Daily-Dose

Contents

From New Yorker

From Vox

Why buzzy tech often fails to protect wildlife.

Several years ago, a Seattle-based tech startup called Pembient turned heads when it announced a plan to 3D-print rhinoceros horns to help combat illegal poaching.

The idea sounded simple: Hunters are killing rhinos for their valuable horns, so flooding the market with synthetic but otherwise identical horns could undermine demand for the real thing. It’s a creative approach to the plight of rhinos, a problem that conservation groups have long struggled to solve. “Can we save the rhino from poachers with a 3D printer?” read one headline in 2015.

Fast-forward to today and neither Pembient nor any other tech firm has disrupted the market for rhino horn. The startup is out of money and far from developing a commercial product. A few other similar efforts have popped up here and there — most recently in 2019, when scientists said they could make synthetic horns out of horsehair — but these products have yet to catch on.

At the same time, companies like Pembient have stoked a debate among scientists over the value and ethics of synthetic animal parts in the campaign against poaching. Some researchers argue that selling fake horns could disrupt the market and help save rhinos, while a more vocal group of organizations says doing so could subvert law enforcement and prop up illegal trade.

The debate also raises questions about the role of tech in wildlife conservation. Though often perceived as a scientific problem, the biodiversity crisis is equally a social, political, and economic issue. Experts told Vox that high-tech approaches sometimes overlook the roots of the crisis, from the economic drivers of poaching to the political underpinnings of habitat loss. Cutting-edge tools can help, they say, but only if they’re developed to address the whole picture of biodiversity — and in partnership with those who are directly involved in conservation.

James Warwick/Getty Images
A rare black rhino in Lake Nakuru National Park, Kenya.

The big idea: Flood the market with fake rhino horns

Earth is home to five rhino species, three in Asia and two in Africa, and most of them are threatened with extinction. The number of Africa’s critically endangered black rhinos, for example, is down more than 90 percent, from around 70,000 in 1970 to roughly 5,500 today. (That’s up from an all-time low of about 2,400 rhinos in the 1990s.)

Poaching is a major force behind these declines. Hunters kill rhinos and saw off their horns, which are incredibly valuable in the underground market, selling for roughly $4,000 to $8,000 per pound, raw, according to one 2019 report. Many horns, which can weigh several pounds each, are sold in China, Vietnam, and other East Asian countries. Some people consume rhino horn powder as a salve for various ailments, such as hangovers and cancer, or carve them into valuable trinkets that tend to signify wealth, according to Michael ‘t Sas-Rolfes, an economist and wildlife trade expert at the University of Oxford.

For decades, environmental groups have sought to fight poaching with law enforcement and campaigns to change consumer behavior around rhino horn in East Asia. Some of these efforts have helped — poaching rates are down from their peak in the mid-2000s — but rhinos, which play a key role in the ecosystem and help maintain African grasslands, continue to perish.

Pembient sought to tackle the problem head-on when it launched in 2015. “By creating an unlimited supply of horns at one-eighth of the current market price, there should be far less incentive for poachers to risk their lives or government officials to accept bribes,” Matthew Markus, Pembient’s founder, wrote on Reddit not long after the company launched.

Sepia Times/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
A cup carved out of rhino horn from the early 17th century in China.

SSPL/Getty Images

To this day, rhino horns are carved and sold as trinkets in markets in East Asia. Here, another cup, possibly from China.

The company originally focused on developing synthetic rhino horn powder — the substance that some consume for its perceived medicinal properties — but it eventually pivoted to developing physical synthetic horns with 3D printing techniques. Solid rhino horns are much harder to replicate than powder, Markus told Vox, and people looking to buy carvings are less likely to care whether they’re sourced from the real thing.

A handful of other companies with similar ideas have sprung up over the years, including US-based firms Rhinoceros Horn LLC and Ceratotech. None seem to have infiltrated the market in a serious way.

Huyen Hoang, the co-founder of Rhinoceros Horn LLC, which set out in 2012 to make a synthetic horn powder, told Vox his company “pioneered” the concept of synthetic horn and actually got its product into stores. He declined to say how much of it the company sold or whether it’s still on the market. The company has no online presence. Hoang suggested that Rhinoceros Horn LLC clashed with conservation groups, which saw the poaching crisis differently. “Too much politics for me and my co-founder,” he said.

The founder of Ceratotech, Garrett Vygantas, said his company still plans to grow rhino horns from scratch in a lab, but it needs more money to develop the product. “A viable prototype will require a sizable investment, which is where I’m held up,” he told Vox.

Meanwhile, in 2019, researchers at Oxford and Fudan University in Shanghai published a paper showing that synthetic rhino horns can be made by bundling together tail hairs from a horse. “We leave it to others to develop this technology further with the aim to confuse the trade, depress prices and thus support rhino conservation,” Fritz Vollrath, a professor at Oxford and a study author, said in a statement.

Ruixin Mi, et al./Nature
A drawing of a rhino with two microscopic views — length-wise (B) and a cross-section (C) — of a real rhino horn, which consists of tightly packed hairs.

Would synthetic horns curb poaching?

There’s not a ton of research into this question, but two studies suggest that identical fakes could, in fact, lower the cost and undercut the supply of authentic horns.

“Economic principles tell us that the availability of synthetic horns can reduce the supply of wild horns — and even drive out wild horn sellers completely from the horn market,” Frederick Chen, an economist at Wake Forest University, wrote in one of the studies, published in the journal Ecological Economics in 2017. (Chen is also a co-author on the other study, along with ‘t Sas-Rolfes, which similarly suggests that synthetic horns could reduce poaching under certain conditions. It was published earlier this year.)

According to Markus, trust among consumers would erode if they learned the market was full of fakes, which in turn would reduce the value of authentic horns. For example, if a would-be buyer thinks there’s a 50 percent chance that a horn product might be fake, they might pay 50 percent less for it. “They are going to be much more hesitant to transact,” Markus said — and that could ultimately limit the incentive to kill rhinos.

But many conservation and animal welfare groups aren’t convinced. They say the situation on the ground is far more complicated than what economic models can tell us — and that making fake horns, let alone with 3D printers, is simply a bad idea.

David Talukdar/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Government officials in India burn rhino horns at a stadium near Kaziranga National Park on September 22, 2021. Burning horns is a controversial but widely used approach that aims to suppress illegal wildlife trade.

One of the most compelling arguments against the technology is that it could stymie law enforcement and possibly even provide a legal cover for illicit trade.

Under a global treaty called CITES, which regulates the trade of thousands of plants and animals, transporting rhino horns internationally is illegal. It’s not clear whether the treaty would apply to synthetic horns, if they’re indistinguishable from the real thing. And if it doesn’t, enforcement officers would need a way to tell real horns from fake ones in order to determine what is and isn’t illicit. Poachers trying to transport wild horns could otherwise claim that their haul is fake.

“It gives a cover to poachers,” said Jonathan Kolby, a wildlife trade consultant and former wildlife inspector at the US Fish and Wildlife Service. “Their alibi can be, ‘Oh, it’s a fake and therefore not a crime.’

One possible way around that issue, according to Markus, is to insert a biomarker, or hidden signature, into fake horns that customs officials can detect. But, as he acknowledges, that opens up an avenue for consumers to tell them apart, too. Research suggests that those consumers are willing to pay more for wild horns.

Major conservation groups like the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) also worry that even fake horns could fuel the market for wild animal products and thus fuel poaching. “Creation of a synthetic rhino horn still props up the demand of rhino horn,” Colby Loucks, vice president of WWF’s wildlife conservation program, told Vox. In other words, it’s hard to say if more fake horns would truly shrink the market for the real stuff.

According to the conservationists and scientists who spoke to Vox, so-called high-tech solutions often neglect the intricate web of social and political forces that they exist in.

Carl de Souza/AFP via Getty Images
Felipe Spina Avino, a conservation analyst at WWF, uses a drone to map part of a nature reserve in the Brazilian Amazon in 2017.

When tech does and doesn’t work

Over her 20-year tenure at the nonprofit Save the Rhino, Cathy Dean, the group’s CEO, has reviewed a number of ideas proposed by tech companies to stop poaching. From making rhino powder to building secret cameras to hide in horns, these products are often disconnected from the reality on the ground, and from the needs of people who manage rhino populations, Dean said.

“I have a rather cynical belief,” she said, “that the rhino poaching crisis has created a commercial market for companies to try to come up with solutions that desperate and possibly gullible rhino site owners feel compelled to try, because they hope it might be the solution to all of their problems.”

In one case, she explained, a company contacted Save the Rhino with an idea for a tracking device that would be inserted into rhino horns. Dean asked the company for some additional information on their product — how big was the device, how long did its battery last, etc. — that she said would help determine whether something like it could really work. In response, Dean went on, the company simply pointed her to a rendering of the device. “It was literally a computer drawing of a doughnut,” she said, with no measurements or sense of scale. “I use it in lectures as an example of how science needs to be better informed by people on the ground.”

The good thing is that tools developed in collaboration with local communities, law enforcement, and park rangers — that is, people who actually face the challenges of conservation directly — can help limit poaching.

Take, for example, WWF’s work in Kenya’s Masai Mara National Reserve. Originally, the group had planned to use small surveillance drones to help park rangers prevent poaching. After spending a few nights with rangers in the reserve, however, Eric Becker, a conservation engineer at WWF, realized that drones wouldn’t be that helpful after all. What the rangers needed instead was simple night vision, said Becker, as poachers tend to operate under the cover of darkness.

WWF provided the thermal imaging equipment — and it worked. “Parachuting into a place with a solution and trying to fit it around their problem,” he said, “doesn’t ever work.” Broadly speaking, drone technology has largely failed to deliver on the promise to help curb poaching, WWF’s Loucks added.

Groups hoping to help should also consider that poaching, like other drivers of biodiversity loss, is a social issue, not a matter of science or technology, according to ‘t Sas-Rolfes. If people consume wild rhino horn because they believe it has medicinal properties, then a synthetic version may not be an adequate replacement.

Patronizing those who consume rhino horn based on their beliefs — as Western media sometimes does — is probably not helping either, ‘t Sas-Rolfes added, noting that negative attitudes toward using rhino horn can provoke a backlash. “You’ve seen some consumption that’s almost conspicuous,” he said. Trying to transform the views of people who believe in traditional medical systems, such as traditional Chinese medicine, is not only challenging but risks “charges of insensitivity, cultural imperialism, or even racism,” Hubert Cheung, a researcher at the University of Queensland in Australia, wrote in a 2020 paper. Conservation would be more effective if scientists had a stronger understanding of traditional Chinese medicine and engaged with people who practice it, he wrote, “to ensure that interventions are culturally appropriate and socially compatible.”

At least for now, the prospect of flooding the market with synthetic horns remains a hypothetical scenario. Pembient doesn’t have enough money to invest in the next stage of development, Markus said, and so far it hasn’t seen “great results” in the lab. That’s to say nothing of the controversy surrounding these products and the regulatory hurdles they’d have to clear. “It doesn’t leave us in a very good position,” Markus said. “But, you know, we’ve yet to call it quits.”

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Aubrey Gordon (@yrfatfriend)

But as Ariza’s experience makes abundantly clear, bullying over weight and appearance is far from a thing of the past. In some ways, it might be worse now: The sheer number of images young people have to deal with every day has multiplied a thousandfold, and those images are often manipulated with Photoshop or filters that create a homogeneous appearance that’s unattainable for many people. “They manipulate your features to become Eurocentricized,” Reanna A. Shanti Bhagwandeen, a freshman at Bates College, told Vox. “It gets rid of, I guess, me.”

Meanwhile, many young people today say the term “body positivity” has been coopted by thin, white, or light-skinned celebrities and influencers — the same people whose looks have been held up as the beauty ideal for generations. What’s more, some of those influencers celebrate features once stereotypically associated with Black women, like full lips, even as Black women themselves remain discriminated against for their appearance.

Given all this, perhaps it’s no wonder that Instagram apparently makes body image issues worse for one in three teen girls, according to Facebook’s internal research. Or that eating disorders, far from disappearing with the advent of body positivity discourse, are actually on the rise.

Indeed, the history of body image and appearance culture in America over the past 40 years can feel like an endless dance: two steps forward, two steps back, with little progress in any direction. Where once beauty standards were enforced by a handful of magazines and consumer brands, that enforcement has now been outsourced to individual users of Instagram and TikTok, who have more than filled the void of “aspirational” images that require extensive body modification to achieve. And those who have always profited from people’s insecurities about their bodies — namely, the weight loss and cosmetic surgery industries — are making more money than ever.

Breaking that cycle is easier said than done. But young people and educators say what’s needed most at this particular stage in the body image wars are guides to help people navigate the torrent of information they now get about their appearance. Teens and kids especially need regular education about “social media and what healthy relationships look like, and what body image means,” Pascale Saintonge Austin, who oversees the Just Ask Me peer education program at the New York nonprofit Children’s Aid, told Vox. “There just needs to be more of a conversation with our young people.”

Fatphobia in America has a long history that’s inextricably tied to racism

Debates about body image in America go back long before today’s millennial versus Gen Z divide. Indeed, the ideal of thinness first came to this country through the European slave trade, according to Sabrina Strings, a sociology professor at the University of California Irvine and author of Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia. Beginning in the 18th century, Europeans were looking for ways to draw distinctions between themselves and the people around the world they had enslaved and colonized. They could no longer rely on skin color alone, since generations of rape by colonists had led to a wide continuum of skin tones among people that European powers still wanted to control. So they started talking about weight.

NYU Press

The cover image of Sabrina Strings’s book is a 19th-century illustration by Sebastien Coeure that depicts Saartjie Baartman. Baartman was an enslaved woman whose physique was displayed in exhibitions in England and France.

Europeans, primarily the French and English, began making the racist and pseudoscientific claim that “Europeans have a great deal of self-control,” which gave them the right to manage not just themselves but others, Strings told Vox. By the same token, they claimed that Black people couldn’t control their appetites, loved food, and tended to be heavier. “This began the whole idea that Black people, as a race, were prone to what was considered a low form of corpulence that should be avoided,” Strings said.

These ideas took root in the US in the early 19th century and sparked a movement to “push for thinness as evidence of racial propriety, and also Christian propriety,” at a time when white Protestant Americans were responding to increased immigration from places like Ireland with anxiety and xenophobia, Strings said. The racialized ideal of thinness faced pushback from its inception — “we can start to see some people questioning these ideas even as they’re being promoted,” Strings said. However, the coordinated movements toward body acceptance and against fatphobia that are better known today didn’t begin until the 1960s and ’70s.

In 1969, Bill Fabrey and Llewelyn Louderback founded the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA) in response to weight discrimination their wives had faced. In the 1970s, two members of the group, Judy Freespirit and Sarah Fishman, created the more radical Fat Underground, inspired by feminist and queer activism. Black writers and activists were also linking weight discrimination and racism, as Briana Dominici notes at Zenerations. “I’m a woman,” welfare activist Johnnie Tillmon wrote in 1972. “I’m a Black woman. I’m a poor woman. I’m a fat woman. I’m a middle-aged woman. In this country, if you’re any one of those things you count less as a human being.”

Despite such bold statements of the problem, the racial politics of fatphobia got less attention than the connections between gender discrimination and misogyny, Strings said. And overall, American culture was slow to change.

The 1980s and ’90s were “an age of monoculture,” Marisa Meltzer, author of This Is Big: How the Founder of Weight Watchers Changed the World — and Me, told Vox. In that pre-social media era, beauty “was dictated kind of top-down by mega-conglomerates” that would anoint celebrities from Cindy Crawford to Christy Turlington to Gwyneth Paltrow as the ideal du jour. “It was always aspirational, and it would always be people who were unbelievably perfect,” Meltzer said. And perfect, in those days, meant thin.

Frank Micelotta/Getty Images
Back row from left, models Linda Evangelista, Cindy Crawford, Lauren Hutton, and Beverly Johnson; front row from left, Christy Turlington and Naomi Campbell in 1993.

It was the age of Jenny Craig, the weight loss empire founded in 1983. It was the age of Oprah’s famous wagon moment, when the host wheeled out 67 pounds of animal fat to represent her recent weight loss (she later said she’d lost the weight by eschewing all solid food for four months). It was the age when what passed for body diversity was putting a model who was maybe a size 4 instead of a size 0 on the cover of Seventeen magazine, as Anne Helen Petersen recently recalled — and some readers still wrote in to complain that the model was too fat.

Convincing ordinary people they were too big, too flawed, too something was also a booming business. In the early ’90s, Jenny Craig was bringing in more than $400 million a year, with a big chunk of that channeled right back into advertising. Ads for diet supplements and other weight loss aids — along with ads featuring very thin women selling all manner of products as a path to an impossibly narrow beauty ideal — boosted magazines’ bottom lines as advertising revenue soared during the 1990s.

The monoculture enforced and policed by media and diet companies, of course, didn’t affect everyone in the same ways. Black readers of teen magazines, for example, were more likely to critique teen magazines and less likely to see them as representations of reality, Petersen wrote. At the same time, Black Americans and other Americans of color were affected by the ideal of thinness put forth in such magazines even if they didn’t personally buy into it. The same racist ideology developed to excuse slavery and colonialism has continued to play out in weight discrimination across American history.

“If you are a fat Black person, particularly a fat Black woman, you are more likely to receive worse medical care, you’re more likely to be discriminated against at your job,” Strings said. “There are all these ways in which having more than one identity characteristic that Americans deem to be coarse will put you in a position for facing greater amounts and different forms of oppression.”

In the 2000s, “body positivity” started to go mainstream

Even as these forms of oppression have persisted, movements opposing fatphobia have grown in visibility and strength. In the 2000s, for example, bloggers and writers like Marianne Kirby and Lesley Kinzel helped bring fat acceptance closer to the mainstream, as Evette Dionne notes in her history of the movement. Beginning around 2008, body positivity advocates, many of them women of color, began posting photos, essays, and poetry on Tumblr and Facebook in an effort to “normalize being bigger and being happy, or being bigger and just being comfortable in your skin,” Stephanie Yeboah, a blogger and author of the book Fattily Ever After: A Black Fat Girl’s Guide to Living Life Unapologetically, told Vox earlier this year. The body positivity movement at that time was predominantly led by “larger fat Black women,” and functioned as “a safe space for marginalized bodies to come together and celebrate and normalize ourselves,” Yeboah said.

As activists and writers have been pushing for change, mass culture has been evolving, too. In 2004, Dove launched its now-famous Campaign for Real Beauty, which featured a diverse group of women posing in their underwear. All of the women had hourglass figures, were relatively young, and appeared not to have physical disabilities — still, none was conventionally model-skinny, and a campaign showcasing even somewhat larger bodies was revelatory for the time. “I feel like that would seem really anodyne now,” Meltzer said, but “that, to me, seems like it was a turning point.”

Nothing happened overnight — in 2012, when writer and influencer Gabi Gregg posed in a “fatkini” and wrote about it for xoJane, the image of a size 18 woman proudly modeling swimwear was still unusual enough to go viral. And swimwear options for women Gregg’s size were still few and far between. The winds of change were blowing, however, as companies realized they could make money selling to the millions of American consumers who were being ignored or alienated by ultra-skinny models and restrictive size ranges.

In 2016, Sports Illustrated put its first plus-size model, Ashley Graham, on the cover. In 2019, brands like American Eagle and Anthropologie began expanding their sizing. The rise of direct-to-consumer brands advertising on Instagram also meant a wider array of sizes and a more diverse group of models appearing in customers’ feeds. Meanwhile, whether through TV shows like Girls or even the (then less derogatory) archetype of the girlboss, “third-wave feminist-style thoughts were becoming very mainstream,” Meltzer said.

Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images for Sports Illustrated
Ashley Graham was the first plus-size model to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated, in 2016. 
    <img alt=" " src="https://cdn.vox-

cdn.com/thumbor/z85boLuwzkbHoFBkUYP493JtRdA=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox- cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22903829/GettyImages_634602306_copy.jpg" /> FilmMagic

Lena Dunham gained attention for unapologetically baring her non-model body on Girls.

In the age of putting “The Future Is Female” on T-shirts, it was no longer “aspirational” for brands to embrace a restrictive, skinny-only aesthetic. Instead, projecting at least a veneer of inclusivity became the norm.

“These ideas that were once a little more fringe, or a little more academic, or like things that you had to really explain to people, are now very normal,” Meltzer said: “that clothes should be made for everyone, and that beauty should be for everyone, and that representation is important.”

Indeed, body positivity, once a movement for and by people living in marginalized bodies, has become ubiquitous, a watchword routinely blazoned across Instagram and TikTok by ordinary people and popular influencers alike. On a recent search, #bodypositivity had 15.2 billion views on TikTok and 8.9 million posts on Instagram. With a few clicks, anyone can access memes saying things like “every body is a bikini body” or “work out because you love your body, not because you hate it.” Or you can find TikTok stars showing off their bellies and proclaiming that fat rolls are normal.

We’ve come a long way from the days when a size 4 model on the cover of a magazine could be the subject of controversy. And, in many important ways, we haven’t.

Social media brought an onslaught of information about our bodies and other people’s

Maybe the biggest difference between the media environment today and in the ’80s or ’90s is that there’s just more now, of everything. Growing up, magazines were dominated by super-skinny models, but “you could take a break,” Austin said. “There was no Facebook or anything like that,” and “it’s not like you had Netflix or DVR.”

Today, by contrast, “it’s so much information,” Austin said. That information can include body-positive messages, but it also, increasingly, includes images of people who have had plastic surgery or use filters or Photoshop to look a certain way. “Everything is so enhanced,” Austin said.

That includes non-Black people trying to attain features once stereotypically associated with Black women, such as full lips or a large butt, Austin said. The appropriation of such features is all part of the same racist tradition that gave rise to fatphobia in the US in the first place, Strings, the sociologist, said. “There are many people who are saying disrespectful things about fat people on the internet,” and especially about fat Black women, she said. But “you will also see a lot of these same people trying to get butt injections or lip injections.”

“It’s not just the fear of Black people,” Strings explained. “It’s the fear and desire of Black people that keeps racism going.”

Even those who supposedly embrace a more inclusive ideal also participate in such appropriation. “Body positivity — I’m not quite sure how it sits with me,” Bhagwandeen said. She points to celebrities like Kim Kardashian, who has championed body positivity in the past but who is also “capitalizing off of BIPOC culture, aspects, identities.”

Sean Zanni/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images
Kim Kardashian with Kanye West at the 2019 Met Gala.

Meanwhile, some say the current embrace of body diversity has its limits. As a child, Wendy Marroquin, now a high school junior in Los Angeles, always saw “white, blonde, thin women who didn’t eat much” held up as the ideal, they told Vox in an email. Things have changed, but only a little: “Curves are in now but the slim waist stays.”

“These ‘ideal’ bodies pushed by the media made me feel insecure about my body and at one point I even hated my body, the body that does so much for me,” Marroquin said.

Moreover, many complain that the ideals of body positivity have been watered down to the point where the supposed “movement” is now dominated by relatively thin women who get praise for showing belly rolls when they sit down or other small deviations from the stereotypical ideal, as Vox’s Rebecca Jennings reported earlier this year. “A lot of fat people have rolls 24/7,” said TikToker @sheismarissamatthews. “Contorting your body so that you have rolls when you don’t naturally have them is not helpful, and taking the face of a movement that is not meant for you is also not helpful.”

While social media can provide positive affirmations, it can also just be a distributed version of the old magazine- and TV- driven culture of insufficiency and insecurity. Instead of a few editors and advertising firms driving the image choices, now it’s a larger number of influencers and TikTok stars — and while the details of the preferred aesthetic may change, the pressure to attain it arguably does not.

Nor do the ultimate beneficiaries: The diet industry was booming pre-pandemic and is poised for a rebound, with companies like Noom gaining in popularity. Meanwhile, after a lull when many elective procedures were canceled in 2020, cosmetic surgery is by all accounts roaring back — even with lockdowns, Americans spent more than $9 billion on aesthetic procedures last year. Social media platforms have given rise to their own plastic surgery trends — consider the Brazilian butt lift, which, as Jennings puts it, “attempts to recreate the way we look when our bodies are filtered through the internet.”

Now, just as in the past, constantly seeing images of supposedly ideal bodies can invite comparison and self-judgment, making young people feel worse about themselves. According to internal Facebook research presented in March 2020 and obtained by the Wall Street Journal, “thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse.”

Those feelings, in turn, can have real mental health consequences. Among teenagers who had suicidal thoughts, 13 percent of British users and 6 percent of American ones traced those thoughts back to Instagram, the Journal reported. Meanwhile, rates of eating disorders appear to have increased in recent years, despite the rise of body positivity rhetoric. According to one 2019 study, the lifetime prevalence of these disorders went up from 3.5 percent from 2000-2006 to 7.8 percent from 2013-2018. Though many factors are surely at play in this rise, other research has found an association between social media use and concerns about eating.

The images on social media can have a psychological impact beyond eating disorders as well. “Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression,” said one slide in the internal Facebook presentation, according to the Journal. “This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.”

Despite such concerning findings, it’s important to recognize that social media platforms don’t exist in a vacuum. Indeed, they’re reflecting back and amplifying messages that young people are also getting, just like in generations past, from their family, their peers, and everyone they encounter in a culture built on racist and fatphobic ideas.

Bhagwandeen, for example, started struggling with her self-image when she was a young child after her uncle told her that a famous Bollywood actor would “never like you” because “you’re too dark.” Over the next few years, she began using skin lightening creams and internalizing the idea that “Eurocentric features were better than mine.”

Today, she’s in a better place, embracing her brown skin, curly hair, and “just myself, holistically.” But “it’s still hard for me,” she said.

“I don’t really like looking in the mirror still, or even looking on Instagram and stuff like that,” Bhagwandeen explained. “It’s still in the back of my head that, like, I’m not good enough.”

You can find real body positivity today — but you have to look for it

For Bhagwandeen, what’s helped the most is “surrounding myself with people who look like me,” people who “really reaffirm that I am normal.” If there’s a way through this particular fraught moment in American body image discourse, many say it’s finding a way to cut through the negative messages to find the role models, peers, and resources that can support you and lift you up.

Perhaps more so than in generations past, those resources are out there — they just have to be found amid all the noise. “I thought for a while that I was too fat or too short because all I ever saw everywhere I looked was slim and tall women,” Marroquin recalls. But “I’ve slowly unlearned that through various different representations in the media like Savage X Fenty’s ad models, Lizzo and different women in media just being at peace with their bodies.”

Marroquin has also channeled their experiences into helping other young people. As a volunteer with the nonprofit Peer Health Exchange, they helped design the app selfsea, which provides first-person videos of teens talking about issues including body image, sexuality, mental health, and more. They got involved because they wanted to make sure other young people got to see representations not just of all body types but of all genders, “because at times the body positivity movement is more directed to women-identifying folks but fails to shed light on male-identifying and nonbinary folks or even intersex folks,” they explained. “We as young people need to see people from the whole spectrum so our future generations don’t develop an unhealthy relationship with their bodies.”

Roy Rochlin/Getty Images For Amazon Studios
Guests attend the Savage X Fenty Show Vol.3 on September 25, 2021.
JOCE/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images
Lizzo in October 2021 in Los Angeles.

For some, getting involved with education and advocacy can lead to healing. Ariza, now a senior at California State University Dominguez Hills, struggled with food and body image issues until she joined Peer Health Exchange in college and started sharing her feelings about her body with other volunteers. They encouraged her to seek therapy, and she was able to find a therapist through the group’s website. Today, “I really have developed and changed my perspective on myself, especially with my body,” Ariza says. “I feel more confident and more secure.”

Not all young people have access to something like Peer Health Exchange, however. That’s why many advocate for lessons on body image and social media to be part of regular public education, much the way health class is (or used to be). “It needs to be integrated into schools, into after-school programs,” Austin of Just Ask Me said. Unfortunately, health services and after-school programs have seen cuts in New York City and around the country in recent years, especially as the pandemic led to budget shortfalls.

That’s especially shortsighted because such programs “raised young people’s self-esteem, gave them a sense of community,” Austin said. “If all of that is being cut, what options are we giving our kids besides phones?”

Then there’s the question of what’s on the phones. In the wake of revelations about Instagram’s impact on young people, Congress has shown an appetite for increased regulation of social media platforms. Frances Haugen, the former Facebook employee who helped bring the company’s internal research to light, has suggested a number of reforms, including increasing congressional oversight, greater scrutiny into Facebook’s algorithms, and increasing the minimum age for users from 13 to 17.

It’s too soon to tell whether such reforms will pass or whether they’ll have a meaningful impact on the kinds of messages young people get about their bodies. But in the meantime, young people themselves are navigating the confusing sea of contemporary body image discourse, offering guidance and inspiration for others along the way.

Ariza’s advice is to “unfollow accounts that make you feel like you need to compare yourself or you need to change,” she said. “Follow people who are going to influence you to go on a 30-minute walk or read a new book or go visit this exhibit.”

For Marroquin, too, avoiding comparison is key. “I’ve started to accept my body more and have tried not to compare myself to other people,” they said. “I really like to remind myself that my body has done nothing wrong.”

Rep. Adam Kinzinger, who serves on the Jan. 6 committee, says it’s appropriate for Pres. Biden to say the DOJ should prosecute those who defy congressional subpoenas.

“It’s appropriate. The President has every right to signal and make it clear where the administration stands.” pic.twitter.com/BuL7jiOO9K

— State of the Union (@CNNSotu) October 17, 2021

If the committee does vote to move forward with contempt proceedings, the motion will then go to the whole House for a vote to determine whether Congress should refer the matter to the Justice Department. That vote, which could come as soon as this week, is also likely to succeed, according to Politico’s Betsy Woodruff Swan and Kyle Cheney.

What the Department of Justice will decide to do from there, though, is a bit more opaque.

“The Department of Justice will make its own independent decisions in all prosecutions based solely on the facts and the law. Period. Full stop,” DOJ spokesperson Anthony Coley said Friday in response to Biden’s suggestion that the DOJ should prosecute Bannon and others who defy congressional subpoenas.

DoJ responds to Biden: “The Department of Justice will make its own independent decisions in all prosecutions based solely on the facts and the law. Period. Full stop.” — @AnthonyColeyDOJ https://t.co/hubxYMG95M

— Katie Benner (@ktbenner) October 16, 2021

Bannon’s defiance is creating such an uproar because his testimony could prove particularly significant to the committee. He reportedly spoke with Trump in late December prior to the insurrection and urged him to focus his varied efforts to overturn the 2020 election on January 6, the day Congress convened to certify the election results. As CNN reported in January, Bannon also told listeners of his podcast War Room on January 5 that “All hell is going to break loose tomorrow.”

Should Bannon be held in contempt of Congress, consequences could include, potentially, jail time, but only if the DOJ pursues charges against him. Technically, according to Reuters, Congress also has the authority to arrest witnesses who refuse to comply with subpoenas, without the involvement of the DOJ. That hasn’t happened in nearly 100 years, however, and it’s unlikely that Congress will pursue this tactic.

Trump is trying to assert executive privilege — even though he’s no longer president

As ABC reported Wednesday, Bannon’s attorney, Robert J. Costello, has written to committee chair Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) that his client won’t comply with the subpoena.

“Until such a time as you reach an agreement with President Trump or receive a court ruling as to the extent, scope and application of the executive privilege, in order to preserve the claim of executive and other privileges, Mr. Bannon will not be producing documents or testifying,” Costello wrote.

Steve Bannon team has fired off another letter to Jan 6 committee repeating that they will not cooperate citing Trump executive privilege claims. Letter obtained by @ABC below —-> pic.twitter.com/BU0F9MuFv0

— John Santucci (@Santucci) October 13, 2021

In addition to Bannon and other Trump officials, the committee has also issued a subpoena to Jeffrey Clark, a DOJ official who backed Trump’s false claims of voter fraud. Trump attempted to install Clark as acting attorney general when Jeffrey Rosen, who was in the role from December 2020 to January 2021, refused to involve the DOJ in efforts to overturn the election.

Trump has also been attempting to apply this argument to documents sought by the committee. Earlier in October, as Politico reported at the time, Trump attempted to block 45 specific documents from the committee, citing “executive and other privileges, including but not limited to the presidential communications, deliberative process, and attorney-client privileges” in a letter to national archivist David Ferriero.

Trump’s letter is not an official invocation of executive privilege, as PBS NewsHour’s Yamiche Alcindor points out. In these cases, the sitting president — Biden — has the final say over whether the privilege should apply, unless the courts say differently.

The Biden administration blocked that request, with White House counsel Dana Remus writing to Ferriero that “President Biden has determined that an assertion of executive privilege is not in the best interests of the United States, and therefore is not justified as to any of the documents.”

As the AP reported last week, Trump does plan to challenge Biden’s decision in court, and it could go in his favor — other former presidents have been able to exercise executive privilege.

However, given the extraordinary nature of the January 6 riots, the norm of confidentiality, which covers former presidents’ records for five years following their term, may be subverted, as it was during Watergate and after the terrorist attacks of September 11.

That won’t stop Trump from attempting to use the same defense to shield other documents from the committee; he has indicated that he will try to protect much of the information they subpoena by invoking executive privilege.

It’s unclear whether Trump actually has any grounds to claim that privilege, particularly when it comes to his communications with Bannon. Trump is no longer president, and Bannon was acting as a private citizen and not an official White House adviser during the period the committee is investigating.

Specifically, as University of Kentucky law professor Jonathan Shaub wrote for Lawfare last month, Trump can’t actually compel anyone to withhold information from the committee; Bannon and other former officials are private citizens now, and the Trump administration has no legal authority over any documents or knowledge in their possession.

And as former federal prosecutor and Brown University professor Jeffrey Robbins told the New York Times, Trump’s arguments for executive privilege are “patently bogus” and lack justification, such as protecting national security.

“It’s open contempt of a subpoena without an apparent basis,” Robbins said.

The actual validity of Trump’s arguments, though, might have less bearing on events than their ability to slow down the process.

“Really what Trump is trying to do, he’s trying to run out the clock on the January 6 select committee,” Punchbowl News co-founder John Bresnahan told MSNBC’s Jonathan Capehart on Sunday. “And they need to move as quickly as they can on this.”

“The question is really what Trump is trying to do, he’s trying to run out the clock on the January 6th select committee. And they need to move as quickly as they can on this,” @bresreports says of the Jan. 6 investigation. #SundayShow pic.twitter.com/AWAZDkMBe0

— The Sunday Show with Jonathan Capehart (@TheSundayShow) October 17, 2021

Trump’s behavior shows why the January 6 investigation is critical

Trump’s attempts to stymie the January 6 investigation underscore exactly why the committee’s efforts are so crucial. Months after Biden took office, Trump and his allies are still using the same tactics that led up to the insurrection to try and propel him back to power.

At a recent rally in Richmond, Virginia, for example, Trump persisted in claiming that the 2020 election was “stolen” from him, the AP reports. Attendees also pledged allegiance to a flag that was reportedly carried at the January 6 Trump rally that preceded the attack on the Capitol.

This month, Trump also recorded a birthday message for Ashli Babbitt, who was shot and killed attempting to storm the Capitol on January 6.

“Together we grieve her terrible loss. There was no reason Ashli should have lost her life that day,” Trump said in the video, which was played at a gathering of Babbitt’s friends and family last week. “We must all demand justice for Ashli and her family.”

In the video, Trump also called for the DOJ to reopen an investigation into her death; the department declined to bring charges against the officer who shot Babbitt as she climbed over a barricade near the House chambers during the attack.

As the tempo of Trump’s ongoing rhetoric demonstrates — as recently as Friday, he was calling for 2020 election results in Arizona’s second-most populous county to be decertified — neither he nor his allies intend to stop amplifying the kind of lies that led to the January 6 riot.

And lawmakers say that is the reason the January 6 committee’s work, including in securing testimony from former Trump officials, is so important: to establish the truth of what actually happened before, during, and after the attack.

“This is about the 10-year argument,” Kinzinger told Tapper on Sunday. “What are our kids going to think when they read the history books? Who’s going to win that argument? And I’ve always believed since I’ve been a kid in Sunday school that truth needs to win out.”

From The Hindu: Sports

From The Hindu: National News

From BBC: Europe

From Ars Technica

From Jokes Subreddit