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Daily-Dose

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Contents

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From New Yorker

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From Vox

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+Harris will become the first woman and first Black and South Asian American to serve as US vice president. +

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+This is the first time a new US administration will be sworn in during a pandemic. The week-long procession of balls, dinners, concerts, and sheer jubilation has been waived under the threat of the virus. Just 2,000 people will be present for the inauguration, a far cry from the 1.8 million who attended Obama’s first inauguration in 2009 and even the 1 million who attended his second in 2013. Congressional leadership, the Biden and Harris families, and other dignitaries will be in attendance, but they’ll be socially distanced on the risers — and masks will be a necessary feature. +

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+Then add to those precautions the ones taken since a mob overran the US Capitol on January 6: an urgent “stay home” order from DC Mayor Muriel Bowser; an estimated 25,000 members of the National Guard on site, far outnumbering inauguration attendees; the National Mall remaining closed until January 21; Airbnb canceling all reservations in the District; local hotels housing active-duty military. The inauguration will look like no other in history. +

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+But make no mistake: The significance of the moment can’t be erased. Harris is America’s first woman vice president. The first vice president of Jamaican descent. The first vice president of Indian descent. Harris will bring her experiences as a Black and South Asian American woman to the vice presidency. She’s bringing Howard University and the Alpha Kappa Alphas with her; she’s bringing her large blended family, along with the wisdom imparted to her by her late immigrant mother, Shyamala Gopalan, and late grandfather P.V. Gopalan. Inside the office of the vice president will be Orange Hill, Jamaica; Chennai, India; and Berkeley, California. America will have its first second gentleman: Doug Emhoff, the son of two Jewish parents from Brooklyn. +

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+This is a major moment for America, its opportunity to finally confirm that women, particularly women of color, have helped cultivate the best version of America. This is America’s chance to honor and reward their image, their nonstop toil for opportunity. This is America’s moment to write a chapter that celebrates the diversity that makes it strong. +

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+Kamala Harris’s swearing-in cannot be overshadowed by hate +

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+Harris has a big opportunity to help America confront some of its biggest ills. Her multiracial identity will hopefully force America to, if not confront the racism that’s at the foundation of its division, then at least stretch the public’s understanding of race. Her identity as a woman will unlock possibilities for other women across the country and help young minds imagine new dreams. +

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+Harris’s swearing-in will redefine the power of representation, a power that she acknowledged last summer. At the Black Girls Lead Conference in August, she told the attendees, “There will be a resistance to your ambition. There will be people who say to you, ‘You are out of your lane,’ because they are burdened by only having the capacity to see what has always been instead of what can be. But don’t you let that burden you.” +

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+Harris’s swearing-in makes representation in America’s second-highest office visible, tangible, and so much more real. +

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+“We have never had a vice president who was not a white man. By her very presence, Harris will shift the paradigm,” Kimberly Peeler-Allen, a co-founder of Higher Heights, an organization dedicated to increasing the political power of Black women, and visiting practitioner at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, told Vox. “Biden has stated that he is looking for a real partner in governing. As that governing partner, Harris will draw on her full life experience as a Black woman in America and a law enforcement officer, a prosecutor, a diplomat, a legislator, to inform the decision-making process of the administration. This is a unique opportunity to uplift and draw focus to underrepresented, underresourced, and marginalized sectors of our society to create systemic change.” +

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+Howard University political science professor Niambi Carter agrees that Harris will likely be “more public-facing” than past vice presidents, since both the pandemic and the calls for racial justice have created a new sense of urgency. Harris has “a real opportunity to not only lay the groundwork for bold policymaking in this administration but maybe also in her own administration if she chooses to run. This is a moment where bold leadership will be needed,” Carter told Vox. +

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+America has only had a few examples of Black women in such high positions — there’s never been a Black female governor, and only two Black women have held office in the US Senate, Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois and Harris. Harris made her commitment to improving communities of color clear while running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019. She advanced a Medicare-for-all plan and plans to help Black mothers, DREAMers, and Black people held back by the homeownership gap. But during a time when activists are calling for prison abolition and the abolishment of the police, many progressives also feel that because of her record as a prosecutor, she has a long way to go on criminal justice reform. It will be up to her to meet that challenge. +

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+Harris is also taking office two weeks after insurrectionists violently scaled the Capitol scaffolding set up for the inauguration, casually replaced American flags with Confederate ones, and forcefully denied the outcome of the presidential election. White supremacy will likely never disappear, but her presence is a marker of defiance, a sign that there’s always been a steady resistance. The new vice president can spearhead the effort to pass anti-racist policies that can help reverse inequality in America. +

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+A depopulated inauguration, surrounded by an armed camp, may be an ominous start to Harris’s vice presidency. Mothers who planned to accompany their daughters to the historic swearing-in will have to stay home. The National Mall, typically the site of smiling faces anticipating the inaugural parade, is instead decorated with flags that represent the millions of people who will be absent. The West side of the Capitol, which has been the site of the swearing-in for 40 years, is one of the few constants this year. +

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+The pandemic has taught America that it can still stay connected — virtually. Years from now, we’ll remember watching, from afar, Howard University’s famed Showtime Marching Band escort Vice President Harris during the inaugural parade. We’ll remember seeing, through our screens, the first Latinx Supreme Court Justice, Sonia Sotomayor, swear in the first Black and South Asian American vice president with a Bible that belonged to Thurgood Marshall, the first Black Supreme Court justice. +

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+Harris is aware that any joy over the new administration is flanked by anxiety ahead of the inauguration — and she doesn’t want that to ruin the moment. +

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+She addressed the country in a video statement on Monday, saying, “I know this Inauguration Day may look a little different from years past — a lot different. Let’s take a moment to celebrate, and then let’s get to work building the America we know is possible.” +

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+#Inauguration2021 on Wednesday may look a little different from years past but it’s important we all take a moment to celebrate this historic moment. pic.twitter.com/WZGnkadiwo +

+— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) January 19, 2021 +
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+She also noted the hard work ahead for the nation. “Our country is on a path to heal and to rebuild. Of course, that doesn’t mean the road ahead is going to be easy. Our nation continues to face challenges from the coronavirus pandemic to this economic recession, from our climate crisis to a long-overdue reckoning with racial injustice, to healing and strengthening the democracy that we all cherish.” +

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+The pandemic, the Capitol riot, and racial justice are issues she is so far not running away from. She also can’t run away from the communities in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Arizona that ushered in a Biden-Harris victory. The swearing-in of Kamala Harris remains historic, despite the smoke of white supremacy that wishes to blur the country’s groundbreaking win. +

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+Social media abuse from political figures isn’t just a Trump problem, and banning him won’t solve it. +

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+Today would have been President Trump’s last day with the special privileges Facebook and Twitter grant to world leaders, which exempt their speech from many of the platforms’ rules. But Trump managed to violate even those platforms’ most permissive policies with posts that encouraged violence at the United States Capitol, getting him kicked off them (and several others) entirely. At least for now, anyway; Facebook and Twitter can, as they always have, change the rules they made up. +

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+Trump’s ban came after years of the social media giants allowing him to push their limits, creating and adjusting their rules about world leaders to avoid having to take action against him — and to avoid positioning themselves as the arbiters of acceptable political speech. Citing the public interest and newsworthiness of almost anything world leaders had to say, Facebook and Twitter allowed them to break some of their rules. But not, as Trump discovered, all of them. +

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+Trump’s ban may have been in accordance with the platforms’ established policies, but deplatforming a world leader — especially this world leader — was still an extraordinary step. Twitter told Recode that Trump is the first head of state to be permanently suspended since the company’s 2019 world leaders policy update. Trump’s Twitter account is gone, along with all of his tweets. Facebook’s ban will definitely last until January 20 and is “indefinite” after that. His page is currently in a state of limbo: still up for all to see, but he’s not allowed to post anything on it. +

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+Now that Facebook and Twitter have shown that they will set and enforce limits for the most powerful person in the world, it raises questions about how the companies will apply or change their policies for world leaders in the future, the relative harm or good their services have caused for democracy, and who they’ll deplatform next. +

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+“I do agree with the decision [to ban Trump],” Deborah Brown, a senior researcher and digital rights advocate at Human Rights Watch, told Recode. “I don’t necessarily agree with how we got there.” +

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+Trump said whatever he wanted on social media with codified impunity until the Trump problem became too big to ignore +

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+Before Trump, social media platforms didn’t see the need for defined policies or special rules for world leaders. Adam Sharp, Twitter’s founding head of news, government, and elections from 2010 until the end of 2016, told Recode that he often had to convince political figures to use the platform, ideally in a personal or authentic way that would make their constituents feel more connected to them. +

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+Trump would need no such convincing. He already used social media — especially Twitter — the way a lot of people did: to blast out his notions and whims, however unsavory, to whoever was willing to read them. Trump wasn’t dignified, he wasn’t diplomatic, and he saw no need to change his behavior when he ran for and then became president. But the platforms couldn’t have expected what would come next. +

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+“I think there was an expectation that abuse would not be originating from these individuals,” Sharp said. “I can’t really fault anyone, five years ago, for not thinking, ‘Do we need a policy for what happens if the president of the United States promotes an insurrection against the United States?’” +

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+After Trump was elected, Facebook and Twitter came out with their policies on posts that they saw as “newsworthy” or of “public interest” — which was pretty much anything the president of the United States (or other world leaders) said on their platforms. This allowed him to threaten nuclear war with North Korea and call for a ban on all Muslims entering the United States. +

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+Twitter became more restrictive in the latter half of Trump’s presidency, placing notices on tweets from political figures that broke its rules, as well as limiting their spread. In October 2019, Twitter again laid out its policies regarding world leaders, including what content was still subject to their terms of service — that is, the exemptions to the world leader exemptions. Here, Twitter noted that its policies may change depending on the “increasingly complex and polarized political culture.” The company also noted that “context matters” when it came to its decisions about threats of violence. +

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+By 2020, both platforms were starting to push back on Trump as the election neared and the coronavirus pandemic raged. When Trump played up the possibility of fraud in voting by mail and played down the severity of the coronavirus, both platforms finally acted: Twitter appended fact-checks to misinformation about mail-in voting, and Facebook took down Trump’s inaccurate post that children were immune to the coronavirus, for example. The platforms increasingly cracked down on other political figures’ posts, too. Inaccurate posts about the coronavirus from Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro and Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro were pulled last March. +

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+But the platforms avoided taking much — or any — action on Trump’s posts that promoted violence. In June, he posted “when the looting starts, the shooting starts!” in response to the George Floyd protests. Twitter kept the tweet up but placed a notice on it, while Facebook did nothing. CEO Mark Zuckerberg would later say that while he understood the desire to remove some politicians’ content, he still believed it was better that the public know what their leaders are saying. +

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+Then Trump lost the election, only to insist, frequently and aggressively, that he won it and encourage his supporters to act before his win was “stolen” from him. Facebook and Twitter said the world leader exemption would no longer apply to Trump once he left office, and likely counted down the days until their Trump problem solved itself. But Trump still managed to force the hands of platforms that dragged their feet to punish him. +

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+“This is not a change in policy — it’s a response to a specific situation based on risk,” Facebook told Recode of Trump’s ban. “We have established policies for dealing with praise of violence on the platform. They apply to all users around the world, including politicians.” +

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+“We made it clear going back years that these accounts are not above our rules and cannot use Twitter to incite violence,” Twitter told Recode. “We will continue to be transparent around our policies, how they evolve, how they are enforced.” +

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+Sharp has for years defended Twitter’s world leader policy, believing that it’s better for the world to see what its leaders have to say than for a private company to take on the job of sanitizing their timelines. +

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+“If the emperor doesn’t have clothes, there should be a bright, burning-hot spotlight on it,” Sharp said. +

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+After the election, though, Sharp saw less of a case that Trump’s tweets informed his electorate, as the electorate had now made the informed decision to remove Trump from power. And Sharp now believes the same world leader status that made Trump exempt from many of Twitter’s rules also made his posts about the insurrection so uniquely destructive — and, therefore, finally actionable. +

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+During and after the Capitol riots, Trump continued to push his narrative that the election was stolen from him and refused to condemn his supporters’ actions, and Facebook and Twitter responded by banning him temporarily, and then indefinitely. After all the words that Trump put on Twitter and Facebook, his ban came down to what was between the lines. His posts, on their face, were actually fairly tame by Trump standards. But the context around them — as well as the possibility that he would use their platforms to incite more violence — was what Twitter and Facebook took into account when making their decision to deplatform Trump. +

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+Twitter and Facebook made the rules and finally enforced them. What happens next? +

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+Trump’s social media exile was applauded by many, but some were also concerned that it could pave the way for deplatforming other world leaders or political speech — and that these decisions would be made by a few private companies with a demonstrably incredible amount of control and influence. +

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+If Trump can get banned from Twitter and Facebook, it stands to reason that any world leader can be, too. But it’s not yet clear if the platforms will change their policies or how aggressively they will enforce them now. Two world leaders that are widely seen as likely to be banned — or who some think should be the next to be banned — are Bolsonaro and Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. +

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+Bolsonaro, who has modeled his presidency on Trump’s and has run afoul of Twitter’s and Facebook’s rules, seems to be preparing for the possibility. After Trump was banned, Bolsonaro encouraged his Twitter and Facebook followers to follow him on Telegram. Khamenei, whose unverified accounts post Holocaust denials and call for the destruction of Israel, is frequently held up as an example of Twitter’s and Facebook’s double standards when they regulate Trump’s speech. Khamenei remains on the platforms — which his own people don’t have access to, as Twitter and Facebook are banned in Iran — but Twitter recently removed one of his tweets promoting coronavirus misinformation, and according to Khamenei, Facebook removed the Arabic-language version of his page (he’s since made a new one). +

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+Several world leaders have meanwhile criticized social media companies’ banning of Trump. Germany’s Angela Merkel called it “problematic” to freedom of opinion, while Mexico’s AndrĂ©s Manuel LĂłpez Obrador, who has called the results of his own election defeats into question, said he didn’t agree with the idea of private companies punishing speech. +

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+“It should concern everyone when companies like Facebook and Twitter wield the unchecked power to remove people from platforms that have become indispensable for the speech of billions — especially when political realities make those decisions easier,” American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) senior legislative counsel Kate Ruane said in a statement. “It is our hope that these companies will apply their rules transparently to everyone.” +

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+Civil and digital rights advocates hope that the platforms will use this as an opportunity to examine how they police political speech and the significant role their services play in the world, where they’ve been weaponized against certain groups, platformed several countries’ disinformation campaigns, and become a recruitment tool for terrorists. When Facebook and Twitter did act to stop some of these abuses of their platforms, they often came too late and after ignoring plenty of warning. +

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+“From my perspective, this raises larger questions around how platforms deal with the speech of politicians,” said Brown of Human Rights Watch. “This shows the need to rethink these policies, to look at whether giving politicians so much free rein to violate policies is actually contributing to harm, and looking at the dynamics in the different countries or people using their platforms.” +

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+Brown said she hoped the platforms would do this proactively, rather than reactively. And she hopes that lesser-known instances of social media abuse by political figures are addressed along with the high-profile ones. +

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+Before banning Trump, Twitter and Facebook announced initiatives that acknowledged their platforms’ significant role in the world and the importance of their moderation decisions. Facebook’s independent oversight board, two years in the making, is now up and running and accepting appeals of Facebook’s content moderation decisions from users. (Who knows? Maybe Trump will submit one.) Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, in a long thread about Trump’s ban, which he called a “failure ... to promote healthy conversation,” pointed to Twitter’s effort called “bluesky” to develop some kind of “standard” for internet conversation that Twitter would follow but which would also “take many years to develop.” +

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+Twitter has also updated its civic integrity policy and temporarily suspended QAnon supporter Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-GA), who frequently tweets election misinformation, for violating it. +

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+In an ideal world, Twitter and Facebook wouldn’t be left to make these decisions at all. Democratically elected world leaders wouldn’t spend the aftermath of their election losses fomenting dissent among their supporters and tacitly approving their violent uprisings, and they wouldn’t be enabled by the people and institutions that are supposed to keep them in check. +

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+“The promise that I and others believed in, of Twitter as a tool for world leaders to be closer to their electorates, to have a more direct and tangible relationship with their constituents than ever before — no one has proven that promise more effectively than Donald Trump,” Sharp told Recode. “And no one has perverted it to do more harm than Donald Trump.” +

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+Facebook and Twitter are in an impossible situation, but it’s one they created for themselves. And they also get to decide what comes next. +

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+Open Sourced is made possible by Omidyar Network. All Open Sourced content is editorially independent and produced by our journalists. +

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+The full pardon of Anthony Levandowski came out of nowhere. +

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+In one of his final acts as President, Donald Trump early on Wednesday morning suddenly pardoned the engineer at the center of an iconic, litigious, and years-long conflict between Uber, Google, and federal prosecutors over the technology for self-driving cars. +

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+Encouraged by some of his highest-profile backers in Silicon Valley, such as venture capitalist Peter Thiel, Trump issued the surprise full pardon to Anthony Levandowski, a former Google executive who had decamped to work for Uber. Levandowski was last year sentenced to 18 months in prison after pleading guilty to stealing trade secrets from Google that he then used to help Uber in the self-driving race. +

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+The announcement came as a shock for several reasons: One was that the news that Levandowski was seeking a pardon had not previously been reported. Another was that it was yet another twist in a legal saga that went on for years — in addition to the federal conviction, Google’s self-driving arm, Waymo, at one point sued Uber in a messy legal case before reaching a settlement. Finally, the thinking was, the matter was basically resolved. +

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+And the final reason making the news so surprising was the cast of characters that the White House said pushed for Levandowski’s full pardon. In addition to Thiel — who was once Trump’s most prominent backer in Silicon Valley — Levandowski’s supporters in his pardon quest included Palmer Luckey, the founder of the virtual-reality company Oculus and a major Trump campaign donor; Michael Ovitz, the legendary founder of the Hollywood talent giant CAA; and other investors and executives tied to Thiel, such as one of his top aides, Blake Masters. +

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+“Mr. Levandowski is an American entrepreneur who led Google’s efforts to create self-driving technology. Mr. Levandowski pled guilty to a single criminal count arising from civil litigation,” the White House said in its statement. “Notably, his sentencing judge called him a “brilliant, groundbreaking engineer that our country needs.” Mr. Levandowski has paid a significant price for his actions and plans to devote his talents to advance the public good.” +

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From The Hindu: Sports

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From The Hindu: National News

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From BBC: Europe

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From Ars Technica

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From Jokes Subreddit

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