“Resist trying to make things better”: A conversation with internet security expert Alex Stamos.
I’m old enough to remember when the internet was going to be great news for everyone. Things have gotten more complex since then: We all still agree that there are lots of good things we can get from a broadband connection. But we’re also likely to blame the internet — and specifically the big tech companies that dominate it — for all kinds of problems.
And that blame-casting gets intense in the wake of major, calamitous news events, like the spectacle of the January 6 riot or its rerun in Brazil this month, both of which were seeded and organized, at least in part, on platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Telegram. But how much culpability and power should we really assign to tech?
I think about this question all the time but am more interested in what people who actually study it think. So I called up Alex Stamos, who does this for a living: Stamos is the former head of security at Facebook who now heads up the Stanford Internet Observatory, which does deep dives into the ways people abuse the internet.
The last time I talked to Stamos, in 2019, we focused on the perils of political ads on platforms and the tricky calculus of regulating and restraining those ads. This time, we went broader, but also more nuanced: On the one hand, Stamos argues, we have overestimated the power that the likes of Russian hackers have to, say, influence elections in the US. On the other hand, he says, we’re likely overlooking the impact state actors have to influence our opinions on stuff we don’t know much about.
You can hear our entire conversation on the Recode Media podcast. The following are edited excerpts from our chat.
Peter Kafka
I want to ask you about two very different but related stories in the news: Last Sunday, people stormed government buildings in Brazil in what looked like their version of the January 6 riot. And there was an immediate discussion about what role internet platforms like Twitter and Telegram played in that incident. The next day, there was a study published in Nature that looked at the effect of Russian interference on the 2016 election, specifically on Twitter, which concluded that all the misinformation and disinformation the Russians tried to sow had essentially no impact on that election or on anyone’s views or actions. So are we collectively overestimating or underestimating the impact of misinformation and disinformation on the internet?
Alex Stamos
I think what has happened is there was a massive overestimation of the capability of mis- and disinformation to change people’s minds — of its actual persuasive power. That doesn’t mean it’s not a problem, but we have to reframe how we look at it — as less of something that is done to us and more of a supply and demand problem. We live in a world where people can choose to seal themselves into an information environment that reinforces their preconceived notions, that reinforces the things they want to believe about themselves and about others. And in doing so, they can participate in their own radicalization. They can participate in fooling themselves, but that is not something that’s necessarily being done to them.
Peter Kafka
But now we have a playbook for whenever something awful happens, whether it’s January 6 or what we saw in Brazil or things like the Christchurch shooting in New Zealand: We say, “what role did the internet play in this?” And in the case of January 6 and in Brazil, it seems pretty evident that the people who are organizing those events were using internet platforms to actually put that stuff together. And then before that, they were seeding the ground for this disaffection and promulgating the idea that elections were stolen. So can we hold both things in our head at the same time — that we’ve both overestimated the effect of Russians reinforcing our filter bubble versus state and non-state actors using the internet to make bad things happen?
Alex Stamos
I think so. What’s going on in Brazil is a lot like January 6 in that the interaction of platforms with what’s happening there is that you have kind of the broad disaffection of people who are angry about the election, which is really being driven by political actors. So for all of these things, almost all of it we’re doing to ourselves. The Brazilians are doing [it] to themselves. We have political actors who don’t really believe in democracy anymore, who believe that they can’t actually lose elections. And yes, they are using platforms to get around the traditional media and communicate with people directly. But it’s not foreign interference. And especially in the United States, direct communication with your political supporters via these platforms is First Amendment-protected.
Separately from that, in a much smaller timescale, you have the actual kind of organizational stuff that’s going on. On January 6, we have all this evidence coming out from all these people who have been arrested and their phones have been grabbed. And so you can see Telegram chats, WhatsApp chats, iMessage chats, Signal, all of these real-time communications. You see the same thing in Brazil.
And for that, I think the discussion is complicated because that is where you end up with a straight trade-off on privacy — that the fact that people can now create groups where they can privately communicate, where nobody can monitor that communication, means that they have the ability to put together what are effectively conspiracies to try to overthrow elections.
Peter Kafka
The throughline here is that after one of these events happens, we collectively say, “Hey, Twitter or Facebook or maybe Apple, you let this happen, what are you going to do to prevent it from happening again?” And sometimes the platforms say, “Well, this wasn’t our fault.” Mark Zuckerberg famously said that idea was crazy after the 2016 election.
Alex Stamos
And then [former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg] did that again, after January 6.
“Resist trying to make things better”
Peter Kafka
And then you see the platforms do whack-a-mole to solve the last problem.
I’m going to further complicate it because I wanted to bring the pandemic into this — where at the beginning, we asked the platforms, “what are you going to do to help make sure that people get good information about how to handle this novel disease?” And they said, “We’re not going to make these decisions. We’re not not epidemiologists. We’re going to follow the advice of the CDC and governments around the world.” And in some cases, that information was contradictory or wrong and they’ve had to backtrack. And now we’re seeing some of that play out with the release of the Twitter Files where people are saying, “I can’t believe the government asked Twitter to take down so-and-so’s tweet or account because they were telling people to go use ivermectin.”
I think the most generous way of viewing the platforms in that case — which is a view I happen to agree with — is that they were trying to do the right thing. But they’re not really built to handle a pandemic and how to handle both good information and bad information on the internet. But there’s a lot of folks who believe — I think quite sincerely — that the platforms really shouldn’t have any role moderating this at all. That if people want to say, “go ahead and try this horse dewormer, what’s the worst that could happen?” they should be allowed to do it.
So you have this whole stew of stuff where it’s unclear what role the government should have in working with the platforms, what role the platforms should have at all. So should platforms be involved in trying to stop mis- or disinformation? Or should we just say, “this is like climate change and it’s a fact of life and we’re all going to have to sort of adapt to this reality”?
Alex Stamos
The fundamental problem is that there’s a fundamental disagreement inside people’s heads — that people are inconsistent on what responsibility they believe information intermediaries should have for making society better. People generally believe that if something is against their side, that the platforms have a huge responsibility. And if something is on their side, [the platforms] should have no responsibility. It’s extremely rare to find people who are consistent in this.
As a society, we have gone through these information revolutions — the creation of the printing press created hundreds of years of religious war in Europe. Nobody’s going to say we should not have invented the printing press. But we also have to recognize that allowing people to print books created lots of conflict.
I think that the responsibility of platforms is to try to not make things worse actively — but also to resist trying to make things better. If that makes sense.
Peter Kafka
No. What does “resist trying to make things better” mean?
Alex Stamos
I think the legitimate complaint behind a bunch of the Twitter Files is that Twitter was trying too hard to make American society and world society better, to make humans better. That what Twitter and Facebook and YouTube and other companies should focus on is, “are we building products that are specifically making some of these problems worse?” That the focus should be on the active decisions they make, not on the passive carrying of other people’s speech. And so if you’re Facebook, your responsibility is — if somebody is into QAnon, you do not recommend to them, “Oh, you might want to also storm the Capitol. Here’s a recommended group or here’s a recommended event where people are storming the Capitol.”
That is an active decision by Facebook — to make a recommendation to somebody to do something. That is very different than going and hunting down every closed group where people are talking about ivermectin and other kinds of folk cures incorrectly. That if people are wrong, going and trying to make them better by hunting them down and hunting down their speech and then changing it or pushing information on them is the kind of impulse that probably makes things worse. I think that is a hard balance to get to.
Where I try to come down on this is: Be careful about your recommendation algorithms, your ranking algorithms, about product features that make things intentionally worse. But also draw the line at going out and trying to make things better.
The great example that everyone is spun up about is the Hunter Biden laptop story. Twitter and Facebook, in doing anything about that, I think overstepped, because whether the New York Post does not have journalistic ethics or whether the New York Post is being used as part of a hacking leak campaign is the New York Post’s problem. It is not Facebook’s or Twitter’s problem.
“The reality is that we have to have these kinds of trade-offs”
Peter Kafka
Something that people used to say in tech out loud, prior to 2016, was that when you make a new thing in the world, ideally you’re trying to make it so it’s good. It’s to the benefit of the world. But there are going to be trade-offs, pros and cons. You make cars, and cars do lots of great things, and we need them — and they also cause lots of deaths. And we live with that trade-off and we try to make cars safer. But we live with the idea that there’s going to be downsides to this stuff. Are you comfortable with that framework?
Alex Stamos
It’s not whether I’m comfortable or not. That’s just the reality. Any technological innovation, you’re going to have some kind of balancing act. The problem is, our political discussion of these things never takes those balances into effect. If you are super into privacy, then you have to also recognize that when you provide people private communication, that some subset of people will use that in ways that you disagree with, in ways that are illegal in ways, and sometimes in some cases that are extremely harmful. The reality is that we have to have these kinds of trade-offs.
These trade-offs have been obvious in other areas of public policy: You lower taxes, you have less revenue. You have to spend less.
Those are the kinds of trade-offs that in the tech policy world, people don’t understand as well. And certainly policymakers don’t understand as well.
Peter Kafka
Are there practical things that government can impose in the US and other places?
Alex Stamos
The government in the United States is very restricted by the First Amendment [from] pushing of the platforms to change speech. Europe is where the rubber’s really hitting the road. The Digital Services Act creates a bunch of new responsibilities for platforms. It’s not incredibly specific on this area, but that is where, from a democratic perspective, there will be the most conflict over responsibility. And then you see in Brazil and India and other democracies that are backsliding toward authoritarianism, you see much more aggressive censorship of political enemies. That is going to continue to be a real problem around the world.
Peter Kafka
Over the years, the big platforms built pretty significant apparatuses to try to moderate themselves. You were part of that work at Facebook. And we now seem to be going through a real-time experiment at Twitter, where Elon Musk has said ideologically, he doesn’t think Twitter should be moderating anything beyond actual criminal activity. And beyond that, it costs a lot of money to employ these people and Twitter can’t afford it, so he’s getting rid of basically everyone who was involved in disinformation and in moderation. What do you imagine the effect that will have?
Alex Stamos
It is open season. If you are the Russians, if you’re Iran, if you’re the People’s Republic of China, if you are a contractor working for the US Department of Defense, it is open season on Twitter. Twitter’s absolutely your best target.
Again, the quantitative evidence is that we don’t have a lot of great examples where people have made massive changes to public beliefs [because of disinformation]. I do believe there are some exceptions, though, where this is going to be really impactful on Twitter. One is on areas of discussion that are “thinly traded.”
The battle between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump was the most discussed topic on the entire planet Earth in 2016. So no matter what [Russians] did with ads and content was nothing, absolutely nothing compared to the amount of content that was on social media about the election. It’s just a tiny, tiny, tiny drop in the ocean. One article about Donald Trump is not going to change your mind about Donald Trump. But one article about Saudi Arabia’s war [against Yemen] might be the only thing you consume on it.
The other area where I think it’s going to be really effective is in attacking individuals and trying to harass individuals. This is what we’ve seen a lot out of China. Especially if you’re a Chinese national and you leave China and you’re critical of the Chinese government, there will be massive campaigns lying about you. And I think that is what’s going to happen on Twitter — if you disagree, if you take a certain political position, you’re going to end up with hundreds or thousands of people saying you should be arrested, that you’re scum, that you should die. They’ll do things like send photos of your family without any context. They’ll do it over and over again. And this is the kind of harassment we’ve seen out of QAnon and such. And I think that Twitter is going to continue down that direction — if you take a certain political position, massive troll farms have the ability to try to drive you offline.
“Gamergate every single day”
Peter Kafka
Every time I see a story pointing out that such-and-such disinformation exists on YouTube or Twitter, I think that you could write these stories in perpetuity. Twitter or YouTube or Facebook may crack down on a particular issue, but it’s never going to get out of this cycle. And I wonder if our efforts aren’t misplaced here and that we shouldn’t be spending so much time trying to point out this thing is wrong on the internet and instead doing something else. But I don’t know what the other thing is. I don’t know what we should be doing. What should we be thinking about?
Alex Stamos
I’d like to see more stories about the specific attacks against individuals. I think we’re moving into a world where effectively it is Gamergate every single day — that there are politically motivated actors who feel like it is their job to try to make people feel horrible about themselves, to drive them off the internet, to suppress their speech. And so that is less about broad persuasion and more about the use of the internet as a pitched battlefield to personally destroy people you disagree with. And so I’d like to see more discussion and profiles of the people who are under those kinds of attacks. We’re seeing this right now. [Former FDA head] Scott Gottlieb, who is on the Pfizer board, is showing up in the [Twitter Files] and he’s getting dozens and dozens of death threats.
Peter Kafka
What can someone listening to this conversation do about any of this? They’re concerned about the state of the internet, the state of the world. They don’t run anything. They don’t run Facebook. They’re not in government. Beyond checking on their own personal privacy to make sure their accounts haven’t been hacked, what can and should someone do?
Alex Stamos
A key thing everybody needs to do is to be careful with their own social media use. I have made the mistake of retweeting the thing that tickled my fancy, that fit my preconceived notions and then turned out not to be true. So I think we all have an individual responsibility — if you see something amazing or radical that makes you feel something strongly, that you ask yourself, “Is this actually true?”
And then the hard part is, if you see members of your family doing that, having a hard conversation about that with them. Because part of this is there’s good social science evidence that a lot of this is a boomer problem. Both on the left and the right, a lot of this stuff is being spread by folks who are our parents’ generation.
Peter Kafka
I wish I could say that’s a boomer problem. But I’ve got a teen and a pre-teen and I don’t think they’re necessarily more savvy about what they’re consuming on the internet than their grandparents.
Alex Stamos
Interesting.
Peter Kafka
I’m working on it.
Farm animals starve and drown while shipped overseas for slaughter. Europe is considering a ban on the trade.
In 2019, a shocking accident at sea drew the world’s attention to one of the meat industry’s cruelest practices: the transport of live farm animals on long, perilous, and often fatal journeys by ship.
Late that year, the Queen Hind, an export ship carrying more than 14,000 sheep from Romania for slaughter in Saudi Arabia, capsized, resulting in the drowning of nearly every animal. Disturbing images emerged of the corpses of sheep floating in the Black Sea.
That sinking was one of the deadliest for animals in recent history, but it wasn’t unique. High-profile reports of animals drowned or abused on ships have prompted a growing movement in Europe and other regions to end the live export of farm animals for slaughter. While the global live animal trade isn’t a focus for the farm animal welfare movement in North America, where exports are relatively less common and tend to occur by land rather than sea, in Europe, it’s excoriated for its cruelty and has emerged as one of the most visible — and potentially winnable — fights for animal advocates.
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Animals International
Countries including Luxembourg and New Zealand recently banned the trade, and even Romania, a top sheep exporter, has been considering an end to the trade after the Queen Hind tragedy. In October, Germany became the biggest economy to announce it would end live export to countries outside the European Union, and called for an EU-wide ban on the practice. That came as a surprising policy reversal, given the importance of the livestock trade to the country. The EU is the world’s biggest livestock exporter, and Germany is one of the top players in that bloc, selling almost 315 million cattle, sheep, pigs, and poultry birds to other EU countries and almost 9 million animals outside the EU in 2019.
But the German government, according to its recent announcement, could “no longer stand by and watch as animals on long transports suffer or die in agony.”
Live animal export, explained
Almost 2 billion of the world’s 80 billion or so land animals raised for food every year, the majority of them chickens, are exported alive to different countries, according to 2021 data from the United Nations. This can happen for a host of reasons: In an interconnected global economy, farm animals are traded just like other commodities, and different countries have become hyper-specialized in different parts of the livestock supply chain. Some nations produce a surplus of animals — either deliberately or as a by-product of their livestock industries — which are exported to other buyers.
Male calves born into Ireland’s booming dairy industry, for example, have no value in dairy production because they can’t make milk, so they’re sold to the Netherlands or Spain for fattening and then either slaughtered for veal or exported again for slaughter elsewhere. Other countries specialize in breeding and exporting certain baby animals: Denmark, for example, is a leader in piglet exports.
And then there’s the demand side. Countries that can’t efficiently raise their own livestock because of limitations like low water supplies or warfare, like Libya, can find it cheaper to import animals, particularly when those animals come at a good price thanks to farm subsidies in their countries of origin. This also reduces the need for importing countries to refrigerate fresh meat.
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But animals aren’t inanimate widgets on a spreadsheet, and when they’re hauled hundreds of miles by land and sea, they’re treated as cargo, not passengers, which means their welfare is the least of anyone’s concerns.
And animal transport is inherently stressful. Trucks and ships are miserable places for animals to be crowded into, and painful tools like electric prods, boards, and sticks are used to force them on board. In the US, too, being trucked to slaughter is among the worst parts of a farm animal’s life. American truck transport conditions are so dire that, according to a recent analysis by the Guardian, more than 20 million animals die every year before they reach a slaughterhouse because of factors including physical trauma, slipping and falling in their own waste, lack of food and water, and extreme heat or cold.
As bad as being transported by land can be, sea transport is even worse, increasing the length of time animals spend in transit to weeks or even months.
“Livestock vessels are terrible places for animals,” said Caroline Rowley, founder of Ethical Farming Ireland, a nonprofit that has long campaigned against Ireland’s export of cows, calves, and other livestock. Most ships used to transport farm animals are past their prime, and there’s the added risk of stormy weather and sinking — something livestock vessels like the Queen Hind are estimated to do at twice the rate of standard freight ships. Delays at sea, which strain limited feed supplies and increase the buildup of excrement, stress, and injury, are another common risk.
Livestock ships are an animal welfare disaster
Although much of what happens at sea goes unnoticed by the public, a run of recent tragedies pushed livestock shipping into international headlines. After the Queen Hind accident in 2019, a company tasked with bringing the ship back to shore discovered secret, unauthorized decks on the vessel, raising concerns that it might have been carrying an unsafe number of animals. The Romanian government, which has helped the country become the EU’s top sheep trader, didn’t address allegations about secret decks but told me in a 2021 statement that the ship was carrying an appropriate number of animals.
In 2020, 41 people and nearly 6,000 cows died after the Gulf Livestock 1, a cargo ship traveling from New Zealand to China, capsized. In an interview last year, the girlfriend of one of the missing crew members said he had spoken of low food supplies on the ship. An investigation by Australia’s ABC cited concerns about the Gulf Livestock 1’s safety, and photos from an independent observer’s report produced for the Australian government revealed animals on the same ship in 2019 thoroughly covered in feces. The disaster galvanized protests against shipping animals, leading to New Zealand’s recent ban on live exports by sea.
Last year, another botched livestock shipment horrified the public in France: 780 bulls that had been sailing to Algeria had to be sent back due to a disagreement over their health paperwork — after which they were killed and disposed of. Similarly failed journeys were reported in 2021, when two ships from Spain bound for Turkey, the Elbeik and the Karim Allah, together carrying about 3,000 young bulls, were forced to return home after being stranded at sea for three months. The animals were killed on arrival without entering the food supply.
A veterinary report on conditions inside the Karim Allah detailed a range of welfare failures, including dead bulls being chopped up and thrown overboard, and animals with joint inflammation, skin conditions, eye ulcerations, abscesses, and broken horns. On the Elbeik, feces buildup was severe, and many bulls were found dead, starving, or dehydrated.
Even when a livestock ship arrives at its destination without incident, what happens next is just as controversial. In the EU, slaughter regulations typically require that animals be stunned to render them unconscious before killing to reduce pain and distress, but in North Africa and the Middle East, this is often avoided or limited in accordance with kosher and halal slaughter rules. Ritual slaughter laws are a highly contentious issue both in European politics and in the animal movement, contributing to debates about religious liberty, pluralism, and animal welfare. And in many countries, halal rules are evolving: In Turkey, for example, more halal butchers are embracing stunning before slaughter.
Activists often use videos of slaughter abroad to draw attention to what they see as the horrors of live export. Just ahead of Germany’s announcement that it would end exports, the minister of food and agriculture, Cem Özdemir, received undercover footage from the organization Animals International that appeared to show workers in two Lebanese slaughterhouses using ropes to bring cows down onto an already bloody floor. The cattle, identified as German by their ear tags, slip on the floor, have fingers pushed into their eye sockets and, once down, have one leg hoisted upward to immobilize them before their throats are cut. (These apparent abuses aren’t tied to halal slaughter; rather, they reflect cruelty that’s common anywhere in the world where animals are slaughtered.)
The German agricultural ministry, responding to my questions about the video for a previous story, did not reference it directly but said it was “unbearable” to see “pictures of dead and injured animals during animal transport and of other animal welfare violations in third [non-EU] countries.”
More nations are banning live export — but that may not be enough
Ending live exports is popular with the public: A recent report on EU animal protection laws found that 94 percent of citizens surveyed supported ending animal shipments to non-EU countries.
The animal trade poses serious human health concerns, too, that might make EU nations inclined toward a ban: Long animal transport times are known to increase the risk of antibiotic resistance, a recent EU report noted — a problem that the continent has been making a concerted effort to address. “Every time you transport animals, you create opportunities for disease spread,” said Ann Linder, a research fellow at Harvard Law School studying zoonotic disease. “Stress lowers immunity, and poor ventilation in trucks also helps spread … there is a real risk of pathogens lingering on surfaces, so you are potentially bringing healthy animals into a contaminated environment, and then locking them in there.”
So far, the route to a ban has been different for each country. In New Zealand, the loss of human life on the Gulf Livestock 1 was a defining moment. In Germany, activists have had a sympathetic ear in agriculture minister Özdemir, a vegetarian who, as Vox has reported, has championed efforts to make Germany more plant-based.
Unsurprisingly, European livestock producers vehemently oppose a ban on live animal exports and have argued the trade boosts livestock prices by creating more demand for their products. And even for European countries that have prohibited live export to non-EU states, there’s a catch: re-export. Because EU member countries can’t ban exports to each other, nations that restrict animal exports out of the EU can simply sell animals to countries without one. Under Germany’s ban, for example, the sale of cattle to Spain will continue unimpeded. From Spain, where no ban exists, animals are fattened and shipped to non-EU countries for slaughter.
Spain is one of the EU’s key fattening and re-export hubs. Although the Spanish agriculture ministry did not respond to questions for this story, recent government data shows the country exports hundreds of thousands of animals annually to the Middle East, North Africa, and Latin America. A 2022 EU report put the annual value of Spain’s beef exports at about $1.2 billion, of which 35 percent is live animals.
To keep the beef trade flowing, Spain buys calves from all over Europe, making it the region’s biggest importer. The country imported 292,000 calves per year between 2015 and 2020, according to the same EU report. One of Spain’s key sources is Ireland, whose dairy industry was worth $5.5 billion in 2021.
To produce that much milk, the Irish dairy sector impregnates its almost 1.6 million dairy cows every year. Since half their offspring are male and unable to produce milk, they’re eventually slaughtered for meat. Some of the calves remain in Ireland and are reared for beef, but tens of thousands are exported for meat or veal production in other EU countries.
Ireland’s island geography means that process involves a journey of at least 18 hours, inside trucks parked on ferries bound for the nearest EU mainland ports in France. From there, the calves are typically trucked to the Netherlands or Spain. Trucks don’t have milk for the calves, so they make the 18-hour ferry journey, plus a few hours for collection and waiting time on either side, without food. A 2020 video, taken by the European animal welfare groups L214 and Eyes on Animals, showed weeks-old calves arriving in France, apparently desperate to nurse, being beaten and kicked to get them off of feeders provided at rest-stops.
In response to questions from Eyes on Animals, the European Commission, the EU’s executive branch, suggested that failure to feed calves on such long journeys violated EU regulations. But Ireland has continued to ship calves overseas without food, exporting over 220,000 of them last year.
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Eyes on Animals/L214
Rowley of Ethical Farming Ireland (EFI) said her group regularly sends evidence of problems with live export to the Irish government, “but the department repeatedly ignores us, or sends platitudes in return.”
EFI and three other NGOs sent an open letter to Ireland’s Department of Agriculture, Food, and the Marine in November, asking for a face-to-face discussion about the possibility of Ireland following Germany’s lead in banning exports outside the EU. “While the Germans are restricting live exports, our government is expanding them, actively seeking new markets,” Rowley said. “It’s totally the wrong direction.”
In an email to Vox, the Irish government said that its “work in this area is conducted on the basis that no one shall transport animals, or cause animals to be transported, in a way likely to cause injury or undue suffering.”
The UK in 2020 promised to end live exports and is expected to soon enact a ban, which might motivate the Irish government to do the same, Rowley said. But an EU-wide ban was equally or potentially more important, she added.
An EU-wide ban might soon be within reach
While individual country bans are helpful, only an EU-wide ban can close the re-export loophole and prevent long shipments and slaughter without stunning, said Gabriel Paun of Animals International.
“The ethical, economical, and social benefits for the EU to ban live export are clear,” Paun said. Those advantages, he said, include not just mitigating unnecessary suffering, but also the economic benefits of killing and processing animals in Europe instead of sending them to other countries to do the slaughtering. The biggest hurdle, he added, is the myth that Middle Eastern countries with halal regulations would rather import live animals than accept meat slaughtered elsewhere. The reality, based on Paun’s experience in those nations, is that packaged halal meat is already being imported and that people don’t want to import “dirty, wounded [EU] animals.”
Similarly, in Israel, where animals are slaughtered according to kosher laws, the public is alarmed by the treatment of imported animals, and multiple bills have been introduced in the Israeli parliament to ban the trade, according to Hila Keren of Animals Now, an Israeli NGO. “A survey conducted in Israel showed that 86 percent of the public support the legislation and 91 percent believe live export involves cruelty to animals,” said Keren. “The price of imported chilled and frozen beef is generally cheaper than the meat of cows slaughtered in Israel,” she added.
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Jo-Anne McArthur / Israel Against Live Shipments / We Animals Media
An opening for a European live export ban is not far off, with an overhaul of the EU’s animal welfare and transport laws scheduled for late this year. Countries expected to support ending live exports include Germany, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Sweden, given that all five recently called for greater restrictions on animal shipments outside the EU. Luxembourg, which banned live animal exports last March, is another supporter.
But opposition is significant. Nations with ports that move large numbers of animals, including Spain, France, Ireland, and Romania, are likely to object to a ban, said Anja Hazekamp, a Dutch European Parliament member and vice chair of a recent animal transport inquiry.
The Spanish agriculture ministry did not respond to questions about export bans. The French government said it “remains opposed to a ban on the export of live animals to third countries for fattening/slaughter,” adding that it would “pay attention” to the upcoming EU revision of animal protection laws.
Ireland’s government didn’t answer questions about whether it would support an EU-wide ban but told Vox that it “demands the highest standards of animal welfare during transport” and “facilitates [live export], recognizing its critical importance to the agri-sector.”
Despite the intransigence of live-exporting nations, Germany’s move to end direct exports to non-EU countries, along with this year’s EU talks, represents the strongest opportunity yet for a change of direction. The outcome will ultimately depend on negotiations between EU countries and a majority vote; a ban could pass over the objections of live-exporting nations.
Arguments for a ban are currently being tested in Romania, a country that exported over 1.8 million sheep outside the EU in 2019. Dragoş Popescu, a progressive senator there, has championed legislation to end live exports by 2025. But he’s faced steep challenges, with his own party deserting him on the issue, which meant he had to introduce the bill by himself in December, he told Vox.
The challenge is to make people aware of live export’s cruelty, he said. “People don’t know about the treatment of the animals. We will need a campaign to raise awareness,” Popescu explained. His campaign will aim to build on the Queen Hind tragedy. “People were shocked by the Queen Hind, by the reality of live export,” he said.
Hopeful as he is, a recent WhatApp message from Popescu reflected just how difficult the fight might be: “The debate [on the bill’s introduction], as expected, was hard. The sheep owners were very loud,” he wrote, adding a bullhorn emoji.
US officials are sold on Japan’s new military posture. Japan’s public might not be.
US officials this week affirmed their commitment to Japan’s plans for rapidly scaling up defense spending amid rising tensions with China and North Korea after decades of limited investment post-World War II. But despite the support of the US and other allies, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s plan to turn Japan’s Self-Defense Forces into an army to counter threats from their neighbors will depend on Japanese people’s willingness to pay for — and staff — the surge.
Japan’s new security posture will increase the nation’s military budget by 56 percent, from about 27.47 trillion yen over five years to about 43 trillion yen (an increase from about $215 billion to $324 billion as of market close on Friday). Historically, Japan has kept security spending low due to its constitutional commitment to avoid war, but the country does have a defense budget and has maintained the Self-Defense Forces since 1954.
US President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin met with their Japanese counterparts over the past week, putting into motion the new postures outlined in Japan’s new strategy. “We’re modernizing our military alliance, building on Japan’s historic increase in defense spending and new national security strategy,” Biden said in his meeting with Kishida Friday, telling reporters that the US is “fully, thoroughly, completely committed to the alliance.”
Blinken, in a press conference Wednesday with Japanese Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi, Austin, and Japanese Minister of Defense Hamada Yasukazu, promised that Japan, under the new security plan, would “take on new roles” in the Indo-Pacific region and “foster even closer defense cooperation with the United States and our mutual partners,” although Blinken did not specify what those new roles would be.
Kishida has cited Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a warning of the threat Japan and other East Asian nations face from an increasingly militarized China — and has also used Ukraine’s successes on the battlefield in gaining support from international partners to explain Japan’s latest military posture.
Despite this week’s fanfare and the commitment of the US and other partners to Japanese military expansion, doubts remain as to whether Kishida can convince the Japanese people to agree to commit both the financial and human capital that his proposed scale-up would require.
Both US and Japanese leadership have attempted for years to increase Japan’s defense spending; the US under Trump pushed NATO allies in particular to increase their defense spending to the 2 percent required under NATO member defense spending protocols. Japan has long fostered close ties with NATO, in spite of not being a member state; Kishida in June attended a NATO ally summit, the first Japanese leader to do so. But increased spending and coordination don’t necessarily mean a stronger military, and the “victory laps” as one expert put it, around the announcement have overshadowed the difficulty Kishida and Japan will face in pulling the proposed expansion.
Japan’s historic military investment, reframed
There’s no doubt that Kishida’s plan to ramp up defense spending is significant, but to frame Japan’s new posture as a 180-degree turn from pacifism is misguided. Japan does have its defense forces, and its defense budget has increased each year for the past nine years; for the fiscal year 2023, Kishida’s government approved a 26.3 percent budget increase, bringing proposed defense spending to 6.82 trillion yen, or $51.4 billion.
Already in 2023, the government plans to purchase eight F-35A Lightning II Joint Strike Fighters and eight F-35B Lightning multirole fighter aircraft, part of a much larger package of F-35s it’s set to acquire from the US. Japan will also continue its development of a sixth-generation fighter with the militaries of Italy and the UK, purchase 500 Tomahawk cruise missiles from the US as it develops its own counterstrike missile capabilities, and ramp up domestic production of missiles including a hypersonic model.
But as Tom Phuong Le, an associate professor of politics at Pomona College, told Vox, the new posture puts more emphasis on acquiring tech and weapons systems rather than recruiting people to serve. Particularly in a cultural context in which people often have good jobs by the time they graduate from university and no familial or cultural ties to military service, “what’s the incentive in joining the military and dealing with Russia, and China, and North Korea when you can have a pretty comfortable job in the regular economy?”
There’s no doubt that the security environment has gotten more dangerous, both in East Asia and elsewhere. Between China antagonizing Taiwan, North Korea testing missiles and nuclear warheads, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, there is reason for many nations — Japan included — to worry about the future and the possibility of conflict.
Those concerns have created an environment for proposed policy changes that “the elites have been pursuing for some time now,” according to Phillip Lipscy, director of the Center for the Study of Global Japan at the University of Toronto. “The willingness of the Japanese public to go along with a more muscular defense has probably changed, or at least the leadership has perceived that public sentiment has changed in part due to the war in Ukraine.”
But, as Mike Mochizuki, associate professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University, explained, the circumstances in which Japan would be pulled into direct conflict with either North Korea or China are very limited; “North Korea is not going to attack out of the blue,” he said, and China’s threat to Japan isn’t a direct attack. “The threat is […] a military conflict over the Taiwan Strait and because of Japan’s geographic proximity, because of the US-Japan alliance, and because US military assets in Japan are seen as critical for any kind of viable US military intervention in the Taiwan crisis — because of that, if there is any kind of Taiwan conflict, there is a high probability that China would attack Japanese territory.”
The political reality in Japan complicates Kishida’s plan
Kishida’s plan to increase defense spending means he’ll likely have to raise taxes — a difficult prospect given Japan’s aging population, whose care is requiring an ever-increasing share of resources. Japan’s public debt in comparison to its GDP is already the highest of any G7 country, and has been since 1998; increasing the debt burden could strain the Japanese economy.
Kishida himself is unpopular, tainted by the scandal of his deceased predecessor Shinzo Abe’s and the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s (LDP) alleged association with the Unification Church, Phuong Le and Mochizuki told Vox. Revelations of the links between the Church, which many in Japan see as an extortive cult, and the government after Abe’s assassination in July torpedoed Kishida’s popularity. Should he decide to hold an election prior to his proposed tax hikes, as he said in late December he likely would, it could essentially be a referendum on that proposal. If that happens, “there are many Japanese saying [Kishida’s] not going to last very long,” Mochizuki told Vox.
As Mochizuki explained, “Kishida himself is quite moderate, and he comes from the faction knowns as the Kochikai, which has been more moderate on defense issues, much more open to stable relations with China, and his foreign minister, Hayashi, has those same views.” However, Kishida’s unpopularity has pushed him and Hayashi toward the more hawkish elements of the LDP. “He’s basically acquiesced to the defense side of things,” Mochizuki said.
“What Kishida’s been trying to do is to get Biden to embrace him,” Mochizuki said.
That political environment, combined with pressure from the US and legitimate regional threats “makes it more likely that Japan is going to take bigger steps,” as Phuong Le said. And though US officials have demonstrated their solid commitment to the US-Japan alliance this week, plans for Kishida’s government to realistically implement the proposed changes have come up short, Phuong Le said.
“Both sides aren’t talking about it because they don’t have solutions.”
Correction, 9 pm: an earlier version of this story stated that Japan’s military budget would increase from 27.47 billion yen to about 43 billion yen. The amount is 27.47 trillion yen to about 43 trillion yen.