Month: November 2020

NYTimes: On Election Day, Facebook and Twitter Did Better by Making Their Products Worse

On Election Day, Facebook and Twitter Did Better by Making Their Products Worse nyti.ms/2TWvxp9

“Mr. Pariser said that the platforms’ work to prevent election interference this year raised bigger questions about how they will respond to other threats.

“These platforms are used for really important conversations every day,” Mr. Pariser said. “If you do this for U.S. elections, why not other countries’ elections? Why not climate change? Why not acts of violence?”

These are the right questions to ask. The social media companies may have gotten through election night without a disaster. But as with the election itself, the real fights are still ahead.”

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NYTimes: A Top White House Coronavirus Adviser Warns of a ‘Deadly Phase’

A Top White House Coronavirus Adviser Warns of a ‘Deadly Phase’ www.nytimes.com/live/2020/11/03/world/covid-19-coronavirus-updates

“We are entering the most concerning and most deadly phase of this pandemic,” Dr. Birx wrote, adding: “This is not about lockdowns — it hasn’t been about lockdowns since March or April. It’s about an aggressive balanced approach that is not being implemented.”
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NYTimes: Be Ready for a Lengthy, Vicious Struggle

Be Ready for a Lengthy, Vicious Struggle nyti.ms/2TMkkqW

“Bartels reports that:

Most Republicans in a January 2020 survey agreed that “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.” More than 40 percent agreed that “a time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands. In both cases, most of the rest said they were unsure; only one in four or five disagreed.”

The strongest predictor of these anti-democratic views “by far,” according to Bartels,

is ethnic antagonism — especially concerns about the political power and claims on government resources of immigrants, African-Americans and Latinos. The corrosive impact of ethnic antagonism on Republicans’ commitment to democracy underlines the significance of ethnic conflict in contemporary U.S. politics.”

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