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bountyofbeads · 4 years

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HOW CONSERVATIVES LEARNED TO WIELD POWER INSIDE FACEBOOK (Democrats are soooooo far behind the curve ball as far as technology goes that if they don't do something fast we're going to get another 4 years of Trump. FIRE TOM PEREZ NOW)

By Craig TIMBERG | Published February 20 at 1:20 PM EST | Washington Post | Posted February 21, 2020 |

Facebook created “Project P” — for propaganda — in the hectic weeks after the 2016 presidential election and quickly found dozens of pages that had peddled false news reports ahead of Donald Trump’s surprise victory. Nearly all were based overseas, had financial motives and displayed a clear rightward bent.

In a world of perfect neutrality, which Facebook espouses as its goal, the political tilt of the pages shouldn’t have mattered. But in a videoconference between Facebook’s Washington office and its Silicon Valley headquarters in December 2016, the company’s most senior Republican, Joel Kaplan, voiced concerns that would become familiar to those within the company.

“We can’t remove all of it because it will disproportionately affect conservatives,” said Kaplan, a former George W. Bush White House official and now the head of Facebook’s Washington office, according to people familiar with the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect professional relationships.

When another Facebook staff member pushed for the entire list to be taken down on the grounds that the accounts fueled the “fake news” that had roiled the election, Kaplan warned of the backlash from conservatives.

“They don’t believe it to be fake news,” he said, arguing for time to develop guidelines that could be defended to the company’s critics, including on the right.

The debate over “Project P,” which resulted in a few of the worst pages quickly being removed while most others remained on the platform, exemplified the political dynamics that have reigned within Facebook since Trump emerged as the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee to the White House in 2016. A company led mainly by Democrats in the liberal bastion of Northern California repeatedly has tilted rightward to deliver policies, hiring decisions and public gestures sought by Republicans, according to current and former employees and others who have worked closely with the company.

Trump and other party leaders have pressured Facebook by making unproven claims of bias against conservatives amid rising signs of government action on the issue, including investigations by Congress and the Justice Department. Republicans also have leveraged Facebook’s fears of alienating conservative Americans to win concessions from a company whose most widely shared news content typically includes stories from Fox News and other right-leaning sources.

These sensitivities — in conjunction with the company’s long-standing resistance to acting as “an arbiter of truth” — have affected Facebook’s responses to a range of major issues, from how to address fake news and Russian manipulation of American voters on the platform to, more recently, the advertising policies that have set the political ground rules for the 2020 election, say people privy to internal debates.

Such factors have helped shape a platform that gives politicians license to lie and that remains awash in misinformation, vulnerable to a repeat of many of the problems that marred the 2016 presidential election.

Facebook, unlike Google and Twitter, also has refused calls to restrict politicians’ access to powerful ad-targeting tools — which Trump used with particular relish four years ago — that allow messages to be tailored to individual voters, based on characteristics Facebook has gleaned over years of tracking user behavior.

“I think Facebook is looking at their political advertising policies in explicitly partisan terms, and they’re afraid of angering Republicans,” said Alex Stamos, head of the Stanford Internet Observatory, a research group, and a former Facebook chief security officer. “The Republicans in the D.C. office see themselves as a bulwark against the liberals in California.”

The company says its decisions are guided not by political calculations but by global policy goals of expanding connections among users and protecting them from government overreach, in line with chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s commitment to allowing speech on the social media platform to remain as unrestricted as possible.

“After 2016, we made massive investments in new teams and technology to make our products safer and to secure elections,” said company spokesman Andy Stone. “People on both sides of the aisle continue to criticize us, but we remain committed to seeking outside perspectives and building a platform for all ideas.”

Kaplan declined to comment for this article.

But critics — both outside Facebook and within its ranks — see something more akin to corporate realpolitik, a willingness to accede to political demands in an era when Republicans control most levers of power in Washington.

“Facebook does not speak Republican,” said a former employee of Facebook’s Integrity Team, which was created to ensure safety and trust on the platform, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak freely about a former employer. “This is what they know about Republicans: Tell them ‘yes’ or they will hurt us.”

In the 16 years since its birth as a website to connect students at Harvard, Facebook has emerged as perhaps the world’s most far-reaching source of news and information, especially since it added the potent subsidiaries Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, creating a stable of globe-spanning communication tools with billions of users. Facebook’s technology played a role in fomenting democratic revolutions across the Arab world and helping to rally domestic political movements such as Black Lives Matter. But the platform also was used to help fuel a genocide in Myanmar, a U.N. report concluded, and has been used to live-stream violence, including video of a massacre at a New Zealand mosque.

Facebook’s power is coveted by American politicians, who know that the vast majority of U.S. voters have accounts. Trump already has spent more than $32 million on the platform for his reelection effort, while Democratic candidates, collectively, have spent more than $107 million, according to Facebook’s Ad Library, one of its transparency initiatives. Andrew Bosworth, a top corporate executive considered a confidant of Zuckerberg, said in a post in December that Facebook was “responsible for Donald Trump getting elected” in 2016 through his effective advertising campaign — a comment that underscored the stakes of the company’s policy moves.

Facebook’s quest to quell conservative criticism has infused a range of decisions in recent years, say people familiar with the company’s internal debates. These included whether to allow graphic images of premature babies on feeding tubes — a prohibition that had rankled antiabortion groups — or to include the sharply conservative Breitbart News in a list of news sources despite its history of serving, in the words of its former executive chairman Stephen K. Bannon, as the “platform for the alt-right.”

Breitbart spokeswoman Elizabeth Moore, citing the popularity of the news site and what she called a strong track record of accuracy, said, “It would be an insane oversight to disenfranchise our massive audience that uses Facebook and craves our news content.”

But its inclusion has sparked criticism among those who say the move was mainly to address Republican complaints about the company.

“I don’t think they do this as a conservative company. I think they do this as a scared company,” said Jeff Jarvis, a journalism professor at the City University of New York who has worked with Facebook on several media projects.

The price has been high in terms of anger from Democrats, such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), who has promised to lead efforts to break up Facebook should she win the presidency. Liberal financier George Soros, writing recently in the New York Times, called for stripping control of Facebook from Zuckerberg and accused the company of having “an informal mutual assistance operation” with Trump.

Yet by at least one metric, Facebook’s moves have succeeded — in appeasing a disruptive, unpredictable president. Just last month in Davos, Switzerland, Trump said of Zuckerberg on CNBC, “He’s done a hell of a job.”

'POWER SHIFT IN WASHINGTON'

Soon after Facebook’s meeting on Project P, former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski came to Facebook’s Washington headquarters offering to advise the company on how to handle the new White House, according to people familiar with the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive internal matters.

The shifting power in Washington was a serious issue for the company. Its employees had donated just $5,171 to Trump, compared with $1.1 million to fundraising committees affiliated with Democrat Hillary Clinton, with nearly half that amount coming from two of Zuckerberg’s closest confidantes, chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg and then-chief product officer Chris Cox, according to the political analytics firm GovPredict.

But the meeting with Lewandowski sparked outrage within an office still reeling from the election. Particularly upset were several Democrats, including director of U.S. public policy, Catlin O’Neill, a former chief of staff to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and the granddaughter of a legendary Pelosi predecessor, Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill (D-Mass.), said people familiar with the visit and its aftermath.

Facebook decided not to retain Lewandowski, who declined to comment on the details of the visit aside from saying by text, “Please be sure to include the facts that I have never worked for them or been paid by them — they solicited me for a meeting and I attended.”

But the encounter left many within the company uneasy about what Trump and his allies might do — or perhaps worse, what he might tweet.

The company gradually implemented policies to combat false, misleading news reports through new transparency initiatives and a system of third-party fact-checkers, a move that upset some Republicans. It also adopted its first policy against “coordinated inauthentic behavior” — essentially using bots, fake accounts or other amplification tactics to manipulate the platform, as Russians and others had in 2016 — and bolstered its security team to police violations.

Complaints eventually grew, however, that conservatives were being unfairly targeted by these moves and by long-standing content policies, such as the prohibition against hate speech. Moves to ban conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and right-wing media stars Milo Yiannopoulos in 2019 for being “dangerous,” for example, generated allegations of censorship by “Big Tech” among more mainstream conservatives.

As these and other complaints against Facebook grew among Republicans, Trump often amplified them over rival social media platform Twitter, where his following tops 72 million users.

“Facebook was always anti-Trump,” he tweeted on Sept. 27, 2017, amid the scandal over Russian efforts to use social media to help elect him. The following month, he added, “Crooked Hillary Clinton spent hundreds of millions of dollars more on Presidential Election than I did. Facebook was on her side, not mine!”

Trump leveled similar charges against other technology companies, as he did in December 2018: “Facebook, Twitter and Google are so biased toward the Dems it is ridiculous!” But often Facebook bore the brunt of the president’s wrath, as it did after a pair of pro-Trump social media personalities, “Diamond and Silk,” accused the company of censoring them after they received a warning about posting “unsafe” content. (The company later said it had acted in error.)

“The wonderful Diamond and Silk have been treated so horribly by Facebook. They work so hard and what has been done to them is very sad - and we’re looking into” it, Trump tweeted in May 2019. “It’s getting worse and worse for Conservatives on social media!”

Rising internal GOP clout

The role of helping the company maneuver through this treacherous new political landscape became a core responsibility for Kaplan, Facebook’s vice president for global public policy, who had joined the company in 2011, after eight years in the Bush White House and a stint as an energy lobbyist.

The former Marine Corps officer had clerked for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and, despite supporting former Florida governor Jeb Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) for president, met with Trump in December 2016 after the White House expressed interest in having him head the Office of Management and Budget. Kaplan later played a key role in organizing support for Trump Supreme Court pick Brett M. Kavanaugh, a longtime Kaplan friend.

As Trump came to office, Kaplan was a Republican in a company increasingly self-conscious about its oversupply of Democrats in its top ranks. This included Sandberg, who had worked in the Clinton administration and hired numerous friends and former colleagues into Facebook — creating a class of internal allies known informally as “FOSS,” for Friends of Sheryl Sandberg.

Kaplan, who had dated Sandberg when they were students at Harvard, managed to be both a FOSS and one of the only Republicans in the room when major decisions got made. The combination lent him credibility when he warned, as he often did, that a looming decision might inflame perilous relations with conservatives.

The rising clout among Facebook’s Republicans went beyond Kaplan. Katie Harbath, a onetime campaign aide to former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, gained increased prominence. Kaplan also dispensed with the tradition of having members of both major parties share power atop the Washington office by hiring a fellow Republican, former Federal Communications Commission chairman Kevin Martin, as his deputy — strengthening the conservative cast of the office at its highest levels.

Kaplan proved to be adept at assuaging conservative concerns about Facebook. Even before Trump won the presidency, the company faced a crisis in May 2016 when tech publication Gizmodo published a story claiming that contractors managing Facebook’s “Trending” module were suppressing conservative stories.

Kaplan tapped a small team of Republicans, including Harbath, to organize a visit for prominent conservatives, such as political commentators Glenn Beck and Tucker Carlson, to Facebook headquarters. The meeting with Zuckerberg and Sandberg calmed the controversy — at least for a time — but conservatives soon would come back with other complaints.

“It’s the squeaky wheels who get the grease,” said another person familiar with the company’s effort to mollify conservatives, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “They were the squeaky wheels.”

As for the “Trending” topics feature, Facebook fired the contractors described in the Gizmodo story and gave the job for determining “Trending” topics to an algorithm. That allowed the feature to become a vehicle for spreading the false news reports that marred Facebook in the months leading up to the election. One recommended story claimed — falsely — that Fox News host Megyn Kelly had been fired for supporting Clinton.

'RUSSIA CAMPAIGN AND FALLOUT'

Security researchers at Facebook found the first signs that Russians were seeking to influence the U.S. election months before the 2016 vote, discovering accounts apparently under control of foreign military hackers.

Those initial discoveries, although shared with the FBI, were not made public. But when U.S. intelligence officials announced in January 2017 that they, too, had detected Russian interference on social media, an internal debate developed within Facebook about what to reveal publicly and when.

The result, after three months of wrangling, was a 13-page white paper in April that did not include the words “Russia” or “Russian.” Instead, there was this oblique reference: “Our data does not contradict the attribution provided by the U.S. Director of National Intelligence in the report dated January 6, 2017.”

Several issues were at play in these debates, including whether Facebook’s researchers had enough clear evidence to name Russia definitively, and company officials pushed to make sure the white paper was rigorous enough to be defended in the face of the expected Republican backlash. But some company employees found the resulting document incomplete, and the caution of company officials fueled complaints that they were acting in part to avoid inflaming tensions with a White House consumed with battling allegations that Russia had helped elect Trump.

“If we say Russia, it will center us in this discussion and anger the administration,” a person familiar with the political dynamics in Facebook’s Washington office recalled hearing.

Stone, the Facebook spokesman, said, “The goal of the white paper was to share our findings in a straightforward manner, which is why there was broad agreement with the security team’s recommendation to refer to the Intelligence Community Assessment and not name any specific nations.”

The worry about political fallout grew in subsequent months as Facebook’s security researchers discovered the Internet Research Agency, whose owner was a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, had used 470 fake accounts and pages to manipulate U.S. voters. When Facebook revealed this Russian interference in September 2017, the fears of angering the White House proved prescient.

Trump soon began tweeting about the company, and conservatives in Congress used the resulting hearings to accuse Facebook of bias against conservative voices on the platform. Such complaints grew the following year, when the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke regarding the use of sensitive Facebook data to direct campaign messaging.

Zuckerberg’s visit to Capitol Hill in April 2018 to address the Cambridge Analytica scandal featured frequent allegations of bias. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) cited Facebook’s warning to Diamond and Silk as exemplifying “a pervasive pattern of political bias.” In a House hearing the next day, Rep. Billy Long (R-Mo.) asked Zuckerberg, “What is ‘unsafe’ about two black women supporting Donald J. Trump?”

While Zuckerberg attributed the incident to “an enforcement error,” the next month the company announced it would conduct an audit of allegations of bias against conservatives at Facebook. Leading this inquiry was not an independent social media researcher but a prominent conservative lawyer, former senator Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.).

The resulting interim report, completed in August, catalogued numerous complaints by conservatives but offered no concrete evidence of bias or any systematic, data-based review of the question. Still, it offered two concessions: Facebook would hire more staff “dedicated to working with right-of-center organizations and leaders.” And the company would loosen a long-standing advertising policy against graphic medical photos; the result was to allow antiabortion groups to depict premature babies reliant on feeding and other medical tubes in political messaging.

The audit and its concessions pleased many conservatives but rankled some on the other side of the political spectrum, who had begun to sense that, in their dealings with Facebook, they were on a losing streak to an organized, forceful and consistent campaign of pressure by conservatives. Civil rights leaders, for example, had been asking for an audit of racism on the platform for several years. It finally got announced the same day, in May 2018, as the conservative bias audit.

“We’ve been in conversation with them, in some iteration, for four years, without much success,” said Malkia Devich Cyril, a senior fellow for the activist group MediaJustice who was part of a Black Lives Matter delegation that visited Facebook in 2016. “As individuals they might have liberal or progressive leanings, but as a company their interests are being served by conservative economic policy.”

'FACT CHECKS AND AD TOOLS'

The political stakes for Facebook became increasingly clear last summer. A major corporate initiative, a cryptocurrency called Libra, landed in Washington with a discernible thud.

“Facebook Libra’s ‘virtual currency’ will have little standing or dependability,” Trump tweeted in July, making clear his intention to impose federal regulations on such an initiative. “We have only one real currency in the USA, and it is stronger than ever, both dependable and reliable. It is by far the most dominant currency anywhere in the World, and it will always stay that way. It is called the United States Dollar!”

About the same time, the Justice Department began a broad antitrust review of major technology companies, including Facebook.

Zuckerberg — who had lashed out at Warren over her calls to break up Facebook, telling employees in a July meeting that he would “go to the mat and … fight” any such effort — took a more conciliatory tone with Trump.

As talk of federal investigations grew in September, Zuckerberg visited the White House. Trump tweeted, “Nice meeting with Mark Zuckerberg of @Facebook in the Oval Office today.” Included was a picture of the young tech billionaire shaking hands with the president.

Zuckerberg also hosted a group of conservatives at his home in Palo Alto, Calif., in June. One participant, longtime anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, praised the company for hiring staff specifically to work with conservatives.

“There has been what seems to be a serious effort to reach out to us,” said Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform.

Two important victories for Trump and conservatives came amid this outreach by Zuckerberg.

The first was when Nick Clegg,Facebook’s vice president for global affairs and communications, announced in September that the company’s system of third-party fact-checkers would not review claims by politicians. Although Facebook said this was merely the ratification of existing practice, the announcement provoked fury among Democrats weary from thousands of well-chronicled falsehoods, embellishments and misstatements by Trump and worried that he would exploit the loophole in the coming campaign season.

An immediate test further underscored these fears: A Trump campaign ad made claims against former vice president Joe Biden, at the time leading in the polls for the Democratic presidential nomination, that independent fact-checkers called dubious. Biden’s campaign demanded the ad be removed, but Facebook refused, reiterating it would not act against false statements from politicians.

Those defending the decision, inside and outside the company, pointed to the traditional leeway given to political speech in the United States and to Zuckerberg’s own reluctance to curb user expression in all but the most extreme circumstances.

He said in a speech at Georgetown University in October that restricting political speech threatens “the ability to speak freely [that] has been central in the fight for democracy worldwide.”

But critics saw yet another effort by Facebook to steer clear of Republican wrath.

“Right now Trump is president, and the company is obviously very attuned to the political winds,” said Vanita Gupta, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a Washington-based umbrella group. “They all know [at Facebook] that the Justice Department and state attorneys general are sniffing around at regulations and litigation.”

The second victory for conservatives came soon after, when Facebook rebuffed calls to limit the ability of politicians to use advertising tools that allow the narrow targeting of individuals based on their home address, gender, education level, income, marital status, job or other characteristics. Brad Parscale, a digital adviser to Trump’s 2016 campaign and now campaign manager for the reelection effort, had boasted of the power of these targeting tools and made clear his eagerness to use them again.

Some Democratic political operatives and the Democratic National Committee also expressed concern to Facebook about losing access to such cheap, effective means for reaching voters. But other prominent Democrats, as well as politically independent technology researchers, warned that what they called “microtargeting” could threaten the sanctity of elections by undermining the accountability and transparency of political speech.

These critics warned that voters had no way to know what messages reached their friends or neighbors, giving politicians license to tailor messages based on what people wanted to hear rather than what was best for the public overall. A lie delivered to just 100 carefully targeted people on Facebook, for example, was much less likely to be caught and corrected than one delivered on a billboard or in a television ad.

Ellen L. Weintraub, a Democrat who then was chair of the Federal Election Commission, warned in a Washington Post opinion piece that such targeting had a history as “a potent weapon for spreading disinformation and sowing discord.”

For these reasons, Google prohibited politicians from using its most powerful targeting tools. Twitter decided to ban political ads altogether. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) urged Facebook to follow the lead of these other companies “rather than continuing to chase political advertising dollars.”

Facebook seriously considered such a move during a months-long internal debate that weighed several types of restrictions, including possibly banning political ads altogether, company officials said, pointing out that such advertising produces a very small percentage of its multibillion-dollar revenue streams while generating a disproportionate amount of headaches.

But when news leaked that Facebook was considering such changes, Trump made clear his opposition. His campaign tweeted, amid red siren emoji, “IMPORTANT @facebook wants to take important tools away from us for 2020. Tools that help us reach more great Americans & lift voices the media & big tech choose to ignore!”

Facebook ultimately announced in January that it would increase the transparency of ad targeting ahead of the 2020 election but impose no new limits for politicians.

In a blog post, Rob Leathern, Facebook’s director of product management, made clear that the company had heard the political clamor on the issue.

“Unlike Google, we have chosen not to limit targeting of these ads,” Leathern wrote. “We considered doing so, but through extensive outreach and consultations we heard about the importance of these tools for reaching key audiences from a wide range of NGOs, non-profits, political groups and campaigns, including both Republican and Democratic committees in the US.”

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Josh Dawsey contributed to this report.

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IN NEVADA, A LAST-MINUTE SCRAMBLE TO MAKE VOTING TECH WORK

By Reed Albergotti | Published February 20 at 1:08 PM EST | Washington Post | Posted February 21, 2020 |

LAS VEGAS — As early voting came to a close here Tuesday evening, a small group of caucus volunteers waited in the parking lot of a dimly lit strip mall to get a hands-on demonstration of the software they would use to tally votes during Saturday’s Democratic caucuses.

“This will not be like Iowa,” one of the volunteers said defiantly, referring to the caucus process in that state roiled by technological mishaps. She said she was determined to learn how the software worked and avert any embarrassing glitches. She asked not to be named for fear of upsetting party officials here.

As Democratic presidential hopefuls campaign in this fast-growing Western state, the role of technology has hung like a cloud over the process that will help determine the party’s nominee. Nevada’s place early on in the presidential nominating process is a point of pride, and everyone from volunteers to party officials to ordinary voters is hoping it doesn’t turn into an embarrassment.

Nevada’s Democratic Party, which runs the caucuses, had planned to use software developed by the same company behind Iowa’s botched caucus app. When those plans were scrapped, Nevada had less than three weeks to put a new system in place, a rush to the finish line that also contributed to Iowa’s problems.

The party now plans to distribute roughly 2,000 iPads equipped with Cisco Systems security software designed to allow corporations to monitor employee devices. The Apple tablets have a single icon on the home page that connects, via cellular data, to customized Google Cloud software that volunteers saw in person for the first time in Democratic Party offices in the Las Vegas strip mall.

Technology came to the forefront of the country’s democratic process after the Feb. 3 Iowa caucuses, when an app designed by a company called Shadow that was used to calculate vote totals malfunctioned, delaying results and opening the door to conspiracy theories, voter distrust and allegations of conflicts of interests.

Even under the best circumstances, the tallying of caucus results has been known to stump some volunteers, according to experts and campaign staffers. Rather than filling out ballots, caucus-goers show support for candidates at in-person gatherings, during a multistep process that can involve changing allegiances and strategic alliances. Candidates without enough support are deemed “nonviable,” and supporters of those candidates can back someone else or form coalitions with other nonviable candidates. When it’s over, the number of supporters in each group determines how many delegates are awarded for each candidate.

Since at least 2008, campaign officials have used technology to try to better manage the process. But because of the transient nature of national politics, the people who have worked on building technological tools come and go, taking their expertise and even their software with them. Every four years, campaigns and party officials essentially start from scratch, according to people who have worked for the Democratic Party during caucuses.

During the Nevada caucuses in 2008, the Obama campaign created its own caucus calculator using Microsoft Excel, according to two people who worked on the campaign. The software, which did the caucus math, was used to correct the vote in several precincts where errors were made, they said, and that process resulted in then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) winning more delegates than he otherwise would have gotten without the oversight.

But the Obama campaign’s know-how and strategy was never passed on to Democratic officials at the state or national level, they said. “A lot of people who developed that stuff are at Uber and Airbnb now,” said one of them, who is now working for Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg’s campaign. That person spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.

Paper results will be used as the official tally in Nevada, the state’s Democratic Party has said. Maggie MacAlpine, co-founder of Nordic Innovation Labs, a consultancy focused on election security, praised the party for creating paper redundancies to guard against manipulation of results.

Election officials should use reasonable restraint when it comes to technology, MacAlpine said. “We’re always advocating a return to paper,” she said. Election technology is the one place, she said, where the more tech-savvy people are, the more they tend to advise against the use of technology. The tools needed to secure online elections are “not even in their infancy yet,” she said.

This year, the Nevada caucuses bring additional challenges. In an effort to increase voter turnout after long lines and confusion in 2016, the party offered early voting as an alternative to the caucusing scheduled for Saturday morning.

Rather than caucus, voters could rank three to five candidates by preference. Those results would later be incorporated into Saturday’s caucuses. Turnout for early voting was high, nearly matching the entire voter turnout for the 2016 Democratic caucuses, according to Nevada Democrats, and lines at early-voting sites stretched along sidewalks through Tuesday evening.

Michael Roybal, a 31-year-old phlebotomist in Las Vegas, said that when he saw the debacle in Iowa on the news, he decided to vote early. He waited more than two hours to cast his vote for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) at a local library Tuesday, where billionaire candidate Tom Steyer had paid for a five-person mariachi band and a free taco stand to entertain early voters. “The caucus sounds like a mess,” Roybal said. “I think a normal primary would be fine.”

But the early voting created a new problem for caucus volunteers: more complicated math, with lots of variables around which candidates will make it through to the final tally.

On Jan. 11, hundreds of volunteers poured into Centennial High School in Las Vegas for a training seminar on the new app developed by Shadow, a Colorado company led by veterans of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign that received funding from Democratic political organizations. In the school’s all-purpose room, Democratic Party officials instructed the volunteers to download the app to their phones. The app, they said, would be used by the volunteers to count and submit vote counts at the election.

Almost immediately, problems arose, according to three people who attended the training. About half the people in attendance were unable to download the app. Others were able to download it, but it wouldn’t open on their phones. The app was not available through Apple’s App Store or Google’s Play Store. Rather, installing it first required the installation of another app.

Donna West, a retired civil servant who has a dog-sitting business and is also chair of the Clark County chapter of the Nevada Democrats, said half of the problems that day were due to “user error,” and about half were because of technological glitches. “We discovered we had volunteers who don’t have smartphones, and so they don’t use apps at all,” West said.

Eventually, the staffers stopped trying to get the app to work, said Seth Morrison, a volunteer site leader for the caucuses who attended the meeting. “By the end of the day, they declared failure,” he said. But the party officials weren’t giving up on the malfunctioning app. Instead, they vouched for the vendor and said it would be fixed before the caucuses just over a month later.

On Feb. 3, as West watched the Iowa debacle unfold on television, she said she was surprised to hear news reports that caucus workers there had not attempted to download the apps onto their phones until the day of voting.

Soon after Iowa’s problems, the Nevada Democratic Party announced that its app was also developed by Shadow and that it would no longer use the app.

Shadow’s CEO, Gerard Niemira, declined to comment.

For many volunteers, that was the first they heard that Iowa and Nevada had planned to use the same software vendor to conduct the caucuses.

Now that the Democrats had scrapped the Shadow app, Nevada Democrats scrambled to find a replacement, rather than put the burden on volunteers to do the complicated math by hand.

On Feb. 8, the volunteers again filed into a local high school — Western — to be trained on how to carry out the Nevada caucuses. The volunteers were broken up into groups for mock caucuses, using the names of Harry Potter characters, where they were walked through the process.

But there was one part of the training that none of the volunteers got. They were told they would be provided with iPads and customized software that would help them tally the vote totals. The software was still being developed, they were told.

According to Morrison and the other precinct leader, state officials would not answer basic questions about how the app would work, or who developed it. “Every time it came to using the tool, they’d say, ‘We’ll tell you about it later,’ ” Morrison said. Officials told volunteers that revealing too much information about the software would be risky, because it would give a head start to hackers, who might try to exploit it and manipulate the caucuses. This strategy, known as “security through obscurity,” is generally discouraged by the cybersecurity industry.

It turns out the party had decided to develop the software in-house using Google Forms, a fact the party revealed to volunteers Tuesday evening.

Google spokeswoman Katie Wattie said the company has provided customer service support to Nevada’s Democratic Party, as it would for any paying customer, but the search engine giant has not dispatched personnel to Nevada to offer extra help.

The Cisco software, called Meraki, could also help Nevada officials remotely monitor signs of suspicious activity. Cisco declined to comment.

It wasn’t until Tuesday that the volunteers had a chance to see the software in person. In Las Vegas, the party held a voluntary training session at what appeared to be a temporary office in a strip mall. The lights in the office were dark, leading some volunteers to wonder whether they were in the right place.

When a staffer for the Nevada Democrats showed up at around 6:30 p.m., five volunteers entered and sat around a brown table with florescent lighting. One brought chips and guacamole for the group to share.

The staffers, who later shared what they were shown in the meeting, said the caucus iPad had only a single icon with the letters CC, for caucus calculator. When opened, the app asked for login credentials, which would be written down on a folder given to staffers. Site leaders say they were told they will receive the iPads a day or two before the caucuses Saturday.

At each step of the way, volunteers are instructed to write the results down on a piece of paper and on a large poster that will hang in the room during the caucus. The results on paper, and not the app itself, will be used for the official results, the state party has said.

When the volunteers enter the vote totals from the room into the iPad on caucus day, the software will automatically adjust those totals based on the number of early votes that were cast in that precinct.

If the app or iPad malfunctions for some reason, or there’s no Internet connection, volunteers will have to do everything by hand. If that happens, they’ll be required to open an envelope containing a spreadsheet with all the early-vote totals. The envelope will contain detailed instructions on how to allocate the votes, the volunteers were told.

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thedeadshotnetwork · 6 years

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What We're Thankful For, 2017 Remember how horrible 2016 was, and how thrilled we were to leave it behind? So many people we loved died—Bowie, Ali, Prince, Shandler, Zsa Zsa, George Michael, Gene Wilder, Carrie Fisher, Sharon Jones, Leonard Cohen, Florence Henderson. Harambe . On and on. So many things we loved died too. The truth , for instance. Civility . Trust in institutions, after a long fight, also shuffled off this mortal coil. There were no signs 2017 would be any better. In fact, with the election of Donald J Trump to the land’s highest office, many believed democracy had suddenly found itself on life support. But in such desperate need to turn the page, we placed a bit of hope in the changing of the calendar year anyway. We were so ready to move on, to say “ Fuck 2016! ,” that on January 1, 2017 we woke up to a silly art prank— Hollyweed —and allowed ourselves to believe it somehow meant things were already looking up. How naive we were. It can feel impossible in this waking nightmare to feel there is anything to be hopeful about or thankful for. But unlike the end of ‘16, things actually do appear to be ticking upward. The investigation into Russia’s meddling in the election is closing in . There’s a Reckoning underway for men who abuse their power, and it just might stick . Trump’s approval rating has hit an historic low , and he's largely revealed himself to be a walking disaster who can’t get anything done. Because of him, people are tired . But they're also active . And there is evidence the pendulum may finally have begun to swing the other way. This could again reveal itself to be naiveté. But for the purposes of this post, we’re running with it—welcoming any and all good news, especially during the holidays, which can be especially tough. In that spirit, we once again asked the staff at VICE.com to write a bit about what they’re thankful for in these bad (but getting better!!) times, personal things or people or places they cling to when the world appears to be crumbling. We may not be out of the mire just yet, but the things we’re thankful for help us weather the storm. My Bike For anyone who’s not familiar, New York City’s public transportation is usually a horrorshow . Subways rarely come on time , and when they do, you run the risk of getting stuck underground for hours , having your face peed on by a complete stranger , catching your first glimpse of a dead body , or witnessing the brutality of the animal kingdom in all its glory . So my third summer in New York I decided to buy a bike and I’ve never been more thankful. Not only is it just a better alternative to the shitshow that is the MTA , a great group activity, and something you can (but shouldn’t) do drunk , but I started to grow more connected to a city that often feels like a concrete tourist wasteland. Riding my bike through Brooklyn’s sprawling neighborhoods, to Rockaway Beach, down to Coney Island, over the bridge into Manhattan, and up and down the West Side Highway, taught me more about the city than a random constellation of subway stops ever could. I got my head above ground and out into the place I now call home, and learned about others who call it home in the process. (Bragging about all the exercise I was getting didn't hurt either.) The day I finally became happy in New York was the day I gave in and got a bike. That’s all it took. I stopped relying on everyone and everything else—the uncertainty of the train schedules, the wait time for a bus, and the cost and terrible music of an Uber or a cab. If you want to understand a city, and to better feel your place within it, get on a bike (you should also throw on a helmet) and just go— while you still can . —Lauren Messman, Associate Editor Quitting Drinking, Superhero Movies, and Guy Fieri Photos: Eve Peyser on Instagram / Wikimedia Commons I've spent most of 2017 writing about the Trump administration , and the triumph of evil. To put it mildly, the world is not well, which is inconceivably frightening, and on a personal level, very demoralizing. A saving grace has been not drinking . When I quit last October, I did so because I knew if I kept drinking I would die. Drinking was always an escape for me, a way to not feel like myself and not be accountable to myself and my loved ones; at the same time, it exacerbated my suicidal ideation and depression. I don't think I would've made it through the most chaotic year of myself if I was still drinking alcohol, a substance that has only plunged me deeper and deeper into chaos. I'm incredibly thankful for my boyfriend, a fellow non-drinker. Together, we spent much of the year looking for other, less harmful ways to escape from this shit world. As it turns out, a good, wholesome way to take our minds off all the horror that is 2017 is watching superhero movies. Suicide Squad , The Dark Knight , Deadpool , Thor: Ragnarok , Batman Robin , whatever the film's Rotten Tomatoes rating, they offer a form of escapism that makes me happy without hurting myself. Same goes with Guy Fieri, and the wonderful stars of the Food Network. I am especially thankful for Guy Fieri's unapologetic Guy Fieri-ness—it's genuinely inspiring to me. Despite the insanity of 2017, it was also the year I learned to love the things I love without being embarrassed about it. — Eve Peyser, Staff Writer, Politics TEA At some point in the last three decades America decided collectively to get really into coffee to the point where I assume schoolchildren in the coastal elite bubble are educated in cold brewing and Aeropresses and why burr grinders are better. I come here not to denounce coffee snob culture (I have paid $5 for a pourover and did not complain about it) but to raise up tea culture. Sometimes I don't need to mainline all that caffeine that comes in your average cup of "good" coffee. I just want a hot drink to read while I watch a mature, adult television program such as a Ken Burns documentary or HGTV. Green tea, bitter black tea with some milk, herbal teas that can taste like flowers or orange or mint—it's all good, apart from Lipton's, which thank God is mostly not served outside of the Midwest, diners, and certain institutional settings. (I'm talking about hot tea here; iced tea is also excellent.) Teabags are fine but really you should have a teapot and loose leaves, which will feel charmingly eccentric to Americans. Next time someone comes over offer them some tea, or better yet just tell them you are making tea and they can have some if they want, because that's the kind of person you are: a hospitable drinker of tea who even has those little mesh balls you put the leaves into. Tea gives you something to do in the kitchen when you want to check out of a family gathering. It warms your hands during cold winter nights. I won't go so far as to say that drinking it makes you a good person but I'm sure that it's harder to be a vicious asshole while drinking a nice cup of hot tea, and isn't that what the holidays are all about? —Harry Cheadle, Senior Politics Editor Yoga When it feels like things are in a tailspin, and I can't stand reading one more headline or wondering why I'm bothering putting money into a 401(k) when Donald Trump could literally blow up the planet at any moment, there's really only one thing that consistently makes me feel better: yoga. For me, practicing yoga is the difference between near-constant low-grade anxiety about the state of the world and the ability to fucking chill about it. When I'm feeling shitty, I've learned to put those feelings aside for an hour and hit the mat instead. Nine times out of 10, I feel somewhat better afterwards. So yes, I am thankful for my yoga practice. (On a related note, I'm also thankful for weed, for very similar reasons.) —Kara Weisenstein, Associate Editor The 2017 World Series Champion Houston Astros This year I flew home to Houston, Texas, to visit my parents. The trip was supposed to be quick, just two days. It ended up being nine. Many of them were spent in the dark, without electricity. My trip was the same weekend another visitor came to town: Hurricane Harvey. Even as He began slowly churning in the Gulf and was projected to come knocking as soon as I touched down, I went ahead with my travel plans undeterred. As a Third Coast native, I'd lived through many a ‘cane, and figured the trip would be just a tad bit wetter than I'd hoped. I was wrong. Though my folks were largely spared , I was beginning to see—through Facebook, texts, calls—that many old friends, neighbors, colleagues, and relatives were not. The scope of destruction was massive, the exact kind you might expect when a year's worth of rainfall is wrenched from the clouds in just a few days . Everyone got touched. Efforts to recover were similarly massive. All the donated money and funds both federal and local helped people rebuild homes, surely, but spirits around the region were also in massive need of renovation. That came in the form of the Houston Astros. This was, in a word, unlikely. These are the Astros. Just a few short years ago they were the worst team in the sport . (The Dis-Astros they were sometimes called when I was growing up.) And even when they've managed to field good teams they always find a way to fuck things up. So when they found themselves this year in the World Series facing a favored Los Angeles Dodgers, the most expensive squad in baseball , there was nary a reason to believe they wouldn't be swept like they were the one and only other time they'd found themselves playing this late into the season. But they won. In seven thrilling, totally fucking insane games , they won. Quickly the photo updates of various rebuilding efforts and the lasting evidence of Harvey's destructive rumble were replaced on my Facebook feed with reaction videos of the last World Series out, photos of the various victories along the way, GIFs of improbable plays, and plans to attend the parade. Nothing will ever erase Hurricane Harvey's enormous impact on the city of Houston. But because of it, the Astro's championship season couldn't have come at a better time. —Brian McManus, Special Projects Editor My Fringe-Ass Dad My dad is fringe, in the same way Frank Reynolds is fringe —in fact, he’s a lot like Frank Reynolds, interspersed with a little bit of Homer Simpson, a dash of Harrison Ford, and a whole lot of Larry David. Once, he hit a deer while he was driving through rural Georgia in his sedan, and instead of doing anything about it, he left the chunk of fur that had lodged itself into his crumpled grill in place, neglected to clean the blood from his hood, and started calling his shitty four-door the “Deer Slayer 2000.” He rips cigs. He doesn’t pay parking tickets, as a rule. He’s been wearing the same army-green coat every winter for about a decade, despite the fact that there’s a gaping, tattered hole in the left elbow. Another good one: Five hours into a bender with my reprobate friends at a grimy Atlanta bar, after too many games of pool (couldn’t really see the balls) and air hockey (somehow wound up with bloody knuckles) on which we bet a pickle-back apiece, everyone in attendance—including, of course, my fringe-ass dad—decided to go to the Clermont Lounge . It’s a seedy, smoky strip club that’s really more of a dive bar than anything, and it is (for lack of virtually any other word in my vocabulary) fringe. But we didn’t have a way to get there. So my dad—who, thankfully, was sober enough to drive—had all eleven of us pile into his tiny, beat up sedan: Two in the front seat, seven in the back, and me and a buddy in the trunk. We all easily could’ve died, and though two people vomited on the way there, we made it, and everything turned out fine—better than fine. It was fucking awesome. We drank, and sang, and ran around like idiots, and danced our asses off. I bought my dad a lap dance. The point is this: My dad is extremely fringe, and I have never laughed harder, or marveled more, or appreciated to a deeper degree anything than I do his fringe-ass self. This Thanksgiving, I’ll eat turkey, and pet my dogs, and probably play a few games of Trivial Pursuit, all of which will be nice. But what I’m most excited about—what I’m most thankful for—is the chance to get weird with the lawless, depraved (and, by the way, huge-hearted, shockingly brilliant, impossibly selfless) psychopath who raised me. Here’s to you, Dad. Stay fringe. —Drew Schwartz, Junior Staff Writer Whitney and Brandy in 'Cinderella' While cleaning my apartment the other day, I was looking for some Whitney Houston to jam to. I stumbled upon the 1997 Rodgers Hammerstein's Cinderella soundtrack, which featured Brandy and Whitney Houston. This was the only version of Cinderella we were allowed to watch growing up, and for good reason—the movie sparked my love and appreciation for Whitney Houston and made me dream of being a princess like no other Disney movie had before. The soundtrack took me back to simpler days where every holiday season my mother, sister, and I would watch the scene with Brandy gliding around the dance floor with her prince. We were in awe of the beautiful ballroom filled with cool-colored gowns. From the mixed-race cast to the banging soundtrack, this movie was a huge part of my childhood. I am thankful for this version of Cinderella that was ahead of its time in so many ways. —Janae Price, Editorial Assistant These Things Image by Lia Kantrowitz Sometimes talking or writing without putting my foot in my mouth is hard work. I’m truly thankful I have a job where I don’t often have to express myself with words. In that vein, here is a collage of other things I’m thankful for. —Lia Kantrowitz, Senior Illustrator New Jersey I'm back at my mother's house right now in New Jersey for Thanksgiving, and I'll be here for four days—the longest stay I've had in my home state since I moved to New York five years ago. I don't miss this place until I'm here, but I often find myself defending it, even in Brooklyn. I only grew up once, but you'd be hard-pressed to convince me there's somewhere better to do it. I'm from a land that people go through to get somewhere better—to New York, to Philly, to the airport. It makes you restless, flamboyant, and (sometimes) overtly obnoxious. It's everything I enjoy about life. There's something in the air, beyond pollution, that will always make me feel at home here. Even just exiting the tunnel on the train from Manhattan, once it emerges on the other side of the Hudson, makes me feel different. The smokestacks. The factories. The toll booths and swamps and power lines. Finally I can say "fuck" every other word, and no one's going to say shit. In New Jersey, you learn things. You learn how to speak, to tell stories. You learn how to drive 80 miles an hour eight inches from the back of another car. You learn you're not fucking special. You don't have to make up your mind here. You can elect a man who might as well be the mascot for corruption, and then you can tell that guy to fuck off and pick the dude who's going to legalize pot. You can watch The Jersey Shore with irony and without irony, simultaneously. You can listen to Bon Jovi, and understand why he's brilliant and silly, and you can listen to Bruce Springsteen, and understand why he's brilliant and silly. Plus, we have better bagels than Long Island. And better emo music. Fuck them. —Alex Norcia, Copy Editor, VICE.com and VICE Magazine November 23, 2017 at 04:23PM

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qqueenofhades · 4 years

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I was already distressed about the political and social situation in the US, and then this happens. Are there any examples of societies that fought back against fascism and won, without civil or international war breaking out? Surely there must be some success stories in history. How did other societies overcome fascism, are there lessons to be applied to our current situation? Please tell me we're not doomed, because I have no hope for the future.

Sigh.

Okay.

I’ve been through... a lot of the stages of grief by now. That is, rageposting on tumblr, venting to my friends via text, drinking, crying while drinking, lying on my bed and staring at the ceiling, feeling the crushing weight of certainty that we’re all screwed and nothing matters, crying while talking to my sister, crying generally, lying in bed some more, and am currently still in bed while writing this, but am struggling to put on my internet historian aunt hat and offer some comfort to the stricken masses.

First off: This is bad. I’m not even going to pretend this isn’t bad. We all knew RBG had cancer again, but it was pretty fixed in our minds that she would somehow manage to hang on until after the election. 45 days before the biggest presidential election of all time, in the middle of this year, when names including Ted “Zodiac Killer” Cruz and Tom “Time for Roe vs. Wade to go, block federal funding from being used to teach about slavery, send in the military to crush the BLM protesters” Cotton have already been floated as some of her possible replacements? With Trump and McConnell determined to work as fast as possible to steal this seat as brazenly as they can, because they are literal fascists who don’t care about their own example (Merrick Garland was nominated in FEBRUARY of an election year and McConnell held it up for being “too close to the election?”)

Ugh. Anyone who doesn’t get that this is bad or acting like people are overreacting doesn’t get what’s at stake. And when, as we’ve said before and are saying again now, the future of everyone who isn’t a white straight rich Republican man in this country depends on an 87-year-old woman with cancer for the fourth time? Something’s wrong here. RBG’s death did not have to leave us in this total existential panic, and oh yeah, maybe this could have ALL BEEN AVOIDED AND WE COULD HAVE ALSO HAD THREE (3) NEW LIBERAL JUSTICES SECURING PROGRESSIVE LEGISLATION FOR A GENERATION IF SOME OF YOU HAD JUST FUCKING VOTED FOR HILLARY CLINTON IN TWO THOUSAND AND FUCKING SIXTEEN.

(Why yes I am still mad about that, I will be bitter until the end of time that we were consigned to four years and counting of this completely avoidable nightmare because of apathy, misogyny, and Leftist Moral Purity TM, but we’re talking about the future and what can still be done here, not what’s in the past.)

Anyway. Here’s the bright side, which admittedly sucks right now, but it’s been the answer all long:

VOTE.

You have to fucking vote, and you have to fucking vote for Biden/Harris. Everything that we’ve been talking about is no longer a hypothetical; it’s happening right now. This is not just some Awful Worst Case scenario, and it’s not somehow being spouted by privileged white liberals ignoring the struggles of the masses. (Viz: that awful fucking text post with its simpering self-righteousness: “are you punching nazis or just telling oppressed people to vote blue?” I hate that text post with a fiery passion and it’s the exact kind of morally holier than thou leftist propaganda that wouldn’t surprise me if it was generated by a troll farm in Krasnoyarsk.) My dad is disabled and lives on Social Security. Trump’s second-term plan to end the payroll tax takes SSID out by mid-2021, so... I guess that’s my dad fucked then. I’m a gay woman with long-term mental illness, no healthcare, no savings, no current job, and a lot of student debt. My sister has complex health problems and relies intensely on publicly funded healthcare programs. All my family have underlying conditions that would put them at worse risk for COVID (age, asthma, immune issues.) These are just the people IN MY HOUSEHOLD who would be at risk from a second Trump presidency. It says NOTHING about my friends, about all the people far less fortunate than us, and everyone else who IS ALREADY DYING as this nation lurches into full-blown fascism. That is real. It is happening.

Here’s the good news and what you can do:

Democrats are fired up and mad as hell, and they’ve already donated $31 million between the announcement of RBG’s death last night and today, and that number is climbing every second.

You can help by donating to Get Mitch or Die Trying, which splits your donation 13 ways between the Democrats challenging the most vulnerable Republican seats in the Senate. That also has raised EIGHT MILLION BUCKS in the less-than-twenty-four hours.

You can donate RIGHT NOW to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, vote if your state offers early voting, request your mail-in ballot, or hound everyone you know to ensure that they’re registered.

You can call your US Senators (look up who they are for your state, ESPECIALLY IF THEY ARE REPUBLICAN OR YOU LIVE IN A SWING STATE OR ARE UP FOR RE-ELECTION IN 2020) and phone the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 to voice your insistence that they respect RBG’s last wishes and refuse to vote on any Trump nominee until after January 2021.

The other good-ish news is that I woke up to an email from the Biden campaign this morning about how they’re well aware of this and they’re already on it. BUT WE CANNOT COUNT ON EITHER THEM OR THE SENATE DEMOCRATS TO BE ABLE TO STOP IT. Because Joe Biden is not president and the Senate Democrats do not have a majority, if the Republicans manage to rush a nominee and a vote and all 52 GOP senators vote for that nominee, hey presto, tyranny by majority, a SECOND stolen Supreme Court seat, and a 6-3 hard conservative majority for the next generation. Even if Roberts or Gorsuch sometimes defect on procedural grounds, Kagan, Sotomayor, and Breyer (who is also 82 and thus ALSO might soon be replaceable, thus resulting in an EVEN WORSE ideological swing) would be outnumbered on everything. This is terrible. I’m not even gonna pretend it wouldn’t be.

BUT:

If Joe Biden is elected with a Democratic Senate and House, IT MATTERS. It gets us off the fascism track, it gives us the ability to make progressive law and have it enacted without going to die in Mitch McConnell’s Kill Stack, it gives Biden the executive authority to nominate liberal judges and change Trump’s worst outrages on day 1, it stands as a huge example of a nation managing to reject fascism by democratic process, and while yes, we’d still have a terribly rigged Supreme Court, Democrats would control all the other branches of government and be able to put safeguards in place. The other option is outright fascism and the end of American democracy for good. This may sound alarmist. It’s not. It’s literally what the situation has ended up as, as all of us who were begging people to vote for HRC in 2016 saw coming all along.

So yes. That’s what you need to do, and what WE need to do. We need to make as much goddamn noise as possible, protest, contact elected representatives, make sure everybody pulls their weight and ferociously fights the promised attempt to ram through a new justice before Election Day, all that. But even if that does happen, THEN WE NEED TO FUCKING DONATE, ORGANIZE, AND VOTE FOR JOE BIDEN AND DEMOCRATS UP AND DOWN THE BALLOT. ALL OF US. NO EXCUSES. NO MORE TWITTER LEFTIST ECHO CHAMBERS. NO MORE. THEN, EVEN WITH A RIGGED SUPREME COURT, WE WILL ALL BE SAFER ON NOVEMBER 4TH AND CAN TRY TO FIX WHAT’S BROKEN.

The stakes are just too high to do anything else.

May her memory be a blessing, and a revolution.

#politics for ts #bury me in a mountain of salt #then vote #the end #humoristhefirstcasualty #ask

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