The U.S. is a collection of bureaucracies that’s bafflingly complex. But political scientists need to find ways to visualize the structure of the government so they can understand how–and if–it works. A new paper proposes a novel way to do this: By mapping the connections between all the government bodies on the state level through their online presences.
In a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers found that the way a state’s websites and online services link to each other strongly resembles the structure of the government–and are more closely tied to each state’s economy than to location, income, or political ideology. “We find that interstate similarities in these structures vary significantly according to the industries in which citizens work and to a lesser degree with income and location, but not with voters’ recent ideological preferences about the proper roles and extent of government,” the researchers write.
[Image: Kim Albrecht]To aid in the study, data viz researcher Kim Albrecht visualized 32.5 million web pages and 110 million hyperlinks to understand how they all link together. His network graph of all 50 states’ government websites and how they’re hyperlinked is the most striking of the paper, with 50 clusters clearly visible within a glorious tangle of connections. “For me, networks are one of the most intriguing and most challenging structures to visualize,” Albrecht tells Fast Company via email. “The problem is to find meaningful layouts for these tangled structures.”
By using both visualizations and statistics, Albrecht and the researchers were able to find meaning in these wildly complex networks, transforming the 32.5 million web pages into 166 categories that reflect what service each web page is providing to the state’s citizens. State-by-state visualizations show just how many services many state agencies have their hands in and how the agencies interact.
[Image: Kim Albrecht]Not everything Albrecht tried worked–some of the network graphs show no clear connections or patterns at all. That led him to create a new kind of visualization, where the amount that a website is connected to others is represented on one axis of the graphic, indicating with a quick glance which services are more complex. “This graphic lead the research in new directions and my colleagues found that the government network has a strong hierarchical structure embedded within it,” Albrecht says.
Tellingly, it’s a state’s economy that seems to determine its structure, rather than the ideas of its reigning political party. For instance, California and Florida have incredibly similar economies and government structures, even though the two states have very different political leanings. The researchers found the same pattern in Massachusetts and Georgia: Georgia’s government is more similar in structure to Massachusetts than its neighbor South Carolina. Perhaps it’s a sign that we’re really more similar than different–even in an ideologically divisive time.
Corporations that are pouring campaign cash into the midterm election cycle have accumulated at least$1.7 trillion in debt, according to a MapLight analysis of Securities and Exchange Commission documents.
The 20 largest corporate PACs operated by publicly traded, non-financial companies have given $31 million to candidates since 2017, even while borrowing record amounts that are being eyed as a potential source of an economic crisis that could rival the 2008 financial collapse in size and scope.
The donations by the heavily indebted companies highlight the importance of their political connections. At least one-third of the biggest corporate donors, including titans like Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin, are major government contractors who rely upon tax dollars for their financial survival. All of the major corporate donors, which include giants such as Amazon, Walmart, and General Motors, have a vested interest in the government’s rules for handling corporate debt. And all would be affected by any government policies designed to pull the economy out of a tailspin.
“The growing concern . . . doesn’t mean we’re on the verge of a recession,” William Cohan, an author and former investment banker, wrote in an August op-ed for the New York Times. “But the corporate debt bubble inevitably will play a role in causing it.”
The potato chip theory
Both Congress and the Federal Reserve Board generally encouraged the accumulation of debt during the last decade. Although stock prices are often viewed as a key indicator of the nation’s economic health, the $40 trillion U.S. bond market is currently worth roughly $10 trillion more than the stock market.
Corporate borrowing, which has been financed heavily with bonds, has been boosted by two factors: Record low interest rates and the tax deductibility of interest from borrowing. The interest rates set by the Federal Reserve Board have remained low since the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, and the most important rate that affects corporate borrowing only recently edged past 2%.
The new debt has been used for traditional purposes, such as refinancing high-interest debt and acquiring other companies. But it’s also been used to repurchase corporate stock, which has the effect of goosing share prices, pleasing both investors and corporate executives whose salaries are tied to company stock prices. For example, Boeing Co., which reported almost $90 billion of debt for the most recent quarter, announced in late 2017 it would buy back $18 billion in shares of its own stock during the next two to three years.
Prior to the 2017 Republican tax overhaul, corporations were allowed to deduct all of their costs for borrowing money. The GOP measure lowered the top corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, but in an effort to curb excessive corporate debt, lawmakers also limited the deductibility of borrowing costs to 30% of a corporation’s income.
Even so, higher interest rates and new tax rules may not curb corporate appetite for debt. A November 2017 study by the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Max Planck Institute found corporations can become addicted to borrowing.
“It’s similar to eating potato chips,” said Paul Pfleiderer, a Stanford finance professor. “You may be fine if you can commit to eating just a few chips. But if you can’t stick with that commitment, you might be better off if you hadn’t started eating them at all.”
Top debtors
The largest corporate PAC donor, AT&T Inc., has given $2.8 million to candidates during the current election cycle. The Dallas-based telecommunications company has borrowed heavily to fund its proposed $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner Inc., the cable television giant. AT&T has borrowed more than $237 billion, according to its latest quarterly report–$68.6 million in “current,” or short-term debt, and another $168.5 million in long-term debt.
AT&T’s PAC has made its largest contributions to candidates running in special elections. It gave $14,000 to Representative Karen Handel (R-GA) who won the most expensive House race in U.S. history in June 2017, and $13,000 to Rep. Ron Estes (R-KS) who won an April 2017 special election to replace former Representative Mike Pompeo, who has worked in the Trump White House as CIA director and secretary of state. Representative Martha Roby (R-AL) was the third-largest recipient of AT&T donations. Roby, who won a primary runoff in July, has received $10,500 from AT&T.
Roby also has been the biggest congressional recipient of contributions from Lockheed Martin Corp., the government’s largest contractor. The Bethesda, Maryland-based aerospace company’s PAC has reported making $2.2 million in donations during the current election cycle. Lockheed, which received $50.5 billion in tax dollars from government contracts during the 2017 budget year, reported $27.4 billion worth of short- and long-term debt in its most recent filing with the SEC.
The second-biggest midterm recipient of Lockheed PAC contributions has been Representative John Larson (D-CT) who is co-chairman of the Congressional Joint Strike Fighter Caucus, a lobbying organization for a controversial, Lockheed-built fighter jet that’s become the most expensive weapons system in Pentagon history. Larson has raised $1.5 million for the midterm election, including $14,000 from the Lockheed PAC; his Republican challenger, Jennifer Nye, has raised less than $5,000 from all sources.
The 20 largest operators of publicly traded, non-financial corporate PACs reported roughly $1.1 trillion in long-term debt, or money that doesn’t have to be repaid within a year. The corporations reported $643 billion in current liabilities, which includes short-term debt that has to be paid within a year.
“Mother of all bubbles”
Almost two-thirds of non-financial corporate bonds are currently graded as junk or near junk, according to a McKinsey & Co. study. Although junk bonds offer higher dividends for investors, heavily indebted companies (or households, or governments) typically will be charged higher interest rates, increasing the possibility of defaults. The rising interest rates can crowd out productive economic activity, since they direct money that could be used to buy goods and services to less-productive avenues, such as debt servicing.
The rising interest rates eventually can spur unemployment, as businesses cut back on salaries and capital investments to meet their obligations. As unemployment rises, consumers–who make up 70% of all economic growth in the U.S.–spend less, and the economy tumbles into a recession.
The U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Financial Research said in its 2017 Financial Stability Report that debt-to-asset ratios, a key figure used to describe risk of corporate bonds, are “flashing red . . . Business debt levels are at all-time highs.”
Corporations are also resorting to riskier venues to attract bond buyers, including exchange traded funds (ETFs), which are used to treat pools of bonds like stocks that can be traded easily, and collateralized loan obligations (CLOs)–high-yield, risky securities with linguistic and financial echoes of the mortgage-backed securities that exacerbated the 2008 economic meltdown.
“The mother of all bubbles exists, and it is in the debt markets,” Steve Blumenthal, cofounder of CMG Capital Management Group, wrote in a May blog post. “It is global in scale, and there is no easy way around the problem. Like bubbles past, this too will pop.”
This story was produced by MapLight, a nonprofit organization that reveals the influence of money in politics.
“I read the book, put the book down, and the book just stuck with me,” he says. “It was inside my head every day. I thought it was a very important story and felt emotionally moved by it.”
Looking for a follow-up to his well-received directorial debut, The Gift, Edgerton considered making a film adaptation of the book, which is about a viciously outed young gay man whose religious parents send him to conversion therapy. There was just one problem.
“I didn’t think I was the right person to tell the story,” the actor says. “For the simple fact that I didn’t identify as someone from the LGBT community. I thought I could be behind the scenes in some way, but maybe it’s not me who should tell the story.”
As time wore on, though, the story stayed under Edgerton’s skin. Eventually, he even started writing out scenes from the book in the way he envisioned them. He was hooked.
“The obsession kept dragging along, and after a while I felt that maybe I was qualified to tell the story because I care about it so much.”
Fast Company recently spoke with Edgerton about his path to making the film. Have a look at a video below to hear him discuss the fears Boy Erased is based in, what it’s like to direct one’s acting heroes (in this case, Russell Crowe), and how the film jells with the current political environment.
Covergirl just made itself look good. The beauty giant announced that it has eliminated animal testing from its products and from every step of its production process. While plenty of smaller cosmetic companies have opted to be cruelty free, as a major drugstore brand, Covergirl is now the biggest makeup brand to receive the trusted “Leaping Bunny” stamp of approval from Cruelty Free International (CFI), a globally recognized third-party monitor and certifier.
To make its products cruelty free, Covergirl’s parent company, Coty, spent months proving to CFI that not only does Covergirl not test its products on animals, but neither do the hundreds of third-party suppliers providing the ingredients that go into making the thousands of products in Covergirl’s portfolio. Covergirl will also undergo ongoing independent checks of its supply chain to ensure it’s living up to its promise.
Covergirl’s bold move paves the way for other cosmetic companies to make their products cruelty free, too. “If we can do it with our size and with our capability and with our complexity … every brand can do this,” says Ukonwa Ojo, chief marketing officer of consumer beauty for Coty. “If we all do it together, we can all envision a cosmetics industry and world that is free from unnecessary animal testing.”
Coty, which also owns Max Factor and Rimmel, hopes to extend its cruelty-free practices to a second brand by 2020. Just in time, too: Not only do consumers want cruelty-free products, but California is working to ban all cosmetic animal testing for products sold in the state by 2020. Coty isn’t the only company striving for animal friendliness. Unilever recently announced its support for a global ban on animal testing in the beauty industry, led by one of its biggest brands, Dove, which was certified as cruelty free by PETA.
During his opening monologue on the final Saturday Night Live before the 2016 election, Benedict Cumberbatch described the moment as “the last week in America as we know it.” He had no idea how right he would turn out to be.
The SNL writers who put those words on giant cue cards for him had no idea either. They seemed to look at that singularly contentious election as a storm to endure, rather than a jaunt through purgatory on the road to hell. Surely, Good would prevail! Jokes about “the last election ever” or “the final season of America” were merely meant to acknowledge that the plane could potentially, maybe crash into the mountain. The people making the jokes likely knew in their hearts that it couldn’t actually happen.
All that has changed now, though, and the final episode of the show before the midterms is the proof.
Before turning attention toward SNL as it stands now, let’s stick with the 2016 version. In the penultimate episode before the election, Tom Hanks used his role as America’s Dad to assure us during his monologue that everything would be fine. The whole show was a premature victory lap, in which the Access Hollywood tape and something about Clinton’s debate performance were depicted as dueling coffin nails for Trump’s chances. Confidence was surging. Forget Wikileaks’ steady drip of Clinton campaign manager John Podesta’s emails! Forget any unforeseen last-minute disasters! This thing was in the bag.
Then came the Comey letter, wherein the director of the FBI informed America that the federal investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails had been reopened. This revelation, which ultimately came to nothing, gave Trump’s campaign the shot in the arm it needed. It’s directly responsible for Benedict Cumberbatch’s feigned concern in that last SNL before the election. The show remains cautiously optimistic nonetheless. The cold open started by demonstrating how mainstream media was willing to view all of Trump’s astoundingly glaring flaws as the equivalent of Clinton’s emails–before the sketch interrupts itself. In a whimsical bit of escapist fantasy that goes down like poison when viewing at this late date, Alec Baldwin and Kate McKinnon break kayfabe, running out into the night to hug various Times Square denizens, regardless of whether they happen to be wearing a Trump That Bitch T-shirt.
We all know what happened next. The division in America proved impossible to bridge using any amount of hugs. The suggestion that everything was going to be okay, that there was some mythical Obama-era Golden Age that could be restored suddenly seemed tragically naive.
The writers on SNL understood very quickly how the white, liberal contingent of viewers had shared their delusions. In the very next episode, hosted by Dave Chappelle, an Election Night sketch reveals just how thoroughly the White Liberal Bubble had insulated so many Americans from reality.
In the two years since the election, SNL has enjoyed an (inconsistent) uptick in relevance while trying to adapt to the Trump era in real time. Sometimes, they’ve nailed it. The Ivanka Trump sketch, “Complicit,” for instance, was an especially unsparing jugular-cut. Too often, though, the show has suffered from Trump fatigue, parachuting in a growing cast of ringers like Robert De Niro and Ben Stiller to join the most overexposed public-life retiree Alec Baldwin in re-creating the week’s biggest spectacle. As we barrel relentlessly toward this week’s midterm election, the show has demonstrated a markedly different attitude from its 2016 incarnation.
Rather than trotting out Baldwin’s Trump to mock any of his recent rally behavior, the cold open takes on Fox News for its nonstop coverage of the caravan–that swirling locus of GOP-stoked racial paranoia.
Baldwin may have simply been unavailable due to his having been arrested the previous day for allegedly punching someone in the face during a parking dispute, but his absence is welcome. Making fun of the apparatus that has been poisoning the brains of conservative voters since before Trump even landed on the political landscape is a fine way to comment on the GOP’s closing argument in this election. Ironically enough, a tasteless Pete Davidson joke from later in the episode seems to be the only thing Fox News wants to talk about right now, perhaps encroaching on its caravan coverage.
Elsewhere, SNL squeezed some political laughs out of truly exploring how Sarah Huckabee Sanders can possibly sleep at night. But the real signal of how things have changed in the past two years is the one sketch explicitly about the midterms.
Despite some encouraging polling for Democrats, the SNL writers appear to have shed themselves of any confidence they’d had going into the 2016 election. Common wisdom from history indicates that a blue wave is coming, but nobody at SNL seems to be taking any chances this time. In a fake ad, blue-district citizens attempt to project 2016-era confidence, only to reveal they’re barely hanging on by a thread. They desperately want that blue wave, but they have also lived through the last two years and now understand that obvious calamities don’t simply avert themselves.
This sketch isn’t Benedict Cumberbatch’s performative fear about “the last week in America as we know it.” This is the work of writers at the end of a two-year constant panic attack who may never trust or reflect the common wisdom ever again. Good.
In 2009, when James Mitchell was three years into his career at Facebook and first stepped into a role to help police its content for policy violations, the notion that the fate of democracy itself might eventually hang in the balance would have seemed absurd. Back then, the world was still getting its head around the idea that Facebook could be a potent tool for political organizing at all—a novel scenario that had been demonstrated the previous year by Barack Obama’s winningly net-savvy campaign for the presidency.
Today, Mitchell is the company’s director of risk and response, overseeing “how we make decisions around abusive content, how we keep users safe, how we grow our teams at scale to make a lot of these complex decisions,” he says. The issues his team confronts are often freighted with political import, whether they involve the spreading of hate speech in Myanmar or a fraudulent account posing as senior Senator Jon Tester (D-MT).
Mitchell is hardly shouldering this responsibility alone. As the U.S. midterm elections approached, I spoke with him as well as news feed product manager Tessa Lyons, director of product management Rob Leathern, and head of cybersecurity policy Nathaniel Gleicher. Along with charging executives across the country with various aspects of election-related security, the company has staffed up with 3,000 to 4,000 content moderators devoted specifically to eyeballing political content around the world—a meaningful chunk of the 20,000 employees devoted to safety and security whom CEO Mark Zuckerberg promised to have on board by the end of this year, a goal the company says it’s met.
Beyond all that hiring, Facebook has also revised policies, built software, and wrangled data. In the case of its response to the use of political ads for nefarious purposes, it’s done all three, creating an archive that lets anyone plumb millions of examples of paid messaging to see who paid for what—a move it hopes will lead researchers to study the way issues-related advertising on the platform gets used and abused. “We can’t figure this stuff out ourselves,” says Leathern, who spearheads this work. “We need third parties.”
The scale of this response is “a really important marker,” says Nathaniel Gleicher, the former Obama-era U.S. Department of Justice and White House official who joined the company as head of cybersecurity policy early this year. “But there’s another piece that isn’t as obvious, which is that we’ve also brought together teams so that they can collaborate more effectively. I now drive the team that has product policy, the product engineers and our threat intelligence investigators, all working hand in hand on this stuff.” In other words, the cross-pollination effort involves vastly more people than can fit in the new election “war room” that Facebook set up at its Menlo Park, California, headquarters for real-time interdisciplinary decision making.
[Photo: courtesy of Facebook]The company’s thinking on the responsibility it bears for preventing abuse of its platform for political means has come a long way since Zuckerberg blithely dismissed as “crazy” the idea that fake news on Facebook could have played a role in Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 U.S. presidential election (a stance he eventually recanted) and the company made its first, rather tentative moves to tamp down on it. Nobody at Facebook says that the problem—and related issues such as hate speech with political intent—isn’t real, or that it’s largely solved it. Or even that it can ever ever satisfy every reasonable person’s concerns about how it’s handling the mess.
Mitchell says that some folks will take issue with Facebook’s decisions, even if the company comes up with optimal policies and executes them more or less perfectly. “And then on top of that, we’re also dealing with instances in which we’ve enforced incorrectly,” he adds. “And then on top of that, we’re dealing with instances in which we discovered that the policy line should live in a different place. And on top of that, we’re dealing with issues where maybe we think the reviewer made the right decision with everything they had at their disposal, but maybe the responsibility lies on us to actually give them a different view to get the right outcome.”
That’s a lot of layers of decision making that Facebook must get right. And many of the pieces of political content it must assess prompt tricky questions, not easy calls. Gleicher compares the company’s challenge to looking for a needle in a haystack—if the haystack were made of nothing but needles.
Remove or reduce?
For all the ways Facebook can be abused—and all the ways it can defend itself—the company sees the problems and its solutions in simple terms at their highest level. “There’s bad actors, bad behavior, and bad content,” says Lyons, whose job involves shaping the feed that’s every user’s principal gateway to content—good, bad, or indifferent. “And there are three things that we can do: We can remove, we can reduce distribution, or we can give people more context. Basically, everything that we do is some combination of those various problems and those various actions.”
Rather than being quick to remove content, Facebook has often chosen to merely reduce its distribution. That is, it makes it less likely that its algorithm will give something a place of prominence in users’ news feeds. “There’s a lot of content that we’re probably never going to broaden community standards to cover, because we think that that would not be striking the right balance between being a platform that enables free expression while also protecting an authentic and safe community,” Lyons explains. This includes garden-variety misinformation, which it attempts to nudge downward in feeds—and works with fact checkers to debunk—but still doesn’t ban outright on principle.
Lyons stresses that pushing down pieces of misinformation has benefits beyond the simple fact that it makes them less prominent. Sketchy content is often set loose on the social network by purveyors of clickbaity hoax sites monetized through ad networks. If Facebook members don’t see the stories, they won’t click on them, and that business model starts to fall apart. “By reducing the amount of distribution and therefore changing the incentives and the financial returns, we’re able to limit the impact of that type of content,” she says.
Facebook has often been criticized for this practice of demoting rather than deleting questionable posts, and in October, it took more punishing action by purging 251 accounts and 559 pages for spreading political spam—both right- and left-leaning—on its network. Even here, however, it wasn’t taking a stance on the material itself (sample headline: “Maxine Waters Just Took It to Another LEVEL . . . Is She Demented?”). Instead, the proprietors of the accounts and pages in question were penalized for using “coordinated inauthentic behavior” to drive Facebook users to ad-filled sites.
Of course, the efforts that have originated in Russia and Iran to pelt Facebook members with propaganda were driven by a desire to tamper with politics, not to game ad networks. Other abusers of the platform are also unmotivated by money. And in the U.S. and elsewhere, Facebook is targeting “any coordinated attempts to manipulate or corrupt public debate for a strategic gain,” says Gleicher. “What my team focuses on is understanding the ways that actors are looking to manipulate our platform. How do we identify the particular behaviors that they use over and over again? And how do we make those behaviors incredibly difficult?”
[Photo: courtesy of Facebook]In some cases, stifling behaviors involves changing Facebook policy to forbid content that would have been deemed acceptable in the past. For instance, earlier this year, prompted by ethnic violence in Myanmar, the company concluded that it needed to confront “a form of misinformation that was not in and of itself actually violating any of the existing community standards,” Lyons says. “It wasn’t directly calling to incite violence. It wasn’t using hate speech. But it was presented in the right environment.”
In July, Facebook responded to such material by updating its list of taboos to prohibit “misinformation that has the potential to contribute to imminent violence or physical harm.” Even in the U.S., in the wake of online hate presaging real-world atrocity, the policy change seems suddenly relevant.
Numbers big and small
Like everything else about Facebook, its war on platform abuse involves gigantic numbers. In the first quarter of 2018, for instance, the company removed 583 million fake accounts—many shortly after they were created—and 837 million pieces of spam. Since political manipulation often involves fraudulent accounts stuffing the network with false content, such automated mass deletion is an important part of the company’s measures against election interference.
But the truth is that the battle between Facebook and those who engage in political interference isn’t purely a game of bot versus algorithm. On both sides, much of the heavy lifting is done by human beings doing targeted work.
“We’ve actually been able to do something like 10 or 12 major takedowns over the past eight months,” says Gleicher. “That may sound like a small number, but the truth is, each of those takedowns is hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of investigator hours driven to finding and rooting out these very sophisticated actors that are intentionally trying to find a weak point in our security and the sort of media ecosystem of society. And so each one of those is a beachhead to having a big impact in the short term, but even more importantly understanding these new behaviors and getting ahead of the curve in the longer term.”
In July, the company removed 32 pages and accounts on the grounds that they were engaged in coordinated inauthentic behavior and had links to Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA) troll farm. With names such as “Black Elevation,” “Mindful Being,” and “Resisters,” the pages didn’t show obvious signs of Russian ties, and the IRA’s members have gotten better at covering their tracks, Facebook says. For instance, they avoided posting from Russian IP addresses and promoted their pages with ads purchased through a third party.
Facebook concluded that these pages were started by accounts showing techniques consistent with those of Russian trolls, and took them down. [Screenshot: Facebook]Among the detritus that Facebook deleted was an event page for “No Unite the Right 2-DC,” a real protest intended to counteract the follow-up to last year’s white-nationalist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville. According to Gleicher, the questionable account that created the page had invited in real groups involved in the protest to cohost the page. “They were essentially trying to trick these people into giving their inauthentic event a veneer of legitimacy,” he says.
Facebook says that this event page was created by a questionable account—which then brought in legitimate activist groups to cover its tracks. [Screenshot: Facebook]This tactic, he adds, “forces us to ask the question, how do we tackle that inauthentic behavior without silencing legitimate speech?” In this instance, after thousands of members had expressed interest in the event, the company shut down the page, explained its actions to the above-board event organizers, and offered to help them set up a new page. At least some of the organizers found that response unsatisfactory; the page had traction as an organizing tool, and they took it personally when Facebook charged that it had suspicious associations.
“We got some criticism for it,” Gleicher acknowledges. “It’s a really challenging balance to strike. And we expect that we and the other platforms and all of society are going to need to figure out how to strike that balance.”
Striking balance is also core to the work done by Mitchell’s group that specializes in giving extra attention to a relatively small quantity of thorny issues relating to policy enforcement. The team’s existence is an acknowledgment that hiring thousands of people to police content creates problems as well as solving them. In some cases, the initial call will simply be wrong; in others, judging a piece of content will lead Facebook to reassess its policies and procedures in ways that require discussion among high-level employees.
Mitchell provides an example. One political ad submitted by a congressional candidate was flagged by the platform for potentially violating a policy that forbids imagery that’s shocking, scary, gory, violent, or sensational. A human reviewer checked out the ad, concluded that it broke the rule, and rejected it.
[Photo: courtesy of Facebook]So what was the verboten subject? The ad depicted genocide in Cambodia—which, though it is indeed shocking and scary, is a legitimate topic of political discourse, not a random provocation. “The actual purpose behind the ad wasn’t to shock and scare the audience,” says Mitchell, whose team ultimately overturned the rejection.
Here again, horrific experiences in Myanmar have taught Facebook lessons with broader resonance. In that country, violent content often wasn’t being reported by members, because it tended to be displayed to users who approved of it; that told the company that it needed to be more proactive and less reliant on users telling it about objectionable material. In other instances, imagery that contained hate speech was being mistakenly flagged for nudity, and therefore routed to reviewers who didn’t speak Burmese. “The idea being, you don’t need to speak a particular language to identify a nude image,” explains Mitchell, adding that Facebook now errs on the side of showing such content to reviewers who are fluent in Burmese.
The precise breakdown of content policing between software, frontline content moderators, and investigators such as those on Mitchell’s team may evolve over time, but Facebook says that the big picture will still involve both technology and humans. “We couldn’t do the scale nor have the consistency without bringing them together,” says Leathern. “We’ll figure out what the right mix of those things are. But I feel that for a long time, it’ll still be some combination of both of those things.”
Miles to go
Facebook may be careful not to declare any lasting victories in the war against political misuse of the platform, but is it making real progress? In September, a study concluded that it was, reporting that user interactions with fake news on Facebook fell by 65% between December 2016 and July 2018. Steep though that decline is, it still leaves about 70 million such interactions a month, which helps explain why alarming examples still abound.
So do seeming loopholes in Facebook’s new procedures and policies. In the interest of transparency, the company now requires “Paid by” disclosures on issues-related ads, similar to those on TV political commercials. Last month, however, Vice’s William Turton wrote about an investigation in which his publication fibbed that it was buying ads on behalf of sitting U.S. senators and Facebook okayed the purchases. Vice tested this process 100 times—once for every senator—and got approval every time. (Facebook says it’s looking at further safeguards.)
Overall, Theresa Payton, CEO of security firm Fortalice Solutions and White House CIO during the George W. Bush administration, gives Facebook credit for stepping up its response to the election-related problems it’s identified, though she says it should coordinate more closely with other online services as well as government institutions such as the intelligence agencies and the Department of Homeland Security. The bad guys, she says, “aren’t going to suddenly say, ‘You know what? We lost. Democracy is alive and we’re not going to meddle anymore.’ They’re just going to up their A game.”
Facebook wouldn’t disagree. “In any space that is essentially a security challenge, you’re constantly trying to fight the problems that you know exist, and also prepare for problems that you expect to be emerging, so that you don’t find yourself unprepared,” says Lyons. “Which I would say we’ve acknowledged we were at different points in the last several years.” She points to “deepfake” videos—meldings of existing video and computer graphics which convincingly simulate well-known people doing or saying something they haven’t—as a potentially alluring tool for political interference that the company has its eye on.
The very name “deepfake” conveys that hoax videos wouldn’t be an altogether new kind of hazard for Facebook to contend with—just weaponized fake news in an even more dangerous package. “I don’t think there’s ever going to be a world where there’s no false news,” Lyons says. “And since Facebook reflects what people are talking about, that means there’s also going to be false news that’s shared on Facebook.”
As those who would leverage this fact grow only wilier—and throw ever-more sophisticated technology at their efforts—Facebook too must up its A game. Not just for any particular election, but forever.
What: The removal of Trump’s controversial anti-immigration ad.
Who: NBC.
Why we care: In a move that could be described as a real whoopsie-daisy, NBC aired an anti-immigration ad from the Trump administration that the network later realized was too “insensitive” to air.
NEW NBC statement regarding the Trump immigration ad:
“After further review we recognize the insensitive nature of the ad and have decided to cease airing it across our properties as soon as possible.” – NBCUniversal Spokesperson.
By “insensitive,” what NBC’s PR means to say is “super racist.” The ad in question is frequently compared to 1988’s famous “Willie Horton” ad targeting Democrat Michael Dukakis–long considered a low point even in the history of dirty political tricks. In the newer ad, the Trump administration links an undocumented immigrant cop killer with the Democrats, which would be an irresponsible tactic even if the cop killer in question had not actually entered the country during the Bush administration. When CNN received the ad, the network deemed it too racist to air.
CNN has made it abundantly clear in its editorial coverage that this ad is racist. When presented with an opportunity to be paid to take a version of this ad, we declined. Those are the facts. ????
NBC’s cowardice in refusing to call the ad “racist” is only eclipsed by its sheer gall in speaking out against the spot after airing it to an audience of millions on the eve of the midterm elections. (Kind of like how the network feigned surprise when Megyn Kelly defended blackface.) Maybe some viewers will only see the ad now through the lens of its retraction, like toothpaste smoothly inserted back in the tube. Mark another notch in NBC’s recent history of holding itself to high moral integrity.
Why we care: Remember when Kanye didn’t seem like exactly the kind of person who could get devastatingly dunked on by a Burger King twitter? Those were the days. Well, they’re gone now. Long gone.
After renouncing his cataclysmic political advocacy last week, the man who gave us the Late Registration album went back to his previous style of provocation: making outlandish hot takes about cultural ephemera.
Even fewer people may agree with the substance of his declaration than they did with his “BILL COSBY INNOCENT” tweet or his thoughts on slavery as a choice, but on the plus side, this tweet doesn’t marginalize anyone’s humanity. There was once a time when Kanye’s contrarian view on McDonald’s would get a warm reception, its ironic embrace jolting the fast food monolith’s numbers even higher that week. At this point, though, Kanye has left himself so vulnerable that even a corporate Twitter account–the British subset of it, at that–could stroll through and eat his lunch for him.
Dang! I knew Burger King was impressive at flame-roasting its Whoppers, but had no idea they were this good at singeing toxic laughingstocks on Twitter. My only hope is that other corporate Twitter accounts don’t try to apply the same playbook to other problematic figures because there’s no way it will ever be as funny again. This supreme act of ownage is more an indicator of how far Kanye West has fallen rather than how amazing Burger King UK is on Twitter.
Reykjavik’s Icelandair just bought its budget rival, WOW Air. How do you say “monopoly” in Icelandic?
Ultra low-cost carrier WOW, which made a name for itself with $99 one-way fares to Europe (and for generating about a thousand reviews with variations on the theme of “there’s nothing wow about WOW”), will be acquired by Icelandair in a deal valued at $18 million, according to Reuters. The deal is still subject to the approval of Icelandair Group’s shareholders, but based on the jump in Icelandair shares (up nearly 50% after the deal was announced), it seems like they are already on board.
“WOW air has in recent years built a strong brand and enjoyed great success in the company’s markets to and from Iceland and across the Atlantic,” Bogi Nils Bogason, interim president and CEO of Icelandair Group, said in a statement, “There are many opportunities for synergies with the two companies but they will continue to operate under their own brands and operating approvals. The tourism industry is one of the cornerstones of the Icelandic economy and it is important that flights to and from Iceland will remain frequent.”
WOW’s founder and sole owner, Skuli Mogensen, said that the deal will make the company more competitive internationally.
While the two companies will continue to operate as separate brands for now, fans of Icelandair may be wondering whether the affiliation with Icelandair will lead to improved conditions on the no-frills WOW, or whether WOW will eventually drag Icelandair down into its yes-we-will-charge-you-for-water hell.
Editor’s note: This article was originally posted as a Facebook comment in response to a new ad about gun safety. The author is an 18-year-old senior at Largo High School, in Largo, Florida, and the daughter of one of our copy editors. We republished it here with the author’s permission.
I’m not one to post a lot of politics on my feed, but I have been compelled to say something in light of the upcoming elections.
As a student, I should be learning how to differentiate equations, not how to build a barricade.
I should be discussing Poe’s The Purloined Letter in English with my classmates, not listening to my teacher discuss escape routes in case our door is kicked down.
I should be practicing IB papers for my exams in May, not watching the police chief tell us how to subdue and attack a person with our backpacks and textbooks.
I understand how intrinsically important the Second Amendment is to the United States’s political history, but we need to think about evolving with the times. We are not looking at 18th-century matchlock muskets anymore. We are looking at AR-15 weapons that leave nobody standing.
Proper gun sense reforms will still give the rights to those who are responsible enough to be entrusted with a firearm, but deny it to those who are deemed unsafe or mentally unstable by the law.
YOUR. GUNS. WILL. NOT. BE. TAKEN. AWAY. IF. YOU. ARE. A. LAWFUL. CITIZEN.
In summation, I will be voting on behalf of the students, like myself, who just want to learn in a safe environment without the (preventable) looming fear of serious injury or death. I will also be voting for those who have prematurely lost their lives, and the parents who will never see their children walk across the stage at graduation, get their first job, or have a family of their own.
Enough is enough.
I hope you join me.
P.S. For those of you who do not agree with my point of view, I respectfully encourage you to either hide or unfriend me. Trying to convince me by commenting on my post is not going to change my mind, nor will I change yours by engaging in a fruitless debate.
Facebook has pulled an ad that was deemed too racist to air on CNN, NBC, and *gasp* even Fox News.
The ad, paid for by Donald J. Trump for President, features a convicted cop killer who was deported multiple times before he shot and killed two California sheriff’s deputies. In a remarkable omission, the ad fails to mention that the killer, Luis Brocamontes, entered the country illegally during the George W. Bush administration (that’s a Republican, for those keeping track at home) and was arrested and released in 1998 by the Maricopa County sheriff’s department led by Joe Arpaio, whom the president pardoned.
The 30-second ad focuses on the controversial so-called migrant caravan of asylum-seekers making their way to the U.S. border. “America cannot allow this invasion. The migrant caravan must be stopped,” the ad, which aired during Sunday Night Football, declares. “President Trump and his allies will protect our border and keep our families safe.” This, despite the fact that most studies show that immigrants do not cause an increase in crime.
The ad was released by the Trump campaign last week and, according to the Daily Beast, the campaign spent between $27,000 and $94,000 promoting the ads on Facebook, before the social media site came to the conclusion that the ad violated its advertising policy against “sensational content.” Users may still share the video on their pages, though.
Facebook’s realization that the ad violated its policies may have come too late. According to the Daily Beast, Facebook advertising data reveals that millions of Facebook users–somewhere between 2.8 million and 5 million of them–viewed the ad before it was removed.
Updated to add a statement sent over by Fox News from Marianne Gambelli, President, Ad Sales: “Upon further review, FOX News pulled the ad yesterday and it will not appear on either FOX News Channel or FOX Business Network.”
Gwyneth Paltrow is famous for curating an annual holiday gift guide. Sometimes items on the list are slightly kooky (an $85 bag of crystals to balance your chakra system, anyone?) and outlandishly expensive (a $595 silk kimono). For the past three years, the list has existed both on Goop’s website, as well as at brick-and-mortar stores. But this year, Goop is taking its gifting concept up a notch with three new pop-up shops in San Francisco, Dallas, and Manhasset, New York.
[Photo: courtesy of Ken Hayden]Goop GIFT, as it will be called, will be organized to bring the digital gift guide to life. Products will be organized according to the brand’s 12 categories, including The Traveler, The Host, and The Lover. And unlike the online experience, buying a product in-store will come with special touches like calligraphy, gift wrapping, and other types of personalization.
There will also be two new categories, including One-Step-Aheader, which focuses on the newest trends, and the One and Only, which will include exclusive items that sound like they will require the average person to take out a second mortgage to purchase something on this list. And interestingly, Goop is now partnering with Google for the first time, to bring new tech to the gift list. There will be a curated selection of Google products, like Google Home, both on the online list, as well as in-store.
We’re all waiting to see what hilarious ideas Paltrow will put on her list. One year, there was fancy $950 toilet paper, a $225 toothpaste squeezer, and 18K $125,000 dumbbells. We’ll have to see what she has up her sleeve this year. The pop-ups open on November 15.
Fast-growing bedsheet startup Brooklinen has just launched a line of sheets for kids called Brooklittles. In keeping with Brooklinen’s sleek, urban aesthetic, the brand has ditched the cutesy pastel bunnies and elephants you find in traditional baby bedding. Instead, the first collection features gender-neutral prints, like little yellow triangles and blue matchsticks. One print is an ode to New York, with little taxi cabs, pizza slices, the Empire State Building, and pretzels sprinkled throughout.
[Photo: courtesy of Brooklittles]Brooklinen has been growing quickly since it launched four years ago. Last year, the brand says it generated $50 million in revenue, and it also landed its first round of funding, a $10 million Series A. Today, Brooklinen opens its first-ever brick-and-mortar pop-up in Soho.
These new baby sheets are part of growing trend: Hip, direct-to-consumer startups creating kid-sized versions of their products–with cute names to match. Allbirds came up with mini versions of their sneakers called Smallbirds. Warby Parker has kids’ versions of many of their adult designs, so you and junior can look identical. East Fork Pottery has a toddler version of its entire ceramic dining set. Now, you and your baby can have coordinated bedding.
Right up until the polls close for the midterm elections on Tuesday, November 6, your inboxes and Twitter feeds will be filled with last-minute requests to donate money to campaigns. The message, generally: Every dollar counts. But some dollars, according to data firm Civis Analytics, go further than others.
In the lead-up to the midterms, Civis Analytics, which was founded by Dan Wagner, chief analytics officer for Barack Obama’s re-election campaign and is backed by Eric Schmidt, partnered with Crooked Media on its get-out-the-vote initiative. Called Vote Save America (à la Pod Save America, Crooked Media’s progressive podcast vehicle), the platform is a fairly straightforward comprehensive voter guide where people can pledge to vote–so far, 132,000 have done so through the site–and get information on what’s at stake in this election, download annotated ballots, and sign up to volunteer.
But like any voter information platform, pushing for donations is a big part of Vote Save America’s endgame. As a national initiative aimed at Pod Save America‘s audience of over 1.5 million people, it has a wide reach across the country, and as the election has gotten down to the wire, it’s aiming to direct donor dollars toward the races where they’ll have the most impact. Figuring out which races those are is where Civis Analytics comes in.
In late October, Civis Analytics released a list of 20 House races where donations could have the most impact. When it went live on Vote Save America, $1 million donation dollars poured in. In response, Crooked Media asked Civis Analytics to narrow the field down to 10 candidates whose races could be most swayed by last-minute donations. They are:
Figuring out which districts could be most influenced last-minute was, according to Civis’s head of political science David Shor, a multifaceted process. For one thing, Civis, which has conducted weekly political polls of 10,000 people each week over the past year, had to figure out which district races were actually close enough to qualify as a toss-up. The firm uses data modeling to determine how close each of the races are. “If the race isn’t between 2% or 3%, you’re wasting your money,” Shor says. This, for instance, has been a critique levied against Beto O’Rourke’s campaign to become the first Democrat elected to the Senate from Texas since 1988. While O’Rourke has raised over $70 million, many polls still show him trailing the incumbent by a fairly significant margin. To Shor, that doesn’t signal a close-enough margin to be influenced by a last-minute infusion of small-dollar donations.
[Photo: Element5 Digital/Unsplash]Even in the final days of the campaign, extra cash can still go a long way. Crooked Media explained how even small donations at the last minute can help candidates: “$15 helps a canvasser to knock on 15 doors in an hour, $25 helps a campaign remind 1,000 people to vote on Facebook, $50 can pay for water and snacks to help 10 volunteers get through a canvassing shift, and $100 can help pay for gas for four volunteers to drive dozens of voters to the polls.”
But Civis’s analysis also factored in how far this money would go in different contexts. “How many votes a dollar will get you varies a lot from district to district,” Shor says. TV advertising costs, for example, vary radically across competitive districts. Lizzie Pannill Fletcher, who’s running outside of Houston, faces much higher costs than Kathleen Williams, who’s running in Montana. But at the same time, funding door-to-door campaigning might get Fletcher farther, because she’s running in a more dense area.
“When we put together all these numbers, we took into account the efficiency of TV buys and their likely impact–were we in a position where the Republican opponent wasn’t saying much, and TV ads would make more of an impact?” Shor says. Civis also took into account relative demographics. Tight districts with a higher proportion of nonwhite or young voters (who are less likely to cast ballots) could benefit GOTV efforts like canvassing and driving people to the polls, whereas more white, older districts are more likely to be influenced by TV ads.
“What’s exciting about this list is that we were able to provide resource allocation guidance to campaigns, along with the donations,” Shor says. And donors itching to help Democratic candidates have a clear sense of how their money might be used to maximum impact.
The momentum generated by the list of most down-to-the-wire campaigns on Vote Save America is certainly monetary: To date, over $1 million has flowed into the campaigns. But it’s also strategic, Shor says. Most Republican candidates–particularly incumbents–spent the bulk of their campaign money on TV buys and social media pushes over the summer, Shor says, assuming they would be shoo-ins come November. “We’re able to rush last-minute money into the Democratic campaigns in these districts, and force Republicans to counter and spend their reserves,” he adds.
And if members of Crooked Media’s Democratic audience see that they live in one of the districts listed on this roundup, they will likely be more inspired to vote, and encourage people to do the same. “There’s a lot of evidence showing that how competitive a district is plays a big role in overall turnout,” Shor says.
Overall, Shor says, the work of identifying where and exactly how last-minute, small-dollar donations could make a real impact contributes to an ongoing shift in the way successful progressive campaigns are run. This year, Democrats have outraised Republicans on the strength of donations less than $200. ActBlue, a crowdfunding platform specifically for Democratic candidates (which is managing donations made in response to the Civis Analytics/Vote Save America list), processed $250 million in small-dollar donations in October alone, and over $1.5 billion this year. The midterm cycle has brought in around 3 million new donors, according to the Washington Post, with an average donation of $40.
This shift, Shor says, has not only made it more possible for unconventional candidates, like the over 1,500 schoolteachers who ran in states where educators walked out in protest over low pay this year, to contend in elections–it’s also made constituents feel more connected to the process, and certainly more able to influence outcomes, even right before the polls open.
Maybe you remember the big show at the White House after Foxconn agreed to build a new manufacturing plant in Mt. Pleasant, Wisconsin. Trump was there to tout the deal as a victory in his “America First” crusade. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker was there trying to win back some of his state’s respect after his 2016 presidential bid took a nose-dive.
And Foxconn founder Terry Gou was there to play on these desires, hoping to get a new American factory on the cheap. The state of Wisconsin agreed to hand over a $4.1 billion subsidy to Foxconn, which will cost Wisconsinites more than a million dollars per job created. And a nonpartisan study shows the state won’t see a return on this investment until 2042.
Now two news stories are emerging that show how one of Trump’s biggest “America First” triumphs is mostly benefitting Foxconn. Just one day before the country votes in numerous Congressional elections, a New Yorker piece shed some light on the shady tactics used by the Mt. Pleasant’s Village Board of Trustees to get the needed land. Here’s the nut:
“To make space for Foxconn’s development, which will also necessitate many miles of new roads, the Village Board has been buying properties, sometimes using the threat of eminent domain to force reluctant homeowners to sell at a price determined by the village. Several weeks before the groundbreaking, the seven-member board went further. By a 6–1 vote, the board designated the entire twenty-eight-hundred-acre area “blighted,” which will allow Mt. Pleasant to issue bonds that are exempt from both federal and state taxes, and may also grant the village a more expansive use of eminent domain to seize the property of the few remaining holdouts, a small if highly visible group, whose property-rights fight embodies a wider sense of disenchantment with the Foxconn deal.”
Part of Foxconn’s agreement with Wisconsin is that it will invest $100 million to build a new research facility at the University of Wisconsin’s engineering school. Foxconn Institute for Research in Science and Technology (FIRST), as it will be called, will comprise a group of Foxconn buildings at the company’s industrial park near Madison, as well as some “Foxconn-sponsored” buildings on the UW engineering campus. Today, The Verge published a story about UW engineering students’ anxiety over the less-than-transparent way the university and the corporate sponsor are planning the facilities:
. . . on campus, the partnership has proven controversial. Last week, the dean of the College of Engineering, Ian Robertson, held a town hall and fielded pointed questions from graduate students who are concerned about the partnership’s implications for intellectual property and academic freedom as well as the opacity of the partnership overall. “We haven’t been told anything,” says graduate student Sonali Gupta. “We went to the town hall to get some answers and came away more confused.”
The main issue is the intellectual property ownership of engineers working in the new facility. Normally, student researchers would retain control of the IP they generate, and the right to publish it. But when a sponsor is involved, the rules change. The university has said intellectual property generated from work done in the new facility will be managed under one of three IP-sharing agreements with Foxconn, the sponsor. In only one of them does the university retain full control of the IP.
The main reason the university needed Foxconn’s involvement is because the state of Wisconsin, under Walker himself, cut its funding by $362 million between 2012 and 2017. In the absence of funds, universities must, and often do, turn to corporate sponsors, which affects IP ownership. In a sense, the vital research that happens within the nation’s universities is being privatized.
Marc Benioff may be celebrity in the tech and business subcultures. But four-time Emmy-winning comedian, actor, writer, and director Chris Rock is a celebrity everywhere. So his video endorsement today of Prop C, a ballot initiative to raise $300 million for housing and homeless programs in San Francisco, adds considerable star power. So does a near-simultaneous video from four-time Grammy-nominated singer/songwriter Jewel Kilcher.
“I never thought I’d be telling you that I’ve been talking to Jewel and Chris Rock,” said Prop C organizer Christin Evans in a conversation with me today. (Evans is widely credited with helping to win the support–including about $7 million in donations–from Salesforce and its flamboyant co-CEO Marc Benioff.)
@OurHomeSF gives San Franciscans the chance to transform their lives. The homeless crisis hurts all of us, so please vote Yes on C tomorrow. Remember Yes on C for compassion. — @jeweljk ???????? pic.twitter.com/dQbG3w9sWP
The appeal is especially personal from Kilcher. “A lot of people don’t realize that I was homeless when I was 18, because I refused the sexual advances of a boss,” she says in a tweeted video. “Nobody plans to become homeless. I know firsthand what it takes to need a hand, and some help. And I benefitted greatly from it.”
Rock’s own video is characteristically direct. “This is one of the richest, most beautiful cities in the world,” he says. “There is no excuse for us to treat the homeless this way.”
In 2017 Amazon announced its plans to build a new headquarters, dubbed “HQ2,” somewhere in the U.S. HQ2 would rival Amazon’s original HQ in size and staff–employing up to 50,000 people earning on average $100,000 a year each. It then announced that it would be taking bids from cities that wanted to be home to HQ2. Now it appears that Amazon has chosen the winning city–but it’s two cities instead of one.
The New York Times is reporting that people familiar with the decision-making process behind HQ2 say Amazon is gearing up to announce that the locations will be the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens in New York City and the Crystal City area of Arlington, Virginia (a suburb of Washington, D.C.). The NYT reports that Amazon already has more workers in those two areas than anywhere else outside Seattle–making them a natural choice.
Sources say that the split will be divided equally, with Amazon employing 25,000 workers in each city. Amazon so far has not commented on the reports of a decision for the locations of HQ2 being finalized. But New York Governor Andrew Cuomo did have this to say about the prospect of Amazon setting up its new HQ in New York:
“I am doing everything I can. We have a great incentive package. I’ll change my name to Amazon Cuomo if that’s what it takes. Because it would be a great economic boost.”
Voting is important, but as many voters know, it’s not always easy to get to the polls. A Pew Research Center analysis of Census Bureau data found that a lack of transportation was one of the top 10 reasons registered voters don’t actually vote. Another recent survey found that 14% of nonvoters didn’t make it to the polls, even though they were registered to vote, because of transportation issues. When looking at the transportation woes of nonvoters under the age of 30, that number balloons to 29%.
This year, private companies, nonprofits, and government organizations are stepping in to make sure that everyone who wants to reach the polls, can. We’ve rounded up some options below:
Motivate
On Election Day, bike-share operator Motivate is offering free rentals in nine of its bike share programs across the country. This includes Citi Bike in New York City and Jersey City; Divvy in Chicago; CoGo in Columbus, Ohio; Bluebikes in Boston; Capital Bikeshare in Washington, D.C.; Nice Ride Minnesota in Minneapolis; Ford GoBike in the Bay Area; and even Biketown in Portland, Oregon (even though the state has a vote-by-mail system). The code for a free day pass for most Motivate programs is BIKETOVOTE. For details, check here.
This election day, @CitiBikeNYC rides are free. Enter code “BIKETOVOTE” in the Citi Bike app to claim your free day pass on Nov 6. pic.twitter.com/yZ1badP9EU
If you’re in Georgia, get a free ride to the polls by simply texting. More details here.
Lime
Go ahead and scoot to the polls thanks to Lime. Wannabe voters in over 100 cities can hop aboard one of Lime’s shared bikes, e-bikes, and e-scooters for a free 30-minute ride to a polling station with the code LIME2VOTE18.
Lyft is providing 50% off or up to $5 off rides across the country to people heading to the polls. Access Lyft’s promo codes here. The company is also providing free rides to underserved communities “that face significant obstacles to transportation” through nonpartisan, nonprofit partners, including local Urban League affiliates; the National Federation of the Blind; Faith in Action; League of Women Voters; the Student Vets of America; and Voto Latino, which is helping voters in Dodge City, Kansas, reach the city’s sole polling place (after it was moved outside of the city, more than a mile from public transportation). For senior citizens, GreatCall has partnered with Lyft, which allows users to simply press zero on their Jitterbug phones to speak to an operator, who will request a ride on their behalf.
Uber
In partnership with #VoteTogether and Democracy Works, the ride-hail company is offering $10 off a single ride to the polls on Election Day, but only on the most affordable Uber option available in your city (Express POOL, POOL or UberX, in that order). Update your app to the most recent version and enter promo code VOTE2018.
You drive the vote, we’ll get you to the polls. Learn more about how we’re helping people show up on Election Day. https://t.co/ftLaWCEhZ7
Peer-to-peer car-sharing company Getaround is offering $10 off Election Day bookings with the promo code GETAROUND2VOTE across the Bay Area, as well as in Los Angeles, Portland, Chicago, Washington, D.C., New Jersey, Philadelphia, Seattle, Boston, New York City, Miami, and San Diego. The discount’s valid through November 7.
Zipcar
Zipcar is offering election discounts. Customers who take a Zipcar on election night (November 6, between 6 p.m. and 10 p.m.) get $20 off a future trip. More info on their #DriveTheVote campaign here.
Rides for the elderly and people with disabilities
For voters with disabilities, local public transit agencies can help arrange so-called paratransit rides to the polls. According to AARP, contact your Area Agency on Aging or transit provider for details. Alternatively, many local companies offer dial-a-ride or van services, which can be found on this Eldercare Locator map by searching “Transportation” and filtering by zip code. Nationwide, there are also networks of volunteers providing free rides to the elderly and people with disabilities. Search for programs here. Registered users can call Arrive Rides, and GoGoGrandparent has also set up hotlines so users can request a ride in advance to be chauffeured to the polls.
In a new book, The End of Animal Farming, Jacy Reese, the research director and cofounder of the nonprofit think tank Sentience Institute, argues that it’s something that could feasibly happen by the end of the century.
Reese studied past shifts, such as how long it took women to get the right to vote and how long it took for cars to be widely adopted, and then made adjustments based on the difficulty of the problem, how motivated people are to tackle it, and what tools are available.
Increasingly, he argues, people are aware of the giant environmental footprint of producing meat, and problems with factory farms. And now it’s becoming more practical to actually replace it. “We’re getting the food technology, and we’re getting the commercial infrastructure,” he says.
Impossible Foods, the manufacturer of a plant-based burger known for its use of heme–the protein that makes blood red and gives meat a large part of its flavor–has raised $387 million to date. Just, a food tech company that started with a plant-based version of mayo and plans to soon launch a “cultured meat” or “clean meat” grown in bioreactors, has raised $220 million. Reese says that more funding could move the field much more quickly.
“In the scope of global technologies, that’s still not much funding,” he says. “If just one government decides to pick up the flag and carry this as one of their most important technological issues, the way renewable energy or solar or something has been picked up, we could see really, really rapid technological progress.” New policies–like meat taxes, which some governments have considered–could also accelerate the adoption of alternatives.
Impossible Foods aims to eliminate the need to use animals in food production by 2035. Richard Branson, who has invested in startups in the field, says that he thinks all meat could be “clean” or plant-based within three decades.
“As a social scientist, as someone who doesn’t have the same incentives, I do take a more pessimistic outlook,” Reese says. “You have to consider the logistics–the meat industry is particularly embedded and particularly large–it’s over $1 trillion globally. So that makes me think that even if we get really rapid moral changes and this exciting new technology, it’s still going to take decades . . . to get to all corners of the globe.” Still, he argues that by 2050, more than half of meat, dairy, and eggs in high-income countries could be animal-free. By the end of the century, that could potentially be true for all “meat” everywhere.
One of the big issues, of course, is social acceptance–something that Reese, who grew up in Texas near cattle ranches, understands well. In the book, he talks through the fallacies in some common arguments about nutrition (meat is not necessary for health), naturalness (animals bred to live on factory farms, with growth hormones and antibiotics, are not “natural”), or the idea that it’s possible to raise animals for meat humanely (even producing eggs humanely may not be possible at scale). Reese argues that social pressure can help people make the shift, whether through campaigns that tout vegan celebrities or through other forms of social proof that societies can move beyond eating meat produced from animal agriculture.
By 2100, he predicts in the book, “all forms of animal farming will seem outdated and barbaric.” The date may be not be precise, but it’s important, he tells Fast Company, to take the long view. “It’s just really important for us to speculate,” he says. “It’s important for us to have long-term strategies. A lot of movements, I think, falter because they are too focused on just what can we achieve tomorrow and not how do we build a movement–how do we build social momentum and legislative momentum for long-term goals.”
The former Microsoft CEO opened the three-day Reinvented Toilet Expo in Beijing on Tuesday, reports GeekWire. The expo focuses on technologies that will revolutionize the collection, management, and treatment of human waste, Gates said, adding, “The technologies you’ll see here are the most significant advances in sanitation in nearly 200 years.”
During his keynote, Gate held up a jar with human feces in it, noting that the amount of human waste in that jar alone contains 200 trillion rotavirus cells, 20 billion Shigella bacteria, and 100,000 parasitic worm eggs.“In places without safe sanitation, there is much more than one [jar’s] worth in the environment. These and other pathogens cause diseases like diarrhea, cholera, and typhoid that kill nearly 500,000 children under the age of 5 every year,” Gates explained.
Gates also highlighted some promising human waste tech, including a small treatment plant called an Omni Processor that processes human waste to produce electricity and clean drinking water. As Gates said:
“Today, we are on the cusp of a sanitation revolution. It’s no longer a question of if we can do it. It’s a question of how quickly this new category of off-grid solutions will scale. We don’t know exactly how long that will take, but we do know it can’t happen fast enough.”
