Beinart: Has the Fight Against Antisemitism Lost Its Way?

2022/08/29 Leave a comment

Of note:

Over the past 18 months, America’s most prominent Jewish organizations have done something extraordinary. They have accused the world’s leading human rights organizations of promoting hatred of Jews.

Last April, after Human Rights Watch issued a report accusing Israel of “the crimes of apartheid and persecution,” the American Jewish Committee claimed that the report’s arguments “sometimes border on antisemitism.” In January, after Amnesty International issued its own study alleging that Israel practiced apartheid, the Anti-Defamation League predicted that it “likely will lead to intensified antisemitism.” The A.J.C. and A.D.L. also published a statement with four other well-known American Jewish groups that didn’t just accuse the report of being biased and inaccurate, but also claimed that Amnesty’s report “fuels those antisemites around the world who seek to undermine the only Jewish country on Earth.”

Defenders of repressive governments often try to discredit the human rights groups that criticize them. A month before the A.J.C. accused Human Rights Watch of flirting with antisemitism, the Chinese Communist Party newspaper Global Times accused it of being “anti-China.” In 2019 a spokesman for Iran accused Amnesty of being “biased” against that country. In this age of rising authoritarianism, it’s not surprising that human rights watchdogs face mounting attacks. What’s surprising is that America’s most influential Jewish groups are taking part.

For most of the 20th century, leading American Jewish organizations argued that the struggle against antisemitism and the struggle for universal human rights were intertwined. In 1913, when the A.D.L. was founded to stop “the defamation of the Jewish people,” it declared that its “ultimate purpose is to secure justice and fair treatment to all citizens.” In 1956, Rabbi Israel Goldstein, the president of the American Jewish Congress, a Jewish group founded in 1918, explained his support for civil rights by saying that his organization would “act against any evil that is practiced on other men with the same conviction and vigor as if we ourselves were the victims.”

The historian Peter Novick has argued that after World War II, American Jewish organizations fought segregation because they believed that “prejudice and discrimination were all of a piece” and thus Jewish groups “could serve the cause of Jewish self-defense as well by attacking prejudice and discrimination against Blacks as by tackling antisemitism directly.”

Although supportive of Israel’s existence, America’s leading Jewish groups did not make it the center of their work in the mid-20th century. And when they did focus on Israel, they often tried to bring its behavior in line with their broader liberal democratic goals. The A.J.C. repeatedly criticized Israel for discriminating against its Palestinian Arab citizens. In 1960 the head of the group’s Israel Committee explained that it hoped to eliminate “antidemocratic practices and attitudes” in the Jewish state so the organization could more credibly “invoke principles of human rights and practices in our country and abroad.”

This began to change after the 1967 war. Israel’s conquest of the West Bank and Gaza Strip made it master over roughly a million stateless Palestinians, which fueled anger at the Jewish state from leftists in the United States and around the world. At the same time, assimilation was leading many progressive American Jews to exit organized Jewish life, which left Jewish groups with a more conservative base as they searched for a new agenda now that civil rights for Black Americans had become law.

The result was an ideological transformation. In 1974, two A.D.L. leaders wrote a book arguing that Jews were increasingly menaced by a “new antisemitism,” directed not against individual Jews but against the Jewish state. Almost a half-century later, that premise now dominates mainstream organized American Jewish life.

Largely as a result of lobbying by Jewish organizations, the American government has embraced the proposition, too. The State Department now employs a definition of antisemitism whose examples include opposing Israel’s existence as a Jewish state. This year the Senate confirmed Deborah Lipstadt — a historian best known for fighting Holocaust denial — to be the Biden administration’s special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism. Ms. Lipstadt has said that Israel’s “continued holding of the West Bank is problematic,” but when asked at her confirmation hearing about Amnesty’s report accusing Israel of apartheid, Ms. Lipstadt claimed that the report’s language was “part of a larger effort to delegitimize the Jewish state” and thus “poisons the atmosphere, particularly for Jewish students” on college campuses. In 2018 several Palestinian members of the Knesset tried to introduce legislation that would grant Palestinians equal citizenship rather than what the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem calls “Jewish supremacy.” According to America’s most prominent Jewish organizations and the U.S. government, this kind of call for equal citizenship constituted bigotry.

Now that any challenge to Jewish statehood is met with charges of bigotry against Jews, prominent American Jewish organizations and their allies in the U.S. government have made the fight against antisemitism into a vehicle not for defending human rights but for denying them. Most Palestinians exist as second-class citizens in Israel proper or as stateless noncitizens in the territories Israel occupied in 1967 or live beyond Israel’s borders because they or their descendants were expelled or fled and were not permitted to return. But under the definition of antisemitism promoted by the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee and the State Department, Palestinians become antisemites if they call for replacing a state that favors Jews with one that does not discriminate based on ethnicity or religion.

But the campaign against antisemitism is being deployed to justify not merely the violation of Palestinian human rights. As relations have warmed between Israel and the monarchies of the Persian Gulf, American officials have begun using the struggle against antisemitism to shield those regimes from human rights pressure, too. In June, Ms. Lipstadt met the Saudi ambassador in Washington and celebrated “our shared objectives of overcoming intolerance and hate.” From there she flew to Saudi Arabia, where she met its minister of Islamic affairs and affirmed, once again, “our shared goals of promoting tolerance and combating hate.” In the United Arab Emirates she sat down with the country’s foreign minister, whom she declared a “sincere partner in our shared goals of” — you guessed it — “promoting tolerance and fighting hate.”

This is nonsense. According to a report this year by Freedom House, a human rights think tank funded largely by the U.S. government, Saudi Arabia is more repressive than Iran. The United Arab Emirates is more repressive than Russia. And although Ms. Lipstadt declared that her visits to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi left her “heartened by changes underway in parts of the Middle East,” both countries, according to Freedom House, are more oppressive than they were in 2017. Less than two months after she lauded the Saudi monarchy’s tolerance, it sentenced a member of the country’s persecuted Shiite minority to 34 years in prison for Twitter activity critical of the government.

When it comes to their own disenfranchised populations, Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. are as intolerant as ever. What has changed is their tolerance for Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. And because officials like Ms. Lipstadt define the fight against antisemitism largely as a fight to legitimize Israel, they legitimize its tyrannical Arab allies as well.

Ms. Lipstadt’s defenders might argue that Jews can’t afford to be picky about our friends. In a world where antisemitism remains a frightening reality, we should look out only for ourselves. In moments of extreme danger, that may be true. But many earlier American Jewish leaders recognized this must be the exception. As a rule, they believed Jews should pursue equal treatment for ourselves as part of a broader effort to secure it for others.

The current alternative — using the fight against antisemitism to defend Israel and its allies — may seem savvy. In the long run, however, it’s foolish. Palestinians do not grow more tolerant of Jews when brutalized by a Jewish state. Saudis and Emiratis do not grow more tolerant of Jews when Israel helps their governments brutalize them.

As part of the rapprochement between Jerusalem and Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, the Israeli government has apparently authorized its high-tech companies to sell the Saudi and Emirati governments spyware they have used to surveil and imprison dissidents. Which may help explain why recent polls show that more than 70 percentof Saudis and Emiratis oppose diplomatic normalization with Israel. For decades, many in the Arab world loathed the United States for bolstering their despotic rulers. It will not ultimately benefit Arab-Jewish harmony for a Jewish state to replace the United States in that unsavory role.

In a terrible irony, the campaign against “antisemitism,” as waged by influential Jewish groups and the U.S. government, has become a threat to freedom. It is wielded as a weapon against the world’s most respected human rights organizations and a shield for some of the world’s most repressive regimes. We need a different struggle against antisemitism. It should pursue Jewish equality, not Jewish supremacy, and embed the cause of Jewish rights in a movement for the human rights of all. In its effort to defend the indefensible in Israel, the American Jewish establishment has abandoned these principles. It’s time to affirm them again.

Source: Has the Fight Against Antisemitism Lost Its Way?

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Kang: The Creep of History

2022/08/27 Leave a comment

Good discussion on the limits of historical examples, and using history as “an evidentiary grab bag” rather than focussing on the present. To which I would add, having a sense of perspective on the changes that have occurred, and those that are occcuring.

Money quote: “All that beating about stuff that happened years ago can sometimes distract us from the injustices of the present, even when the goal of it is to provide some useful allegory about the persistence of one type of oppression or another.”

Last week, the historian James Sweet found himself in the middle of one of the confusing messes that pop up from time to time in the highest reaches of academia. As the president of the American Historical Association, Sweet writes a monthly address to his colleagues. His September entry, published on Aug. 17, was titled, “Is History History? Identity Politics and Teleologies of the Present.” What followed was a seemingly harmless missive about “presentism,” a phenomenon wherein historians allow the political, identity-based demands of the current day to dictate the focus of their scholarship and inquiry. Paraphrasing one of his predecessors, Sweet asked if students who enter the field with a fixed, identity-first point of view might be better suited to sociology, political science or ethnic studies.

Later in his address, Sweet writes, “If history is only those stories from the past that confirm current political positions, all manner of political hacks can claim historical expertise,” and claims that “too many Americans have become accustomed to the idea of history as an evidentiary grab bag to articulate their political positions.” As an example, he writes about taking a tour of the Elmina Castle in Ghana, a stop in the Atlantic slave trade. Sweet claims that his tour guide at Elmina both overstated the relevance of the site to African Americans (according to Sweet, “less than one percent of the Africans passing through Elmina arrived in North America”) while falsely downplaying the role that Ghanaians played in the slave trade. These elisions, Sweet believes, come from a desire to make history conform to our modern political understandings of race and inequality.

Sweet’s address was met with considerable criticism, and in some cases backlash, from fellow historians, many of whom felt that he was demeaning the work of minority scholars by broadly questioning whether work driven by “identity politics” belonged in the historical tradition. Sweet quickly apologized.

I agree with Sweet on the fundamentals of what he said, but I also understand why minority scholars felt like the integrity of their work was being questioned. An uncharitable reader might accuse him of singling out scholars who write about identity (read: mostly nonwhite scholars) and making unfounded insinuations about the motivations behind their work. This would be more forgivable if Sweet were not the president of the American Historical Association, a position that presumably gives him some influence over where the discipline is headed. There have been times in my own career when someone high up in an institution assumes that because I am not white, my work must be driven by identity politics. It’s an enraging experience.

What interests me most about the Sweet controversy, however, is the idea that history itself might be taking up too much space in the ways that we think about the present not just in the cloisters of the university but also within the broader discourse around social justice. “We suffer from an overabundance of history,” Sweet writes, “not as method or analysis, but as anachronistic data points for the articulation of competing politics.”

What does it mean to have an “overabundance of history”? At first glance, the idea might seem ridiculous. The public, in theory, should know about everything from the migration patterns of early man to what happened during Operation Desert Storm and beyond. In a multiethnic country rooted in the genocide of Native Americans and built on the backs of enslaved Africans, all citizens should have some knowledge of how we got to where we are in 2022. But I don’t think Sweet is talking here about historical knowledge or even scholarship, really, but rather the creep of historical writing into other disciplines, especially journalism. (Much of Sweet’s address is a halfhearted swipe at “The 1619 Project.”)

It’s unfortunate that Sweet ultimately seems aggrieved about the sanctity of history as a profession and a discipline, because there is a compelling point hidden somewhere in “Is History History?” Over the past decade or so, history has become the lingua franca of online political conversation. This is a relatively new phenomenon; back in 2010, around the time I began writing on the internet, much of the conversation revolved around cultural criticism. Young, ambitious writers published essays about “Mad Men” and other prestige television shows; pop music criticism took on a weight in political discourse that felt exciting and even a bit dangerous. Today, much of that cultural production has moved to history.

These trends are admittedly difficult to track — there is no start date for the era of online historical writing, nor is there a gravestone for lengthy pop culture criticism — but the shift has something to do with the centrality of Twitter over the past decade (historical documents and photos make for great screenshots) and, more important, the changes in the country itself. Once Donald Trump became president, it was harder to write about “Breaking Bad” and Taylor Swift in such self-serious tones.

“The Case for Reparations” by Ta-Nehisi Coates, which detailed the practice of redlining, certainly wasn’t the first piece of journalism that brought in historical techniques, but it was, without question and for good reason, the most influential of its era. History like this — cleareyed, thorough and written toward an explicit political end — showed a generation of young journalists how they might be able to leverage their skills in a new way. I was a young magazine writer when that article came out, in 2014. I recall feeling impressed by the prose and the research while realizing that Coates had raised the stakes for what a magazine story could do. He had, in effect, written a work that felt much more like an object, something that wouldn’t immediately decompose once the next news cycle rolled in.

I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that Coates inspired thousands of imitators and ushered in a new type of journalism in which historical research could take precedence over reportage. (I tried my hand at a couple of historical essays before giving up.) Twitter has also allowed historians to assume a place in the public discourse that would’ve been available to only a select few before the advent of social media. This is ultimately a good thing that has flattened some of the usual hierarchies in the academy. A historian who writes good Twitter thread — say, about the long and sustained effort to end abortion rights in the United States — will be able to present an abbreviated version of his or her work to thousands, potentially millions of people without having to star in a Ken Burns documentary. As a result, history does seem to have an unusual amount of weight in the public discourse.

I don’t believe there’s some perfect mix of academic disciplines that will yield the most fruitful public conversations. But I do agree with Sweet that in today’s discourse, history acts mostly as what he calls “an evidentiary grab bag.” This, as he points out, happens both on the left and the right. Someone can find something in an archive, prop it up in the course of an argument and then declare the issue settled forever because history has acted as the arbiter. Sweet’s mistake is that he seems to believe that there is a type of real history — the exact type that’s produced by credentialed people in lofty spaces — that actually should be used in this hierarchical way, when the better argument would be to simply say that all history, regardless of the pedigree or methodology of its scholar, should be subject to intense scrutiny.

And yet I don’t think it’s particularly debatable that there is, in fact, an overabundance of history. Perhaps stories of the past have always been used to advance modern political goals, but I can’t think of a time in recent American memory where so much history has been fashioned into so many cudgels. All that beating about stuff that happened years ago can sometimes distract us from the injustices of the present, even when the goal of it is to provide some useful allegory about the persistence of one type of oppression or another. Over the past two years, for example, I have been bewildered by how much of the conversation about the rise in hate crimes against Asian Americans has been dominated by evocations of history, whether it’s the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 or Japanese internment.

These are certainly important conversations that provide an ideological framework that places Asian Americans within a history of violence and oppression. And yet I sometimes find myself wondering what all that history really has to do with Asian people being attacked and even killed in 2022. History, in this moment, has an anesthetizing, diversionary effect; instead of talking about what’s happening to recent immigrants to the United States in 2022, we are talking about what happened to gold miners in the 19th century. The connections we draw between the two might make sense logically, but they ultimately do not go anywhere.

These intellectual flailings are the more compelling evidence that the journalists, thinkers and scholars who set much of the public discourse might be making a bit too much of history. Whenever something bad happens to an oppressed group, there is an impulse to buttress it with the bad things that happened in the past as a way to almost confirm that the present is still terrible. This isn’t a necessarily bad reflex, but it oftentimes feels unnecessary. Most of the time, we can just process what happens as it happens and try to deal with the problem in front of us.

Source: The Creep of History

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Chambers: Accusations of systemic racism on campus aren’t proof it exists

2022/08/27 Leave a comment

Anecdotes do not equal evidence although they can point the way to more detailed study. Wider surveys and studies are more helpful in understanding the extent and forms of discrimination and bias.
Public service employment equity reports and surveys, now with disaggregated data, are good examples (although in my experience, are unlikely to convince many activists):
Accusations of systemic racism have become increasingly commonplace on university campuses, led primarily by anti-racist activists. With the return to classes in September we can expect more of this.
The activists consider racism not only to be a serious campus problem, but insist that university administrators publicly support this position. For example, at the University of Ottawa, activists have pressured administrators to address the issue on two notable occasions.

Source: Chambers: Accusations of systemic racism on campus aren’t proof it exists

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Black August uplifted as alternative Black History Month

2022/08/27 Leave a comment

Will be interesting to see if picked up by Canadian activists, just as BIPOC was, as another US import  rather than focussing on Canadian specificity and history:

For Jonathan Peter Jackson, a direct relative of two prominent members of the Black Panther Party, revolutionary thought and family history have always been intertwined, particularly in August.

That’s the month in 1971 when his uncle, the famed Panther George Jackson, was killed during an uprising at San Quentin State Prison in California. A revolutionary whose words resonated inside and out of the prison walls, he was a published author, activist and radical thought leader.

To many, February is the month dedicated to celebrating Black Americans’ contributions to a country where they were once enslaved. But Black History Monthhas an alternative: It’s called Black August.

First celebrated in 1979, Black August was created to commemorate Jackson’s fight for Black liberation. Fifty-one years since his death, Black August is now a monthlong awareness campaign and celebration dedicated to Black freedom fighters, revolutionaries, radicals and political prisoners, both living and deceased.

The annual commemorations have been embraced by activists in the global Black Lives Matter movement, many of whom draw inspiration from freedom fighters like Jackson and his contemporaries.

“It’s important to do this now because a lot of people who were on the radical scene during that time period, relatives and non-relatives, who are like blood relatives, are entering their golden years,” said Jonathan Jackson, 51, of Fair Hill, Maryland.

George Jackson was 18 when he was arrested for robbing a gas station in Los Angeles in 1960. He was convicted and given an indeterminate sentence of one year to life and spent the next decade at California’s Soledad and San Quentin prisons, much of it in solitary confinement.

While incarcerated, Jackson began studying the words of revolutionary theoreticians such as Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, who advocated class awareness, challenging institutions and overturning capitalism through revolution. Founding leaders of the Panthers, including Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, were also inspired by Marx, Lenin and Chinese Communist leader Mao Tse-tung.

Jackson became a leader in the prisoner rights movement. His letters from prison to loved ones and supporters were compiled in the bestselling books “Soledad Brother” and “Blood in My Eye.”

Inspired by his words and frustrated with his situation, George’s younger brother, Jonathan, initiated a takeover at the Marin County Superior Court in California in 1970. He freed three inmates and held several courthouse staff hostage, in an attempt to demand the release of his brother and two other inmates, known as the Soledad Brothers, who were accused of killing a correctional officer. Jonathan was killed as he tried to escape, although it’s disputed whether he was killed in a courtroom shootout or fatally shot while driving away with hostages.

George was killed on Aug. 21, 1971, during a prison uprising. Inmates at San Quentin prison began formally commemorating his death in 1979, and from there, Black August was born.

“I certainly wish that more people knew about George’s writings (and) knew about my father’s sacrifice on that fateful day in August,” said Jonathan Jackson, who wrote the foreword to “Soledad Brother” in the early ’90s, shortly after graduating from college.

Monifa Bandele, a leader in the Movement for Black Lives, a national coalition of BLM groups, says Black August is about learning the vast history of Black revolutionary leaders. That includes figures such as Nat Turner, who is famous for leading a slave rebellion on a southern Virginia plantation in August 1831, and Marcus Garvey, the leader of the Pan-Africanism movement and born in August 1887. It includes events such as the Haitian Revolution in 1791 and the March on Washington in 1963, both taking place in the month of August.

“This idea that there was this one narrow way that Black people resisted oppression is really a myth that is dispelled by Black August,” said Bandele, who is also a member of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, a group that raises awareness of political prisoners.

“And what we saw happen after the 1970s is that it grew outside of the (prison) walls because, as people who were incarcerated came home to their families and communities, they began to do community celebrations of Black August,” she added.

The ways of honoring this month also come in various forms and have evolved over the years. Some take part in fasting, while others use this time to study the ways of their predecessors. Weekly event series are also common during Black August, from reading groups to open mic nights.

Sankofa, a Black-owned cultural center and coffee shop in Washington that has served the D.C. community for nearly 25 years, wraps up a weekly open mic night in honor of Black August on Friday. The event has drawn local residents of all ages, many who have shared stories, read poetry and performed songs with the theme of rebellion.

“This month is all about resistance and celebrating our political prisoners and using all of the faculties that we have to free people who are in prison, let me say, unjustly,” emcee Ayinde Sekou said to the crowd during a recent event at Sankofa.

Jonathan Jackson, George’s nephew, also believes that there are largely systemic reasons as to why Black August, and his family history specifically, are not widely taught.

“It’s difficult sometimes for radicals who were not assassinated, per se, to enter into the popular discourse,” he said. “George and Jonathan were never victims. They took action, and they were killed taking that action, and sometimes that’s very difficult to understand for people who will accept a political assassination.”

Jackson hopes to honor his father’s and uncle’s legacy through documenting the knowledge of elders from that era, as a means of continuing the fight.

“We need to get those testimonies. … We need to understand what happened, so that we can improve on what they did. I think now is as good a time as any to get that done,” he said.

Source: Black August uplifted as alternative Black History Month

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Workplace diversity programmes often fail, or backfire

2022/08/26 Leave a comment

Important studies, noting that cultural-inclusion training, targeted recruitment, mentor programmes, and cross-training between groups, underpinned by the business case for diversity were more effective:

Diversity and anti-harassment training is a booming industry. International company surveys suggests the number of people hired for jobs with “diversity” or “inclusion” in the title has more than quadrupled since 2010. Attempts to reduce discrimination and harassment in the workplace are laudable, and make good business sense. But only if they work. Listen to this story.

Unfortunately, the consensus now emerging among academics is that many anti-discrimination policies have no effect. What is worse, they often backfire. Some among them suspect the reason many interventions nevertheless remain popular is a hidden motive: that they are used not to reduce discrimination, but to shield against litigation. 

Successful anti-discrimination programmes should, for instance, help make firms’ management less male and pale. For a forthcoming book, Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev tested this proposition. They collected data on anti-discrimination training programmes and targeted grievance procedures at 829 American companies implemented from 1971 to 2002, and how they affected the representation of ethnic groups and genders in management up to 2015. They found that most did the opposite of what one might expect. On average, 20 years after these interventions were introduced, the group that benefited most were white men. https://infographics.economist.com/2022/20220827_GDC101/

What about the short-term? One large experiment compared the effects of eight one-time interventions to reduce unintentional biases, such as reading a vivid story with a black hero and a white villain. Among 6,321 non-black Americans, all reduced implicit bias favouring white over black people immediately after. But when retested one to five days later, the effects of all interventions had faded. Statistically speaking, the effects of all but one were nil.

Yet some programmes worked well. Mr Dobbin and Ms Kalev found that cultural-inclusion training, with an emphasis on how managers could increase their teams’ productivity with a more varied crew, was linked with greater diversity among higher-ups later on. Targeted recruitment, mentor programmes, and cross-training between groups, were also found to help. 

This is in line with a recent study by Oriane Georgeac and Aneeta Rattan, who found that atypical candidates feel less likely to be included when given a company statement with a business case for diversity instead of one with a simpler acknowledgment of its importance. They suggest explicit rationales make some suspect they will be judged based on stereotypes—rather than how they do their job.https://infographics.economist.com/2022/20220827_GDC102/

You can forgive firms their initial eagerness to implement programmes of unproven effectiveness. In global surveys, 75% of them now say diversity is a stated value or priority. But if they mean what they say, such firms should now be shifting resources, away from programmes that do not work (or worse) and towards those that do. 

But it could be, at least in America, that the courts will need to move first. Many employers may be motivated to institute diversity policies less by productivity or morality than by legal liability. In a study of 1,188 federal civil-rights opinions decided between 1965 and 2014, Lauren Edelman, a researcher, found that judges increasingly considered such practices evidence of compliance with civil-rights laws, regardless of effectiveness. If judges start paying more attention to which programmes work, it may force firms to do so too.■

Sources: “Getting to diversity”, by F. Dobbin and A. Kalev, Harvard University Press, 2022; “Reducing implicit racial preferences”, by C.K. Lai et al., Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2016; ZoomInfo

Source: Workplace diversity programmes often fail, or backfire

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Google Finds ‘Inoculating’ People Against Misinformation Helps Blunt Its Power

2022/08/26 Leave a comment

Interesting. Worth checking out the videos:

In the fight against online misinformation, falsehoods have key advantages: They crop up fast and spread at the speed of electrons, and there is a lag period before fact checkers can debunk them.

So researchers at Google, the University of Cambridge and the University of Bristol tested a different approach that tries to undermine misinformation before people see it. They call it “pre-bunking.”

The researchers found that psychologically “inoculating” internet users against lies and conspiracy theories — by pre-emptively showing them videos about the tactics behind misinformation — made people more skeptical of falsehoods afterward, according to an academic paper published in the journal Science Advances on Wednesday. But effective educational tools still may not be enough to reach people with hardened political beliefs, the researchers found.

Since Russia spread disinformation on Facebook during the 2016 election, major technology companies have struggled to balance concerns about censorship with fighting online lies and conspiracy theories. Despite an array of attempts by the companies to address the problem, it is still largely up to users to differentiate between fact and fiction.

The strategies and tools being deployed during the midterm vote in the United States this year by Facebook, TikTok and other companies often resemble tactics developed to deal with misinformation in past elections: partnerships with fact-checking groups, warning labels, portals with vetted explainers as well as post removal and user bans.

Social media platforms have made attempts to pre-bunk before, though those efforts have done little to slow the spread of false information. Most have also not been as detailed — or as entertaining — as the videos used in the studies by the researchers.

Twitter said this month that it would try to “enable healthy civic conversation” during the midterm elections in part by reviving pop-up warnings, which it used during the 2020 election. Warnings, written in multiple languages, will appear as prompts placed atop users’ feeds and in searches for certain topics.

The new paper details seven experiments with almost 30,000 total participants. The researchers bought YouTube ad space to show users in the United States 90-second animated videos aiming to teach them about propaganda tropes and manipulation techniques. A million adults watched one of the ads for 30 seconds or longer.

The users were taught about tactics such as scapegoating and deliberate incoherence, or the use of conflicting explanations to assert that something is true, so that they could spot lies. Researchers tested some participants within 24 hours of seeing a pre-bunk video and found a 5 percent increase in their ability to recognize misinformation techniques.

One video opens with a mournful piano tune and a little girl grasping a teddy bear, as a narrator says, “What happens next will make you tear up.” Then the narrator explains that emotional content compels people to pay more attention than they otherwise would, and that fear-mongering and appeals to outrage are keys to spreading moral and political ideas on social media.

The video offers examples, such as headlines that describe a “horrific” accident instead of a “serious” one, before reminding viewers that if something they see makes them angry, “someone may be pulling your strings.”

Beth Goldberg, one of the paper’s authors and the head of research and development at Jigsaw, a technology incubator within Google, said in an interview that pre-bunking leaned into people’s innate desire to not be duped.

“This is one of the few misinformation interventions that I’ve seen at least that has worked not just across the conspiratorial spectrum but across the political spectrum,” Ms. Goldberg said.

Jigsaw will start a pre-bunking ad campaign on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and TikTok at the end of August for users in Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, meant to head off fear-mongering about Ukrainian refugees who entered those countries after Russia invaded Ukraine. It will be done in concert with local fact checkers, academics and disinformation experts.

The researchers don’t have plans for similar pre-bunking videos ahead of the midterm elections in the United States, but they are hoping other tech companies and civil groups will use their research as a template for addressing misinformation.

However, pre-bunking is not a silver bullet. The tactic was not effective on people with extreme views, such as white supremacists, Ms. Goldberg said. She added that elections were tricky to pre-bunk because people had such entrenched beliefs. The effects of pre-bunking last for only between a few days and a month.

Groups focused on information literacy and fact-checking have employed various pre-bunking strategies, such as a misinformation-identifying curriculum delivered over two weeks of texts, or lists of bullet points with tips such as “identify the author” and “check your biases.” Online games with names like Cranky Uncle, Harmony Square, Troll Factory and Go Viral try to build players’ cognitive resistance to bot armies, emotional manipulation, science denial and vaccine falsehoods.

A study conducted in 2020 by researchers at the University of Cambridge and at Uppsala University in Sweden found that people who played the online game Bad News learned to recognize common misinformation strategies across cultures. Players in the simulation were tasked with amassing as many followers as possible and maintaining credibility while they spread fake news.

The researchers wrote that pre-bunking worked like medical immunization: “Pre-emptively warning and exposing people to weakened doses of misinformation can cultivate ‘mental antibodies’ against fake news.”

Tech companies, academics and nongovernmental organizations fighting misinformation have the disadvantage of never knowing what lie will spread next. But Prof. Stephan Lewandowsky from the University of Bristol, a co-author of Wednesday’s paper, said propaganda and lies were predictable, nearly always created from the same playbook.

“Fact checkers can only rebut a fraction of the falsehoods circulating online,” Mr. Lewandowsky said in a statement. “We need to teach people to recognize the misinformation playbook, so they understand when they are being misled.”

Source: Google Finds ‘Inoculating’ People Against Misinformation Helps Blunt Its Power

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Nicolas: La haine, tranquille

2022/08/26 Leave a comment

Of note. Good thought experiment:

La dernière péripétie de la course à la chefferie du Parti conservateur du Canada est particulièrement surréelle. Pierre Poilievre, bien en tête dans les intentions de vote, a serré la main à un partisan le week-end dernier, lors d’un événement de campagne. Le partisan en question s’est avéré être Jeremy Mackenzie, fondateur du Diagolon — un homme et un groupe associés à « l’extrémisme violent » par le Centre intégré d’évaluation du terrorisme (CIET), l’organisme fédéral chargé de repérer les menaces à la sécurité nationale.

On comprend que dans un bain de foule, un politicien ne connaît pas nécessairement l’identité de toutes les personnes auxquelles il serre la main. Mais depuis, l’identité du personnage est devenue publique. Le candidat à la chefferie conservatrice, Jean Charest, et le chef du NPD, Jagmeet Singh, ont tous deux demandé à Pierre Poilievre de dénoncer l’individu. Pour le moment, c’est le silence radio du côté de Poilievre. Et ce silence ne semble pas affecter particulièrement la campagne du candidat.

Il y a encore quelques années, l’incident aurait semblé surréel à quiconque suit la politique de près ou de loin. On constate pourtant que le meneur de la course au Parti conservateur peut désormais serrer la main d’un extrémiste violent surveillé par les autorités antiterroristes canadiennes, tranquille, sans que cela fasse de vagues. Après tout, M. Poilievre et plusieurs de ses collègues députés n’ont aussi eu aucun problème à s’afficher avec le convoi dit « de la liberté » à Ottawa en février dernier.

Pourtant, le CIET a aussi déterminé ce convoi comme une « opportunité » de recrutement et de réseautage importants pour plusieurs mouvements extrémistes violents, selon un rapport rendu public la semaine dernière par le truchement d’une demande d’accès à l’information. Cela ne veut pas dire que tous les participants au convoi appartenaient à des groupes extrémistes violents, bien sûr. On dit plutôt que leur présence était assez importante, particulièrement au sein des organisateurs, pour qu’il soit très problématique, voire dangereux, pour des élus de s’y associer.

Ce recrutement et ce réseautage, et par ricochet donc, cette croissance des groupes violents associés à l’extrême droite depuis février dernier, sont devenus palpables. Encore il y a deux semaines, des partisans de QAnon ont attaqué des policiers de Peterborough, en Ontario, en s’imaginant procéder à leur « arrestation citoyenne ». Et plusieurs journalistes — des femmes, surtout racisées — font l’objet depuis quelques mois d’une campagne ciblée de haine.

Des courriels, écrits sur un modèle similaire, reprennent le vocabulaire et les théories haineuses des groupes d’extrême droite, tout en les ponctuant de menaces de viol et de mort. Devant la gravité de la situation, le Toronto Star, Global News, le Hill Times et l’Association canadienne des journalistes ont même dû faire une sortie conjointe pour dénoncer la situation et interpeller les services de police qui auraient failli à traiter avec assez de sérieux plusieurs plaintes reçues.

Résumons donc. Des militants d’extrême droite, dont plusieurs ont été identifiés comme des menaces terroristes, ont contribué à paralyser la capitale nationale l’hiver dernier. Depuis, ils se sont multipliés, et certains d’entre eux s’en prennent non seulement à des élus, mais aussi à des journalistes, et même à des policiers.

Imaginons un moment que ce soit le leader d’un groupe terroriste associé à l’islamisme qui serre la main de Pierre Poilievre, ou qui envoie des menaces de mort et de viol à des journalistes. Pensez-vous que l’impact sur la course à la chefferie du Parti conservateur serait la même ? Pensez-vous qu’on banaliserait autant la gravité des menaces reçues ? Imaginons qu’un regroupement autochtone décide de procéder à « l’arrestation citoyenne » d’un corps policier. La nouvelle serait-elle traitée comme de la petite routine d’actualité politique d’été ?

Poser la question, c’est y répondre. La banalisation des menaces posées par l’extrême droite au Canada est d’ailleurs déjà dénoncée depuis plusieurs années par les experts en la matière. Et bien sûr, cette montée de la haine affecte non seulement les figures publiques, mais aussi les gens ordinaires. Entre 2019 et 2021, les crimes haineux déclarés par la police ont augmenté de 72 %, selon les compilations de Statistique Canada. Là encore, imaginons une augmentation de 72 % de n’importe quel autre type de crime au Canada sur une période de deux ans. Tout le monde en parlerait.

Souvent, lorsque la menace vient de l’extrême droite, l’analyse policière et médiatique porte sur des « incidents isolés », des « loups solitaires ». Le mouvement est donc là, devant nous, et il grandit. Mais on peine encore à le voir comme un mouvement. Chaque plainte pour menace de mort ou de viol, par exemple, sera traitée isolément — si elle est même traitée.

On se garde, le plus souvent, de se pencher sur les réseaux auxquels appartient l’individu qui déverse sa haine. Pour cesser de banaliser le phénomène, il faudrait enfin comprendre que, même lorsqu’on a affaire à un homme seul derrière son clavier, cet homme appartient à un contexte social bien précis.

Source: La haine, tranquille

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Urback: Ahmed Hussen demands to know how someone else let his government partner with an apparent antisemite

2022/08/25 Leave a comment

Fair comment and good advice as to how the Minister should have handled it “A reasonable response from Mr. Hussen would be for him to come out and explain that the Heritage Ministry did not do its due diligence in this case, but that it is developing specific protocols, which will soon be publicly disclosed, to vet grant recipients.”

Screw-ups happen, but bureaucratic and political-level vetting needs to improve.

Non-accountabilities, as non-apologies, that shift the blame to others undermine trust and credibility:

Ahmed Hussen, Minister of Housing and Diversity and Inclusion, is demanding accountability: How could someone else have let his government pair up with a guy who spews noxious, hateful views on Twitter for an anti-racism project? What will someone else do to make it better? And how can someone else ensure that this sort of thing never happens again?

Last year, a group called the Community Media Advocacy Centre (CMAC) received a grant of $133,800 from the Department of Canadian Heritage to develop an anti-racism strategy for Canadian broadcasting. Laith Marouf, a senior consultant with CMAC, was spearheading the project according to a news release from April, though he still found time to tweet about “loud mouthed bags of human feces aka the Jewish White Supremacists,” and why they deserve “a bullet to the head.” In other tweets, Mr. Marouf also called former justice minister Irwin Cotler the “Grand Wizard of Zionism” and former U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell a “Jamaican house-slave.”

A lawyer acting for Mr. Marouf told CBC that while his client’s tweets target “Jewish White Supremacists,” the consultant does not harbour any animus toward Jews in general – which is true only if you ignore tweets such as the one where Mr. Marouf explained why he “stopped sharing the works of Jewish White people, even if anti-Zionist/anti-Imperialist.” Perhaps he’s one of those “do as I say, not as I do” diversity and inclusion lecturers.

Canadian tech blogger Mark Goldberg had been writing about Mr. Marouf’s zany interpretation of anti-racist activism for at least a year, but it wasn’t until his observations were amplified by Quillette editor and former National Post columnist Jonathan Kay that thousands of Canadians became aware of the person the Canadian government had contracted to teach others about prejudice. Yet it still took more than a week – and one false start with a vague statement from Mr. Hussen about his ministry looking to “rectify” the matter – before the government announced that CMAC’s funding would be cut and its project suspended.

In that announcement, Mr. Hussen was adamant that there would be accountability: Not from his ministry or from Canadian Heritage to explain how they vet grant recipients and/or what they will do to make sure this sort of thing doesn’t happen again, but from CMAC, “to explain how they came to hire Laith Marouf, and how they plan on rectifying the situation given the nature of his anti-Semitic and xenophobic statements.”

“We look forward to a proper response on their next steps and clear accountability regarding this matter,” Mr. Hussen’s statement concluded, affirming that with this government, the buck stops elsewhere. “I want to assure Canadians that our government has and will continue to fight anti-Semitism and hate in all its forms.”

By this government’s telling, then, the feeble Ministry of Heritage – with its billion-dollar budget and more than 1,800 employees – was hoodwinked by an organization harbouring an antisemite right there on its public list of consultants. Maybe Google was down for the many months Mr. Marouf was working with the Heritage department, thus preventing anyone from searching his name. Or maybe they just thought Mr. Marouf’s Twitter persona was an elaborate bit because no anti-racism lecturer with any knowledge of right-wing white supremacy would seriously use the phrase “Jewish White Supremacists,” since bona fide white supremacists obviously do not consider Jewish people to be white.

For a government that has made self-flagellation a matter of routine – that declared itself complicit in Indigenous genocide and rarely shies away from an opportunity to apologize for a past injustice – its cabinet ministers seem awfully shy to take responsibility now. Perhaps that’s because this is not something that can be blamed on Canada generally, but on this government specifically – a government that accidentally gave an apparent frothing antisemite permission to lecture Canadian broadcasters on racism.

The expectations for this government are not high. A reasonable response from Mr. Hussen would be for him to come out and explain that the Heritage Ministry did not do its due diligence in this case, but that it is developing specific protocols, which will soon be publicly disclosed, to vet grant recipients. But such a response could only be expected of a government actually interested in accountability. This government is only keen on the appearance thereof – that and foisting the blame on an organization that apparently hoodwinked an entire ministry.

Source: Ahmed Hussen demands to know how someone else let his government partner with an apparent antisemite

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Elghawaby: Racial diversity is good for business but CTV, Bell Media got it horribly wrong

2022/08/25 Leave a comment

Of note. One of the good aspects of the CAJ surveys is that we will start being able to track trends, just as government has been able to do with respect to the public service and the federally-regulated sectors.

Haven’t looked at j-school diversity trends but hopefully will be able to do so in the 2021 census:

Angry reactions to the sudden ousting of decorated broadcaster Lisa LaFlamme from her job as CTV’s chief news anchor and senior editor haven’t abated. 

In fact, a new Dove Canada campaign encouraging people to turn social filters grey in solidarity with women “being edged out of the workplace” has added renewed energy to online chatter. That’s due to speculation that LaFlamme’s decision to keep her silver locks was among the possible reasons for her sudden dismissal.

Whether it was her hair, her strength, or her salary, what most people agree is that LaFlamme’s firing reeks of discrimination rooted in sexism and ageism.

What has been largely lost amidst the justified uproar is a full embrace of the channel’s first-ever racialized male national news anchor. 

As Global News reporter Ahmar Khan tweeted: “Omar Sachedina is very much deserving of the role and is well-respected amongst journalists, but Bell Media’s treatment of Lisa LaFlamme overshadows it all. A Muslim man helming the biggest National news program — history. But, diversity doesn’t cover the gaps of mistreatment.”

Khan was reacting to the instant blowback Sachedina received to his poorly timed tweet announcing his new role. 

For racialized communities, who are too often missing from Canada’s newsrooms, particularly in leadership positions, it feels impossible to celebrate this historic moment. 

Yet, it’s critical to remember how far behind the nation’s newsrooms are when it comes to representation and inclusion. A lack of diversity hurts both their bottom lines and our democracy.

A 2021 paper from the World Economic Forum titled,“Tackling Diversity and Inclusion in the Newsroom,” explored how racial diversity is crucial to the success of the media industry.

“The Poynter Institute, a non-profit journalism education and research organization, reports that trust in the media is particularly low in communities that have long felt ignored or misrepresented by mainstream news outlets. News outlets cannot expect to hold or grow the attention of a diverse group of readers without accounting for their diversity in the newsgathering and news reporting process,” reads the paper. 

It goes on to point to a 2018 study from the global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, which shows how diverse companies outperform those that aren’t as diverse, leading to a 36 per cent increase of profitability. This is often attributed to healthier work environments, which foster growth and innovation.

In Canada, we’re barely even catching up to the racial realities of our newsrooms, as the Canadian Association of Journalists pointed out last year in one of the most comprehensive analyses of newsroom diversity ever published (in which Bell Media’s CTV refused to participate).

That survey collected race-based data on 3,783 journalists in 209 newsrooms and the results were disheartening. It found that almost half of all Canadian newsrooms exclusively employed white journalists, and that about nine in 10 newsrooms have no Latin, Middle Eastern or mixed race journalists on staff. 

About eight in 10 newsrooms have no Black or Indigenous journalists; two-thirds have no Asian people on staff. Eighty per cent of newsrooms have no visible minority journalists in any of the top-three editorial positions: editor-in-chief, executive producer, or deputy editor.

This impacts the quality of political news we receive, with racialized candidates viewed as “outsiders.” This biased lens means they receive more negative coverage than white candidates, according to Erin Tolley, assistant professor of political science at the University of Toronto, and author of the 2016 book, “Framed: Media and the Coverage of Race in Canadian Politics.”

So, for communities sometimes underserved or stereotyped by mainstream media, it’s a good day when a racialized journalist steps into a leadership role.

Except when it happens under circumstances like the one both Sachedina and LaFlamme found themselves in. That’s on Bell Media.

Source: Racial diversity is good for business but CTV, Bell Media got it horribly wrong

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Liberal government cuts funding, suspends anti-racism group’s project after tweets

2022/08/24 Leave a comment

Should never have happened.

Officials need to do a better job in G&C applications vetting, including social media of the organization and key staff to reduce future risks:

The Liberal government has cut funding for an anti-racism group and suspended work on a project it was running after a member of the group made antisemitic remarks in a social media post.

“Antisemitism has no place in this country. The antisemitic comments made by Laith Marouf are reprehensible and vile,” Housing, Diversity and Inclusion Minister Ahmed Hussen said in a statement posted on Twitter Monday.

“We have provided notice to the Community Media Advocacy Centre (CMAC) that their funding has been cut and their project has been suspended.”

Marouf, a senior consultant on an anti-racism project that received $133,000 from the federal government, posted the controversial remarks on his Twitter account. The account is private but a screenshot of the post showed a number of tweets with his photo and name.

One tweet said: “You know all those loud mouthed bags of human feces, aka the Jewish White Supremacists; when we liberate Palestine and they have to go back to where they come from, they will return to being low voiced bitches of [their] Christian/Secular White Supremacist Masters.”

Last year, the Community Media Advocacy Centre (CMAC) received a $133,800 Department of Canadian Heritage grant to build an anti-racism strategy for Canadian broadcasting.

The Liberal government has cut funding to an outside group it hired to deliver anti-racism training after it was discovered that one of the group’s leaders made antisemitic remarks in social media posts.

Marouf is listed as a senior consultant on CMAC’s website and is quoted saying that CMAC is “excited to launch” the “Building an Anti-Racism Strategy for Canadian Broadcasting: Conversation & Convergence Initiative” with funding support from Heritage’s anti-racism action program.

He expressed gratitude to “Canadian Heritage for their partnership and trust imposed on us,” saying that CMAC commits to “ensuring the successful and responsible execution of the project.”

Marouf is not antisemitic, says lawyer

In Hussen’s statement, he called on CMAC to explain how it came to hire Marouf and how it plans to rectify the damage caused by his “antisemitic and xenophobic statements.”

“We look forward to a proper response on their next steps and clear accountability regarding this matter,” he said.

The Canadian Press reported last week that a lawyer acting for Marouf asked for his client’s tweets to be quoted “verbatim” and distinguished between Marouf’s “clear reference to ‘Jewish white supremacists”‘ and Jews or Jewish people in general.

Marouf does not harbour “any animus toward the Jewish faith as a collective group,” lawyer Stephen Ellis said in an email.

Source: Liberal government cuts funding, suspends anti-racism group’s project after tweets

Lilley of the Toronto Sun:

At noon Monday, Diversity Minister Ahmed Hussen tweeted out that he was cutting the funding from the Community Media Advocacy Centre.

The Montreal based group received a $133,822 grant last September for a program called Building an Anti-Racism Strategy for Canadian Broadcasting. It had already held workshops in Vancouver, Montreal and Halifax with events still scheduled for Calgary, Winnipeg and Ottawa.

A major problem, though, were the comments from the man leading these sessions, Laith Marouf. He has called “Jewish White Supremacists” “bags of human feces,” said that French is an ugly language, and that “Frogs have much less IQ.” He once called Colin Powell the “Jamaican house slave of the Empire.”

Marouf’s lawyer said that Marouf does not have “any animus toward the Jewish faith as a collective group” and said his tweets made a clear distinction between “Jewish White Supremacists” and Jews in general.  But that explanation is difficult to accept.

That’s not the kind of person who should be lecturing another human being on racism.

“The anti-Semitic comments made by Laith Marouf are reprehensible and vile,” Hussen said in a statement.

“We have provided notice to the Community Media Advocacy Centre (CMAC) that their funding has been cut and their project has been suspended.”

Hussen called on CMAC to explain how they came to hire Marouf, given that the group is supposed to be about fighting racism and hate while Marouf’s comments were “anti-Semitic and xenophobic.” The minister should be pushing CMAC to answer those questions, but he has to answer many himself.

How did this group and Marouf get funding in the first place?

How could Hussen end up being quoted in an April press release with Marouf when a simple search would have turned up many of his vile comments?

Will anyone be held accountable for this?

We used to have ministerial accountability in our government; ministers would resign when their departments messed up. There’s no doubt that the government did mess up, not just Hussen’s department, but also Canadian Heritage which approved the grant.

Speaking to government insiders to get a sense of how this came to be shows a series of missteps across four different ministers, two departments and many months. The grant was approved last September as Canada was in the middle of a federal election.

The grant had been making its way through the system at Heritage Canada which was then overseen by then-minister Steven Guilbeault. While the grant was funded by Heritage, it was handed out by the Minister of Diversity, Inclusion and Youth which at that time was Bardish Chagger.

By the time the government got around to actually handing out the money and making and making an announcement, Pablo Rodriguez was the minister at Heritage and Hussen had taken over the diversity file. It appears that the vetting process wasn’t fully followed because the people in charge assumed others had or would do the vetting required.

On the one hand, I am tempted to cut the government some slack because their contract was with CMAC, not Larouf, but he’s been with them for years. This was not a new hire; he’s featured on their website and was likely central to their application.

According to government sources, had the contract been directly with Marouf, he could have been fired immediately. Since the contract was with CMAC, the government had legal advice they had to follow before the contract could be terminated.

There is now an internal review to see how this happened, and the government is looking at their options, including whether any funding can be recovered from the group.

They should be reviewing the entire anti-racism training industry they are supporting. As I’ve written previously, it appears to a sham.

It took the Trudeau government longer than it should have to fix their mistake, but at least they are fixing it.

Source: LILLEY: Firing anti-racism group took too long given trainer’s racist comments

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , , ,

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