Bouchard: L’interculturalisme, indifférent au social?

2021/11/15 1 Comment

More Quebec diversity debates with the unfortunate mischaracterization of multiculturalism in opposition to interculturalism whereas in reality, the practical differences are nuanced (multiculturalism allows one to integrate into either French or English, interculturalism into French):

C’est un plaisir d’échanger avec un interlocuteur comme Marco Micone. Son engagement en faveur du Québec est bien connu, ses analyses sont toujours pertinentes et ses avis méritent attention. Dans son texte paru dans l’édition du Devoir des 23 et 24 octobre, il soulève à propos de l’interculturalisme une critique que d’autres ont déjà formulée, mais il le fait d’une façon particulièrement bien articulée.

Sa critique principale, c’est que l’interculturalisme québécois, tel que proposé, donnerait dans le culturalisme. Il accorderait donc une nette préséance aux facteurs culturels (et ethniques) aux dépens et même dans l’ignorance d’autres facteurs, principalement tout ce qui se rattache au social. C’est la première objection. Selon la deuxième, l’interculturalisme en viendrait ainsi à masquer la réalité concrète des hommes et des femmes dans leur vie quotidienne. Selon une troisième objection, il faudrait centrer l’attention non pas sur les différences, mais sur « l’humanité » que partagent ces hommes et ces femmes — « on ne peut pas parler de culture italienne, algérienne, haïtienne ou autre au Québec ».

En quatrième lieu, l’interculturalisme est accusé de proposer une conception abstraite et statique des cultures et de « ne pas tenir compte du contexte qui les détermine et les nourrit ». Enfin, les propositions et explications soumises par le modèle ne déborderaient pas la sphère culturelle.

Voici comment je réponds à ces cinq objections, à la lumière de la définition que j’ai déjà donnée de l’interculturalisme (notamment dans mon ouvrage de 2012).

En ce qui concerne la première critique, nous savons que depuis quelques décennies, au Québec comme dans plusieurs sociétés, le racisme se nourrit moins de traits physiques que de caractéristiques culturelles (les Noirs sont paresseux, les musulmans, fondamentalistes, les Mexicains, violents, etc.). On reconnaît là un fondement de diverses pratiques discriminatoires bien connues. Voilà un exemple où le culturel est intimement lié au social. Un autre exemple a trait au rapport majorité-minorité. Encore là, l’analyse culturelle révèle des systèmes de perceptions favorisant la domination et l’exclusion. Dans ce cas, l’interculturalisme invite à examiner une configuration démographique et le rapport de pouvoir inégal qui lui est associé.

Des modèles préétablis

À propos du deuxième argument, ce sont bien sûr les comportements des hommes et des femmes qui sont en définitive déterminants, ceux des membres de la société d’accueil comme ceux des immigrants. Mais les premiers seront incités à reproduire (souvent inconsciemment) les préconceptions que je viens d’évoquer alors que les seconds devront les confronter pour s’en défendre. La sociologie a bien établi que les individus inventent rarement leurs conduites. Ils obéissent ou réagissent le plus souvent à des modèles préétablis, des modèles relativement stables que les acteurs perpétuent par leurs comportements.

La troisième objection appelle une nuance importante. Encore une fois sur la base de nombreuses études, il paraît peu contestable que, parmi les populations immigrantes, il subsiste pendant longtemps assez d’éléments de la culture d’origine pour parler de différences ethnoculturelles. C’est justement parmi ces différences que se trouvent les traits servant de prétextes au racisme. Il importe donc d’y porter attention. En même temps, bien évidemment, on doit se garder de figer ces traits dans des carcans culturels dont l’immigrant n’arrive plus à se défaire — c’est l’une des principales critiques adressées au multiculturalisme. Ainsi, au gré des contacts, des échanges et des choix de chacun dans la vie quotidienne, une culture commune prend forme — une culture québécoise (c’est aussi ce que pense Marco Micone).

Quatrièmement, affirmer que l’interculturalisme propose une vision abstraite et statique des cultures, hors de leur contexte, c’est lui faire un faux procès. Je dirais même que ce type de préoccupation est au cœur du modèle. Sur ce point, j’aurais apprécié que l’auteur produise quelques références.

Cinquièmement, Marco Micone affirme que l’interculturalisme ne rend pas compte des disparités économiques et des affinités de classes. Il a raison, mais ce ne sont pas là ses objectifs propres. Il est par contre inexact d’affirmer qu’il s’en désintéresse. Certes, il ne prétend pas les expliquer, mais il en tient compte assurément, dans la mesure où ces réalités pèsent sur les possibilités et modalités de l’intégration et ses aléas.

Enfin, on aura compris que, dans mon esprit, l’interculturalisme ne prétend nullement « expliquer le sort et le comportement des individus par la culture, au mépris des déterminants sociaux ». Je soutiens cependant qu’il existe une composante culturelle inhérente aux performances scolaires, à la déviance et à la pauvreté (je reprends ici le texte de l’auteur), ce qui a été bien établi par une longue tradition de recherche. Il va de soi, par ailleurs, que la culture n’est qu’une composante parmi d’autres.

Pour toutes ces raisons, j’affirme que, si on veut comprendre le culturel, on ne peut éviter de porter attention au social. Et vice-versa.

Je remercie Marco Micone de m’avoir donné l’occasion d’apporter ces clarifications.

Source: L’interculturalisme, indifférent au social?

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Document suggesting students learn positive aspects of Nazi Germany deleted by Alberta education officials

2021/11/15 Leave a comment

Striking that the document dates from 1984 with multiple revisions without anyone noticing or taking action:

A document that suggested Alberta students learn about the positive aspects of Nazi Germany has been deleted from the Ministry of Education’s website, following criticism from multiple groups.

The document, a set of guidelines for “recognizing diversity and promoting respect,” suggested considering whether a given educational resource addressed “both the positive and negative behaviours” of various groups.

“For instance,” it read, “if a video details war atrocities committed by the Nazis, does it also point out that before World War II, German government’s policies substantially strengthened the country’s economy?”

Source: Document suggesting students learn positive aspects of Nazi Germany deleted by Alberta education officials

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Pakistan: When Databases Get to Define Family

2021/11/13 Leave a comment

Good long and interesting read:

“ERROR: UNMARRIED MOTHER” flashed across the computer screen as 30-year-old Riz began the process of renewing his Pakistani Computerized National ID Card (CNIC), a compulsory identification document that functions like a social security number, driver’s license, and passport all rolled into one. Riz’s parents have been married for 31 years, but the database did not agree; there was no way to proceed without this validation check. Every visit to the registration office ended with an officer saying, “Sorry, sir, the computer doesn’t allow it.”

Without a renewed CNIC, Riz could not even buy a bus ticket. In Pakistan, access to sectors and services as diverse as telecom, banking, health records, social welfare, voting, and employment have all been made contingent on having a verified record with the National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA).

Riz’s identity validation problem was not caused by a glitch in the system. The requirement of having two married parents is, instead, an example of the social judgments encoded within Pakistan’s digital ID database design. It turned out that, to avoid taking on her husband’s family name, Riz’s mother had never updated her marital status with NADRA. In the analog Pakistan of the early 1990s, she had gotten by without issue. Thirty years later, social expectations had become embedded into databases, and Riz would be unable to access basic services unless a query on his mother’s marital status returned “TRUE.”

Riz’s experience tells the larger story of how Pakistan chose to structure its digital ID system. The system places each individual within a comprehensive digital family tree. Digital households are built up of pre-encoded, socially and legally approved relationships, and can be connected to other households through similar socially and legally approved relationships. Each registered individual is required to prove ties of blood or marriage to another verified Pakistani citizen. Marriages (state-approved) create a link between two households, and children (only through marriage) create a continuing link with both households’ genealogies.

Pakistan’s experience with creating databases that encode kinship reveals important lessons about the complexities of building digital ID systems. Database design is not just computational. At every step, social, political, and technical decisions coalesce.

Source: When Databases Get to Define Family

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US Black Farmworkers Say They Lost Jobs to Foreigners Who Were Paid More

2021/11/13 Leave a comment

Seems like a clear case of displacement of long-term farmworkers by temporary foreign workers, ironically and disgracefully African Americans replaced by white South Africans:

For more than a quarter-century, Richard Strong worked the fertile farmland of the Mississippi Delta, just as his father and his grandfather did, a family lineage of punishing labor and meager earnings that stretched back to his enslaved ancestors brought from Africa.

He tilled the soil, fertilized crops and irrigated the fields, nurturing an annual bounty of cotton, soybeans and corn for a prominent farming family. “I’ve been around farming all my life,” Mr. Strong said. “It’s all we knew.”

Black families with deep connections to the Delta have historically been the ones to perform fieldwork. That began to change about a decade ago, when the first of dozens of young, white workers flew in from South Africa on special guest worker visas. Mr. Strong and his co-workers trained the men, who by last year were being lured across the globe with wages of more than $11 an hour, compared with the $7.25 an hour that Mr. Strong and other Black local workers were paid.

Growers brought in more South Africans with each passing year, and they are now employed at more than 100 farms across the Delta. Mr. Strong, 50, and several other longtime workers said they were told their services were no longer needed.

“I never did imagine that it would come to the point where they would be hiring foreigners, instead of people like me,” Mr. Strong said.

From the wheat farms in the Midwest to the citrus groves in California’s Central Valley, growers have increasingly turned to foreign workers as aging farmworkers exit the fields and low-skilled workers opt for jobs in construction, hospitality and warehouses, which offer higher pay, year-round work and, sometimes, benefits.

The agricultural guest worker program, known by the shorthand H-2A, was once shunned by farmers here and elsewhere as expensive and bureaucratic. But the continuing farm labor shortages across the country pushed H-2A visas up to 213,394 in the 2020 fiscal year, from 55,384 in 2011.

“Our choice is between importing our food or importing the work force necessary to produce domestically,” said Craig Regelbrugge, a veteran agricultural industry advocate who is an expert on the program. “That’s never been truer than it is today. Virtually all new workers entering into the agriculture work force these days are H-2A workers.”

In the Mississippi Delta, a region of high unemployment and entrenched poverty, the labor mobility that is widening the pool of fieldworkers is having a devastating effect on local workers who are often ill-equipped to compete with the new hires, frequently younger and willing to work longer hours.

The new competition is upending what for many has been a way of life in the rich farmlands of Mississippi. “It’s like being robbed of your heritage,” Mr. Strong said.

In Mississippi, where the legacy of slavery and racism has long pervaded work in the cotton fields, a federal lawsuit filed by Mr. Strong and five other displaced Black farmworkers claims that the new foreign workers were illegally paid at higher rates than local Black workers, who it said had for years been subjected to racial slurs and other demeaning treatment from a white supervisor.

Two additional plaintiffs are preparing to join the suit, which says farmers violated civil rights law by hiring only white workers from South Africa, a country with its own history of racial injustice.

“Black workers have been doing this work for generations,” said Ty Pinkins, a lawyer at the Mississippi Center for Justice, which is representing the Black farmworkers in the lawsuit. “They know the land, they know the seasons, they know the equipment.”

A vast flood plain, the Mississippi Delta boasts some of the country’s richest soil. It also is the poorest pocket of the poorest state. In Indianola, a town of almost 10,000 about 95 miles north of Jackson, the median household income is $28,941.

The hometown of the blues legend B.B. King, Indianola is the seat of Sunflower County, where empty storefronts line forlorn downtowns and children play outside crumbling shacks.

The region, which is more than 70 percent Black, remains rigidly segregated. Black children attend underfunded public schools while white students go to private academies. Black and white families bury their dead in different cemeteries.

The Delta is only one of a number of places where South Africans have been hired for agricultural work in recent years. While Mexicans accounted for the largest share of last year’s H-2A visas, or 197,908 of them, the second-largest number, 5,508, went to South Africans. Their numbers soared 441 percent between 2011 and 2020.

Garold Dungy, who until two years ago ran an agency that recruited foreign farmworkers, including for Pitt Farms, the operation that employed Mr. Strong and the other plaintiffs, said South Africans represented the bulk of his business. They are “the preferred group,” he said, because of their strong work ethic and fluency in English.

Under the program, growers can hire foreign workers for up to 10 months. They must pay them an hourly wage that is set by the Labor Department and varies from state to state, as well as their transportation and housing.

Farmers must also show that they have tried, and failed, to find Americans to perform the work and they must pay domestic workers the same rate they are paying the imported laborers.

According to the Black workers’ lawsuit, Pitt Farms paid the South Africans $9.87 an hour in 2014, a rate that reached $11.83 in 2020. The plaintiffs who worked in the fields were paid the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour or $8.25 on weekends, plus occasional bonuses.

Both Walter Pitts, a co-owner of Pitts Farms, and the farm’s lawyer, Timothy Threadgill, declined to discuss the farm’s hiring strategy because of the pending litigation.

The reliance on South Africans may reflect the nature of agriculture and the demographics in the Mississippi Delta, compared with places like California.

“In the Mississippi Delta, row-crop production requires fewer workers but workers who have skills to use machinery and equipment,” said Elizabeth Canales, an agricultural extension economist at Mississippi State University. “We hardly have any Latinos in this remote region. Naturally, it’s easier to hire South Africans where language will not be a barrier, especially because in this area, you have a very small Spanish-speaking population.”

The South Africans arrived in the region willing to work weeks that sometimes stretched to 75 hours or more, grueling schedules that might have been difficult for older local workers to maintain, industry analysts said.

There was initially no public controversy over the program in Indianola. Growers in the region described the South Africans as “good workers,” said Steve Rosenthal, a three-term mayor of Indianola who lost his bid for re-election in October. Until the lawsuit was filed, he did not realize that some Black workers had been let go.

“If you have a man that you’ve trained and worked with for years and he knows how to get stuff done,” he said, “how in good conscience can you bring somebody over and pay him more than a man that’s been with you five, eight, 10 years?”

The Strong family has worked for generations for the Pitts family, which has farmed in the Mississippi Delta for six decades. Richard Strong’s grandfather Henry and grandmother Isadora worked their land. So did his father and his uncle.

Mr. Strong and his brother got hired in the 1990s; he eventually operated not only tractors, but big equipment like combines and cotton pickers. He mixed chemicals to control weeds and pests. He ran irrigation pivots in 19 fields, covering some 3,000 acres. He rose to manager, driving across the farm to verify that everything was in working order.

When he first heard that Africans were coming to work on the farm, about eight years ago, “I didn’t question it. I just went along doing my job,” he said.

But when four white men showed up, they were not the Africans he had expected. Even so, Mr. Strong said, the men, a good 20 years younger than him, were “cool guys.”

He taught the men how to properly plow, how to input GPS settings into the tractors’ navigation systems, how to operate the irrigation system so just the right amount of water was sprinkled on the crops.

Over the next few years, more South Africans came, until more than half the farm’s work force was there on foreign visas.

One of them was Innes Singleton, now 28, who learned about the opportunity to work in Mississippi from a friend in 2012.

He had recently finished secondary school and did not know what to do next.

He arrived in Indianola in early 2013, and is now earning $12 an hour, making in one week what would take a month for him to earn in South Africa, where the unemployment rate now exceeds 30 percent.

“I learned a lot here,” he said, adding that he sometimes had to work up to 110 hours a week. South Africans now do the main work on the farm, he said, and four locals “help us out.”

After the 2019 season, Mr. Strong traveled to Texas to visit his ailing father-in-law. When he returned, the Pitts Farm truck that he drove had disappeared from outside the house he had rented from the grower for about a year. He was told to vacate and was not offered work for the 2020 season.

A year later, others were let go, including his brother, Gregory, who said he had devoted much of his life to Pitt Farms.

“I gave them half my life and ended up with nothing,” he said. “I know everything on that place. I even know the dirt.”

Andrew Johnson, another plaintiff in the lawsuit, is 66 and said he had worked 20 years at the farm.

“I used to work rain or shine or anything,” he said.

But before the 2021 season began, he said, one of the Pitts owners told him “he didn’t need me no more.”

Since the lawsuit was filed, other Black workers have come forward, saying they had labored in the fields and catfish farms of the Delta before unfairly losing their jobs, Mr. Pinkins, the lawyer, said.

In late October, as the harvesting season came to a close, eighteen-wheelers in Indianola rumbled down the highway, loaded with bales of cotton. Driving alongside the farm where he spent 24 years, Mr. Strong scanned the rows of neatly carved earth as far as the eye could see. “I put in all that,” he said, with a certain pride.

Then a tractor passed by, a young South African man at the wheel, and Mr. Strong looked away. “I miss working the land,” he said.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/12/us/black-farmworkers-mississippi-lawsuit.html

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Saudi Arabia Gives Citizenship to ‘Outstanding’ Expats in Shift

2021/11/13 Leave a comment

Will be interesting to see who qualifies:

Saudi Arabia granted citizenship to an unspecified number of foreigners whose expertise could help the country as it diversifies away from oil, a major shift that follows a similar decision by the neighboring UAE earlier this year.

The program targets people with “outstanding capabilities” and backgrounds in “rare specialties,” the official Saudi Press Agency reported. The kingdom will focus on naturalizing foreigners in fields including Shariah, medicine, science, culture, sports and technology, “in order to strengthen the pace of development” and boost its attractiveness for investment and human capital, the agency said.

Saudi Arabia becomes the second Gulf country to formalize a process aimed at giving expatriates a bigger stake in the economy after the UAE announced its own naturalization program for exceptional foreigners in January.

It also underlines the kingdom’s growing competition with its neighbors for business and talent as Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman tries to expand non-oil sectors such as tourism and manufacturing.

Immigrants make up a third of the population in Saudi Arabia, but with extremely limited mechanisms for granting permanent residency or nationality, they have little long-term stability.

Even as officials work to attract more highly-educated foreigners, the government has been reserving for Saudis many jobs once occupied by lower-income immigrants from other Arab, Asian and African countries — part of an effort to tackle citizen unemployment of over 11%.

Source: Saudi Arabia Gives Citizenship to ‘Outstanding’ Expats in Shift

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Canada forced these Japanese Canadians into internment camps. Now they’re at the same nursing home

2021/11/13 2 Comments

Good reminder of our history and the lasting memories:

Leaning forward in her wheelchair to look over a massive photo album, Sue Kai delves into memories from decades ago. Kai, 96, and her son, Brian, pore over snapshots of her past, some dating back to the moment her life was irrevocably changed.

Kai was 16 years old, and living with her family in the downtown Vancouver home her father built with his own two hands, when it happened.

“One Sunday everybody is going crazy: ‘Bomb bomb bomb bomb,'” said Kai. “I said, what’s a ‘bomb bomb bomb bomb?’ Then they said ‘Pearl Harbor.'”

Source: Canada forced these Japanese Canadians into internment camps. Now they’re at the same nursing home

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Australian comms agencies perceive diversity as not urgent

2021/11/13 Leave a comment

Of note. Any views on how this compares with Canada?:

A new study by the Framework for Agency Inclusion and Representation (FAIR) and comms agency Think HQ showed that Australian comms agencies are falling behind on diversity practices. While awareness appeared to be high, qualitative findings showed that there were inconsistencies on knowledge and implementation in the workplace as well as in client work and advisory.

The survey, which used 131 responses from the country’s comms industry, found that while all respondents are quite aware of broader diversity and inclusion principles that initially focused on gender, many have limited understanding, much less a focus on cultural diversity. Most of them were aware of the cultural diversity of the Australian population, but do not see the urgency or importance of integrating it in their business operations enough to equate it with business success.

For example, one respondent suggested that they do not see integrating cultural diversity matters in their business as essential because “people are succeeding without it”. The respondent added: “We still seem to be progressing well adapting and being so people don’t see the urgency of the need.”

Another respondent said that diversity in the workplace is not a priority for them because it isn’t tied to their KPIs. Yet another respondent said that multiculturalism in comms work is ‘niche’ whether communicating to Australian-born audiences or residents with migrant backgrounds. “I don’t think it is so much about making your communication sharper for… culturally diverse audiences because they are too niche,” this person said.

In terms of hiring, the interviewees acknowledged the lack of communication practitioners with culturally diverse backgrounds. A few of them who recruited from England had the propensity to count those hires as part of the ‘culturally diverse’ cohort. A majority of respondents quoted that some 20% of their staff have a culturally diverse background but when further probed, they indicated that the number could have included British, who are not considered culturally and linguistically diverse.

One respondent said: “If I think about my career today, it’s predominantly been in agencies with privileged white people, private school-educated, tertiary education.”

While ‘positive discrimination’ was quoted as a way to recruit more culturally diverse talent, many respondents also mentioned that second- and third-generation Australians do not necessarily want to be identified based on their ethnicity or ancestry. This appears to be a conundrum that many recruiters or leaders still face in Australia.

Here are a few charts that reflect findings from the study:

Source: Australian comms agencies perceive diversity as not urgent

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Facebook Employees Found a Simple Way To Tackle Misinformation. They ‘Deprioritized’ It After Meeting With Mark Zuckerberg, Documents Show

2021/11/12 Leave a comment

More on Facebook and Zuckerberg’s failure to act against mis- and dis-information:

In May 2019, a video purporting to show House Speaker Nancy Pelosiinebriated, slurring her words as she gave a speech at a public event, went viral on Facebook. In reality, somebody had slowed the footage down to 75% of its original speed.

On one Facebook page alone, the doctored video received more than 3 million views and 48,000 shares. Within hours it had been reuploaded to different pages and groups, and spread to other social media platforms. In thousands of Facebook comments on pro-Trump and rightwing pages sharing the video, users called Pelosi “demented,” “messed up” and “an embarrassment.”
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

Two days after the video was first uploaded, and following angry calls from Pelosi’s team, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made the final call: the video did not break his site’s rules against disinformation or deepfakes, and therefore it would not be taken down. At the time, Facebook said it would instead demote the video in people’s feeds.

Inside Facebook, employees soon discovered that the page that shared the video of Pelosi was a prime example of a type of platform manipulation that had been allowing misinformation to spread unchecked. The page—and others like it—had built up a large audience not by posting original content, but by taking content from other sources around the web that had already gone viral. Once audiences had been established, nefarious pages would often pivot to posting misinformation or financial scams to their many viewers. The tactic was similar to how the Internet Research Agency (IRA), the Russian troll farm that had meddled in the 2016 U.S. election, spread disinformation to American Facebook users. Facebook employees gave the tactic a name: “manufactured virality.”

In April 2020, a team at Facebook working on “soft actions”—solutions that stop short of removing problematic content—presented Zuckerberg with a plan to reduce the reach of pages that pursued “manufactured virality” as a tactic. The plan would down-rank these pages, making it less likely that users would see their posts in the News Feed. It would impact the pages that shared the doctored video of Pelosi, employees specifically pointed out in their presentation to Zuckerberg. They also suggested it could significantly reduce misinformation posted by pages on the platform since the pages accounted for 64% of page-related misinformation views but only 19% of total page-related views.

But in response to feedback given by Zuckerberg during the meeting, the employees “deprioritized” that line of work in order to focus on projects with a “clearer integrity impact,” internal company documents show.

This story is partially based on whistleblower Frances Haugen’s disclosures to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which were also provided to Congress in redacted form by her legal team. The redacted versions were seen by a consortium of news organizations, including TIME. Many of the documents were first reported by the Wall Street Journal. They paint a picture of a company obsessed with boosting user engagement, even as its efforts to do so incentivized divisive, angry and sensational content. They also show how the company often turned a blind eye to warnings from its own researchers about how it was contributing to societal harms.

A pitch to Zuckerberg with few visible downsides

Manufactured virality is a tactic that has been used frequently by bad actors to game the platform, according to Jeff Allen, the co-founder of the Integrity Institute and a former Facebook data scientist who worked closely on manufactured virality before he left the company in 2019. This includes a range of groups, from teenagers in Macedonia who found that targeting hyper-partisan U.S. audiences in 2016 was a lucrative business, to covert influence operations by foreign governments including the Kremlin. “Aggregating content that previously went viral is a strategy that all sorts of bad actors have used to build large audiences on platforms,” Allen told TIME. “The IRA did it, the financially motivated troll farms in the Balkans did it, and it’s not just a U.S. problem. It’s a tactic used across the world by actors who want to target various communities for their own financial or political gain.”

In the April 2020 meeting, Facebook employees working in the platform’s “integrity” division, which focuses on safety, presented a raft of suggestions to Zuckerberg about how to reduce the virality of harmful content on the platform. Several of the suggestions—titled “Big ideas to reduce prevalence of bad content”—had already been launched; some were still the subjects of experiments being run on the platform by Facebook researchers. Others —including tackling “manufactured virality”—were early concepts that employees were seeking approval from Zuckerberg to explore in more detail.

The employees noted that much “manufactured virality” content was already against Facebook’s rules. The problem, they said, was that the company inconsistently enforced those rules. “We already have a policy against pages that [pursue manufactured virality],” they wrote. “But [we] don’t consistently enforce on this policy today.”

The employees’ presentation said that further research was needed to determine the “integrity impact” of taking action against manufactured virality. But they pointed out that the tactic disproportionately contributed to the platform’s misinformation problem. They had compiled statistics showing that nearly two-thirds of page-related misinformation came from “manufactured virality” pages, compared to less than one fifth of total page-related views.

Acting against “manufactured virality” would bring few business risks, the employees added. Doing so would not reduce the number of times users logged into Facebook per day, nor the number of “likes” that they gave to other pieces of content, the presentation noted. Neither would cracking down on such content impact freedom of speech, the presentation said, since only reshares of unoriginal content—not speech—would be affected.

But Zuckerberg appeared to discourage further research. After presenting the suggestion to the CEO, employees posted an account of the meeting on Facebook’s internal employee forum, Workplace. In the post, they said that based on Zuckerberg’s feedback they would now be “deprioritizing” the plans to reduce manufactured virality, “in favor of projects that have a clearer integrity impact.” Zuckerberg approved several of the other suggestions that the team presented in the same meeting, including “personalized demotions,” or demoting content for users based on their feedback.

Andy Stone, a Facebook spokesperson, rejected suggestions that employees were discouraged from researching manufactured virality. “Researchers pursued this and, while initial results didn’t demonstrate a significant impact, they were free to continue to explore it,” Stone wrote in a statement to TIME. He said the company had nevertheless contributed significant resources to reducing bad content, including down-ranking. “These working documents from years ago show our efforts to understand these issues and don’t reflect the product and policy solutions we’ve implemented since,” he wrote. “We recently published our Content Distribution Guidelines that describe the kinds of content whose distribution we reduce in News Feed. And we’ve spent years standing up teams, developing policies and collaborating with industry peers to disrupt coordinated attempts by foreign and domestic inauthentic groups to abuse our platform.”

But even today, pages that share unoriginal viral content in order to boost engagement and drive traffic to questionable websites are still some of the most popular on the entire platform, according to a report released by Facebook in August.

Allen, the former Facebook data scientist, says Facebook and other platforms should be focused on tackling manufactured virality, because it’s a powerful way to make platforms more resilient against abuse. “Platforms need to ensure that building up large audiences in a community should require genuine work and provide genuine value for the community,” he says. “Platforms leave them themselves vulnerable and exploitable by bad actors across the globe if they allow large audiences to be built up by the extremely low-effort practice of scraping and reposting content that previously went viral.”

The internal Facebook documents show that some researchers noted that cracking down on “manufactured virality” might reduce Meaningful Social Interactions (MSI)—a statistic that Facebook began using in 2018 to help rank its News Feed. The algorithm change was meant to show users more content from their friends and family, and less from politicians and news outlets. But an internal analysis from 2018 titled “Does Facebook reward outrage” reported that the more negative comments a Facebook post elicited​​—content like the altered Pelosi video—the more likely the link in the post was to be clicked by users. “The mechanics of our platform are not neutral,” one Facebook employee wrote at the time. Since the content with more engagement was placed more highly in users’ feeds, it created a feedback loop that incentivized the posts that drew the most outrage. “Anger and hate is the easiest way to grow on Facebook,” Haugen told the British Parliament on Oct. 25.

How “manufactured virality” led to trouble in Washington

Zuckerberg’s decision in May 2019 not to remove the doctored video of Pelosi seemed to mark a turning point for many Democratic lawmakers fed up with the company’s larger failure to stem misinformation. At the time, it led Pelosi—one of the most powerful members of Congress, who represents the company’s home state of California—to deliver an unusually scathing rebuke. She blasted Facebook as “willing enablers” of political disinformation and interference, a criticism increasingly echoed by many other lawmakers. Facebook defended its decision, saying that they had “dramatically reduced the distribution of that content” as soon as its fact-checking partners flagged the video for misinformation.

Pelosi’s office did not respond to TIME’s request for comment on this story.

The circumstances surrounding the Pelosi video exemplify how Facebook’s pledge to show political disinformation to fewer users only after third-party fact-checkers flag it as misleading or manipulated—a process that can take hours or even days—does little to stop this content from going viral immediately after it is posted.

In the lead-up to the 2020 election, after Zuckerberg discouraged employees from tackling manufactured virality, hyper-partisan sites used the tactic as a winning formula to drive engagement to their pages. In August 2020, another doctored video falsely claiming to show Pelosi inebriated again went viral. Pro-Trump and rightwing Facebook pages shared thousands of similar posts, from doctored videos meant to make then-candidate Joe Biden appear lost or confused while speaking at events, to edited videos claiming to show voter fraud.

In the aftermath of the election, the same network of pages that had built up millions of followers between them using manufactured virality tactics used the reach they had built to spread the lie that the election had been stolen.

Source: Facebook Employees Found a Simple Way To Tackle Misinformation. They ‘Deprioritized’ It After Meeting With Mark Zuckerberg, Documents Show

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Olympic Games are great for propagandists – how the lessons of Hitler’s Olympics loom over Beijing 2022

2021/11/12 Leave a comment

Canadian sports journalists to note:

On the morning of Aug. 14, 1936, two NBC employees met for breakfast at a café in Berlin. Max Jordan and Bill Slater were discussing the Olympic Games they were broadcasting back to the United States – and the Nazi propaganda machine that had made their work, and their visit to Germany, somewhat unpleasant. 

Slater complained about all the staged regimentation and the obviously forced smiles everywhere. 

“Why don’t they revolt? We wouldn’t stand for all this browbeating and bullying in America. I know that. Why do they stand for it here?” Slater asked Jordan. 

As they were talking, three armed Nazi guards sat down at the next table. The whole café quieted. “It was as though a chill had come over those present,” Jordan later recalled. “In a nutshell, there was the answer to Bill’s question.”

I included the story Max Jordan recounted in his memoir in my book on the Nazi origins of Olympic broadcasting because it perfectly encapsulated the quandary facing American sports journalists whenever the International Olympic Committee pushes them to broadcast happy images provided by repressive regimes.

It’s now less than 100 days from the opening ceremony of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, and therefore it’s time for an honest discussion about the ethics of sport journalism and the morality of American media’s complicity with authoritarian regimes that hide the active repression of their citizens.

Abundant evidence

The world knows what China is doing right now. Courageous reporting has publicized the series of repressive domestic and international actions taken by the Chinese government over the past five years.

The persecution of the Uyghurs and other human rights abuses, the abrogation of the Hong Kong treaty along with the imposition of the Chinese government’s repression in that port city, and the prevention of a comprehensive and transparent investigation into the origins of COVID-19 are all well documented. 

Thus, the Chinese government now wants good press in the West. And its efforts to ensure favorable coverage have prompted new concerns about media control and censorship during the Games, with a U.S. government spokesman recently urging Chinese government officials “not to limit freedom of movement and access for journalists and to ensure that they remain safe and able to report freely, including at the Olympic and the Paralympic Games.”

But, as was clear from the experience during the 1936 Olympics, if U.S. journalists go to Beijing and emphasize the beauty of its landscape, the happiness of its citizenry and its futuristic infrastructure, and fail to cover the more controversial realities in China, that would signal compliance with – and promotion of – Chinese propaganda. 

This is American sports journalism’s Red Smith moment. 

Politics, meet sports

On Jan. 4, 1980, Walter “Red” Smith, the veteran New York Times sports columnist, surprised his readership with his endorsement of the boycott movement against that summer’s Moscow Olympic Games. Boycott advocates were protesting the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. 

Smith’s stance was unexpected, as he had carefully sidestepped – or even ignored – many other moments he considered unhealthy political intrusion into international athletic competition. But Smith wrote that history had proved that America’s participation in the Nazi Games was a mistake – even if the great Black American runner Jesse Owens redeemed the event in public memory.

“When Americans look back to the 1936 Olympics,” Smith wrote in his famous column, “they take pleasure only in the memory of Jesse Owens’ four gold medals.” Outside of that, he admitted, “we are ashamed at having been guests at Adolf Hitler’s big party.”

Smith was an old-school sports reporter, already an old-timer in 1980 – he died in 1982. His reporting and columns reflected the influence of Grantland Rice and Paul Gallico, the giants who invented modern American sports writing in the 1920s. But there had always existed another group of sports reporters less afraid to point out obvious political unpleasantness.

For example, the great Jimmy Cannon had no problem freely peppering political references and acerbic commentary throughout his columns. Westbrook Pegler detested the Nazis and criticized them relentlessly throughout the 1936 Games. And Howard Cosell’s sharp commentaries, on such issues as Muhammad Ali’s boxing suspension in the 1960s and the political activism that erupted in 1968 in Mexico City, remain a credit to his legacy.‘The U.S. Olympic Committee … is in the main a group of pompous, arrogant and medieval-minded men who regard the games as a private social preserve,’ said Howard Cosell.

That Red Smith had spent decades remaining largely apolitical in public made his support for the boycott surprising. That he was only the second sports columnist to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize, and that his opinions were widely respected, gave his endorsement significant clout. 

‘The one lever we have’

Smith opened the gates for others to point out the incongruity and obvious hypocrisy of celebrating the Soviet Union’s peaceful intentions while the Soviet army was invading and occupying Afghanistan. In his column, Smith quoted British Member of Parliament Neville Trotter, who led the boycott movement in Great Britain. 

“This is the one lever we have to show our outrage at this naked aggression by Russia,” Trotter told Smith. “We should do all we can to reduce the Moscow Olympics to a shambles.” 

One well-known and nationally respected sports journalist has explicitly and unambiguously called for boycotting the 2022 Beijing Games: Sally Jenkins. The Washington Post’s veteran columnist – who last year was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for commentary – published a scorching column plainly stating that “ignorance is no longer an excuse.”

“It was a forgivable mistake to award an Olympics to Beijing in 2008,” she wrote. “It’s unforgivable to hold one there now.”

Red Smith’s boycott column remains one of his most important and lasting examples of public service. As a media historian, I believe that those who emulate his courage today, like Sally Jenkins, will likely be remembered in the same way tomorrow.

Source: https://theconversationcanada.cmail20.com/t/r-l-trtkukiy-kyldjlthkt-jj/

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Poland Gets Support From Europe on Tough Borders

2021/11/12 Leave a comment

Good example of “weaponization” of refugees:

The migration crisis of 2015, when millions of migrants and asylum seekers surged over Europe’s borders, nearly tore apart the European Union. Many members offered asylum to the refugees; others, like Poland and Hungary, wanted no part of it.

Six years later, the current standoff at the border of Poland and Belarus has echoes of that crisis, but this time, European officials insist that member states are united when it comes to defending Europe’s borders and that uncontrolled immigration is over.

What is different, the Europeans say, is that this crisis is entirely manufactured by the dictator of Belarus, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, as a response to sanctions that the Europeans imposed on his country in the face of a stolen election and a vicious repression of domestic dissent.

“This area between the Poland and Belarus borders is not a migration issue, but part of the aggression of Lukashenko toward Poland, Lithuania and Latvia, with the aim to destabilize the E.U.,” Ylva Johansson, the European commissioner for home affairs, said in an interview over the summer.

The crisis began in late August, when growing groups of migrants, mostly from the Middle East, began massing at the borders of Poland, Latvia and Lithuania, shepherded there by Belarus. That movement has now become much larger, with at least 4,000 or more men, women and children trapped in the freezing cold, without proper shelter or toilets, between Belarus and its neighbors.

Both Poland and Lithuania declared states of emergency and fortified their borders, while Belarusian forces have in some cases aided the migrants in breaking through. The border regions have been shut to journalists and aid workers, but upsetting videos and pictures of the migrants facing barbed wire have been distributed, often by Belarus itself.

On Wednesday, the German foreign minister, Heiko Maas, called Mr. Lukashenko’s tactics a “cynical power play” and said that blackmail must not be allowed to succeed. In Washington the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, met President Biden and emerged to say that what was transpiring on the Belarus border is “a hybrid attack, not a migration crisis.”

Source: Poland Gets Support From Europe on Tough Borders

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