++One of the real challenges that we’re facing is that we don’t have a lot of information +
++Social media has drastically restructured the way we communicate in an incredibly short period of time. We can discover, “Like,” click on, and share information faster than ever before, guided by algorithms most of us don’t quite understand. +
++And while some social scientists, journalists, and activists have been raising concerns about how this is affecting our democracy, mental health, and relationships, we haven’t seen biologists and ecologists weighing in as much. +
++That’s changed with a new paper published in the prestigious science journal PNAS earlier this month, titled “Stewardship of global collective behavior.” +
++Seventeen researchers who specialize in widely different fields, from climate science to philosophy, make the case that academics should treat the study of technology’s large-scale impact on society as a “crisis discipline.” A crisis discipline is a field in which scientists across different fields work quickly to address an urgent societal problem — like how conservation biology tries to protect endangered species or climate science research aims to stop global warming. +
++The paper argues that our lack of understanding about the collective behavioral effects of new technology is a danger to democracy and scientific progress. For example, the paper says that tech companies have “fumbled their way through the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, unable to stem the ‘infodemic’ of misinformation” that has hindered widespread acceptance of masks and vaccines. The authors warn that if left misunderstood and unchecked, we could see unintended consequences of new technology contributing to phenomena such as “election tampering, disease, violent extremism, famine, racism, and war.” +
++It’s a grave warning and call to action by an unusually diverse swath of scholars across disciplines — and their collaboration indicates how concerned they are. +
++Recode spoke with the lead author of the paper, Joe Bak-Coleman, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington Center for an Informed Public , as well as co-author Carl Bergstrom, a biology professor at the University of Washington, to better understand this call for a paradigm shift in how scientists study the technology we use every day. +
++The two interviews have been combined and lightly edited for length and clarity. +
++Shirin Ghaffary +
++You tweeted that this paper is one of the most important ones you’ve published yet. Why? +
++Carl Bergstrom +
++My original background is in infectious disease epidemiology, respiratory viruses. And so I was able to do some stuff that’s reasonably important during Covid. What I’m doing there is really filling in the details in a well-established framework. So it’s more, you know, dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s. +
++And I think what’s really important about this paper is that it’s not doing that at all. It’s saying, “Here’s a massive problem, and the way to conceptualize it, that is critically important for the future. “ +
++And, you know, it’s suggesting an alarm going off upstairs. It’s a call to arms. It’s saying, “Hey, we’ve got to solve this problem, and we don’t have a lot of time.” +
++Shirin Ghaffary +
++And what is that problem? What are you sounding the alarm bell on? +
++Carl Bergstrom +
++My sense is that social media in particular — as well as a broader range of internet technologies, including algorithmically driven search and click-based advertising — have changed the way that people get information and form opinions about the world. +
++And they seem to have done so in a manner that makes people particularly vulnerable to the spread of misinformation and disinformation. +
++Just as one example: A paper — a poorly done research paper — can come out suggesting that hydroxychloroquine might be a treatment for Covid. And in a matter of days, you have world leaders promoting it, and people struggling to get [this medicine], and it being no longer available to people who need it for treatment of other conditions. Which is actually a serious health problem. +
++So you can have these bits of misinformation that explode at unprecedented velocity in ways that they wouldn’t have prior to this information ecosystem. +
++[Now], you can create large communities of people that hold constellations of beliefs that are not grounded in reality, such as [the conspiracy theory] QAnon. You can have ideas like anti-vaccination ideas spread in new ways. You can create polarization in new ways. +
++And [you can] create an information environment where misinformation seems to spread organically. And also [these communities can] be extremely vulnerable to targeted disinformation. We don’t even know the scope of that yet. +
++Joe Bak-Coleman +
++The question we were trying to answer was, “What can we infer about the course of society at scale, given what we know about complex systems?” +
++It’s kind of how we use mice models or flies to understand neuroscience. Part of this came back to animal societies — namely groups — to understand what they tell us about collective behavior in general, but also complex systems more broadly. +
++So our goal is to take that perspective and then look at human society with that. And one of the things about complex systems is they have a finite limit to perturbation. If you disturb them too much, they change. And they often tend to fail catastrophically, unexpectedly, without warning. +
++We see this in financial markets — all of a sudden, they crash out of nowhere. +
++Carl Bergstrom +
++My hope is very much that this [paper] will sort of galvanize people. The issues that are in this paper are ones that people have been thinking about from many, many different fields. It’s not like these are new issues entirely. +
++It’s rather that I think this paper will hopefully really highlight the magnitude of what’s happened and the urgency of fixing it. Hopefully, it’ll galvanize some kind of transdisciplinary collaborations. +
++So it’s important because it says this needs to be a crisis discipline, this is something that we don’t understand. We don’t have a theory for how all of these changes are affecting the way that people come to form their beliefs and opinions, and then use those to make decisions. And yet, that’s all changing. It’s happening. … +
++There’s a misperception that we’re saying, “Exposure to ads is bad — that’s causing the harm.” That’s not what we’re saying. Exposure to ads may or may not be bad. What we’re concerned about is the fact that this information ecosystem has developed to optimize something orthogonal to things that we think are extremely important, like being concerned about the veracity of information or the effect of information on human well-being, on democracy, on health, on the ecosystem. +
++Those issues are just being left to sort themselves out, without a whole lot of thought or guidance around them. +
++That puts it in this crisis discipline space. It’s like climate science where you don’t have time to sit down and work out everything definitively. This paper is essentially saying something quite similar — that we don’t have time to wait. We need to start addressing these problems now. +
++Shirin Ghaffary +
++What do you say to the people who think this is not really a crisis and argue that people had similar concerns when the printing press came out that now seem alarmist? +
++Carl Bergstrom +
++Well, with the printing press, I would push back. The printing press came out and upended history. We’re still recovering from the capacity that the printing press gave to Martin Luther. The printing press radically changed the political landscape in Europe. And, you know, depending on whose histories you go by, you had decades if not centuries of war [after it was introduced]. +
++So, did we somehow recover? Sure we did. Would it have been better to do it in a stewarded way? I don’t know. Maybe. These major transitions in information technology often cause collateral damage. We tend to hope that they also bring about a tremendous amount of good as we move toward human knowledge and all of that. But even the fact that you’ve survived doesn’t mean that it’s not worth thinking about how to get through it smoothly. +
++It reminds me of one of the least intelligent critiques of the [Covid-19] vaccines that we’re using now: “We didn’t have vaccines during the Black Death plague. And we’re still here.” We are, but it took out a third of the population of Europe. +
++Shirin Ghaffary +
++Right, so there is pain and suffering that happened with all those transformational technologies as well. +
++Carl Bergstrom +
++Yeah. So I think it’s important to recognize that. It’s still possible to mitigate harm as you go through a transformation, even if you know you’re going to be fine. I also don’t think it’s completely obvious that we are going to be fine on the other end. +
++One of the really key messages of the paper is that there tends to be this general trust that everything will work out, that people will eventually learn to screen sources of information, that the market will take care of it. +
++And I think one of the things that the paper is saying is that we’ve got no particular reason to think that that’s right. There’s no reason why good information will rise to the top of any ecosystem we’ve designed. So we’re very concerned about that. +
++Shirin Ghaffary +
++One important defense of social media is that Facebook and Twitter can be places where people share new ideas that are not mainstream that end up being right. Sometimes media gatekeepers can get things wrong and social media can allow better information to come out. For example, some people like Zeynep Tufekci were sounding the alarm on the pandemic early, largely on Twitter, back in February 2020, far ahead of the CDC and most journalists. +
++Carl Bergstrom +
++Yeah, to look at the net, you have to look at the net influence of the system, right? If somebody on social media has things right but if the net influence on social media is to promote anti-vaccination sentiment in the United States to the point that we’re not going to be able to reach herd immunity, it doesn’t let social media off the hook. … +
++I was enormously optimistic about the internet in the ’90s. [I thought] this really was going to remove the gatekeepers and allow people who did not have financial, social, and political capital to get their stories out there. +
++And it’s certainly possible for all that to be true and for the concerns that we express in our paper to also be correct. +
++Joe Bak-Coleman +
++Democratizing information has had profound effects, especially for marginalized, underrepresented communities. It gives them the ability to rally online, have a platform, and have a voice. And that is fantastic. At the same time, we have things like genocide of Rohingya Muslims and an insurrection at the Capitol happening as well. And I hope that it’s a false statement to say we have to have those growing pains to have the benefits. +
++Shirin Ghaffary +
++How much do we know about whether [misinformation] has increased in the past year or five years, 10 years, and by how much? +
++Carl Bergstrom +
++That’s one of the real challenges that we’re facing, actually, is that we don’t have a lot of information. We need to figure out how, to what degree, people have been exposed to misinformation, to what degree is that influencing subsequent online behavior. All of this information is held exclusively by the tech companies that are running these platforms. +
++[Editor’s note: Most major social media companies work with academics who research their platforms’ effects on society, but the companies restrict and control how much information researchers can use.] +
++Shirin Ghaffary +
++What does treating the impact of social media as a crisis discipline mean? +
++Carl Bergstrom +
++For me, a crisis discipline is a situation where you don’t have all of the information that you need to know exactly what to do, but you don’t have time to wait to figure it out. +
++This was the situation with Covid in February or March 2020. We’re definitely in that position with global climate change. We’ve got better models than we did 20 years ago, but we still don’t have a complete description of how that system works. And yet, we certainly don’t have time to wait around and figure all that out. +
++And here, I think that the speed with which social media, combined with a whole number of other things, has led to very widespread disinformation — [that] here in the United States [is] causing major political upheaval — is striking. How many more elections do you think we have before things get substantially worse? +
++So there are these super-hard problems that take radical transdisciplinary work. We need to figure out how to come together and talk about all that. But at the same time, we have to be taking actions. +
++Shirin Ghaffary +
++How do you respond to the chicken-and-egg argument? You hear defenders of technology say, “We’re just seeing real-world polarization reflected online,” but there’s no proof that the internet is causing polarization. +
++Carl Bergstrom +
++This should be a familiar argument. This is what Big Tobacco used, right? This is Merchants of Doubt stuff. They said, “Well, you know, yeah, sure, lung cancer rates are going up, especially among smokers — but there’s no proof it’s been caused by that.” +
++And now we’re hearing the same thing about misinformation: “Yeah, sure, there’s a lot of misinformation online, but it doesn’t change anyone’s behavior.” But then all of a sudden you got a guy in a loincloth with buffalo horns running around the Capitol building. +
++Shirin Ghaffary +
++The paper calls for people to more urgently understand the impacts of these new rapid advancements in communication technology in the past 15 years. Do you think that this isn’t being addressed enough by academic scientists, government leaders, or companies? +
++Joe Bak-Coleman +
++There’s been a lot of work that’s been done here, and I don’t think we’re trying to reinvent that wheel at all. But I think what we’re really trying to do is just highlight the need for urgent action and draw these parallels to climate change and to conservation biology, where they’ve been dealing with really similar problems. And the way they’ve structured themselves, like climate change now involves everything from chemists to ecologists. And I think social science tends to be fairly fragmented in subdisciplines, without a lot of connection between them. And trying to bring that together was a major goal of this paper. +
++Shirin Ghaffary +
++I’m biased to be very aware of this problem because my job is to report on social media, but it feels like there is a lot of fear and concern about social media’s impact. Misinformation, phone addiction — these seem to be issues that everyday people worry about. Why do you think there still isn’t enough attention on this? +
++Carl Bergstrom +
++When I talk to people about social media, yes, there’s a lot of concern, there’s a lot of negativity, and then there’s bias by being a parent as well. But the focus is often on the individual-level effects. So it’s, “My kids are developing negative issues around self-esteem because of the way that Instagram is structured to get ‘Likes’ for being perfect and showing more of your body.” +
++But there’s less talk about the entire large-scale structural changes that this is inducing. So what we’re saying is, we really want people to look at the large-scale structural changes that these technologies are driving in society. +
++The bipartisan deal is a disappointment on climate change, but it’s only part one. Here’s what could come next. +
++This is not the transformative climate deal that activists have been pushing for. +
++Many of the promises President Joe Biden made on the campaign trail and early in his presidency — to slash rising greenhouse gas emissions and prepare America’s aging infrastructure for a changed climate — were missing from his announcement Thursday that 21 senators had reached a bipartisan $973 billion infrastructure deal. +
++“It is in no way, shape, or form a substitute for a comprehensive climate bill,” Leah Stokes, a UC Santa Barbara political scientist and adviser to the climate advocacy group Evergreen Action, told Vox. On its own, “it could even have some emissions increases, potentially.” +
++But Stokes added that the infrastructure deal should not be considered on its own, because Democrats have a plan for passing more ambitious climate action. +
++Facing Republican opposition, the slim Democratic majority in Congress is pursuing its climate agenda on two tracks. Now that they have an initial bipartisan deal, they will try the once-obscure parliamentary procedure known as reconciliation, which allows Congress to pass budget-related matters through a simple Senate majority — which Democrats have. Top Democrats, from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to President Biden, say there will be no infrastructure package without a reconciliation bill that includes many of their priorities that were left out of the Senate deal, including those dealing with climate change. +
++Getting both done will be tricky — already some Republicans who had signed on to the bipartisan deal are backing away from it after Biden announced the two-pronged approach, and Democrats will face tense internal debates about how big the reconciliation bill should be. +
++The compromise announced Thursday included a scaled-down version of Biden’s original $2 trillion American Jobs Plan. A large portion of the bipartisan deal, $109 billion, injects funding into repairing and building roads, bridges, and other major projects. There’s $66 billion set aside for passenger and freight rail, $49 billion for public transit, and $55 billion for water infrastructure. Climate actions to lower emissions are among the least ambitious parts of this deal. +
++While it’s not clear which climate policies are on the table now, what’s missing from the infrastructure deal tells us a great deal about what could be coming next. And it’s possible to identify top Democratic priorities by looking closely at everything that dropped out of Biden’s original American Jobs Plan. +
++What’s missing from the deal +
++The bipartisan infrastructure package comes nowhere close to meeting Biden’s goal of cutting US climate pollution 50 percent by 2030 compared to 2005 levels. In some sectors, the funding is a small fraction of what Biden proposed in his American Jobs Plan, and an even smaller fraction of what experts have modeled to transform the economy. But in most cases, there’s no funding at all for cleaning up the power sector and building pollution and addressing racial injustices. +
++Here are key areas that are missing compared to the original American Jobs Plan: +
+-
+
- +The first federal clean electricity standard: This power sector has gotten a lot cleaner the past decade, as natural gas and renewables have become more cost-competitive than coal-fired power plants, but that change is uneven across the country. To go further, the original American Jobs Plan proposed that Congress set a standard for utilities to ratchet up their renewable commitments to reach 80 percent clean energy by 2030. Economists and environmentalists consider it one of the most critical policies to address climate pollution quickly. + +
- +Federal investments and tax credits for clean energy: Congress would have to follow up with serious cash to transform the grid into a clean power sector. Spending could take a few different forms, from direct federal investment to expanding tax credits for renewables. + +
- +A phaseout of fossil fuel subsidies: The federal government actively helps keep fossil fuels artificially cheap through almost $15 billion annually in subsidies for oil, gas, and coal, according to an analysis by the environmental group Oil Change International. That’s far more than the government spends on clean energy subsidies. Every Democratic president in recent memory has pledged to cut these subsidies, including Biden, but budgetary action requires Congress. + +
- +Cleaning up transportation pollution: The investments for electric vehicle infrastructure like charging stations and tax credits are much smaller in the bipartisan deal, at $15 billion compared to $174 billion in the American Jobs Plan. Likewise, the deal allots $28.5 billion less for public transit than the original proposal. + +
- +Investing in communities disproportionately affected by climate change: Biden pledged that the lion’s share of any federal funding — 40 percent — would go to places that are hit hardest by pollution and climate impacts, often communities of color. There were many other commitments to these frontline communities throughout the American Jobs Plan, including $20 billion to reconnect neighborhoods cut off by highways. The bipartisan deal only allots $1 billion for that effort. + +
- +Research and development for climate solutions: Biden previously called for $35 billion in clean energy research, development, and deployment, which didn’t make it into the bipartisan proposal. + +
+“Whether you’re looking at public transit or clean energy, or retrofitting buildings, the economic modeling shows that to meet Biden’s goal of cutting climate pollution in half by 2030, while delivering full employment and advancing racial economic and environmental justice, Congress needs to go much bigger and bolder,” Ben Beachy, director of A Living Economy for Sierra Club, said. +
++The chart below, based on data gathered by the Sierra Club, compares the two plans. One key piece of the Biden plan that’s missing entirely from the bipartisan deal is $400 billion in energy spending dedicated to clean energy tax credits. +
+/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22682182/D8LI9_the_senate_infrastructure_deal_leaves_out_br_a_lot_of_climate_friendly_policies.png)
Tim Ryan Williams/Vox
++What this deal does do for climate +
++It’s hard to gauge exactly how much the bill would curb greenhouse gas emissions at this point, but parts of the bipartisan Senate deal would help shrink the US’s carbon footprint. +
++Funding for public transit, electric school buses, and half a million electric vehicle chargers would help cut carbon dioxide emissions from driving. Transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gases in the US, and cars and light trucks account for 60 percent of emissions in the sector. +
++The second-largest source of greenhouse gases in the US is electricity production. The framework doesn’t specifically call for more clean energy on the power grid, but it includes $73 billion for power infrastructure, like transmission. Transmission lines can link areas that need energy with places where wind and solar power are cheap, which can be separated by thousands of miles. This would help boost the business case for wind and solar power. The proposal calls for a new grid authority to facilitate clean energy transmission, and an infrastructure financing authority to help come up with the money to pay for it. +
++Another key climate provision is what the White House called the “largest investment in addressing legacy pollution in American history” — $21 billion allocated to environmental remediation. +
++There are more than 3.2 million abandoned oil and gas wells across the US leaking methane, a potent greenhouse gas, to take just one example. These leaks emit the equivalent emissions of burning 16 million barrels of crude oil per year — and the Environmental Protection Agency says that may be a drastic undercount. +
++Plugging these wells would therefore go a long way toward reducing the US greenhouse gas emissions. And since many of these wells are in rural areas or places with fossil fuel development, stopping leaks could also be a jobs strategy. +
++“It can really help with the transition for oil and gas production workers into remediation, and similarly for some of the coal communities, they could employ a lot of people remediating coal mining,” said Dan Lashof, the US director of the World Resources Institute. “That may not be called out as an economic transition strategy, but I think it should be seen as part of that.” +
++The proposal also calls for $47 billion in spending on resilience, which includes bolstering infrastructure against “the impacts of climate change, cyber attacks, and extreme weather events.” +
++However, the deal also contains elements that observers worry could undermine progress on climate change. The new construction of roads, bridges, and power lines in the proposal is likely to be resource- and energy-intensive. While the White House calls for these investments to be made with “a focus on climate change mitigation,” it’s not clear yet how this would be enforced. +
++“If you put a condition on the federal funding for some of these projects that require using low-carbon concrete and steel, that would improve that aspect of it,” Lashof said. +
++In addition, some of the new infrastructure will go to benefit cars, shipping, and airplanes that use fossil fuels. The proposal calls for $25 billion for airports and $16 billion for ports and waterways, for example. +
++Whether the emissions reductions from the electric vehicles and other environmental line items in the proposal will outweigh the emissions increases from construction and infrastructure for the fossil-fuel-dependent sectors of the economy remains to be seen. That’s why many Democrats also want a separate climate-focused bill to pass alongside the Senate deal. +
++Will there be a climate deal? +
++Many Democrats have rallied around the promise “no climate, no deal.” Biden reinforced the message Thursday, saying he will not sign an infrastructure bill without another bill on his desk addressing climate change, a point echoed by both Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. +
++That means Democrats are publicly betting the farm on advancing the second track of their climate strategy: reconciliation. +
++“In effect, that means no reconciliation package, no bipartisan deal,” Beachy told Vox. “Congress must move a big, bold infrastructure package that tackles the climate crisis, curbs injustice and creates millions of good jobs before moving any bipartisan deal.” +
++There are two major caveats to Democrats’ promise: First, the announcement this week was just the broad brushstrokes of a bill, so it’s not a done deal yet. There’s also the mystery about the contents of the reconciliation package — much of which will depend on moderate Democrats such as West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin. +
++But the possibilities open under reconciliation give climate experts hope that Congress may still meet the gravity of the climate crisis. +
++“I’m very optimistic, to be honest,” Stokes said. “I think that President Biden, Speaker Pelosi, and Leader Schumer are all deeply committed to climate action and we need to make sure they stay committed. The lines have been drawn, and we will be passing a climate bill this summer. I feel pretty certain about that.” +
++Though Chauvin was sentenced to 22.5 years, police violence continues to plague America. +
++In April, people around the country awaited the verdict in the murder trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. The video of George Floyd, pinned to the ground by Chauvin’s knee for nine minutes and pleading to breathe, had gone viral the summer prior, setting off a wave of protests around the world. After just 10 hours of deliberation, jurors returned with a conviction of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter. People took the streets to cry, hug, and gather, the verdict bringing both a sense of relief that an officer was going to face consequences for enacting violence — a rarity in the criminal justice system — and anger, since any outcome wouldn’t bring Floyd back. +
++On Friday, Chauvin was sentenced to 22.5 years in prison, out of a possible 40. This being one of the highest-profile trials of police violence that America has ever known, there was great pressure wrapped up in this moment — as well as the promise of closure. “This is a unique case with an enormous amount of visibility and attention from the entire globe, and if we are honest, it has an impact,” said Christopher Brown, principal attorney at the Brown Firm, which has sued police officers in excessive force cases. +
++But while Chauvin’s punishment will likely send ripples through police departments across the country, Chauvin’s time behind bars still won’t exactly represent justice, activists say. Just hours before the Chauvin verdict was announced on April 20, a police officer shot and killed 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant in Ohio. This was after an officer shot and killed Daunte Wright in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, just 10 miles from the courthouse where the Chauvin trial was underway on April 13. At least 181 Black people were killed at the hands of police between the time of Floyd’s murder on May 25, 2020, and the end of the trial, according to the Mapping Police Violence database. +
++Activists say that the fight for justice will continue long after Chauvin’s sentencing, until police stop killing Black people indiscriminately. +
++“The length of a prison sentence has never been the definition of ‘justice’ for us. Justice would have meant that George Floyd would still be alive today. Justice would mean that our systems seek to address the issues of violence systemically, not be showcasing a bad apple here or there to take the fall,” said Amara Enyia, the policy research coordinator for the Movement for Black Lives. “Justice requires true commitment to changing the systems that have harmed so many communities. We cannot lose sight of that vision — even in the face of a long prison sentence for Chauvin.” +
++Police violence has remained unchanged, and support for Black Lives Matter has waned overall +
++On June 3, 44 days after the Chauvin verdict was announced, members of the US Marshals Service task force shot and killed Winston Boogie Smith Jr., a 32-year-old Black man living in Minneapolis. For weeks, Smith’s family’s demanded answers after officials said there was no video evidence of how law enforcement killed him. His death set off protests in the city; during one of them, Deona Knajdek, a 31-year-old mother of two, was killed when someone drove a vehicle into the crowd of protesters. +
++The deaths kept national attention on Minneapolis ahead of Chauvin’s sentencing, strengthening distrust in law enforcement and demonstrating how one conviction does not solve police violence. In the past 10 years, Minneapolis has tried many police reforms, including adopting body cameras, rolling out racial bias training, and changing use of force guidelines, with little success in eliminating police violence, as Vox’s Sean Collins reported. After Floyd’s death, the city’s officers had new protocols to follow, like having to explain why they drew their weapons, banning chokeholds, limiting no-knock warrants, and barring firing at moving vehicles. But activists say the reforms didn’t address the root causes of police violence. +
++Instead, activists continue to work to inform the community about police violence and are taking steps to amend the city charter to cut the police budget and redirect funds to mental health services, violence prevention, and education, after the city council failed to do so after Floyd’s death. A poll conducted in August 2020, two months after the height of the protests, found that the majority of Minneapolis residents (73 percent) were in support of defunding the police. +
++But the permanence of police violence is not just present in Minneapolis. It continues in North Carolina, where police shot and killed Andrew Brown Jr. in late April; and in Hawaii, where police shot and killed Lindani Myeni in early June. And while voters passed police reforms in cities and states across the country in November — from redirecting police funding to housing and other services in Los Angeles to an expansion of a police oversight board in San Francisco — there’s more work to be done to create meaningful legislation and a lasting shift in public opinion, activists say. Polls have shown that support for Black Lives Matter, which reached a record high during protests after Floyd’s death, had dropped from 67 percent last June to 55 percent in September. +
++Lasting change will mean more Americans remaining engaged in anti-racism efforts, in the work of fighting to reimagine an America that lifts all communities, activists say. +
++“This will be George Floyd’s indelible mark on the country’s longstanding need to address police violence against African Americans: promoting important and necessary dialogue on the issue of excessive force by officers who are tasked with protecting and serving,” Brown said. +
++If there is one sign that there has been a significant cultural shift in how Americans think about the racist practices embedded in the county’s institutions, it’s that there’s been pushback to any semblance of a reckoning. This has manifested in bills to ban anti-racist education and limit voting rights in communities of color. “The escalated attacks on Black people have spread not just through police killings, but in the increased attempts to criminalize protest through anti-protest legislation sweeping the country, the voter suppression laws that have been sweeping the country, and even the latest hysteria over critical race theory,” Enyia said. “Those increased attacks only show that we are being effective in our organizing and that we must keep persisting.” +
++
++