polis Foundation, the organization spent more than $2 million from 2001 to 2008 on a semiannual mailer sent to “hundreds of thousands of households throughout Colorado” that was intended to build “on a foundation of familiarity with Jared Polis’ name and his support of public education.” It was one of the charity’s largest expenditures.
A 2005 edition of the mailer reviewed by ProPublica had the feel of a campaign ad. It was emblazoned with the title “Jared Polis Education Report,” included his name six times on the cover and featured photos of Polis, a former state board of education member, surrounded by smiling school children.
The newsletters were discontinued just as he was elected. Because the mailers did not explicitly advocate for his election, they would have been legally allowed as a charitable expenditure.
A decade later, when he ran for governor in a race that he personally poured more than $20 million into, Polis featured his philanthropy in his campaign. In one ad, he used testimonials from an employee and a graduate of a business training charity he founded for military veterans.
Polis’ spokesperson, Victoria Graham, defended the mailers, saying they were intended “to promote innovations and successful models in public education and to raise awareness for the challenges facing public education.” She also pointed to a range of other philanthropy Polis was involved in, from founding charter schools, which she noted were not named after him, to distributing computers to organizations in need.
“His philanthropy is not and has never been motivated by receiving a tax write-off, and to state otherwise is not only inaccurate but fabricating motives and intent and cynical in its view of charity,” Graham said.
While Polis’ charitable giving has helped keep the percentage of his income he pays in taxes low, he has also been able to keep his total taxable income relatively small by using another strategy common among the wealthy: investing in businesses that grow in value but produce minimal income.
It sounds counterintuitive, but it’s a basic principle of the U.S. tax system — one that typically benefits wealthy people who can afford not to take income. Investments only trigger income taxes when they produce “realized” gains, such as dividends from a stock holding, the sale of an asset or profits from a company. But an investment’s growth in value, while it makes its owner richer, is not taxable.
Polis acknowledged his use of the strategy in 2008 after he released tax information during his first run for Congress and faced criticism for paying so little in taxes. “I founded several high-growth companies, and we would manage those for growth rather than for profit,” he said. “When I make money, I pay taxes. When I don’t make money, I don’t.”
In one of the recent years Polis paid no income taxes, his losses were larger than his income. In two of the years, it was about a million dollars. From 2010 to 2018, when he paid an overall rate of just 8.2%, including payroll taxes, his income averaged $1.5 million.
During that period of low taxes and relatively low income, Polis’ estimated net worth rose sharply. Members of Congress only have to report the value of each of their assets in ranges, so assigning a precise number is impossible. But the nonprofit data site OpenSecrets, which makes estimates by taking the midpoint of the ranges, shows Polis’ wealth growing from $143 million in 2010 to $306 million in 2017, making him the third richest-member of the House at the time. (Graham said congressional disclosure forms are confusingly formatted, potentially causing certain assets to be counted more than once, “so these numbers are likely wildly off.” She did not provide alternative net worth figures.)
One of Polis’ primary vehicles for building his fortune, while avoiding taxable income, appears to have been a family office, Jovian Holdings. The board of directors included his father, sister and a rather surprising outsider: Arthur Laffer. The famed conservative economist’s Laffer Curve provided the Reagan administration with the intellectual basis for arguing that cutting taxes would increase tax revenue. (Polis’ sister is a ProPublica donor.)
The term family office has a mom-and-pop feel, but it is actually part of the infrastructure of protecting the fortunes of the ultrawealthy, from crafting investment and tax strategy to succession and estate planning to concierge services. Depending on how they’re organized, for instance as a business, their costs — the salaries of the staff, rent — can be deductible.
One of the executives at Polis’ family office, according to her LinkedIn profile, is a seasoned tax expert who specializes in “maximizing cost savings both operationally and with all taxing authorities.” She removed that detail around the time ProPublica approached Polis about his taxes.
Unlike ordinary investors, Polis was able to claim millions in deductions for some of the costs of his money management, specifically his family office, which contributed to lowering his tax burden. Ironically, the investment apparatus that helped Polis avoid taxable income became a tax break.
ProPublica discussed the scenario, without naming Polis, with Bob Lord, tax counsel for the advocacy group Americans for Tax Fairness. He said the public appears to be essentially subsidizing Polis’ investing while getting little in return. With a typical business, he said, you get the tax break but also relatively quickly make taxable income.
The costs of a family office are “being taken even though the income may be way out in the future. It’s just a giveaway,” Lord said. “What is the public getting from it? This really, really rich politician gets to shelter his income while his investments grow and doesn’t pay tax on it until he sells.”
Deferring paying taxes is a valuable perk. But the strategy, Lord said, may allow Polis an even more lucrative outcome. Now that Polis has made his fortune, he may be able to largely dodge the tax system forever. Should he die before selling his investments, his heirs would never owe income taxes on the growth.
Graham acknowledged that the tax system unfairly benefits the wealthy but said Polis is not purposely avoiding income that would result in taxes.
“The Governor has long championed tax reforms precisely because the income tax is inadequate and a mismatched way to tax most wealthy people who do not have a regular income but who make money in other ways and should be taxed,” she said. “Since 2006, Governor Polis has paid over $20 million in taxes on the money he earned on his gains and he has championed tax reforms that would lower the tax burden on middle-income earners and eliminate loopholes to ensure higher earners pay their share.”
ProPublica’s data shows that at least two federal officials have already taken steps to preserve their family fortunes for their heirs, exploiting loopholes that divert revenue from the federal government.
Scott, the Florida senator who ran one of the world’s largest health care companies, and DeVos, Trump’s education secretary and believed to be the richest member of his cabinet, have both stored assets in grantor retained annuity trusts — a form of trust used to avoid gift and estate taxes.
GRATs, as they’re commonly known, were accidentally created by Congress in 1990. Lawmakers were trying to close another estate tax loophole and in doing so unintentionally paved the way for another one. The lawyer who pioneered the trusts estimated in 2013 that they had cost the federal government about $100 billion over the prior 13 years.
To use this tax-avoidance technique, you put an asset, like stocks or real estate, into a trust assigned to your heirs. The trust pays you back the starting value of the asset (plus some interest). If the original asset rises in value, the gains can go to your heirs tax-free.
GRATs have become widely used among the superrich. A ProPublica investigation found that more than half of the nation’s richest individuals have employed them and other trusts to avoid estate taxes.
It’s unclear from ProPublica’s data how much DeVos, 63, and Scott, 68, were able to transfer tax-free.
DeVos and her husband employed a GRAT from at least 2000 to 2003. DeVos’ father was a wealthy industrialist. Her husband was the president of Amway, a multilevel marketing company that focuses on health, beauty and home products. Her family is believed to be worth billions.
Her causes both before and during her time in government depended on tax dollars. As a donor and fundraiser for Republican causes, she pushed for charter schools and government subsidies to allow parents to send their kids to private schools. As education secretary, she pushed to send millions of federal dollars intended for public schools to private and religious schools instead.
Scott, one of the wealthiest senators, with a net worth likely in the hundreds of millions, used a GRAT for much longer, from at least 2001 through 2009. His tax data shows the assets in the trust — stakes of a private investment fund and family partnership he and his wife created — receiving millions in income.
When he was in the private sector, Scott benefited from federal programs like Medicare, which are funded by taxes. He built and ran Columbia/HCA, a massive chain of for-profit hospitals. After a fraud investigation became public, he resigned and the company paid $1.7 billion to settle allegations it overbilled government health programs. Scott has previously emphasized that he was never charged, though he acknowledged the company made mistakes.
Scott declined to comment. Nick Wasmiller, a spokesman for DeVos, said she “pays her taxes in full as required by law. Your ‘reporting’ is not only factually wrong but also doubles-down on the criminal actions that underpin ProPublica’s political campaign to prop up the Biden Administration’s failing agenda.”
California Congressman Darrell Issa was one of a handful of Republicans who bucked his party in 2017 and voted against Trump’s tax overhaul.
Issa said he opposed the legislation because it all but eliminated the deduction taxpayers could take on their federal returns for state and local taxes. That provision was particularly contentious in high tax blue states like California, but most Republicans from his state still fell in line. The other GOP congressman in the San Diego area, for example, voted yes.
Limiting the write-off, known as the SALT deduction, was one of the few progressive changes in the Trump tax law. The deduction had long disproportionately benefited the wealthiest because they pay the most in state and local taxes. According to one projection, if the cap were removed from the deduction, households with income in the top 1% would reap the most benefit, paying $31,000 less a year on average — amounting to more than half of the total taxes avoided through the write-off. The top 25% of households would average less than $3,000 in savings a year, and the savings drop precipitously from there, with most households deriving no benefit.
In interviews and public statements, Issa said in fighting to preserve the deduction, he was defending the interests of middle-class taxpayers. “I didn’t come to Washington to raise taxes on my constituents,” he said at the time, “and I do not plan to start today.”
It’s true that more than 40% of taxpayers in Issa’s former district, a relatively affluent swath of Southern California, were able to make at least some use of the deduction.
But the 68-year-old congressman, who made a fortune in the car alarm business, was in the top echelon of its beneficiaries. Between 2003 and 2017, his tax data shows, Issa generally paid a relatively high tax rate but was able to claim more than $51 million in write-offs thanks to the SALT deduction, an average of more than $3 million a year.
By contrast, households in his district that made between $100,000 and $200,000 and took the SALT deduction claimed an average of $14,843 in 2017.
Issa’s spokesman, Jonathan Wilcox, declined to say if the SALT deduction’s impact on the congressman’s taxes factored into his decision to advocate for it.
“So much stupid,” Wilcox said. “Be sure to write back if you ever do better than trolling for garbage.”
Gov. Jim Justice is believed to be the richest person in West Virginia, controlling vast reserves of valuable steelmaking coal and owning The Greenbrier luxury resort. He made an appearance in 2014 on the Forbes list of 400 wealthiest Americans. Estimates of his net worth have ranged from the hundreds of millions to well over a billion.
Nonetheless, he’s paid little or no federal income taxes for almost every year between 2000 and 2018, ProPublica’s trove of tax records shows. In 12 of those years he paid nothing, and in all but two of those years, his rate didn’t exceed 4%.
His largest tax payment came in 2009, when his family sold off much of its mining holdings to a Russian company for more than half a billion dollars. That year, after deductions, his tax rate rose to a modest 13.4%.
In more recent years, Justice, 70, has reported tens of millions in losses each year. That not only helped him to minimize his federal income taxes, it also allowed him to apply those losses to his profits from previous years — and get refunds for the taxes he initially paid in those years.
Justice’s income was low enough in 2018 for his family to qualify for and receive a $2,400 coronavirus stimulus check, aid meant for low- and middle-income Americans.
The recent years of large losses reported on Justice’s tax returns have coincided with real signs of financial problems. The coal industry’s fortunes have rapidly declined. He’s been hounded for unpaid bills and loans. The Russian company that bought much of his coal empire sued him and got him to buy back the assets — at a much discounted price but attached to significant debt. Forbes knocked him off its wealth ranking, citing escalating battles with two major lenders over unpaid debt. Justice’s representatives have said he pays what he owes, and his business empire is in good shape.
But even before his empire began showing significant cracks, Justice was reporting losses or little income for a man so wealthy. From 1996 to 2008, Justice, who received a coal and farming fortune from his father, who died in 1993, either reported losses to the IRS or just a few hundred thousand dollars in income.
The disconnect could be explained by the generous deductions afforded to coal business owners.
For example, owners are allowed a depletion deduction, which allows them to take 10% of the revenue from coal they extract and write it off against their profit. This spin on depreciation can have outsized benefits because unlike normal depreciation — in which the write-offs are based on how much you paid for an asset — the write-off amount here faces no such limit, and can therefore exceed the initial investment. The deduction has been criticized by environmentalists and congressional Democrats as an overly generous giveaway.
Another benefit coal owners get is the ability to immediately expense much of their mine development costs on their taxes instead of being forced to stretch such deductions over a longer period of time. Justice has said that in the 15 years after his father’s death, he oversaw “a massive expansion of multiple businesses which included significant coal reserve expansion” — development that could have provided him with a significant stockpile of such write-offs. (ProPublica has previously reported on other generous write-offs. Sports team owners, for example, are allowed to deduct the value of their intangible assets — such as media deals and franchise rights — as wasting assets, even as they rise in value.)
Experts said this could explain how Justice could have reported negative income of $15 million in 2008, a year in which Mechel, the Russian company that subsequently bought much of his family’s coal empire, said that business alone produced about $94 million in EBITDA — a common measure of a business’ profitability before taxes and some other expenses.
Justice declined to answer a list of specific questions about his taxes. In a statement, his lawyer, Steve Ruby, said Justice “has paid millions upon millions of dollars in state and federal income taxes and has always followed the law. In many years, his businesses have suffered losses as the result of weak coal prices combined with substantial outlays to save jobs at local businesses that other companies were abandoning.
“When many other coal producers were filing for bankruptcy, the Justice companies persevered and refused to take the easy way out through a bankruptcy proceeding, a decision that contributed to those losses. Like any other taxpayer, Gov. Justice does not owe income taxes in years in which his income is negative,” the statement read.
Ruby confirmed that Justice received coronavirus stimulus checks but said he did not cash them.
Like Scott and DeVos, Justice has used GRATs to sidestep estate and gift taxes, his returns and court records suggest.
In 2008, the year before he sold much of his coal empire to the Russian company, two GRATs appeared on his returns for the first time. And when the Russian company sued Justice, it also sued him in his capacity as the trustee for those GRATs. Justice had placed at least some of the coal assets into the trusts before the sale, according to the lawsuit.
Ruby’s statement did not address Justice’s use of GRATs.
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?
“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).
“Pfizer has used its monopoly on a lifesaving vaccine to extract concessions from desperate governments,” said the report’s author, urging action from the Biden administration.
Pfizer has used its position as a producer of one of the leading Covid-19 vaccines to “silence governments, throttle supply, shift risk, and maximize profits” through secret contracts with countries around the world, according to a Public Citizen report published Tuesday.
“The contracts consistently place Pfizer’s interests before public health imperatives.”
“Behind closed doors, Pfizer wields its power to extract a series of concerning concessions from governments,” report author Zain Rizvi, law and policy researcher at Public Citizen’s Access to Medicines program, said in a statement. “The global community cannot allow pharmaceutical corporations to keep calling the shots.”
The new report begins by noting February reporting about accusations of Pfizer—an American pharmaceutical giant that developed its mRNA vaccine with the German firm BioNTech—”bullying” Latin American governments during contract negotiations for doses.
Public Citizen obtained unredacted term sheets, drafts, or final agreements between Pfizer and Albania, Brazil, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, the European Commission, and Peru. The consumer rights advocacy group also examined redacted contracts with Chile, the U.S., and the U.K.
You can read our first story on Pfizer’s vaccine contracts in Latin America here. We found Pfizer had asked some countries to put up sovereign assets as a guarantee against the cost of any future legal cases. (Published February.)https://t.co/c0Y8qDIW4z
Based on those contracts, the report identifies six tactics Pfizer is using to serve the company rather than public health in the midst of a deadly pandemic:
1. Pfizer Reserves the Right to Silence Governments
The Brazilian government complained earlier this year that the company insisted on “unfair and abusive” terms but ultimately accepted a contract that “waived sovereign immunity; imposed no penalties on Pfizer for late deliveries; agreed to resolve disputes under a secret private arbitration under the laws of New York; and broadly indemnified Pfizer for civil claims.”
Brazil also agreed to a nondisclosure provision similar to those found in contracts with the European Commission and the U.S. government.
2. Pfizer Controls Donations
Again using Brazil as an example, the report points out that the South American nation must first get a go-ahead from Pfizer to accept donations or buy its vaccines from others. The country is also barred from “donating, distributing, exporting, or otherwise transporting the vaccine outside Brazil without Pfizer’s permission.”
3. Pfizer Secured an “IP Waiver” for Itself
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla “has emerged as a strident defender of intellectual property in the pandemic,” the report says, noting his opposition to a proposal that members of the World Trade Organization who signed on to the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) waive IP protections for Covid-19 vaccines and treatments during the crisis.
“But, in several contracts, Pfizer seems to recognize the risk posed by intellectual property to vaccine development, manufacturing, and sale,” Public Citizen explains. “The contracts shift responsibility for any intellectual property infringement that Pfizer might commit to the government purchasers. As a result, under the contract, Pfizer can use anyone’s intellectual property it pleases—largely without consequence.”
4. Private Arbitrators, Not Public Courts, Decide Disputes in Secret
While the U.K. contract requires that disputes are settled by secret panel of three private arbitrators under the Rules of Arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce, the report says, “the Albania draft contract and Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Dominican Republic, and Peru agreements require the governments to go further, with contractual disputes subject to ICC arbitration applying New York law.”
5. Pfizer Can Go After State Assets
“Pfizer required Brazil, Chile, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and Peru to waive sovereign immunity,” the report highlights, detailing that the doctrine can sometimes protect states from companies trying to enforce decisions reached by the previously noted secret arbitral panels. Some of the contracts enable the company to “request that courts use state assets as a guarantee that Pfizer will be paid an arbitral award and/or use the assets to compensate Pfizer if the government does not pay,” according to Public Citizen.
6. Pfizer Calls the Shots on Key Decisions
“What happens if there are vaccine supply shortages? In the Albania draft contract and the Brazil and Colombia agreement, Pfizer will decide adjustments to the delivery schedule based on principles the corporation will decide” the report notes, concluding that “under the vast majority of contracts, Pfizer’s interests come first.”
Public Citizen calls on world leaders, especially U.S. President Joe Biden, to “push back” against Pfizer’s negotiating tactics and “rein in” its monopoly power.
According to the group, the Biden administration can “call on Pfizer to renegotiate existing commitments and pursue a fairer approach in the future” as well as “further rectify the power imbalance by sharing the vaccine recipe, under the Defense Production Act, to allow multiple producers to expand vaccine supplies.”
The U.S. administration “can also work to rapidly secure a broad waiver of intellectual property rules,” the report adds, declaring that “a wartime response against the virus demands nothing less.”
In response to Public Citizen’s report, Sharon Castillo, a spokesperson for Pfizer, toldThe Washington Post that confidentiality clauses were “standard in commercial contracts” and “intended to help build trust between the parties, as well as protect the confidential commercial information exchanged during negotiations and included in final contracts.”
Castillo also said that “Pfizer has not interfered and has absolutely no intention of interfering with any country’s diplomatic, military, or culturally significant assets,” adding that “to suggest anything to the contrary is irresponsible and misleading.”
Meanwhile, Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen’s Access to Medicines program, accused Pfizer of “taking advantage of countries’ desperation” with the far-reaching contracts.
“Most of us have sacrificed during the pandemic; staying distant to protect family and friends,” Maybarduk said Tuesday. “Pfizer went the other way, using its control of scarce vaccines to win special privileges, from people that have little choice.”
This article was originally published on Common Dreams by JESSICA CORBETT was republished under the Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
Michele Carew, an elections administrator with 14 years of experience, has resigned after a monthslong campaign by Trump loyalists to oust her. “I’m leaving on my own accord,” she said.
An elections administrator in North Texas submitted her resignation Friday, following a monthslong effort by residents and officials loyal to former President Donald Trump to force her out of office.
Michele Carew, who had overseen scores of elections during her 14-year career, had found herself transformed into the public face of an electoral system that many in the heavily Republican Hood County had come to mistrust, which ProPublica and The Texas Tribune covered earlier this month.
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
Her critics sought to abolish her position and give her duties to an elected county clerk who has used social media to promote baseless allegations of widespread election fraud.
Carew, who was hired to run elections in Hood County two-and-a-half months before the contested presidential race, said in an interview that she worried that the forces that tried to drive her out will spread to other counties in the state.
“When I started out, election administrators were appreciated and highly respected,” she said. “Now we are made out to be the bad guys.”
Critics accused Carew of harboring a secret liberal agenda and of violating a decades-old elections law, despite assurances from the Texas secretary of state that she was complying with Texas election rules.
Carew said she is joining an Austin-based private company and will work to help local elections administrator offices across the country run more efficiently. She will oversee her final election in early November before leaving Nov. 12.
David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonprofit that seeks to increase voter participation and improve the efficiency of elections administration, said Carew’s departure is the latest example of an ominous trend toward independent election administrators being forced out in favor of partisan officials.
“She is not the first and won’t be the last professional election official to have to leave this profession because of the toll it is taking, the bullies and liars who are slandering these professionals,” said Becker, a former Department of Justice lawyer who helped oversee voting rights enforcement under presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. “We are losing a generation of professional expertise. We are only beginning to feel the effects.”
Though experts say it is difficult to determine how many elections officials have left their positions nationally, states like Pennsylvania and Ohio have seen numerous departures. According to the AP, about a third of Pennsylvania’s county election officials have left in the last year and a half; in Ohio, one in four directors or deputy auditors of elections have left in the southwestern part of the state, according to The New York Times.
Hood County would seem an unlikely place for disputes over the last presidential election given that Trump won 81% of the vote there, one of his largest margins of victory in the state. Across the country, partisans’ demands for audits have mostly focused on counties and states carried by President Joe Biden, particularly those that went for Trump four years earlier.
But Texas, despite going for Trump by 6 percentage points, has seen its fair share of blowback. Last month, the Texas secretary of state announced a “comprehensive forensic audit” of four of the state’s largest counties hours after Trump issued a public letter demanding audits of the state’s results.
Before that, in July, Texas passed sweeping voting legislation that critics say disenfranchises vulnerable voters and unfairly targets administrators and other elections officials. Among the law’s provisions are new criminal penalties for election workers accused of interfering with expanded powers given to poll watchers.
On Saturday, after blasting the four-county audit plan as “weak,” Trump threatened the speaker of the Texas House of Representatives with a primary challenge if the speaker didn’t advance a bill that would allow audits in more counties.
In Hood County, the local GOP executive committee likewise issued warnings to Republican officials who defended Carew. In July, the committee threatened County Judge Ron Massingill with a social media campaign that would tell voters he was “incapable of providing them with free and fair elections” if he didn’t convene the county’s elections commission to discuss Carew’s termination.
Massingill refused, arguing that no political party should be able to direct the activities of the independent elections administrator. Katie Lang, the county clerk and vice chair of the county’s election commission, convened the meeting and moved to fire Carew. Carew survived the vote by a 3-2 margin, with Massingill and the county tax assessor, both Republicans, joining the Hood County Democratic chair.
Republican County Chair David Fischer called on county commissioners to dissolve the independent office of elections administrator and transfer election duties to Lang, which he said would make the election administration process more accountable to the county’s Republican majority.
Counties in Texas can choose between hiring an independent elections administrator, who is meant to be insulated from political pressures, or letting a county official, often an elected county clerk, run elections. County clerks, who manage functions like property records and birth certificates, run elections in many of the state’s smallest counties.
Fischer has declined to speak with ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.
On social media, Lang has shared “Stop the Steal” and “Impeach Biden” memes and videos. Lang made national headlines in 2015 after refusing to issue a marriage license to a gay couple following the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision legalizing same-sex marriage. Lang did not respond to a request for comment on Monday, but she previously told the Hood County News she wished Carew “the best in her future endeavors.”
Over the last year, Carew has come under fire for everything from her connection with the League of Women Voters, which critics say is anti-Trump, to her interest in a $29,000 grant, funded in part by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, that would have been used to pay for costs related to the pandemic.
She was also accused of harboring a hidden agenda after refusing to allow a reporter with the fervently pro-Trump One America News Network into a private training for election professionals in March when she headed the Texas Association of Elections Administrators.
The most sustained criticism of Carew came from critics who accused her of violating the law by not adhering to an obscure election law that requires ballots to be consecutively numbered.
But seven election experts and administrators told ProPublica and the Tribune that consecutively numbering ballots is out of step with best practices in election security and voter privacy, and that consecutive numbering is not required to conduct effective election audits.
Despite the toll the last year has taken on her, Carew on Monday remained defiant. “I’m leaving on my own accord,” she said. “I’m the one who wins in the end.”
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
Leaked documents reveal the e-commerce company’s private-brands team in India “secretly exploited internal data” to copy products from other sellers and rigged search results.
U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday renewed her call to break up Amazon after internal documents obtained by Reutersrevealed that the e-commerce giant engaged in anti-competitive behavior in India that it has long denied, including in testimonies from company leaders to Congress.
“These documents show what we feared about Amazon’s monopoly power—that the company is willing and able to rig its platform to benefit its bottom line while stiffing small businesses and entrepreneurs,” tweeted Warren (D-Mass.) “This is one of the many reasons we need to break it up.”
Warren is a vocal advocate of breaking up tech giants including but not limited to Amazon. The company faces investigations regarding alleged anti-competitive behavior in the United States as well as Europe and India. The investigative report may ramp up such probes.
Aditya Karla and Steve Stecklow report that “thousands of pages of internal Amazon documents examined by Reuters—including emails, strategy papers, and business plans—show the company ran a systematic campaign of creating knockoffs and manipulating search results to boost its own product lines in India, one of the company’s largest growth markets.”
“The documents reveal how Amazon’s private-brands team in India secretly exploited internal data from Amazon.in to copy products sold by other companies, and then offered them on its platform,” according to the reporters. “The employees also stoked sales of Amazon private-brand products by rigging Amazon’s search results.”
In India, Amazon stoked sales of private-brand products by manipulating its search results so that the products would appear ‘in the first 2 or three … search results’ when customers were shopping on https://t.co/OA0tY09fhk, an internal document shows https://t.co/1FMsAX0pza
In sworn testimony before the U.S. Congress in 2020, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos explained that the e-commerce giant prohibits its employees from using the data on individual sellers to help its private-label business. And, in 2019, another Amazon executive testified that the company does not use such data to create its own private-label products or alter its search results to favor them.
But the internal documents seen by Reuters show for the first time that, at least in India, manipulating search results to favor Amazon’s own products, as well as copying other sellers’ goods, were part of a formal, clandestine strategy at Amazon—and that high-level executives were told about it. The documents show that two executives reviewed the India strategy—senior vice presidents Diego Piacentini, who has since left the company, and Russell Grandinetti, who currently runs Amazon’s international consumer business.
While neither Piacentini nor Grandinetti responded to Reuters‘ requests for comment, Amazon provided a written response that did not address the reporters’ questions.
“As Reuters hasn’t shared the documents or their provenance with us, we are unable to confirm the veracity or otherwise of the information and claims as stated,” Amazon said. “We believe these claims are factually incorrect and unsubstantiated.”
“We display search results based on relevance to the customer’s search query, irrespective of whether such products have private brands offered by sellers or not,” the company said, adding that it “strictly prohibits the use or sharing of nonpublic, seller-specific data for the benefit of any seller, including sellers of private brands.”
Warren was not alone in calling for the breakup of Amazon following the report.
“This is not shocking. But it is appalling,” the American Economic Liberties Project said in a series of tweets. “Independent businesses have sounded the alarm for years—providing evidence that Amazon stole their intellectual property.”
4/ Months later, in April 2020, @WSJ revealed that Amazon had been stealing from independent businesses to create competing products.https://t.co/ZgsNmtExIJ
— American Economic Liberties Project (@econliberties) October 13, 2021
“We said back in 2020 that a perjury referral was in order—and it still is,” the group added, highlighting testimony from Bezos and Nate Sutton, Amazon’s associate general counsel. “But Amazon will remain an anti-business behemoth, flagrantly breaking the law and daring policymakers to stop them.”
Highlighting a report from a trio of its experts, Economic Liberties added that “it’s time to break Amazon up.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by JESSICA CORBETT and republished under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
“How many more insurrections have to happen before we hold Facebook to account?” one group asked after whistleblower Frances Haugen said the corporation is unwilling to confront hate speech and disinformation.
Following whistleblower Frances Haugen’s Sunday night allegation that Facebook’s refusal to combat dangerous lies and hateful content on its platforms is driven by profit, social media experts denounced the corporation for embracing a business model that encourages violence and endangers democracy—and urged the federal government to take action.
Haugen, who copied a “trove of private Facebook research” before she resigned from the social media company in May, toldCBS‘s Scott Pelley during a “60 Minutes” interview that the tech giant took some steps to limit misinformation ahead of the 2020 election because it understood that then-President Donald Trump’s incessant lies about voter fraud posed a serious threat. Many of the safety measures that Facebook implemented, however, were temporary, she added.
“As soon as the election was over,” Haugen said, “they turned them back off or they changed the settings back to what they were before to prioritize growth over safety. And that really feels like a betrayal of democracy to me.”
Facebook officials claim that some of the anti-misinformation systems remained in place, but in the interregnum between Election Day and President Joe Biden’s inauguration, far-right extremists used the social networking site to organize the deadly January 6 coup attempt—something acknowledged by an internal task force’s report on Facebook’s failure to neutralize “Stop the Steal” activity on its platforms.
There is, according to Haugen, a simple explanation for why executives at the company refuse to do more to mitigate harmful social media behavior: “Facebook has realized that if they change the algorithm to be safer, people will spend less time on the site, they’ll click on less ads, they’ll make less money,” she said.
“The thing I saw at Facebook over and over again was there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook,” Haugen told Pelley. “And Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money.”
Haugen—who first revealed her identity on Sunday after having secretly shared internal documents with federal regulators, reported on in the Wall Street Journal‘s series, “The Facebook Files”—also said the corporation is lying to the public about how effective it is at curbing hate speech and disinformation, arguing that “Facebook has demonstrated it cannot operate independently.”
In the wake of Haugen’s bombshell interview, social media experts condemned Facebook for prioritizing “profits above all else.”
“Facebook runs on a hate-and-lie-for-profit business model that amplifies all sorts of toxicity on its platforms,” Jessica J. González, co-CEO of Free Press, said Monday in a statement. “Thanks to this brave whistleblower, we now have further proof that Facebook’s executives—all the way up to CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg—routinely chose profits over public safety.”
González, co-founder of Ya Basta Facebook and the Change the Terms coalition, added that Facebook executives “designed the company’s algorithms to put engagement, growth, and profits above all else, even allowing lies about the 2020 election results to spread to millions in advance of the white-nationalist assault on the U.S. Capitol.”
Longtime critics of Facebook argued that the “new revelations” about the company demand immediate federal intervention.
“How many more insurrections have to happen before we hold Facebook to account?” the Real Facebook Oversight Board, a coalition of civil rights leaders and academics, asked in a statement released after Haugen’s interview aired. “The system is blinking red, and without real, meaningful, independent, and robust oversight and investigation of Facebook, more lives will be lost.”
“The goal,” added the group, “is no longer to save Facebook—Facebook is beyond hope. The goal now is to save democracy.”
Free Press summarized the Journal‘s key findings on Facebook, which we now know stem from internal documents provided by Haugen:
Facebook exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules; Instagram is harmful to millions of young users; Facebook’s 2018 algorithm change promotes objectionable or harmful content; Facebook’s tools were used to sow doubt about Covid-19 vaccines; and globally, Facebook is used to incite violence against ethnic minorities and facilitat[e] action against political dissent.
Shireen Mitchell, founder of Stop Online Violence Against Women, praised Haugen for exposing Facebook’s “amplification and use of hate to keep users on the platform engaged.”
Facebook has “weaponized… data in harmful ways against users,” Mitchell continued, and failed to consider the negative effects of “hate-filled rhetoric” even after the Myanmar military used Facebook to launch a genocide in 2018.
González argued that Haugen “turned evidence of this gross negligence over to the government at great personal risk, and now we need the government to respond with decisive action to hold the company responsible for protecting public safety.”
“The government must demand full transparency on how Facebook collects, processes, and shares our data, and enact civil rights and privacy policies to protect the public from Facebook’s toxic business model,” said González.
“Facebook must also act swiftly to remedy the harms it is continuing to inflict on the public at large,” she added. “It must end special protections for powerful politicians, ban white supremacists and dangerous conspiracy theorists, and institute wholesale changes to strengthen content moderation in English and other languages—and we need this all now.”
According to Carole Cadwalladr, a journalist at The Guardian and co-founder of the Real Facebook Oversight Board, “Facebook is a rogue state, lying to regulators, investors, and its own oversight board.”
“What we are seeing today is a market failure with profound, devastating global consequences,” she said. “Executives and board members must be held to account. There is evidence to suggest that their behavior was not just immoral but also criminal.”
Shoshana Zuboff, professor emeritus at Harvard Business School and author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, argued that “even as we feel outrage toward Mr. Zuckerberg and his corporation, the cause of this crisis is not a single company, not even one as powerful as Facebook.”
“The cause is the economic institution of surveillance capitalism,” said Zuboff. “The economic logic of these systems, the data operations that feed them, and the markets that support them are not limited to Facebook.”
“The imperatives of surveillance economics determine the engineering of these operations—their products, objectives, and financial incentives—along with those of the other tech empires, their extensive ecosystems, and thousands of companies in diverse sectors far from Silicon Valley,” she continued. “The damage already done is intolerable. The damage that most certainly lies ahead is unthinkable.”
Zuboff added that the only “durable solution to this crisis” is to “undertake the work of interrupting and outlawing the dangerous operations of surveillance capitalism and its predictable social harms that assault human autonomy, splinter society, and undermine democracy.”
Haugen is scheduled to testify on Tuesday at a Senate subcommittee hearing on “Protecting Kids Online.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by KENNY STANCIL and republished under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
Frances Haugen said the company’s leaders know how to make their platforms safer, “but won’t make the necessary changes because they have put their astronomical profits before people.
Two days after a bombshell “60 Minutes” interview in which she accused Facebook of knowingly failing to stop the spread of dangerous lies andhateful content, whistleblower Frances Haugen testified Tuesday before U.S. senators, imploring Congress to hold the company and its CEO accountable for the many harms they cause.
Haugen—a former Facebook product manager—told the senators she went to work at the social media giant because she believed in its “potential to bring out the best in us.”
“But I’m here today because I believe Facebook’s products harm children, stoke division, and weaken our democracy,” she said during her opening testimony. “The company’s leadership knows how to make Facebook and Instagram safer, but won’t make the necessary changes because they have put their astronomical profits before people.”
“The documents I have provided to Congress prove that Facebook has repeatedly misled the public about what its own research reveals about the safety of children, the efficacy of its artificial intelligence systems, and its role in spreading divisive and extreme messages,” she continued. “I came forward because I believe that every human being deserves the dignity of truth.”
Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen: "I saw Facebook repeatedly encounter conflicts between its own profits and our safety. Facebook consistently resolved its conflicts in favor of its own profits."
“I saw Facebook repeatedly encounter conflicts between its own profits and our safety,” Haugen added. “Facebook consistently resolved its conflicts in favor of its own profits.”
“In some cases, this dangerous online talk has led to actual violence that harms and even kills people,” she said.
Addressing Monday’s worldwide Facebook outage, Haugen said that “for more than five hours, Facebook wasn’t used to deepen divides, destabilize democracies, and make young girls and women feel bad about their bodies.”
“It also means that millions of small businesses weren’t able to reach potential customers, and countless photos of new babies weren’t joyously celebrated by family and friends around the world,” she added. “I believe in the potential of Facebook. We can have social media we enjoy that connects us without tearing apart our democracy, putting our children in danger, and sowing ethnic violence around the world. We can do better.”
Doing better will require Congress to act, because Facebook “won’t solve this crisis without your help,” Haugen told the senators, echoing experts and activists who continue to call for breaking up tech giants, banning the surveillance capitalist business model, and protecting rights and democracy online.
She added that “there is nobody currently holding Zuckerberg accountable but himself,” referring to Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.)—chair of the Senate Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security Subcommittee—called on Zuckerberg to testify before the panel.
“Mark Zuckerberg ought to be looking at himself in the mirror today and yet rather than taking responsibility, and showing leadership, Mr. Zuckerberg is going sailing,” he said.
Frances Haugen strongly shakes her head in agreement as Richard Blumenthal says "Mark Zuckerberg ought to be looking at himself in the mirror" and "Zuckerberg, you need to come before this committee." pic.twitter.com/QC0B6zK9tW
“Big Tech now faces a Big Tobacco, jaw-dropping moment of truth. It is documented proof that Facebook knows its products can be addictive and toxic to children,” Blumenthal continued.
“The damage to self-interest and self-worth inflicted by Facebook today will haunt a generation,” he added. “Feelings of inadequacy and insecurity, rejection, and self-hatred will impact this generation for years to come. Our children are the ones who are victims.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by BRETT WILKINSand republished under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
Recent White House Study on Taxes Shows the Wealthy Pay a Lower Rate Than Everybody Else
A decade ago, in an essay for The New York Times, Warren Buffett disclosed that he had paid nearly $7 million in federal taxes in 2010. “That sounds like a lot of money,” he wrote. “But what I paid was only 17.4 percent of my taxable income — and that’s actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office. Their tax burdens ranged from 33 percent to 41 percent and averaged 36 percent.”
The words “taxable income” are doing a lot of work in that sentence.
Buffett owns a substantial number of shares in Berkshire Hathaway, the fabulously successful holding company he founded decades ago. As the company’s shares have soared nearly every year, his wealth has grown by billions. Under the U.S. tax code, none of that is taxed until he sells shares at a profit.
A little math shows that Buffett’s 17.4% rate meant he reported roughly $40.2 million in income in a year where Forbes said his wealth grew by $3 billion. His revelation made it possible to compare how much he was paying the government to the increase in the size of his fortune.
No one did so, and Buffett became something of a folk hero for calling for any increase in taxes.
When we obtained access to a trove of tax data on the richest Americans, it quickly became clear to our reporters that Buffett’s comparison of his own tax rate to his employees’ vastly understates the inequity of our tax system. Buffett is far from unique; the documents showed that the amount of money people like Michael Bloomberg, Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk reported to the IRS as income was infinitesimal when measured against their annual gains in wealth.
And so the first story in our “Secret IRS Files” series set out a new concept that makes more sense in our 21st century Gilded Age; we called it “the true tax rate.” We compared the annual taxes paid by the ultrarich to their wealth gains to give readers a sense of how the system really works.
From 2014 to 2018, we pointed out, Buffett paid $125 million in federal taxes. As he said, that sounds like a lot. But according to Forbes, his riches rose $24.3 billion during that period, making his true tax rate 0.1%. In a detailed written response, Buffett defended his practices but did not directly address ProPublica’s true tax rate calculation.
When we published this story, howls of rage rang out from the freewheeling corners of Twitter to the ornate offices on Wall Street. Some of the most irate critics wrote to me directly and demanded to know whether I was so @#$!@ stupid that I didn’t understand the meaning of the word “income tax.”
“This story, sadly, reeks with ‘class envy,’” one angry reader wrote. “If this was intended to get clicks, you made your money.” We’re a nonprofit and our revenue from advertising adds almost nothing to our annual budget, but I understand this reader’s larger point, which we noted in the story: The ultrarich are doing only what the current tax code invites them to do.
The debate intensified, and the White House-backed proposals on taxes advanced by congressional Democrats largely followed the traditional approach of raising rates on income. A separate bill introduced by Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders to impose a 3% tax on all wealth above $1 billion is seen as having little chance of passing.
The reluctance to embrace a wealth tax is deeply rooted. The biggest donors to both parties would be hit hard by such a law. And as we pointed out in our initial story, the complexities of taxing wealth are not trivial. Several countries have tried and struggled to figure out a fair way to tax stock gains. Does an entrepreneur whose stock skyrockets in one year, and pays a big tax, deserve a rebate if his company’s shares plummet the next year?
All of that said, we took note when White House economists issued a study that used publicly available data to estimate “the average Federal individual income tax rate paid by the 400 wealthiest American families’ in recent years, determined using a more comprehensive measure of income.” Their methodology was similar to ours, and their findings — that those families gained $1.8 trillion from 2010 to 2018 and paid 8.2% in taxes — are in line with what we found in the tax data.
The authors say their findings are evidence in support of President Joe Biden’s plan for tweaking the existing system; the words “wealth tax” are not mentioned. They point to the administration’s proposal to impose higher tax rates on stock dividends and on capital gains, the profit an investor reaps when selling a stock whose value has risen.
(The Biden administration has proposed getting rid of a provision in the tax code that shields heirs who inherit stock from paying capital gains tax on the growth in value that occurred before the shares were transferred.)
None of the proposed changes come close to addressing the biggest hole in the system, which is that an ultrarich person can live comfortably off gains in wealth while never selling a single share. As our initial story pointed out, the Buffetts and Bezos of the world can borrow against the value of their considerable holdings and live comfortably without selling stock or receiving any income from dividends, which new companies like Tesla and Amazon don’t pay.
The strategy, known as “buy, borrow and die,” allows the wealthy to amass fast fortunes, pay no taxes on those gains and pass on much of the wealth to their descendants.
Herb and Marion Sandler, the founders of ProPublica, made it clear from the outset that they hoped our journalism would spur real-world change. They were not particularly interested in stories whose biggest effect was that they had “started a conversation.”
We still measure our success by tangible effects. But over the years, we have seen that the road to impact on very complex issues can begin by changing the conversation.
Lawmakers have said that some of the most egregious tax loopholes we’ve exposed, notably multibillion-dollar Roth IRA accounts, will be scrutinized as Congress takes up tax legislation in coming months.
There’s no telling where the larger conversation about taxing wealth will lead. As the White House paper suggests, a new way of thinking about equality and taxation has taken center stage. Whether that ultimately results in change remains very much an open question.
Bond jump should have been seen coming, yet the reaction is nevertheless a big rush to the exits
In what some are calling a Taper Tantrum, the markets dropped with a sense of purpose today, with little bounce after the close in the futures market. With Fed rate hikes now a certainty, inflation concerns real, and bond yields spiking today, there were plenty of things to point to as catalysts.
This could be, and this is extremely likely regardless of what endless permanent-bull commentators would have you believe, the start of a tough two months, with late September and October being known as a very dangerous time in markets, especially whey they exhibit pre-crash signs and warnings.
Insane valuations that have preceded past September / October disasters are back
It’s unbelievable that the fall of 2008, when the financial crisis came to a head with the Lehman Brothers collapse, was 13 years ago, and the prior peak in November 2007 was a full 14 years.
I guess we can observe that we now have the iPhone 13, with the iPhone “1” which was just called “iPhone” at the time, has been marking the time with yearly iterations, not always named in sequence:
iPhone: June 29, 2007
iPhone 3G: July 11, 2008
iPhone 3GS: June 19, 2009
iPhone 4: June 24, 2010
iPhone 4S: October 14, 2011
iPhone 5: September 21, 2012
iPhone 5S & 5C: September 20, 2013
iPhone 6 & 6 Plus: September 19, 2014
iPhone 6S & 6S Plus: September 19, 2015
iPhone 7 & 7 Plus: September 16, 2016
iPhone 8 & 8 Plus: September 22, 2017
iPhone XS, XS Max: September 21, 2018
iPhone 11, Pro, Pro Max: September 20, 2019
iPhone 12, Mini, Pro, Pro Max: October 23, 2020
iPhone 13, Mini, Pro, Pro Max, September 24, 2021
And during all these years, for the most part the artificially inflated Fed “bubble of everything” has continued.
Here is a disturbing chart, courtesy of Elliott wave International at Elliottwave.com:
This behavior, seen across nearly all markets since extreme measures were taken to respond when the March 2020 pandemic crash occurred, has been building to a crescendo. And today was a tiny pin-prick that could augur ill for October.
What this has led to, naturally, is an overvaluation beyond anything seen in modern times, perhaps 500 years. The previous all-time-peak for overvalued stocks (S&P) was in March 2000. August 2021 is far beyond that peak and likely will stand as the most overvalued moment for decades.
Unless, that is, somehow the insane valuations are pushed even higher. Which is unlikely, but not impossible, given the state of delusional euphoria that pervades the financial markets.
Many 2021 characteristics, such as the Crypto, NFT frenzy will be seen in a similar light to the tech stocks in 2000 or Real estate in 2007
There’s a sense that it is normal for bored apes NFTs to experience a multimillion dollar bidding wars, or for crypto alt coins with dog mascots to explode 10,000% or more during this, possibly final phase, of what has been called the “everything bubble”.
And why not? If you bought and held almost anything in March 2009 or again at the bottom of the crash on March 16, 2020, then you have seen nearly continuous gains that you’d be eager to risk on, well, anything.
And if you were 10 years old in the year 2000, you’d not have known about NASDAQ drops that take around 13 years to regain what was lost after a 1 year bear market, so why worry?
Perhaps the Fed and the markets seemingly infinite ability to expand and inflate will go on for years. Or the next bear, possibly the one that already kicked off today, and will accelerate into October, is one to take seriously.
Subpoenas have been issued for documents and testimony that held close ties to then-President Trump and were either working or had communications with the White House on in the the days leading to Jan 6th. An official press release revealed four individuals have been served and include: former WH Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, former WH Deputy Chief of Staff Daniel Scavino, Defense Dept Official Kashyap Patel, and lastly former advisor Stephen Bannon.
Chairman Bennie G. Thompson wrote:
“The Committee is investigating the facts, circumstances, and causes of the January 6th attack and issues relating to the peaceful transfer of power, to identify and evaluate lessons learned and to recommend corrective laws, policies, procedures rules, or regulations”
According to committee, Mark Meadows allegedly communicated with officials at the state level and Justice Dept in an effort to overturn 2020 election result ( or prevent its certification).
Kashyap Patel performed several national security jobs for Trump as well as served as Chief of Staff to then Defense Secretary Christopher Miller. Patel allegedly was in involved with discussions among senior Pentagon officials regarding Capitol security before and on Jan 6.
Daniel Scavino prior to Trump’s rally on the 6th took to his social media to encourage MAGA-ers to “be a part of history”. According to records obtain he also have text messages from the White House on Jan. 6.
Steve Bannon communicated with Trump around Dec 30 regarding focused efforts on or leading up to Jan. 6 and even told his War Room podcast listeners that “all hell was going to break loose”
The subpoenas instruct the witnesses to appear at depositions on the following dates and are required to produce all relevant documents by October 7th:
October 15, 2021: Mark Meadows and Daniel Scavino
October 14, 2021: Kashyap Patel and Stephen Bannon
The letters to the four witnesses can be found here:
Shocking. DTJ sues his own niece, Mary Trump along with The New York Times and several reporters (Suzanne Craig, David Barstow and Russ Buettner) for obtaining his tax documents used to investigate his finances.
The 2018 article which won a Pulitzer Prize which showcased how the former president “participated in dubious tax schemes during the 1990’s including instances of outright fraud, that greatly increased the fortune he received from his parents”.
The report reveal confidential tax returns and financial records, highlight that Trump received at least $413 million from his father’s real estate empire, although he always touted himself as a “self-proclaimed” billionaire.
“I think he is a loser, and he is going to throw anything against the wall he can. It’s desperation. The walls are closing in and he is throwing anything against the wall that he thinks will stick. As is always the case with Donald, he’ll try and change the subject.”
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is said to be working on a rebranding plan. According to The New York Times, the plan which has come to be known internally as “Project Amplify” was signed off by the CEO and included a boost of pro-Facebook stories (written by the Facebook Team) onto its billions of users.
An internal meeting back in January hatched the initiative to showcase “positive” stories about the social network platform on its largest digital real estate, the News Feed.
Based on the report from the Times, some executives present at the meeting were “shocked” by the proposal.
Project Amplify also made strong attempts for the Facebook platform to distance itself from any scandals (i.e. minimizing access to negative reports) relating to Zuckerberg, while simultaneously, ramping up new stories that provided a more flattering spin on the social network.
When the iOS 15.1 update drops for the general public (likely soon as it’s already been seeded to beta testers since Monday) it will feature the ability to add your proof of vaccination status to the Health app and then create a vaccination ID card in Apple Wallet.
Many businesses, venues, restaurants, and more are requiring proof of vaccination for entry. For example California is the first state where proof of COVID vaccination or negative test for indoor events over 1,000 people.
The new feature in iOS 15.1 is made possible by the support Smart Health Cards which are valid for California, Louisiana, New York, Virginia, Hawaii, and some Maryland counties, as do Walmart, Sam’s Club, and CVS Health.
Above: ID in iPhone Wallet
Therefore, using this system you would be able to to look up their information in state databases, if you are in any of the states listed above, but if you were vaccinated through at Walmart or CVS it will also be feasible to add your information to the Health and Wallet.
Once you have gone to the web site for your state, for example in California it would be found at https://myvaccinerecord.cdph.ca.gov where you can type in personal information such as name and date of birth to get access to your records and status.
Though iOS 15 already has the ability to download the information to your Health app, and you can do this today, the last step, adding an ID to your wallet from the health app will not be possible until you have upgraded to iOS 15.1.
The record is locked to your name and can only be used by you. There will be a QR code that you will first download to your health app on the iPhone, then, once it is in the health app there will be a prompt to allow you to “add to wallet”. By clicking that link a vaccination ID car, with the QR code will be generated and added to your wallet.
iOS 15.1 is likely to be available under > General > software update in your phone’s Settings app within days. (Our guess is by Monday, September 27, 2021)
Tap the download link on your iPhone or iPod touch.
Tap Add to Health to add the record to the Health app.
NYMag Article details this deceptive talking point endlessly repeated by the Right
It’s hard to trace the origin of the partially accurate, yet highly misleading, stat that has been so often used to refute the idea that the current tax burden in the U.S. is not falling enough on the richest 1% compared to the rest of society.
The stat, which under the very narrow definition of “taxes” as federal income tax, calculated separately from any other form of tax, is, in this narrow sense, basically true. This isolated and totally meaningless fact does not address the overall taxes paid by the “top 1%” (which itself is an arbitrary category).
The reality, when overall taxes paid are taken into account, as the NT Mag article points out, is actually much less dramatic and has completely different implications for any call to “tax the rich” which was made by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Dress, as an example.
First, the top 1% represent 21% of all income, which means, by the narrow definition of declared income for tax purposes, that they “earn” more than 20% of the total income declared.
Further, this does not include the loopholes that allow billionaires to have virtually no declarable income and still avoid capital gains taxes via Roth IRAs and other methods, even as the calculated net worth of theses individuals increases by billions.
Opinion: ultimately, rather than defending the current system as if it is already adequate and somehow fair, the facts show that, on so many levels it’s hard to delineate them all, the system is functioning in a way that is not only unfair, but so corrupt that change would need to be nearly total before it could even be accurate to say that it was functioning fairly for the majority.
According to the article, the actual stat, with the above dodges, that are universally used, still not taken into account, is that: “the richest one percent earn about 21 percent of the income and pay 24 percent of the taxes”.
Which is a far cry from the ubiquitous sound byte that “1% pays 40% of taxes”.
Above: Inspiration4 Crew Members / Photo / Netflix
What do a billionaire, cancer survivor, geoscientists and a data engineer have in common?
For the first time on the streaming platform, Netflix will offer a 5 part docuseries covering the SpaceX’s Inspiration4 Mission in near real-time.
The series will cover SpaceX’s first all civilian mission (no astronauts!) as they prepare and train for the mission, the live launch coverage from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, as well as footage from inside the Crew Dragon spacecraft as the 4 passenger crew orbit the Earth on the 3 day mission.
Unlike recent flights from Virgin (Richard Branson) and Blue Orbit (Jeff Bezos) that led suborbital flights, Inspiration4 will reach higher altitudes than that of the International Space Station and make history as first all-civilian mission to orbit.
Multiple firsts and groundbreaking accomplishments that go beyond, way beyond…
Breakdown for Netflix’s “ Countdown: Inspiration4 Mission to Space”
Monday, September 6: Meet the four civilians heading to space
Monday, September 13: Watch them prepare
Wednesday, September 15: Watch the live launch
Thursday, September 30: Spend time with the crew in space
The Inspiration4 Mission which was brokered as a private deal by 38 year old Jared Isaacman, CEO of Shift4 Payments with SpaceX.
Isaacman will lead the mission along with his 3 other crew members: 29 year old Hayley Arceneaux who will act as chief medical officer , 51 year old Dr. Sian Proctor (mission pilot), who will become the fourth Black female American in space and 41 year old Christopher Sembroski, a veteran of the U.S. Air Force who will be the mission’s specialist.
The mission also serves as a $200 million fundraising campaign for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
A day before the launch day, Netflix will also launch “A StoryBots Space Adventure” on Sept.14 which is a live-action/animation special where Inspration4 crew members will participate by answering some of kids’ most pressing space related questions.
“It’s important to address the fact that billionaire heirs may never pay tax on billions in stock gains.”
Sen. Ron Wyden, chair of the Senate Finance Committee, warned Tuesday that House Democrats’ newly released tax plan would let U.S. billionaires off the hook by omitting key reforms that progressive lawmakers, advocacy organizations, and President Joe Biden have embraced.
“It would be a monumental mistake for Congress to pass a bill that really exempts billionaires,” Wyden (D-Ore.) told the New York Times in response to the House Ways and Means Committee’s proposal, which was spearheaded by Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.).
While the House plan (pdf) would hike taxes on large corporations and the top 1% of earners in the U.S., analysts and Democratic lawmakers have voiced concerns that it doesn’t go nearly as far as it should to raise revenue for policy priorities and tackle the nation’s runaway income inequality, which the coronavirus crisis has made even worse. According to one recent analysis, the collective wealth of U.S. billionaires has risen by $1.8 trillion—62%—during the pandemic.
Wyden’s committee is in the process of crafting a tax plan of its own as Democrats race to compile their sprawling budget reconciliation package, which is expected to include major investments in green energy, healthcare, housing, and other key areas.
Specifically, Wyden and progressive organizations criticized the House Ways and Means Committee for failing to tackle a loophole that allows the ultra-wealthy to pass on massive fortunes to their heirs tax-free. Earlier this year, Biden released a tax plan that would close the loophole.
“It’s important to address the fact that billionaire heirs may never pay tax on billions in stock gains,” Wyden toldHuffPost on Monday. “The nurses, firefighters, and teachers who pay their taxes with every paycheck know the system is broken when billionaire heirs never pay tax on billions in stock gains.”
Steve Wamhoff, director of federal tax policy at the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), echoed Wyden’s concern, noting in an interview with the Washington Post that “if the Ways and Means plan was enacted as is, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk would still pay an effective rate of $0 on most of their income if they pass their assets on to their heirs.”
“It’s obviously a big improvement over the tax code we have now,” Wamhoff said of the House plan, “but there are a lot of things Biden suggested that would go a lot further.”
I agree with Chairman @RonWyden: we need to pass a bill that ensures that billionaires and corporations are finally paying their fair share. A wealth tax and my Real Corporate Profits Tax are two ways to get that done. https://t.co/xTtTQ8PGx2
On Tuesday, the progressive advocacy group Patriotic Millionaires made the House plan’s shortcomings the focus of a new mobile billboard campaign that features an image of Bezos—the richest man in the world—accompanied by the caption, “Oops! Missed me! (Thanks, Richie Neal!)”
“Richard Neal and the House Ways and Means Committee failed the president, failed the country, and failed history. It’s that simple,” Morris Pearl, chair of the Patriotic Millionaires, said in a statement. “This is not what the American people voted for when they elected Joe Biden as president.”
To remedy the proposal, the Patriotic Millionaires urged the House Democratic leadership to make several changes, including:
End the preferential tax rate for capital gains income over $1 million as President Biden requested. There is no intellectual or economic justification for working people in America to pay a higher tax rate than investors.
Eliminate the “stepped up basis” that allows the heirs of billionaires to avoid capital gains taxes on inherited assets (provide a reasonable exemption for family farms and small businesses). The committee’s failure to address this problem at all is particularly troubling.
End the Carried Interest Loophole which allows fund managers to mischaracterize their “ordinary” income as capital gain income for tax purposes. The Ways and Means proposal extends the hold time for investments to five years. Given that most private equity firms hold investments for six years, this change will have essentially zero effect. The loophole should be eliminated entirely.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), whose “Tax the Rich” dress at the lavish 2021 Met Gala made waves on social media, said Tuesday that “members of both parties have tried to halt taxing the wealthiest in our society” even after billionaires made enormous wealth gains during the pandemic.
“It’s unacceptable,” the New York Democrat added. “We must tax the rich.”
According to a June survey released by Americans for Tax Fairness, 72% of U.S. voters support closing “loopholes that let the wealthy avoid paying taxes on the profits from assets they transfer to heirs.” The poll also found that 62% of voters support raising the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%.
The House Ways and Means Committee proposal would only raise the corporate rate to 26.5%.
As Chuck Collins and Sarah Anderson of the Institute for Policy Studies argued in a blog post on Monday, “The public has a tremendous appetite to do much more to address the grotesque concentrations of democracy-distorting wealth and power—and to shut down the ways that billionaires and a few hundred global corporations manipulate our tax system.”
“House Democratic tax writers do not go far enough to raise revenue or reduce extreme wealth inequality,” Collins and Anderson wrote. “The tax reforms would generate an estimated $2.2 trillion—just barely more than the revenue lost due to the 2017 Republican tax cuts.”
Thousands crowded near the only way out of Afghanistan ahead of U.S. August 31 deadline
It has been reported that at least two explosions and gunfire occurred just outside Kabul airport. The blast happened around one of the entry gates of the Hamid Karzai International Airport on Thursday August 26, 2021.
Based on an AMN report and Pentagon statements, the blast may have been the result of a suicide attack. There have been casualties and injuries, including U.S. service members among Afghan citizens, however no additional details have been confirmed.
This is an emerging, breaking story and various outlets, including Fox News, The Wall Street Journal and others have reported multiple, sometimes conflicting totals regarding the dead and wounded.
Fox News reported 10 Marines were killed, up from four, according to U.S. officials
“We can confirm that the explosion at the Abbey Gate was the result of a complex attack that resulted in a number of US & civilian casualties. We can also confirm at least one other explosion at or near the Baron Hotel, a short distance from Abbey Gate. We will continue to update,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby tweeted.
— Maj. Gen. Patrick Ryder (@PentagonPresSec) August 26, 2021
The following bullet points were published in the Fox News article cited above:
A suicide bombing outside the Abbey Gate at Kabul’s airport in Afghanistan Thursday has killed at least 10 U.S. Marines and soldiers, U.S. officials tell Fox News.
A U.S. official indicated that the attack set off a firefight at Abbey Gate, where last night, there were 5,000 Afghans and potentially some Americans seeking access to the airport.
A second explosion happened outside the Baron Hotel, sources say.
