British Columbias efforts to ensure the safety of tailings storage facilities (TSFs) at the provinces dams have not lived up to governments world class ambitions, according to an internal audit conducted within the Ministry of Energy, Mines and Low Carbon Innovation and made public Friday.

The audit, designed to assess whether or not the province is doing enough to prevent a repeat of the 2014 Mount Polley tailings dam collapse, which sent 24 million cubic metres of mine waste into Quesnel Lake and surrounding waterways, found a lack of data, incomplete record and ambiguous regulations are undermining best practices when it comes to ensuring tailings facilities are effectively monitored and kept safe.

Tailings refer to waste rock and processing chemicals produced at mines that are often mixed with water and stored in enormous ponds or pits, created with manufactured dams. Tailings dams can be impressive and imposing structures. The Copper Mountain mine near Princeton, B.C., is currently seeking permission from the province to increase the height of its tailings dam to 255 metres, potentially taller than Vancouvers tallest skyscrapers and over six times the height of the Mount Polley dam.

B.C. lists 70 tailings storage facilities at metal and coal mines across the province that are operating, closed or undergoing care and maintenance.

The audit found the ministry of mines is inconsistent in its approach to enforcing specific provisions of B.C.s Health, Safety and Reclamation Code, which was updated in 2016 to incorporate recommendations from the expert panel which investigated the Mount Polley dam collapse.

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The audit, conducted by Chief Auditor Andrew Rollo and a team within the ministrys Mine Audits and Effectiveness Unit, found that overall the 2016 changes to the code have had a positive impact on the management of tailings facilities in B.C. But the report found that gaps in the regulation and vague definitions can introduce confusion and present challenges for compliance verification and enforcement.

The audit report adds that the ministry is inconsistent in enforcing some code provisions and in its approach to dealing with tailings facilities at mines which are not operating.

Although the ministry sets out expectations for mining companies, it has not clearly documented how and under what authority these expectations may be enforced, the audit says.

The audit puts forward seven recommendations to resolve inconsistencies and put a plan in place to ensure B.C.s regulatory framework upholds best practices. Energy and Mines Minister Bruce Ralston said the ministry is committed to implementing all seven recommendations put forward by the chief auditor and will continue our work to build a world-leading regulatory framework for TSFs here in B.C.

The timing of this report is significant, Alan Young, director of the Materials Efficiency Research Group, told The Narwhal, because B.C. has expressed strong ambitions to provide responsibly sourced metals to fuel electric vehicle batteries, to fuel the windmills of the future.

As part of the provinces post-pandemic recovery, Ralston said he wants B.C. to be seen as an environmentally responsible jurisdiction for mining investment. At a Mining Day at the B.C. legislature in March, Ralston announced that the provinces improvements to mine permitting have made B.C. a leader in the growing global environmental, social and governance investment movement.

But the findings of the audit cast Ralstons claims into question, potentially undermining B.C. s positioning with investors and mineral buyers who want to source ethical and environmentally sound materials.

Young, who is also a B.C. Mining Jobs Task Force member, said B.C., because of its clean energy supply, stable government and respectful dealings with Indigenous communities, is well-positioned to supply the world with responsibly sourced metals.

The world needs resource metals right now, Young said.

At the same time weve heard from the auditor that there are significant areas of concern where B.C. needs to clean up its act. So we have a big challenge if we want to meet our ambitions we have to act on the auditors recommendations because until we do we will fail.

Following the Mount Polley tailings collapse, the danger of tailings dams came into even sharper focus in 2019 when a massive dam failure in Brumadinho, Brazil killed 270 people. The catastrophe resulted in 16 criminal charges for murder and the mines owner, Vale, paying $7 billion USD in compensation.

Globally, there have been two to four tailings pond ruptures a year. Studies completed in the wake of the Brumadinho failure found that, under current rules, more dam collapses could be expected. The Mount Polley expert panel concluded that, if mining companies continue with business as usual, B.C. could face an average of two dam collapses every 10 years.

The Brazilian disaster was a catalyst for the 2020 creation of the Global Tailings Standard, which, according to an international group of 142 scientists, communities and environment organizations, are needed to put an end to the deaths and environmental destruction caused by tailings dam failures.

The Brazil disaster also sparked warnings from international organizations that investors will avoid countries that do not have tight safety and ethical standards with assurances that mine waste is safely stored.

Francis Sullivan of ResponsibleSteel, which has developed international certification standards for responsible steelmaking, said the organization looks for mine certification programs that are able to identify high-risk mines likely to create social and environmental problems such as those with poor mine tailings management.

As buyers and investors become more knowledgeable about the specific issues relating to mining, there will be increased pressure on mining companies to demonstrate that they have identified and are managing these risks, Sullivan told The Narwhal.

The push for new standards is significant for Canada, home to about 60 per cent of global mining companies, and in particular for B.C. where many companies are headquartered.

Mining is a foundational part of the provinces economy, employing more than 30,000 people, with a production value of $9 billion a year and will play a large part in the provinces economic recovery following COVID-19 and in the global transition to a low-carbon economy, according to a statement from the ministry provided to The Narwhal.

In 2020, B.C. amended the Mines Act to create a chief permitting officer position, separate from the chief inspector of mines, and created an investigative unit. But critics say more changes are needed and, unless the regulations are improved, investment is likely to be affected.

Bev Sellars, the former chief of the Xatsull (Soda Creek) First Nation, told The Narwhal that right now, nothing works well when it comes to B.C.s mining regulatory regime.

Sellars in whose territory the Mount Polley mine is located said the current rules dont protect people and the environment.

If B.C. thinks their regulations are world class then we better be prepared to say goodbye to more animals, birds and the finned who depend on the environment. Also, we better be prepared to have more humans get sick, she said.

Ugo Lapointe, Canadian program coordinator for MiningWatch Canada, does not believe B.C. can claim to have globally competitive mining regulations, especially when it comes to overseeing tailings storage facilities.

The overriding concern is that, despite a recommendation from the panel that public safety must be emphasized, the provinces regulations do not specify that safety must come above economic considerations, Lapointe said.

When they address the safety design considerations, they list economic factors as being one consideration to mix into the decision. This should be removed, he said.

A MiningWatch report, Safety First: Guidelines for responsible Mine Tailings Management, recommends the ultimate goal of tailings management must be zero tolerance for human fatalities and harm to the environment.

That means that, if a company cannot afford to build a safe dam using best available technology or pay for more expensive dry stack tailings, cannot put up an adequate bond, is unwilling to prepare for worst-case scenario extreme events and cannot ensure full cleanup costs are readily available, the project should not be approved, Lapointe said.

If its more costly than you are able to pay for, then dont build it. As a company, you need to redesign your project or you need to wait for the metal prices to be higher. This is what we mean by safety first, said Lapointe, who is also pushing for boards of directors to be held accountable for failures.

If one of your facilities fails, there should be a direct consequence and, if you are a board member, you should be banned from any other board member position in Canada. The fines are pitiful and theres no real sanctions to the corporation or the board of directors, Lapointe said, pointing to the recent $60 million penalty under the federal Fisheries Act levied against a subsidiary of Teck Resources for discharging selenium and calcite into Elk Valley waterways in 2012.

The fine is the largest issued against a company in Canada, but pales beside the companys revenue of $4.5 billion from coal in 2012.

Much larger fines, in the range of billions of dollars, are often issued in the U.S. and companies do change their behaviour if the deterrents are high enough, Lapointe said.

In the wake of the Mount Polley disaster, B.C. laid no charges against the company. Sellars launched a private prosecution against Mount Polley, arguing the company violated 15 environmental and mining laws that resulted in the tailings pond collapse, but that case was eventually quashed in the courts.

Sellars said she believes it is just a matter of time until another tailings pond disaster happens in B.C.

The environment has to be put ahead of industry making money. The government allows short cuts so the companies can rake in more money. That has to stop, she said.

Sellars said shed also like to see an independent organization set up to monitor mining. Governments push mining by providing incentives and then supposedly are also the watchdogs of the industry, she said. That does not work.

The audit points to a lack of cooperation between B.C. ministries responsible for safeguarding the environment and also noted the presence of confusing rules that are difficult for the provinces mine monitors to enforce.

These issues were among the many problems documented in 2016 when then-auditor-general Carol Bellringer issued a scathing report on compliance and enforcement in B.C.s mining sector.

Concerns about the ministrys geotechnical team also surfaced both in Bellringers report and the new audit, which concludes there are continuing problems with targets and priorities. The audit recommends that the ministry should have written policies for the lifecycle of a mine, including document reviews and inspections.

There is a lack of documented priorities, policies or procedures for most of the work that the geotechnical engineering team routinely performs with respect to TSFs (including inspections, managing annual reporting and review of permit applications) and a lack of formal strategy for addressing compliance issues at non-operating TSFs, the audit says.

The Mount Polley review panel found that the disaster was caused by a design flaw that did not recognize a weak layer of glacial soil beneath the dam foundation and, although ministry staff were not responsible for the design of the Mount Polley dam, Bellringer pointed out in her report that ministry staff failed to perform geotechnical inspections at the mine for several years, even though the policy is for a minimum of at least one inspection a year.

That has changed, according to the ministry and a spokesperson said geotechnical inspections are now conducted annually province-wide.

Sites are prioritized each year based on whether they have active TSFs or other higher-risk infrastructure, site operational status and compliance history, said an emailed statement from the ministry in answer to questions from The Narwhal.

The audit noted that 72 per cent of mine sites inspected are found to be in compliance with B.C.s four code requirements, which include completing a 2018 Dam Safety Inspection report, having an Engineer of Record, having a tailings storage facility qualified person and having an independent tailings review board. For the 28 per cent of mines that did not meet those code requirements, seven mines were identified as representing high or very high consequence rating when it comes to tailings safety. Another four were listed as presenting significant consequence.

The audit elicited a response from the mines ministry, that outlines steps already being taken to improve the safety of tailings facilities, including better collaboration with B.C.s Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy and the Ministry of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development. An action plan from the ministry outlines efforts to analyse B.C.s safety code for clarity and establishing a team of safety inspectors, including those with geotechnical expertise.

Tailings safety expert Dave Chambers, a geophysicist at the Montana-based Center for Science in Public Participation, agrees that there should be more emphasis on safety and he is disappointed the ministrys audit did not use broader criteria to look at tailings regulations.

I would like to see something in the regulatory guidance that says we really want to make safety paramount. The B.C. regulation doesnt say that. You can assume thats the guiding principle, but its not clearly stated, he said.

If you dont clearly state it, it becomes only one of the considerations. If you put safety on an equal level with cost, cost is going to win every time and thats the way it works right now.

Chambers is encouraged that B.C. is looking at the regulations, but said many questions are left unaddressed.

For example, some jurisdictions, such as Brazil, Chile, Ecuador and Peru, are banning upstream tailings dams structures where new levels of the dam are built on top of previously deposited tailings but B.C. regulations are silent on the issue even though upstream dams are known to be the most risky design, especially in wet climates or areas prone to earthquakes.

I think, if you are going to do an evaluation, you at least need to ask the question of whether we need to consider this, Chambers said.

One of the biggest controversies is wet versus dry mine closures.

The expert panel recommended that filtered tailings, or dry stack, be used instead of storing mine waste underwater behind dams, but most mines, including those still in the provincial approval process, continue to use tailings ponds.

However, wet closures are usually cheaper, so are favoured by mining companies and B.C. is avoiding the question by saying each application is site specific, Chambers said.

To me thats just a copout. The way I would like to see jurisdictions approach this is to start with an assumption of a dry closure. Then, if you can demonstrate through a risk-assessment process that a wet closure poses less long-term risk to the public not to the mining company it could be justified. Otherwise it should be a dry closure because it minimizes the potential for a catastrophic failure, Chambers said.

A ministry background statement says every mine is different, so each facility demands a unique solution.

Dry-stacking is one example of best available technologies, but it is not the only method for tailings management, it says, emphasizing that proponents must demonstrate they are using the best available technology for the site.

Dry storage has been approved for the Silvertip Mine in northern B.C., but almost all other mines continue to use wet tailings storage.

In the months leading up to the audits release, claims that B.C. has world-class regulations have come under increasing fire from the provinces closest neighbours in the U.S.

Tailings dams in the northwest of the province, near the border with Southeast Alaska and close to vital salmon-bearing rivers such as the Taku, Unuk and Stikine, are an ongoing worry for Alaskans and 25 Washington state legislators have written to Premier John Horgan calling for policy reforms to protect transboundary watersheds and downstream communities.

An additional concern for Southeast Alaska residents is the absence of commitments of financial help in the case of a disaster and Chambers questions why B.C. has not ensured that there would be adequate compensation for those affected if there is another failure, similar to Mount Polley.

Theres really no mechanism to assure financial compensation for those that would be impacted downstream, he said.

The effects of B.C.s mines on transboundary rivers is now under scrutiny by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which has agreed to consider a petition submitted by the Southeast Alaska Indigenous Transboundary Commission, a coalition of 15 tribes, claiming that B.C. mines close to the border are violating their rights because of threats to fish, wildlife and plants from acid mine drainage and fears that there could be another tailings dam collapse.

The application from the Copper Mountain mine to increase the height of its tailings dam in southern B.C. in the wake of the Mount Polley disaster has also elicited letters of concern from U.S. politicians downstream.

In May, Washington State senator Jesse Salomon wrote a letter to Horgan and Ralston, noting B.C. policy falls short of holding mining interests accountable for their impacts, exemplified by the costs of the Mount Polley disaster falling on taxpayers.

Mining companies have clearly demonstrated their willingness to gamble while playing with house money, the senator wrote. My hope is that your forthcoming policy would correct that, such that the burden of liability and therefore incentive to avoid disaster rests with the mining company.

This concern is not pedantic or hypothetical, the letter goes on. Tailings storage at the Copper Mountain mine poses substantial risk to Washington residents and resources.

Calvin Sandborn, legal director at the University of Victorias Environmental Law Centre, challenges claims that B.C.s mining standards are among the best in the world and points to a March letter to B.C. from 25 U.S. representatives and senators who are worried about the downstream effects of coal and metal mines close to the border.

Any statement about British Columbias standards being some of the best in the world does have to be questioned. Talk to the Americans that are downstream of the coal mines in the Elk Valley. Our standards are way weaker than American standards, Sandborn said.

Canada and B.C. have been dragging their feet over matching U.S. selenium-pollution standards, instead, allowing concentrations of the pollutant at two-and-a-half times what is permitted in the U.S., Sandborn pointed out.

How does that make us world class? he asked.

There are a lot of Americans that are really P.O.ed with the Canadian and B.C. governments because theyre finding high levels of selenium in their fish because our levels are so inadequate.

Selenium, which washes out of piles of waste rock from the mines, can cause fish deformities and affect reproduction.

In February the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency approved selenium levels below 0.8 parts per billion for Lake Koocanusa, the lake which straddles the border downstream from the Elk Valleys coal mines, while B.C. standards are not to exceed two parts per billion.

They were negotiating for years trying to set a common standard for that lake and finally the Amercians just got frustrated after years of negotiation and just went ahead, Sandborn said.

The province is working to determine selenium water quality objectives for Lake Koocanusa that would be protective of all designated uses, in accordance with B.C. science-based policies and procedures, according to the ministry.

Meanwhile, local governments in Skagit County, Washington and more than 200 conservation, recreation and wildlife groups, together with Tribes and First Nations, are upping the fight against an application by Imperial Metals owners of Mount Polley for a mining permit in the headwaters of the Skagit River, an area known as the Donut Hole.

This is an unacceptable risk to the lives and livelihoods of an entire region, said Laurie Gere, Mayor of Anacortes.

Sandborn believes the mining industry continues to have a disproportionate say in regulating the industry, which reinforces the ongoing problem with enforcement.

They need to put some resources into it, said Sandborn, who wants to see the B.C. government bring in help from the Indigenous Guardians.

Mining has not been a priority for this government and it needs to move to a number one priority. If you kill a watershed, you are killing it for thousands of years, he said.

Then there is the question of taxpayers picking up the cost of mine cleanups because the province does not demand adequate bonding from companies to cover the cost of reclamation or ensure there are hefty and enforceable financial penalties for breaking the rules.

B.C. is still far, far, short of getting adequate bonding on their mining operations. They are still not requiring full bonding from companies, Sandborn said.

A report from B.C.s Chief Inspector of Mines says that, in 2019, there was $1.9 billion of bonding in place up from $1.6 billion the previous year for an estimated liability of $2.8 billion.

Were working to ensure owners of large industrial projects are bonded, moving forward, so that they not British Columbians pay the full costs of environmental cleanup if their projects are abandoned, according to the ministry background statement.

But, for those living and working downstream of B.C. mines, those assurances are not yet sufficient and there are continuing concerns that B.C.-based mining companies are reaping the profits, while downstream neighbours shoulder the risks.

With files from Carol Linnitt

Updated: June 18, 2021 at 2:39 p.m. PT: This article was updated to remove reference to Bev Sellars role as chairperson of First Nations Women Advocating Responsible Mining, a group that is now defunct.

Photo: Garth Lenz / The Narwhal

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See the article here:

Audit of B.C.s tailings pond regulations casts shadow on governments world class mining claims - The Narwhal

Trisha Paytas said the H3H3 Podcast crew is upset with her after an outburst on "Frenemies." Screenshot YouTube/blndsundoll4mj

Since Paytas quit "Frenemies" and started attacking Klein, many of the fans they gained during the podcast's run have turned against them.

While some "Frenemies" viewers believed Paytas demonstrated character growth on the show, some of those former fans are now questioning Paytas' actions before and during the series.

For example, in the wake of Vazquez leaking the call, Paytas called Hanna a "rape apologist." At the same time, Paytas has also been criticized for their handling of rape allegations against their collaborators.

On May 19, Paytas tweeted a screenshot showing that podcaster Adam22 was accused of rape. But Paytas has not disavowed the for-profit sex tapes they made with Adam22 and his partner, pornstar Lena the Plug. Adam22, whose real name is Adam Grandmaison, has denied the allegations.

Online attention has also renewed around Paytas' admission that they hit Klein's brother-in-law, their fiance Moses Hacmon, during a domestic dispute in 2020 Paytas has since said the incident has been "spun."

Paytas most recently implied the narrative that they are an "abuser" is false. In the original clip explaining the dispute, Paytas said they were trying to get Hacmon's phone from him and that Hacmon tackled them, leading Paytas to hit Hacmon. Paytas and Klein have both stated that Paytas and Hacmon "worked through" the incident, which Paytas said included receiving mental health treatment.

Similarly, Paytas has said they once drove their car into ex-boyfriend Nash's house while high on meth. Nash was later villainized on "Frenemies," while Paytas attributed their own behavior in part to untreated mental health conditions and substance abuse.

Continued here:

How Trisha Paytas and Gabbie Hanna became the internet's favorite YouTubers to hate - Insider

The phone rings and its Mike Lindell, the MyPillow Guy, recovered cocaine addict, believer that the 2020 presidential count was 20 million off, and, apparently, a fan of 1970s AM Radio. After saying hello and introducing myself, Lindell begins howling through the telephone line,Wanna see my picture on the cover, wanna buy five copies for my mother.He laughs loud and says, You gonna put me on the cover ofRolling Stone. I tell him it is unlikely since the story will only be online.

Undeterred, Lindell is still stoked, urging me to come out to New Richmond, Wisconsin, for a free speech rally starring Diamond and Silk, pardoned felon Dinesh DSouza, and David Clarke, the former Milwaukee County sheriff who is always in a cowboy hat. Oh, yeah, and a video appearance from that deplatformed guy that Lindell refers to as the real president.

The park where were going to be once had 40,000 for a concert, and were going to try and break that record. Ill see you there. All I ask is you watch my videos. He pauses a moment. And visit my freedom-of-speech website: frankspeech.com.

This is like your dad saying hell take you to watch LeBron play from courtside seats if you spit shine the garage and explain why Mom left him for her jazzercise instructor.

Officially, Lindells event is called called the MAGA Frank rally, a name that manages to both pledge fealty to Donald Trump and hawk Lindells glitchy free speech (conspiracy theory) website. The rally is one part far-right cosplay party featuring a series of wacky and deluded characters who hold no elective office. The other part is fucking scary, the aforementioned hucksters hold dangerous sway over a party that in the not-so-distant past had presidential standard bearers named Romney and McCain. Sure, you could violently disagree with their policies, but they didnt give you the feeling they would merrily march the country off a cliff dancing to Trumps piper tune. Lindells gathering had the potential to be corny and creepy, a look at Americas diseased underbelly that is now so full of pus it could poison the rest of us.

So, I watched the videos.

NOT LONG AGO, I was staying in Los Angeles at a friends house, where Rachel Maddow is venerated and in a corner sit posters left over from the Womens March on Washington in 2017. I couldnt sleep and pounded my lumpy pillow. I look down at the mishmash of cushion and let out a yowl. It was a MyPillow.

Back in 2015, Lindell was just a guy who had never voted and whose smooth voice could sell a pillow to Californians left of Upton Sinclair. But since then, Lindells life has spun his car onto the Trumpian gravel road less traveled. Its not his first spinout; much of Lindells adult life was spent sniffing coke and smoking crack while crashing motorcycles and not sleeping for weeks at a time. Its all in his memoir, What Are the Odds?, which explains how Lindell makes and squanders fortunes, a slave to the white powder. But hes not that hard on himself. Even at his worst, he portrays himself as an addict with a heart of gold. Not once, but twice, he gives black drug addicts his last dollars so they can make it home and begin the journey to redemption. (The book is, shall we say, light on full names and contains no footnotes.)

Miraculously, Lindell got clean overnight, his pillow business thrived, and he had a dream he would meet Donald Trump and he did! They became fast friends during the presidents term and Lindells admiration grew exponentially. He is the only president in my lifetime who wasnt in it for the ego and worked only for the people and not for his own interests, Lindell told tells me shortly after we meet in Wisconsin.

This is, of course, the upside-down-world version of Donald Trump. The president named Lindell a co-chair of his Minnesota campaign. Lindell admits he was not aware that a Republican had not carried the state since 1972. Election night came and went. Imagine Lindells shock that Trump had lost not just Minnesota, but the presidency.

I was out there, talking to people; its just not possible.

So while Rudy Giuliani was holding pressers adjacent to Philadelphia mortuaries and sex shops, Lindell hired computer experts and hackers most who appear in his videos without names and came to the novel conspiratorial conclusion that voting machines across America had been hacked by the Chinese Communist Party and the election had been stolen from his buddy. In the dying days of the Trump regime, Lindell visited the White House and was photographed holding a piece of paper that had the words martial law typed on it. This brought the White House press corps running. According to Lindell, this was part of his master plan. Theyd ask about the martial-law thing, and Id say, Do you know how easy it is to hack a voting machine? says Lindell. This reverse strategy, according to Lindell, was also used to persuade a reporter to induce Dominion Voting Systems into suing him for $1.3 billion in damages, claiming that MyPillow Guy had repeatedly defamed the company by asserting they were either in cahoots or duped by the Chinese. (He is now countersuing). Guess what? I had reporters calling me about the lawsuit and Id say, Did you watch my videos?

Eventually, Lindells baseless claim got him banned from Twitter Jack Dorsey should go to jail and friendly outlets like Fox, which he repeatedly calls cowards. But heres the twist. Lindell may have been deplatformed and denounced, but he still has the ultimate dead-end supporter in the 45th president. As a result, he is adored by the tail of the conservative movement that wags the dog.

LINDELL URGED ME TO meet him at the River Edge Apple River Campground at 7:15 a.m., but he doesnt show up until a little after 8:00. He is in a state of agitation. Todays rally was thrown together in two weeks, and Lindell is a micromanager. He orders trailers to be moved so they dont appear on camera, and he becomes obsessed with a giant flag to the side of a stage. That cant come loose when the president is talking, says Lindell to a work crew.

We then settle into his air-conditioned bus for a chat. A gofer gets him coffee, which he pounds and then demands a second cup. I ask him how he went from a 2016 nonvoter to 2020 expert on data machine manipulation. The pillow salesmen was always a Trump election truther but, according to him, it was the January 9th arrival of a trove of never-really-explained data that convinced Lindell if not anyone else that his pal was getting robbed.

Everybody brought me everything, says Lindell, fingering his mustache. He had an aide retrieve his hearing aids and then resumes. I was the last hub in the wheel, the last voice for America. All I did was put in millions of dollars to validate it. Behind Lindell, Charlottes Web plays on a screen. Its the scene where the rat scurries around collecting treasure and garbage. Ive said it before, if I knew this had happened in reverse and Trump got put in, Id still be sounding the alarm.

Not bloody likely. Lindell explains that it was the Chinese Communist Party that was behind the hacks. But it is never explicitly explained how in any of his videos. His latest is Absolute 9-0, a reference to the fact he believes the Supreme Court will unanimously reinstate Trump as president after the justices see his not-disclosed information. As promised, I watched Absolute 9-0 and tell Lindell the numbers rolling by as his unnamed hacker spoke in sentences that used English to make an indecipherable word salad had confused me. Oh, those numbers were just b-roll, says Lindell, twitching in his blue suit and violet tie.

Lindell says there is an easier way to prove it was all bogus.

There was 147 million registered to vote. OK, Biden got 80 million and Trump got 75 million. Thats 10 million extra voters. Lindell nods repeatedly, proud of his point. In fact, over 213 million American were registered to vote Lindell was off by just a bit, i.e., 66 million. He then mentions that 1.7 million Pennsylvanians requested mail-in ballots while the election count shows hundreds of thousands more, proving more fraud. In reality, Pennsylvanians requested over 3 million mail-in ballots. As Lindell becomes more caffeinated, the claims become increasingly exorbitant. Trump won 80 million to 68 million, Lindell says as conservative outlets line up in the bus for their interview. That would be a 19 million-vote swing. Lindell is a college dropout whose main mathematical background comes from card counting at casinos. He says that number will be confirmed when there are audits done in all 50 states.

Lindell backs off from his earlier claims that Trump will ascend back to the throne in August and now says, Six months from now, Trump will be our real president and our country will be heading toward its greatest rebirth in history.

It is time for Lindell to tour the grounds again, but I ask him quickly about the insurrection of January 6th. Lindell gets angry. He argues that connecting the Capitol insurrection to his constant railing that the election was stolen is ridiculous. What are you talking about? Number one, Ive never even watched footage of that. But in my opinion, it was a setup. Ive been to over 50 rallies year. There has never been one incident. And you dont think it was a setup? Gimme a break.

I wonder aloud whether he risks doing permanent damage to the country he professes to love and cite the death threats that officials like Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger has received.

You mean the guy who works for Governor Kemp? Theyve been in it from the start. Same with Ducey in Arizona. Lets talk about the death threats Im getting.

Maybe another time.

MAGA Frank Rally in New Richmond, Wisconsin, on Saturday, June 12th, 2021

Tim Gruber/Ackerman + Gruber for Rolling Stone

ITS LIKELY THAT LINDELLis getting his marching orders from El Ex Presidente, although he wont say so directly. Regardless, Lindell and his squad are fighting a two-front war remarkably similar to Trumps own doomed crusade: vote fraud and Big Tech traitors. Lindells greatest supporters are sitting in the next luxury bus. The first thing you notice about Diamond and Silk is that Diamond does most of the talking, with Silk serving as her hype woman. Its a style they honed as the Hardaway sisters, the children of a televangelist. Were in the United States of America; this is supposed to be the land of the free, the home of the brave, not slaves, says Diamond outfitted in a black dress on a 90-degree day. Were supposed to be able to attain the American dream, not live the American nightmare. The duo prattles on about how shadow banning and Facebook intervention hurt their ability to make a living. You cant ban me for being black and having views you dont like, says Diamond. This is true, but the hilarious thing is that Facebook has long maintained it hasnt blocked or suppressed their content and the duo hasnt come up with any specific evidence, much as they didnt come up with any reason for lending their names to an anti-sanctuary bill sponsored by noted racist Steve King of Iowa.

Besides, theyd rather talk about critical race theory, which Diamond calls critical conspiracy theory. Why are you teaching children to hate each other? Thats not what Martin Luther King taught. I started counting to myself and got to seven before the other culprit emerged.

If you want to talk about black and white, everybody is not 100 percent black. President Barack Hussein Obama, whos biracial, has a white mother, a black father, but hes a race baiter; he puts out the most race stuff. What about him? Hes black and white. Well, did his white mothers ancestors own slaves? It makes us go farther. And now hes pushing this racism on me. Its socialism, its Marxism, and hes the face of it.

Of course Diamond, Silk, and Lindell live in their own political Narnia that has only a tangential connection to reality, but then again, so does a significant segment of todays Republican Party. Its not clear whether I should be laughing or crying. Either way, hatred of Obama is the third leg of the end-of-days square, paired with voter fraud and Big Tech tyranny. (Later, Dinesh DSouza will describe Obama, a man who has been out of office for almost five years, as the snake at the head of the oncoming Democratic totalitarianism.) The fourth side, and the potentially most impactful with the Lindell wing of the party, is a feeling of abandonment from the RNC and Fox, which doesnt send a crew to the rally. Later, former Milwaukee County sheriff David Clarke says he wont give a dime to the GOP until it signs on to Trumps new contract for America, a document that is rumored to be under construction but currently exists only in Trumps and Newt Gingrichs heads.

Diamond and Silk

Tim Gruber/Ackerman + Gruber for Rolling Stone

Isnt this a shame? says Diamond. We have the RNC and the GOP thats supposed to be for the Republican Party, but to have Mike Lindell doing more for voter integrity than the very people thats supposed to be for the people? If youre not fighting for American first, what are you doing to earn your salary?

I say goodbye, but Diamond admonishes me to run her words as is, without any commentary. Im about to tell them thats not what journalism is about, but Im busting for a piss. I just smile and head back into the summer cauldron.

THE WEATHERMAN SAID TODAY was going to be the cool day, which seems like nonsense as the temperature head into the upper 80s with most of the crowd broiling in an unrelenting sun. Maybe thats why the event isnt attracting the 40,000 or even Lindell-predicted 20,000. Instead theres a healthy 3,000 to 5,000 people, probably similar to the turnout Foreigner will get in July at a local casino. The usual crowd is here, a trio of Proud Boys in yellow shirts and a QAnon man and wife who said the return of Trump is somehow tied to the 11 books of the Bible that the Canaanites had excised from the final book. And there are impressionable young minds. I take a photo of two high school kids in defund the media caps. Theyre all smiles until I tell them if they are successful my second-grader son will starve to death. The girl looks like she is about to cry.

In a patch of shade, I find a fortyish mom named Martha. She looks exhausted, as one would after driving through the night from Dayton, Ohio. She did so at the behest of her 11-year-old daughter, Khloe. The girl is a political junkie, and their last vacation was to the CPAC conservative fest in February.

I think Biden cheated, says Khloe, wearing a blue-and-white shirt she swiped from her dads drawer. Its not hard to count all the votes. And it took so long. There are a lot of blue states that should not be blue states.

Khloe also mentions with a smile and a shrug of her shoulders that her attempt to convert her fellow classmates has met with mixed results. I told them I could send them some streams that would change their mind, and some of them stopped talking to me. She added with some glee, Ive been banned from some TikTok accounts.

I ask here where she gets her news. My mom got me into the PT News Network, says Khloe, mentioning a far-right website that is pro-Devin Nunes and anti-1619 Project. They have a lot of good information, says Khloe. I want to ask her about checking out mainstream sources, but its too late. She curls up and falls asleep.

MAGA Frank Rally in New Richmond, Wisconsin, on Saturday, June 12th, 2021

Tim Gruber/Ackerman + Gruber for Rolling Stone

YOU HAVE TO GIVE CREDIT to Mike Lindell for taking on all comers. Unlike Dinesh DSouza who refuses an interview at a conference about media cancellation Lindell welcomes them all, which is either bravery or malignant narcissism. But anyone who thought an interview between Lindell and TheDaily Shows Jordan Klepper would be a positive experience has not owned a television for a decade. In the minutes before Trump is going to drop in via satellite, Lindell and Klepper square off in an absurdist duel as a TV crew and a few gawkers watch.

ML: You didnt watch Absolutely 9-0?

JK: I didnt.

ML: And you call yourself a journalist. Thats horrible.

Im torn watching the exchange. As a journalist, I agree it is not cool that Klepper didnt watch the film. As a human being, I am jealous that Kleppers brain cells remain unsullied of Lindells mumbo jumbo. Point: Klepper.

Lindell is pissed.

Were supposed to let people like you destroy us and take away our voices? Fox isnt here, shame on Fox. Have you watched Absolute 9-0? You didnt even watch it.

Klepper tries humor

Mike, Ive watched all your pillow commercials.

What does that have to do with that? Youre being a jokester. Shame on you.

A producer shouts in what about the death threats against Georgia Secretary of State George Raffensberger. Mike looks like hes about to blow an artery as he repeats what he told me.

Brad Raffensberger and Kemp were in on it.

The Daily Show crew looks both horrified and excited.

Lindell waves them away.

Ive got to get ready for the president.

BESIDES THE FIASCO of The Daily Show, whose staff Lindell declares horrible people from the stage, not a lot has gone smoothly today in rural Wisconsin. Around 11 oclock, Mike had the crowd whooping for a flyover of World War II planes, but they didnt show. His tension level kept ratcheting higher. After three dudes saw my media credentials, they reported that they were not able to post photos and information about the rally to their social media platforms. I relay this to Lindell, and he turns on me. Why are you trying to cause trouble? Our network is fine, if they have problems thats something Mark Shuckabuck [Zuckerberg] is doing.

MAGA Frank Rally in New Richmond, Wisconsin, on Saturday, June 12th, 2021

Tim Gruber/Ackerman + Gruber for Rolling Stone

Shortly after 3 p.m., his mood is elevated. The planes finally show up, pumping some energy into the rapidly wilting crowd. Then, just a few minutes later, Donald Trump pops up on the Jumbotron.

So here he is, the greatest president weve ever had Donald J. Trump. God bless you, sir. With Trump huge and a smiling Lindell tiny, it looks like a scene out of 1984.

Trump goes on autopilot. He says he was cheated in Wisconsin and everywhere else in America except for the District of Columbia. He takes credit for the vaccines and $3 billion in shipping contracts for Wisconsin. On it goes. Then it happens.

Mike, I want to thank you, you are a courageous patriot.

Lindell looks three inches taller and a decade younger. This is what it is all about.

From there, we go into summer reruns. Trump relitigates hydroxychloroquine, Hunter Bidens laptop, Russia, everything but his golf handicap. He says the Senate would have gone 60-40 Democrat if not for his Herculean efforts.

And then he is gone. And here Lindell has made a grave mistake. He has chosen to speak after the president. He steps to the mic as a third of the crowd heads for waiting shuttle busses. He then speaks for more than 50 minutes, giving what can charitably be called an executive summary of his 400-page memoir. He throws in some red meat about getting back to the Bible. We are about to have the greatest revival for Jesus. He hits on how great our economy was pre-pandemic. But from there it is a slide show of his triumph over drugs and sin, complete with a photo of a crack-addled Lindell.

Finally, theres a pivot back to election fraud, wherein Lindell spins a series of fuckups as an ingenious plan to keep reporters interested in his story. He announces a July cyber summit and a mock election at which hell show specifics of how the election was stolen. The end result is not surprising.

I see Donald Trump sitting in the White House as the greatest president in history. I see the machines gone forever. I see us all coming together as one nation under God.

The remaining crowd cheers, but is now so thin you can hear individual whoops and war cries.

He stops after 53 minutes, and Steely Dan blares on the PA system. But theres one more task. A hundred or so supporters remain, and Mike Lindell works the rope line. He looks exactly like a politician. I tell him goodbye. He smiles.

Call me anytime, theres always new information. Im available.

I HEAD BACK TOmy hotel for a Silkwood shower. I change my clothes and jump into my car. Its about 35 minutes into Minneapolis, and the sun is setting, mercifully; the evening takes on a golden American glow as the lights of CHS Field, home of the AAA St. Paul Saints, are just taking effect. I keep driving into Minneapolis and park just short of a closed-off street.

The first sign you see says You Are Now Entering the Free State of George Floyd. It has been nearly 13 months since Floyd was choked to death, and the area now known as George Floyd Square remains a living monument. A life-size blue angel with wings lies near where he died with the words I cant breathe, I cant breathe, Mama. Fresh flowers and a teddy bear rest at a nearby shrine, and pilgrims lay down offerings and solemnly pose for pictures. About half a block away, theres a different kind of energy as a crowd of maybe 100 watch different men and women krump the night away, their exuberant movements suggest a happy exorcism, the bad spirits being chased away by joy. I ask a few in the crowd if they know about Mike Lindell and they shake their heads.

I stop at one of the shrines and linger for a bit on my way out. A slight woman named Crystal politely approaches me and explains she is raising money for a square regular who is pregnant and has nowhere to go. We even take Venmo, says Crystal. But I fish out a bill thats been in my wallet since before the pandemic.

I ask her if she knows of Liddell. She doesnt but is curious. I explain how he is from Minneapolis and has spent a small fortune attempting to overturn an election that happened over 200 days ago and has been declared the fairest in American history. She shakes her head in disbelief.

He spent all that money? She gestures at the neighborhood. Does he have any idea how much that could help people around here? She smiles and gives a thats-how-America-works shrug.

And she disappears into the twilight.

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Diamond and Sulk: A Weekend With Mike Lindell and the MAGA Zombies - Rolling Stone

Published on June 15th 2021

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Are The UCI Taking The P**S? Play Banned Or Not Banned With The GCN Show Ep. 440 | GCN - Global Cycling Network

From the left: Lab Leak Discredits the Experts

If COVID-19 did leak from that Wuhan lab, Thomas Frank thunders at The Guardian, we may very well see the expert-worshiping values of modern liberalism go up in a fireball of public anger. In the Trump years, liberalism made a sort of cult out of science, expertise, the university system, executive-branch norms, the intelligence community, the State Department, NGOs, the legacy news media and the hierarchy of credentialed achievement in general. But if the once-suppressed lab-leak theory proves true, it will start to dawn on people that our mistake was not insufficient reverence for scientists, or inadequate respect for expertise, or not enough censorship on Facebook. It was a failure to think critically about all of the above.

Media watch: The Gray Lady Forgets

At National Review, Isaac Schorr notes that The New York Times gave President Bidens budget a far more generous top-line takeaway than it did to President Donald Trumps a few years earlier. Trumps 2018 budget would have incensed any Tea Party-style conservative, but it was the Times that was outraged. Its story headlined White House Proposes $4.4 Trillion Budget That Adds $7 Trillion to Deficits called Trumps plan a federal spending spree. Compare that to the papers story on Bidens plan, Biden to Propose $6 Trillion Budget to Make US More Competitive, which gives the administration a voice, touting its arguments for the budget bender. How big spending is framed, it seems, depends entirely on the political party of the president proposing it.

Reality check: Voter ID Is Huge in Europe

While Democrats are warning anew of racist voter suppression, ... democracies in Europe and elsewhere tell a different story of the benefits of stricter voter-ID requirements after hard lessons learned, reports John R. Lott Jr. at RealClearInvestigations. Of 47 nations surveyed in Europe a place where, on other matters, American progressives often look to with envy all but one country requires a government-issued photo voter ID to vote. The rule holds elsewhere, too: After massive fraud stole the 1988 presidential election from a left-wing challenger, Mexico in 1991 mandated voter photo IDs with biometric information, banned absentee ballots and required in-person voter registration and voter turnout rose.

Iconoclast: Shameless Facebook

The same day Facebook reversed its decision to censor posts about COVIDs possible manmade origins, the social-media giant announced an extension of its policy of shadow-banning accounts that promote misinformation, fumes UnHerds Freddie Sayers. If you share something deemed to contain misinformation multiple times, your account could be silenced; you wont be informed, you wont know to what degree your content will be hidden and you wont know how long it will last all thanks to fact-checkers whose authority cannot be questioned. That the diktat came just as Mark Zuckerberg embarrassedly walked back the COVID rule shows how unaccountable these global superpowers are and how free to act with impunity: In democracies, after all, entire governments might collapse over mistakes like Facebooks, yet Big Tech hasnt learned its lesson.

Foreign desk: A Golden Age for Genocide

Seeing a crowd shouting Stop the Genocide! in Washington, The Wall Street Journals Walter Russell Mead wasnt sure which contemporary atrocity they had in mind: Chinas treatment of the Uighurs? Burmas of the Rohingya? No, they were ethnic Tigrayans getting early reports from friends and relatives of mass murder and ethnic cleansing against civilians by Ethiopian and Eritrean forces. Last week, Germany asked forgiveness for colonial-era mass killing in Namibia, and France admitted its terrible responsibility in Rwandas 1994 genocide. Yet new genocides and bloody campaigns that bear genocidal hallmarks are taking lives faster than halfhearted apologies can be made for the old ones. The international community hasnt been this morally weak since the Cold War and has no serious plan to restore the moral and political foundations of our fraying world order despite much moral grandstanding.

Compiled by The Post Editorial Board

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Lab leak discredits the experts and other commentary - New York Post

Less than 24 hours after a violent mob of Trump supporters stormed the United States Capitol this year, Facebook took the once-unthinkable step of banning the worlds most powerful elected leader from its namesake platform and its subsidiary, Instagram. In the following days, platforms like Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, Twitch, TikTok, Snapchat and Discord followed suit, banning a constellation of accounts and groups affiliated with the sitting president, or involved in the effort to spread misinformation about the 2020 presidential election.

To many, this was a welcome, if overdue, response to then-President Donald Trumps efforts to undermine confidence in elections: 58 percent of U.S. adults supported the bans, according to Pew Research. But a number of high-profile Republicans spoke up in response, framing it as the latest ploy in an alleged conspiracy among tech companies to silence conservative voices.

Shadow bans block a user or individual pieces of content without letting the offending user know theyve been blocked.

Prior to this years influx of public bans, this censorship narrative was assembled around the concept of shadow bans: a moderation technique used to secretly block users from posting to a social platform. In conservatives telling, it is used in a targeted way to suppress political content Silicon Valley types disagree with.

To be clear, theres no reason to believe this claim of political targeting. A 2021 report from the New York University Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, calls the idea that social media companies unfairly target conservatives a falsehood with no reliable evidence to support it.

The ongoing controversy surrounding shadow bans points to a tension inherent to any attempt at building a global community: Most of us want some kind of moderation, but opinions differ widely as to where lines should be drawn. And in moderation systems where everyone has something to be unhappy about, secrecy around their animating policies provides fertile ground for conspiracy theories to spread.

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A moderation technique first popularized in bulletin boards and early web forums, shadow bans block users or individual pieces of content without letting the offending user know theyve been blocked. To a shadow-banned user, the site continues to function as normal they can still make posts and engage with other peoples posts but to others, the user appears to have gone silent.

Its as if they were Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense, and they didnt know they were dead, said Duane Roelands, who moderated a bulletin board hosted on a Rutgers University server in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Its as if they were Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense, and they didnt know they were dead.

Predating the modern internet, that message board, Quartz BBS, was essentially a collection of chat rooms dedicated to specific topics, ranging from jokes to television shows and political debates not unlike a Slack workspace or a Discord server. But the bulletin board, which Roelands accessed from his Commodore 64, only supported 10 concurrent users. The text-only rooms displayed posts in pure chronological order, and they maxed out at 200 posts, at which point old messages would get automatically deleted.

So if a room suddenly erupted with conversation about a hot topic an election or an important news event what would happen is what we called scrolling the room, where messages were leaving that 200-message window very quickly, Roelands said. Often in the case of a single day, or, with a very hotly contested topic, that scrolling could happen within an hour or even less.

To keep those debates from getting needlessly ugly, Roelands and his fellow moderators would shadow-ban users, either temporarily or permanently, depending on the offense.

Offensive behavior could be anything from simply being constantly abrasive and obnoxious, to being disruptive in a room devoted to serious topics like sexual orientation, gender identity or politics, he said. Our behavioral guidelines basically boiled down to, Dont be a jerk.

On Quartz BBS, shadow bans tended to happen in waves, as groups of ill-behaved newcomers flooded the message boards every few months. Roelands and his fellow moderators would refer to the waves as cicada season.

While an explicitly banned user is likely to create a new account and keep posting, a shadow-banned user might conclude that other people just dont care what they have to say. Over time, the thinking goes, they will lose interest and go away.

In that sense, shadow bans are just a technical implementation of a strategy long employed by forum users Dont feed the troll! with the added benefit of not relying on users to exercise restraint.

On traditional message boards, shadow bans are a clear-cut proposition: either your posts are blocked or they arent. And that approach makes sense when posts are served up chronologically. But modern social networks which usually serve up content through algorithmically curated feeds can achieve similar results through subtler means that limit certain users reach without blocking their content entirely.

One approach is to exclude a users posts from discoverability features. In 2017, a number of photographers, bloggers and influencers noticed substantial drops in engagement with their Instagram posts. At the time, more than a dozen Instagram users told tech reporter Taylor Lorenz that shadow-banned users posts werent showing up in hashtag searches or on the Instagram Search & Explore tab.

Instagram didnt tell these users what theyd done wrong, but Lorenz pointed to spammy hashtag usage and unauthorized automation tools as behaviors that likely triggered the changes.

The same year, in a similar effort to make feeds less spammy, Instagrams parent company, Facebook, deployed a machine learning model to identify and reduce the reach of people and pages who rely on engagement bait. Common examples of the genre include calls to share with a friend whos addicted to coffee, like if you support local coffee shops and tag someone you want to hang out with on our patio.

In addition to limiting the reach of individual posts that employ the strategy, Facebook announced that it would demote repeat offenders at the page level.

People would always find a way to follow the letter of the law while violating the spirit of the law.

This machine learning model has since been expanded to include comments under posts. And in 2019, Facebook started flagging engagement bait in the audio content of videos as well. (R.I.P. Dont forget to like and subscribe! Its been real.)

According to Facebooks own documentation, the platform does not tell publishers if their pages have been demoted, or why, citing concerns that users could rely on specific details to find workarounds a concern that hearkens back to the early days of shadow bans.

We figured out early on that if you clearly defined what was acceptable behavior and what was not, people would always find a way to follow the letter of the law while violating the spirit of the law, Roeland told me. This is a behavior that has persisted online to this day, and theres never really been a good solution for it.

The Instagram bans reported by Lorenz in 2017 look quite different from traditional shadow bans from a technical perspective, but they also share important similarities. The strategy targeted accounts according to undisclosed criteria, and aside from a rapid drop in reach, users had no way to find out why, or even whether, theyd been affected by the platforms decisions.

That secrecy seems to be the only real throughline among the techniques real and imagined that users refer to when they talk about shadow bans.

Often, the term is being used to describe more subtle [strategies] described by social media companies as downranking.

I dont think, when we hear the term [shadow ban], it always means the same thing, said Stephen Barnard, an associate professor at St. Lawrence University whose research focuses on the role of media and technology in fostering social change. Often, the term is being used to describe more subtle [strategies] described by social media companies as downranking.

Facebooks effort to limit the spread of engagement bait is a typical example of downranking. In a Medium post published in March 2021, Facebook VP of Global Affairs Nick Clegg acknowledged that the News Feed also downranks content with exaggerated headlines (clickbait) as well as content from pages run by websites that generate an extremely disproportionate amount of their traffic from Facebook relative to the rest of the internet.

In cases where a platform publicly announces changes to its feeds ranking algorithm, referring to the outcome as a shadow ban feels like a bit of a stretch though everyday users who dont follow Facebooks product blog may beg to differ.

Demoting pages for being disproportionately successful at drawing Facebook traffic seems more shadowy at first glance, but the internal logic makes sense when you consider how news sites compete for eyeballs on social networks. If a story is true and its headline is accurate, a number of credible news outlets will quickly corroborate it. As a result, users will share multiple versions of the same story from different, competing outlets. Conversely, if a story relies on sketchy sourcing, or if its headline makes claims unsupported by the reporting, the article can become a permanent exclusive the only link available for spreading the word.

In the aggregate, therefore, a disproportionate reliance on viral Facebook hits over other sources of traffic may be a pretty good indicator that a site is willing to stretch the truth although its certainly possible that legitimate publications may get caught up in the dragnet.

And while the platform may not offer clear guidance on where the line is, exactly, most sites that veer into extremely disproportionate Facebook traffic territory probably know that they are, in fact, actively juicing the algorithm.

But social media companies also employ strategies that look even more like traditional shadow bans with some important adjustments to account for how users engage with their platforms.

More on Marketing:Will Newsletters Launch a Marketing Boom the Way Podcasts Did?

One key difference between a traditional messageboard and social networks like Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn is the overlap between the users digital and real life social circles. If a message board user simply stops posting one day, you might not think too much of it. But if a close friend stops showing up in your social feeds, you might ask them why theyve disappeared the next time you see them.

To help moderators slow the spread of offensive content and reduce the chance of backlash, Facebooks moderation approach allows for blocked posts to remain visible to a users first-degree connections. So instead of tilting at windmills all by yourself, you can do so in an echo chamber of people just like you.

This strategy is laid out in a 2019 patent for a system that automatically identifies and hides offensive content in Facebook groups or on pages: In one embodiment, the blocked comments are not displayed to the forum users. However, the blocked comment may be displayed to the commenting user and his or her friends within the social networking system. As such, the offending user may not be aware that his or her comment is not displayed to other users of the forum.

They dont know whats happened immediately. But they always find out.

Reasonable people may disagree on whether this can be accurately described as a shadow ban and some have. In a discussion thread about Facebooks patent, for example, Hacker News user NoodleIncident argued that the patented system is nicer to the banned user than a shadowban because the users friends can still see the comments.

This might be a necessary concession to effectively keep the user from finding out about their status the core idea of shadow banning. And ultimately, its probably more effective, because, according to Roelands, users are smarter than shadow-ban proponents tend to give them credit for.

When users are shadow-banned, they dont know whats happened immediately, he said. But they always find out.

The fact that common moderation techniques depend on keeping users in the dark has no doubt played a big role in turning the term shadow ban into a catch-all explanation for unexplained changes in social media performance and a rallying cry for those who think tech companies are censoring them.

In surveying users who experienced content moderation in the run-up to the 2016 election, Sarah Myers West, now a postdoctoral researcher at New York Universitys AI Now Institute, found that many users saw correlations between what they referred to as online censorship and algorithmic intervention.

My definition of content moderation might be: Was a post, photo or video you posted taken down, or was your account suspended, West said. But a number of folks would interpret content moderation as something like: I lost a lot of followers and I dont really have a good explanation for that but I think this is an overt effort by someone at this platform to shut me down. Or: My posts normally get a certain amount of engagement, but I posted about this topic, and all of a sudden my number of likes is negligible.

Social engagement can fluctuate for reasons that have nothing to do with censorship, of course. But West, who is also one of the conveners of the Santa Clara Principles on Transparency and Accountability in Content Moderation, said the opacity surrounding moderation systems and algorithmic feeds leave users speculating about how it all works.

Users would develop their own folk theories to make sense of it.

Users would develop their own folk theories to make sense of it, West said. And those folk theories tended toward the political.

One common theory among users was that social platforms deliberately aimed to suppress their points of view. Others believed their posts were actively sabotaged by other users making concerted efforts to flag posts for violating platform policies, in turn triggering mechanisms that limit a posts reach.

And then some people were just genuinely perplexed, West said. They just really did not know or understand what was going on, and they just wanted an explanation of how they could modify their behavior in the future so they wouldnt encounter this kind of issue.

The lack of transparency is especially frustrating for those who depend on social platforms in their day-to-day lives. In her research, West spoke with people living with disabilities whose support networks existed primarily online. Some told her they feared losing access to these networks not just because theyd lose a way to socialize with other people, but because they relied on these platforms to check in on each other and to reach out if they needed help.

These users stories help to illustrate an important consideration when talking about content moderation: It has real-life implications.

Chris Stedman, author of IRL: Finding Realness, Meaning, and Belonging in Our Digital Lives, sees the debate over shadow bans as a symptom of a broader anxiety about the power social media platforms have over our means of self expression.

Thats been especially true over the past year, as weve all come to rely on online platforms for much-needed social interaction. But for many, the distinction between social media and real life was fading away long before the pandemic.

At one point, the internet was a discrete space that we could step into and out of. I have vivid memories of biking to the library as a kid and writing my name on a clipboard to use a shared computer. It was really set apart from the rest of my life, Stedman said. Now, a bigger and bigger part of what it means to be me how I find a sense of connection and community and express myself has moved into digital spaces.

According to Google Trends, which measures the popularity of search terms over time, interest in shadow bans remained more or less flat from 2004 (the start of the data set) until April 2017 (when the Instagram shadow ban controversy reported by Taylor Lorenz began picking up steam). But interest really started ramping up in 2018, following a Vice story that used the term to describe a bug in Twitters interface that prevented some conservative leaders from showing up as suggestions within its search feature. A subsequent tweet by President Trump called the mishap a discriminatory and illegal practice.

And the ring of the term itself probably added fuel to the fire.

Shadow banning sounds quite nefarious, and I think that is part of its success in the public discourse.

Shadow banning sounds quite nefarious, and I think that is part of its success in the public discourse, Barnard said. It has this sense of a faceless entity, and its conspiratorial. It contains a more or less explicit assertion that these liberal tech executives from California are censoring us and conspiring to force their progressive agenda throughout American politics.

In his view, the lack of insight into the inner workings of social networks play a role too especially among conservatives, who tend to have a lower level of trust in media institutions. Together, these factors form a perfect storm where each social post that fails to gain traction becomes another piece of evidence of a broad-based effort at suppression, as opposed to just a failed attempt at going viral.

It becomes a seemingly plausible explanation, of course ignoring all the ways these platforms are helping them spread their messages which of course is the deep irony of all of this, Barnard said.

And underneath it all is a kernel of truth: Social networks arent censoring conservatives on ideological grounds, but they are trying to limit the spread of misinformation most notably about elections and about COVID-19. And among those most vocal in accusing social platforms of liberal bias are noted purveyors of misinformation on exactly those topics: Senator Josh Hawley, who raised his fist in solidarity with rioters outside the Capitol in January; Breitbart News, which was investigated by the FBIfor its role as a vector for Russian propaganda in the 2016 election; Ben Shapiro, whose censored site The Daily Wire saw its social media engagement skyrocket last year.

In short, social platforms are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Downranking is essential to preventing the spread of misinformation, and offering too much transparency about automated moderation systems will make it easier for bad actors to circumvent them. At the same time, any secretive, large-scale moderation system is bound to cause frustrations like those expressed by users in Wests study who said they didnt know what theyd done wrong.

More on Marketing:Good User-Generated Content Is Hard to Find

The term shadow banning has taken on a life of its own, evolving from a signifier of a specific moderation technique to shorthand for anything from actual downranking to unfounded conspiracy theories. And because most people learned about shadow bans as the centerpiece of a bad-faith argument, its hard to see how the term could return to its original meaning. According to Google Trends, interest in shadow banning as a topic reached an all-time high this January, and it continued to rise in February as well.

And on some level, maybe shadow bans were never all that great to begin with. Adrian Speyer, who is head of community at the forum software provider Vanilla Forums, urges users of his companys platform to treat shadow bans as a last resort.

If someone is not welcome in your community, you should escort them from the premises.

If someone is not welcome in your community, you should escort them from the premises, Speyer said.

In his view, shadow bans provide an easy way out of having difficult, but important conversations about community standards. These conversations can help foster a greater sense of ownership, and empower users to help moderators as they seek to uphold those standards.

Looking back on his time as a bulletin board moderator, Roelands has also come to see shadow bans differently. For one, because theres no feedback loop directly related to a specific action, users are never given an opportunity to learn where they went wrong. But perhaps more importantly, because people could usually tell when a trouble-making user suddenly disappeared, it created an environment where otherwise-upstanding community members sought to publicly humiliate users who had been shadow banned.

It made our community meaner, Roelands said. Its like the difference between restorative and retributive justice. Shadow bans wont turn people into better members of the community.

At any rate, social platforms are starting to recognize that opacity is a real problem. In his March Medium post, Clegg announced that Facebooks roadmap for this year includes providing more transparency about how the distribution of problematic content is reduced.

Twitter is also rethinking its moderation policies with an eye toward increasing transparency. In late January, the company rolled out a new pilot program called Birdwatch that lets users annotate tweets they believe to be misleading. Users then vote on each others submissions, in a system that will be familiar to users of web forums like Reddit or Hacker News.

Twitter will make all data contributed to Birdwatch available to the public, along with the algorithm the Birdwatch feature uses to determine which posts rise to the top.

At the time of this writing, the No. 1 post on Birdwatch was an exercise video posted by Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene with the caption: This is my Covid protection . The current top note labels the post as potentially misleading, citing CDC guidance on COVID-19 prevention: Exercise does not offer protection against COVID-19. Wearing a mask, staying socially distant, washing your hands, and getting vaccinated are the best ways to protect yourself and others.

As far as warnings go, this label is more specific and actionable than the generic This claim is disputed tag rolled out during the vote count following the presidential election. But perhaps most importantly, the system gives end users an opportunity to set their own standards and give each other clear feedback on whats in bounds and what isnt.

These features are unlikely to solve the companies moderation problems for good. Facebooks user base includes more than a third of the worlds population, which makes creating any agreed-upon set of community standards impossible. And an upvote-driven moderation system like Birdwatch could devolve into something resembling mob rule.

But both social media giants seem committed to giving their users more insight into why posts are downranked or flagged.

And thats a start, at least.

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What Are Shadowbans And Why Do They Happen? - Built In

Former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and other Republicans are expressing outrage following Facebook's decision to uphold its ban on former president Donald Trump. GOP leaders now contemplate whether it's necessary or not to 'break up' the social media giant. Fox Nation host Tomi Lahren weighed in on the Trump ban, telling "Fox & Friends First" Thursday that Facebook has become a Big Tech company that is "throttling conservative voices only."

TOMI LAHREN: Yeah, I really do think that it needed to come to this in order to wake people up and understand if they can do this to the former president of the United States, someone who may very well run again in 2024, it can happen to all of us.

It already does happen to all of us. The censorship, the shadow banning, the silencing of conservative voices. Big Tech has gotten away with this for far too long. And I wish they could just be a content curating platform. But they're not. They are content discriminating.

So I know that the liberals like to come after us and say, yes, we believe in private companies having the ability to control what they do in their own entities. But when you're going so far as to control the message and you are siphoning off and throttling conservative voices only and especially the president, the former president of the United States, it's time to stand up and say it's gotten this bad.

There needs to be action. And I would hope that the Democrats would join with us in this effort to protect free speech. At the end of the day, like our president said, what are they so afraid of? If his message is so horrible, if our message, our conservative values are so horrible, then why are we not allowed to express them and have the American people and the public decide what they want to believe and what they want to follow?

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Why do you have to censor us? Why do you have to shadow ban us? Let this be a free marketplace of ideas again. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat. What are you so afraid of?

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Tomi Lahren to Big Tech: Why do you have to censor conservatives? - Fox News

The de-platforming of the former president, as Republicans like to call it, has deprived him of beloved social media megaphones that made his political career, as well as crucial fund-raising and organizing machinery for any future presidential run. Facebook advisers decision to keep the ban in place for now is undoubtably a daunting prospect for Trumps apparent presidential ambitions for himself in 2024.

But it is becoming increasingly clear that the ex-president no longer needs the social media platforms that nurtured his devoted following and rocketed him to the presidency in 2016 to exert an iron grip over his party or keep his lies about election fraud in 2020 percolating among his base.

This week alone, Cheney, a daughter of the Republican establishment who has long commanded deep respect from her party, appeared poised to be expelled from party leadership over her refusal to go along with Trumps lies about the election showing Trump can still foment a mutiny in Congress even as his voice gets softer nationally. His favored candidate came out on top in a special election in Texas. And a Republican-ordered audit of the 2020 election results in the biggest county in Arizona, an unusual and unnecessary process his supporters are hoping will give cause to the baseless distrust in the outcome, dragged on.

It all points to a strange, almost-backwards dynamic in the GOP after Trumps presidency: Even as his megaphone gets tinnier, as the tool that forged his political persona eludes his grip, his influence over the party he remade is only getting stronger.

Theres no real evidence that voters have distanced themselves from him, theres no real evidence that elected officials have changed their tune on him if anything, they are more loyal to him than ever before, said Brendan Buck, a Republican strategist and a former aide to the erstwhile House speakers John Boehner and Paul Ryan who is troubled by his partys direction.

Donald Trump, he added, is much bigger than any one medium of communication.

His banishment from the social platforms for inciting an insurrection has also fed into a victimhood narrative among his base that has largely prevented Republicans from questioning why he lost in the first place or laying any blame at his feet.

This sort of deepens the view of Republicans generally that hes a martyr, that he was sacrificed by media and Big Tech, said Scott Jennings, a Republican consultant who previously worked on campaigns for Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell. His leadership of the party is at the moment unquestioned.

Still, there are obvious drawbacks for Trump to his continued banishment from Facebook, which the social media giant first instituted after he used his page to disseminate lies that fraud cost him the election and to seemingly praise participants in the deadly insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6. (At the time, Twitter banned Trump indefinitely.)

Trump and his team skillfully used the social networks to fund-raise, organize, build buzz, and crucially to constantly insert himself into the news cycle and say his piece without moderation or fact-checking. His campaign manager at the time said Facebook and Twitter won him the 2016 election. Beyond that, the constant, undulating feedback buoyed his spirits.

Long ago, this is probably 2013 or 2014, he told me that he was going to run for president because Twitter was telling him to do it, said Michael DAntonio, a biographer of the former president. It was central to his political identity, to his political methodology.

Now, he is no longer center stage. Social media interactions concerning Trump have dropped 91 percent since January, according to a study by NewsWhip that was first reported by Axios a statistic that could be explained by the end of his presidency as well as the loss of his accounts.

A small group of Trump staffers sends several e-mails a week to reporters since he lost his Twitter and Facebook accounts and access to his millions of followers in January.

And while Trump has called his e-mailed press releases more elegant than his rapid-fire social media strategy, he now has to contend with a layer between him and his public that makes it harder for him to insert himself into the news of the day. Thats welcome news for Democrats who often languished in his shadow.

Yes, it influences the Republican Party, but it gives space for Democrats to run the vision, for Biden to run the vision he needs to right now, said Amanda Renteria, a Democratic strategist and a former aide to Hillary Clinton. The diminution of Trump, combined with the infighting he has fomented within the Republican Party, has given her party more space to get work done and reorient itself, Renteria said.

But the former presidents allies see a flip side to his being banned. They are already seizing on his extended Facebook ban as evidence that a woke mob was always out to get him, stoking the grievances that have animated much of the partys discourse in recent months and that they are hoping will help them win back the House in the midterms.

Weve known for multiple cycles that Facebook, Twitter, and Big Tech have become an extension of the lefts woke mob, said Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, in a statement. The First Amendment and our freedom of speech is a right granted to all Americans from the Constitution, not from Facebooks Oversight Board. If Big Tech can ban a former President, whats to stop them from silencing the American people next?

The Republican Party has become entirely focused on a culture war, Buck said, and this is a large part of that culture war.

Sam Nunberg, a former aide to Trumps campaign, suggested that keeping Trump off the platform could make boycotting social media a new litmus test among Republican primary candidates trying to establish their conservative bona fides in relation to him.

Is it going to be seen as, if President Trump is still canceled by Facebook, if youre Nikki Haley, if youre somebody seen as a country club-esque Republican, if you use Facebook, is that going to hurt you? Nunberg said.

The ban has not stopped Trumps falsehoods about the 2020 election from taking root deep in the psyche of much of the GOP. Believing the election was stolen has become nothing short of an orthodoxy for the Republican base, who have censured elected officials who dont believe it and demanded recounts and new voting restrictions.

Cheney has tried to be a ballast against those lies, and on Monday she took to her own Twitter account to do so once again.

The 2020 election was not stolen, she wrote. Anyone who claims it was is spreading THE BIG LIE, turning our back on the rule of law and poisoning our democratic system.

Cheney may not have lost her social media accounts, but it doesnt appear that posts like hers hold much sway over a party that has already been remade by Trump.

Jess Bidgood can be reached at Jess.Bidgood@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @jessbidgood.

Original post:

Stripped of his megaphone and much of his influence, Trump still holds GOP in his thrall - The Boston Globe

TALLAHASSEE Gov. Ron DeSantis has put a bulls-eye on tech giants that he contends censor conservatives speech, but the social media apps and platforms hes targeting are blockbusters for the states financial portfolio.

DeSantis, a close ally of former President Donald Trump, and Republican legislative leaders on Tuesday laid out a plan to punish Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Google and Twitter for blacklisting users or putting gags on social-media posts.

But the five tech behemoths are huge earners for Floridas investment portfolio, according to the State Board of Administration. The board manages Floridas pension plan as well as investments for more than two dozen other accounts.

Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Google, which is publicly traded as Alphabet, and Twitter reaped $3.1 billion for the state last year. The states investment in the big five known colloquially as FAAAT was just shy of $8 billion, according to information provided by State Board of Administration manager of external affairs John Kuczwanski.

DeSantis, House Speaker Chris Sprowls and Senate President Wilton Simpson held a news conference to condemn the tech companies, which have also been under scrutiny by Congress.

DeSantis repudiated Twitter for blocking Trump from its site and scolded Amazon for dropping Parler, a social media app used by many conservatives. Both actions occurred after Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 in a violent attempt to prevent the certification of President Joe Bidens victory in the November election.

Speaking to reporters Tuesday, DeSantis expressed concern that the tech firms could disable or suspend a political candidates account in the run-up to an election.

They could potentially de-platform a candidate, suppress a message, and that is something that is okay? I dont think so, he said.

DeSantis, however, isnt proposing that the state shed its investments in the corporate giants.

Im open to it, he said when asked about such a move. But I dont think that would markedly change the behavior of big tech. These are really big companies.

The five companies make up about 7.8 percent of the states global equity portfolio, which totaled around $103 billion at the end of December.

The companies blew past the states 16.35 percent benchmark for global equity investments, Kuczwanski told The News Service of Florida in a phone interview Wednesday.

For example, the annual return on Facebook was more than 81 percent. At 31 percent, the return on Alphabet Inc. was the lowest of the five tech companies.

The states investment gurus dont recommend dropping the tech stock superstars.

We believe divestiture is the least effective way to change corporate business practices and in most cases is counterproductive; and divesting from companies shuts off an important access point to proxy voting and corporate management teams, Kuczwanski said in an email.

As of mid-day Wednesday, Apples market capitalization, or market cap, was $2.3 trillion, Amazons was $1.7 trillion, Alphabets was $1.3 trillion, Facebooks was $760.8 billion and Twitters was $43.7 billion. Market cap refers to the total dollar market value of a companys outstanding shares of stock.

DeSantis said legislation targeting the companies could include such sanctions as a $100,000-a-day fine for each day a candidate is removed from a platform.

The plan also could require technology companies promotion of candidates to be recorded as campaign contributions with the state elections office, he said. Tech companies could also be prohibited from blocking or partially blocking posts by or about political candidates, a practice known as shadow banning.

But critics of the proposal maintain that such policing of tech companies could be problematic.

Berin Szka, a technology law attorney who is president of TechFreedom, called DeSantis plan a reboot of a 1913 Florida law that required newspapers to give political candidates the right to reply to editorials. In 1974, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the law as unconstitutional.

Since 1998, the Court has repeatedly held that websites enjoy the same, complete protection of the First Amendment which makes everything he proposes unconstitutional. Gov. DeSantis poses as a constitutional conservative, but hes made quite clear that he doesnt take the Bill of Rights seriously, Berin said in a prepared statement.

While DeSantis and legislative leaders arent calling for the state to dump its investments in the U.S.-based tech companies, Florida lawmakers in the past have ordered steps to limit investments in certain corporations.

Under state law, the State Board of Administration has a list of scrutinized companies with prohibited business operations in Sudan and Iran. The prohibited operations involve the petroleum or energy sector, oil or mineral extraction, power production or military support activities, according to the agencys website.

The SBA also has a list of scrutinized companies that participate in a boycott of Israel, including actions that limit commercial relations with Israel or Israeli-controlled territories.

Dara Kam, News Service of Florida

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Florida Republicans target Big Tech and its big business in the state - Tampa Bay Times

Conservatives claims of censorship and other forms of bias on social media are unfounded, according to a study by New York University released Monday. After an uproar from conservative media over that report, one of the authors of the study stood by it in comments to Mediaite.

False Accusation: The Unfounded Claim that Social Media Companies Censor Conservatives, from NYUs Stern business school, made the case that such claims are not supported by evidence.

The claim of anti-conservative animus on the part of social media companies is itself a form of disinformation: a falsehood with no reliable evidence to support it, the study says. No trustworthy largescale studies have determined that conservative content is being removed for ideological reasons or that searches are being manipulated to favor liberal interests.

Conservatives have long accused tech and social media companies, often referred to as Big Tech in conservative media, of censoring, suppressing, or otherwise limiting the reach of their politicians and personalities. Republicans have also accused Twitter of shadow banning conservative politicians, alleging that the company manipulated its search algorithm to limit the ability to easily search for certain Republican officials.

The NYU study recognizes that initiatives to comb out false content disproportionately hurt conservatives, but points out that its because the right spreads more content that violates platform rules than the left.

In light of this discrepancy, the study continues, it stands to reason that right-leaning content would face labeling, demotion, or removal more frequently than left-leaning content.

In examining Facebook interactions to disprove anti-conservative bias, the study found that there were millions more interactions on Facebook with conservative media organizations than traditional, mainstream, or liberal media organizations.

From January 1 through November 3, 2020, Fox News had the most interactions 448 million and Breitbart was next, with 295 million. By comparison, CNN had the third-most interactions on Facebook, 191 million, ABC News had 138 million, NBC News had 106 million, and the New York Times had 87 million fewer than the conservative Daily Caller, which had 97 million Facebook interactions.

Regarding so-called shadow banning on Twitter, the study also found no support for these claims. [T]heres no evidence that Twitter intentionally shadow banned Republicans or anyone else, the study says. Rather, Twitter said it experienced a technical glitch which caused some 600,000 accounts including those of some Democratic politicians not to be auto-suggested when people searched for them. As the study points out, the glitch was fixed within 24 hours, but conservative politicians have continued to use it as an example of anti-conservative bias.

The study recommended that social media companies address conservatives claims by providing more disclosure for content moderation actions, offering users a choice of content moderation algorithms, hiring more employees and installing a content overseer to increase human moderation of influential accounts, and releasing more data for researchers.

The study also urged the administration of President Joe Biden to pursue a constructive reform agenda for social media, and to work with Congress to update Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act so that social media companies protection against liability depends on them taking more actions to monitor content. Study authors also encouraged the Biden administration to create a Digital Regulatory Agency, or expand federal oversight of social media, in order to rebuild the eroded trust in social media platforms that the study says has resulted from claims of anti-conservative bias.

Conservative media, including Breitbart, Fox News, and The Daily Caller, were quick to challenge the studys findings.

The Daily Caller covered the fact that the study was backed, at least in part, by Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, a longtime donor to Democratic candidates. Fox News linked the NYU study to Newmarks previous warnings about the proliferation of misinformation and disinformation on social media, and Breitbart focused on a monologue from Foxs Tucker Carlson that dismissed the study as manipulation by Big Tech. Carlsons monologue also mentioned Newmark, and managed to include criticisms of the usual array of modern-day conservative targets, including Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Gavin Newsom, and Hillary Clinton, before seeming to ultimately conclude that the study was actually the work of liberal philanthropist and one of conservatives favorite villains George Soros.

Conservative outlets also pointed to actions by Twitter and Facebook to limit the reach of an October 2020 New York Post story that included alleged emails from a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden. There were significant credibility concerns about the storys veracity, but the social media companies actions Facebook subject the piece to a fact-check review, while Twitter temporarily blocked any sharing of the link to the story sparked a massive conservative backlash.

Twitter eventually reversed its decision to block the story, but conservatives have continued to cite the incident as an example of social media companies anti-conservative bias. The NYU study addressed this, saying that, in retrospect, the social media companies actions seem like a case of reasonable decisions wrapped in mystifying processes, and concluded that [c]onsistency, clearer rules, and greater transparency would have gone a long way toward defusing criticism of these platform actions.

In response to criticism from conservative media, Paul Barrett, deputy director of the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights and one of the authors of the study, told Mediaite that Newmarks backing was disclosed from the start, and that Newmark did not play a role in the report itself. He also acknowledged the limited access to data, an issue which the study itself addressed when it suggested that social media companies release more data to researchers.

Were proud to have Craig Newmark as one of our supporters, Barrett said. We disclosed right up front in the report that he is a backer. But he had no say over the contents of the report. We didnt discuss it with him or clear the results with him.

We acknowledged in the report that there are limitations on available data related to content moderation and other aspects of the platforms activities. So, we gathered the data that we could such as engagement information available from CrowdTangle and NewsWhip and combined that with information from previous research by other organizations, Barrett added. We also did a close analysis of particular instances of supposed censorship over time. We relied on this combination of sources to reach our conclusion that the claim of anti-conservative bias is unfounded. In fact, it is a form of disinformation meant to rile up the Trump base.

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NYU Responds to Conservative Uproar Over Report Bias Report - Mediaite