What Happened: July 16, 2021

The Big Story

The Biden administration is coordinating directly with Facebook to identify posts it wants removed from the social media platform. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters Thursday that the administration was in “regular touch with the social media platform” and had been “flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation” about COVID-19. Psaki’s disclosure came immediately after Surgeon General Vivek Murthy delivered a public statement that blamed social media platforms for allowing the spread of misinformation and called on them to take a more active role in censoring content that government officials deem dangerous. “Modern technology companies have enabled misinformation to poison our information environment,” Murthy said, calling on technology companies to “monitor misinformation more closely.” After instituting new protocols for censoring misinformation last year, the major tech platforms, including Facebook, have reversed their policies on multiple occasions. After initially banning any speculation about COVID-19 being a man-made virus, Facebook reversed that decision in May of this year—on the same day that President Biden called on U.S. intelligence agencies to “redouble their efforts” to investigate the origins of the virus.

Read it Here: https://nypost.com/2021/07/15/white-house-flagging-posts-for-facebook-to-censor-due-to-covid-19-misinformation/

Today’s Back Pages: Your Weekend Reads

The Rest

• The cryptocurrency industry “leverages a network of shady business connections, bought influencers, and pay-for-play media outlets to perpetuate a cultlike ‘get rich quick’ funnel,” says Jackson Palmer, co-creator of Dogecoin, a popular cryptocurrency that has a market value of around $54 billion. Dogecoin was created in 2013 to poke fun at the hype around cryptocurrencies. But driven partly driven by a desire among crypto-enthusiasts to “spoof the spoof,” it became a legitimate investment—a spectacle that seemed to make the point that the apparent weirdness and absurdity of cryptocurrencies was no impediment to their market power. Palmer now assails it as a right-wing technology that the wealthy use to avoid taxes and regulations.

Despite claims of “decentralization”, the cryptocurrency industry is controlled by a powerful cartel of wealthy figures who, with time, have evolved to incorporate many of the same institutions tied to the existing centralized financial system they supposedly set out to replace.

— Jackson Palmer (@ummjackson) July 14, 2021

• The lead federal prosecutor investigating Hunter Biden for tax violations and “business dealings with foreign interests” decided to suspend the case prior to the 2020 election to prevent it from coming to the public’s attention, according to an investigation in Politico. The prosecutor on the case, U.S. Attorney David Weiss, is a Trump appointee described as having a reputation for “taking on the Delaware establishment.” At the same time that government officials in Delaware were allegedly suppressing information, social media platforms were censoring reporting on Hunter Biden’s business dealings, including suspending the New York Post’s Twitter account—a decision that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey later told Congress he regretted. In other words, this is the same pattern of state-tech platform collusion seen in today’s coordinated efforts to fight COVID-19 misinformation—only here used for explicitly political purposes.
Read it here: https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/16/hunter-biden-probe-prosecutor-499782

• The Pope caused an uproar among pious Catholics Friday when he announced that the Church would reinstate restrictions on the use of the Latin Mass, the liturgy preferred by Catholic traditionalists. The decision from Pope Francis, made to eliminate what he called a source of division within the church, reverses the policy set by his more conservative predecessor Pope Benedict—who loosened the restrictions in 2007.

• A “small number” of the alleged Colombian mercenaries arrested in connection with the assassination of Haiti’s president were trained by the U.S. military, according to a Pentagon spokesman. Both the United States and Colombia, which developed close security ties as a result of the Colombian civil war, send soldiers to train with the other’s military.

• The Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting on Wednesday has received virtually no attention in the U.S. press but may offer a window into how the organization’s key players, China and Russia, plan to respond to the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Writing in Asia Times, Pepe Escobar, a Brazilian journalist who provides valuable on-the-ground reporting within an explicitly anti-U.S. and anti-Israel perspective, has an account of the framework worked out at the summit. In short, Russia and China are seeking an arrangement with the Taliban to keep violence in Afghanistan from spilling over onto their borders—or, in Russia’s case, into the Central Asian “Stan” countries in its sphere of influence—and to prevent the fomenting of jihadist terrorism in the region. The Taliban has to agree to those terms and to “real inter-Afghan negotiations towards national reconciliation and a durable political solution, thus preventing all-out civil war,” and in return gets left alone within the borders of Afghanistan.
Read it here: https://asiatimes.com/2021/07/russia-china-advance-asian-roadmap-for-afghanistan/

• Severe floods in Europe caused by heavy rains are believed to have killed more than 120 people in Germany and Belgium. More than a thousand are still missing.

• Unemployment claims hit their lowest level last week since March 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic began shutting down large sectors of the U.S. economy. Jobless claims, including the four-week moving average, which The Wall Street Journal notes “can smooth out volatility in the weekly figures,” also fell to a post-pandemic low. The trend continued with state-level claims, which also hit their lowest level overall since March 2020. The numbers are still higher than pre-pandemic levels but indicate economic recovery generating an increased demand for workers, especially as restrictions lift and Americans resume travel and recreational activities.

• The neo-German expressionist actor Nicolas Cage stars in a new movie called Pig, in which he plays a chef who lives in the woods and embarks on a revenge odyssey after his truffle-hunting pig is kidnapped and ... Eh, maybe just watch the trailer for yourselves. The movie is in theaters today.
See it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-hFLl7mYlw

The Back Pages

Your Weekend Reads

◦ The search for the number of numbers in existence sounds like a riddle from a short story by Jorge Luis Borges but is actually a hard math problem—one upon which mathematicians involved will tell you “human dignity depends.” I believe them. This article offers an approachable account of matters such as “an extra size of infinity”:

Most importantly, the result strengthens the case against the continuum hypothesis, a hugely influential 1878 conjecture about the strata of infinities. Both of the axioms that have converged in the new proof indicate that the continuum hypothesis is false, and that an extra size of infinity sits between the two that, 143 years ago, were hypothesized to be the first and second infinitely large numbers.

Read it here: https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-many-numbers-exist-infinity-proof-moves-math-closer-to-an-answer-20210715/


◦ There are few people alive more fascinating than Charles Farrell, a jazz pianist who played with Sonny Rollins and Ornette Coleman and who got his start working at mob clubs before he parlayed that into fixing fights as “the Moby Dick of boxing.” Here he appears with New York Daily News columnist and host Harry Siegel and guest host Tim Marchman—who are, respectively, my brother and dear old friend from Brooklyn—on the podcast FAQ NYC. 

Listen here: https://faq.nyc/2021/07/14/book-club-lowlife/


◦ “The future of (ads) privacy” is a wonky title, but don’t let that throw you off. This is an illuminating peek behind the curtain, written by an insightful industry insider on how the “privacy” of digital life gets made and unmade:

Like porn, advertising is a ruthlessly pragmatic (and quantitative) business willing to adopt any technology that yields a minor edge. The same way that porn pioneered online payment and video-streaming when Amazon and Netflix weren’t even glimmers on the horizon yet, ads will be the first industry to undertake this complete refactoring of how your data is used. Consider all the data that your smart watch is currently ingesting about you—heart rate, location, blood oxygenation, sleep quality, even cardiac fibrillation—the biggest collection of human health data in history, all just sitting on your device and usable in a million different ways.

Read it here: https://www.thepullrequest.com/p/the-future-of-ads-privacy