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Facebook and Twitter Refuse to Remove Controversial Pelosi Video

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2 months ago

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  • President Donald Trump posted a video that was edited to make it look like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ripped up his State of the Union speech while he recognized special guests.
  • Democrats demanded Facebook and Twitter remove the video, while others said it would set a dangerous precedent concerning parody videos.
  • Facebook refused to remove the video, saying that it did not violate the platform’s new policy on manipulated media.
  • Twitter also said it would not remove the video because its new policy on manipulated videos does not go into effect until March 5, and the company will not apply it retroactively.

Controversial Video

Facebook and Twitter have refused to take down a controversial video shared by President Donald Trump that was edited to look like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tore up the president’s State of the Union speech while he was honoring special guests.

The video, shared by Trump on both social media platforms Thursday, took actual footage from the now-viral moment when Pelosi tore up his speech following his State of the Union address.

The video, however, spliced the real footage so that it appeared as though the speaker was tearing Trump’s speech while he was recognizing one of the last Tuskegee Airmen, a reunited military family, and others.

Response

Many House Democrats responded to the video in posts on Twitter, arguing that it was misleading or doctored and calling for it to be taken down.

On the other side, plenty of people also shared and defended the video, like Suzanne Nossel, the chief executive of the free-speech advocacy group PEN America, who argued that the video “would open door to ban a great deal of parody.”

“Viewers can tell she didn’t rip up speech multiple times in exact same way. Harsh, nasty, underhanded, yes,” she wrote. “But parody often is.”

Benny Johnson, the chief creative officer of Turning Point USA, the conservative nonprofit that originally made the video, defended the move in a thread on Twitter. 

“Here is how we made it: We took real lines from the President’s State of the Union speech and then used a real footage of Speaker Pelosi tearing up Trump’s speech as a transition for each clip,” he wrote. “That’s it. Real events that really happened, in a timeline.”

Johnson also argued that removing the video would set a bad precedent.

“Would you call a Super Bowl highlight reel ‘doctored’ because the footage of the big play it did not show every play before and after in sequence?” he wrote. “Is a news package ‘doctored’ when they clip just a small part of a politicians speech? No!”

Twitter and Facebook Respond

Pelosi’s Deputy Chief of Staff Drew Hammill called for Twitter and Facebook to remove the video in a tweet on Friday.

“The latest fake video of Speaker Pelosi is deliberately designed to mislead and lie to the American people, and every day that these platforms refuse to take it down is another reminder that they care more about their shareholders’ interests than the public’s interests,” he wrote.

In an unusual move, Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone responded to Hammill’s tweet.

“Sorry, are you suggesting the President didn’t make those remarks and the Speaker didn’t rip the speech?” he asked, to which Hammill responded, “what planet are you living on?  this is deceptively altered. take it down.”

Stone later told reporters over the weekend that the video did not violate Facebook’s new policy from January on manipulated media and deepfakes.

He specifically pointed to a specific part of the policy that says Facebook will remove that kind of content if it “has been edited or synthesized – beyond adjustments for clarity or quality – in ways that aren’t apparent to an average person and would likely mislead someone into thinking that a subject of the video said words that they did not actually say.”

Facebook also said in their post announcing the new policy that the platform “does not extend to content that is parody or satire, or video that has been edited solely to omit or change the order of words.”

A Twitter spokesperson separately told reporters that it too would not remove the video because its new policy regarding manipulated media, which it announced last week, does not go into effect until March 5 and will not be applied retroactively.

The spokesperson also did not answer hypothetical questions about whether or not the new policy would apply to videos similar to the edited one of Pelosi in the future.

According to Twitter’s new policy, users cannot “deceptively share synthetic or manipulated media that are likely to cause harm.” Twitter may also label those kinds of tweets. 

Although notably, the criteria outlined by Twitter for what it will consider when removing or labeling posts includes, “Whether the content has been substantially edited in a manner that fundamentally alters its composition, sequence, timing, or framing.” 

The video of Pelosi is expected to be an important test case for how social media companies deal with manipulated media at a time when there is mounting pressure on these platforms regarding the spread of misinformation.

See what others are saying: (Business Insider) (Politico) (Fox News)

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World Health Organization Defends Its Relationship With China After Trump Threatens to Cut Funding

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1 day ago

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April 8, 2020

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  • President Trump announced Tuesday that he would cut funding to the World Health Organization; however, minutes later, he backtracked and said he was only considering cutting those funds. 
  • Trump criticized the W.H.O. for being “China-centric,” a criticism it has also faced from other Republican lawmakers over the course of the pandemic.
  • The W.H.O. responded Wednesday by defending its relationship with China and by urging the United States not to cut funding.
  • Loss of funding from the U.S. could cut deep, as that funding makes up 14% of the W.H.O.’s budget.

Trump Says The U.S. Is Looking at Cutting Funding to W.H.O.

President Donald Trump announced he would be cutting United States funding to the World Health Organization at a Tuesday coronavirus press briefing. However, a little more than 15 minutes later, he backtracked and said he was only considering cutting that funding.

“We’re going to put a hold on money spent to the W.H.O.,” he originally said.

“We’re going to put a very powerful hold on it and we’re going to see. It’s a great thing if it works but when they call every shot wrong, that’s no good. They called it wrong. They call it wrong. They really, they missed the call.” 

“So quick follow-up on that,” a reporter asked him later. “Is the time to freeze funding to the WHO during a pandemic?”

“Well, maybe not,” he said. “I’m not saying that I’m going to do it. But we’re going to look at it.”

A different reporter then pressed Trump by saying he had said funding would be cut. 

“No, I didn’t,” Trump said. “I said we’re going to look at it. We’re going to investigate it. We’re going to look at it, but we will look at ending funding, yeah.”

While, currently, no decision has been reached on whether or not to defund the W.H.O. on the U.S. side, if the country were to pull the plug, it could be a deep cut for the organization. The U.S. is the W.H.O.’s biggest donor, and according to its website, U.S. contributions make up 14% of the W.H.O.’s budget.

On top of that, Trump had already previously requested that Congress slash the country’s W.H.O. contribution from $122 to $58 million for the fiscal year in 2021. 

Trump Calls the W.H.O. “China-centric”

Part of the reason why Trump has threatened to cut the W.H.O.’s funding is because of the organization’s relationship with China and its opposition to Trump restricting travel with China back at the end of January.

“They actually criticized and disagreed with my travel ban at the time I did it,” Trump said Tuesday. “And they were wrong. They’ve been wrong about a lot of things. They had a lot of information very early and they didn’t to want to — they seemed to be very “China-centric.” 

“They called it wrong,” he added. “They called it wrong. They really, they missed the call. They could have called it months earlier. They would have known, and should have known, and they probably did know.” 

In January, the W.H.O., cited evidence that it said “[showed] that restricting the movement of people and goods during public health emergencies is ineffective in most situations and may divert resources from other interventions.”

“In fact, we oppose it,” W.H.O. Director General Tedros Adhanom said. 

On February 11th, the W.H.O did partially revise its stance on travel restrictions, saying that such restrictions “…may have a public health rationale at the beginning of the containment phase of an outbreak, as they may allow affected countries to implement sustained response measures, and non-affected countries to gain time to initiate and implement effective preparedness measures. Such restrictions, however, need to be short in duration, proportionate to the public health risks, and be reconsidered regularly as the situation evolves.” 

Of course, U.S. travel restrictions haven’t been short. In fact, they’ve been in place for over two months now. That ban was also imposed well into the outbreak only after China had already reported thousands of cases.

Other public health experts have also argued that travel bans require strenuous amounts  of government resources and that there are more effective ways of fighting the spread of the virus, including measures like comprehensive testing.

However, some experts have praised Trump for closing the borders between the U.S. and China. That includes one of the lead members of Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force, immunologist Dr. Anthony Fauci.

“One of the things that we did very early and very aggressively, the president put the travel restriction coming from China to the United States and most recently from Europe to the United States because Europe is really the new China,” Dr. Fauci said in a March 22 interview with CBS’ Face the Nation. 

Other Lawmakers Criticize the W.H.O. for Inaction Against China

Trump’s potential cut to the W.H.O. is just the latest in a series of criticism from Republican lawmakers. 

Monday night on Fox News, Senator Rick Scott (R-FL) accused the W.H.O. of bending the knee to China, pointing to several instances including a January 14th tweet from the W.H.O. Notably, that tweet referenced a preliminary investigation from Chinese authorities who said there was “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus.”

That statement has since been proven false. 

In that interview, Scott also mentioned that he had asked the W.H.O to investigate China but the organization turned him down.

“If they had done their job,” he said, “everybody would have gotten more ready. We wouldn’t have shut down this economy, and we wouldn’t have all these people dead all over the world.”

Scott then went on to say Senate Homeland Security Committee Chair Ron Johnson (R-WI) had agreed to investigate the W.H.O’s response.

Last week, Senator Martha McSally (R-AZ) called for Adhanom to step down from the W.H.O. because, according to McSally, he’s assisting China in covering up underreporting.

W.H.O. Defends Its Relationship With China

The W.H.O. responded directly to Trump’s potential funding cut Tuesday morning. Its regional director for Europe said, “We are still in the acute phase of a pandemic so now is not the time to cut back on funding.”

Senior adviser to Adhanom, Bruce Aylward, also defended the organization’s relationship with China, saying, “It was absolutely critical in the early part of this outbreak to have full access to everything possible, to get on the ground and work with the Chinese to understand this.” 

“This is what we did with every other hard hit country like Spain and had nothing to do with China specifically,” Aylward added.

Aylward also defended the W.H.O.’s January recommendation to keep borders open, saying that Beijing had worked hard to identify and detect early cases and their contacts, ensuring they didn’t travel.

See what others are saying: (Business Insider) (The New York Post) (CNBC)

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Court Decisions Force Wisconsin to Hold Primary During Pandemic. Here’s What You Need to Know

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2 days ago

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April 7, 2020

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  • The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that the state must hold its primary Tuesday, overruling Gov. Tony Evers executive order to postpone the election.
  • Separately, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a lower ruling that would have let absentee ballots be cast until April 13.
  • Both decisions were the results of legal challenges from the GOP-led legislature, which refused to delay the election or allow for full mail-in voting and also objected to extending absentee voting.
  • Wisconsin is now the only state to hold a major in-person election since shelter-in-place orders have been implemented all over the country.

Wisconsin’s Legal Battle

After a dizzying legal back-and-forth, Wisconsin held its primary election Tuesday despite warnings from public health experts about gatherings during the coronavirus pandemic.

Wisconsin is now the only state to hold a major in-person election since it and the majority of other states issued shelter in place orders. More than a dozen other states postponed their primaries in response to the outbreak, making Wisconsin the only state to hold in-person elections in April.

That, however, is not for lack of trying on the part of Gov. Tony Evers. On Monday, Evers issued an executive order delaying the election until June 9.

According to reports, Evers held off on the move until the last minute because many local offices on the ballot start their terms in April, and Wisconsin state law says only the state legislature can change the date of the election. 

But the GOP-led legislature refused to change the date or allow the election to go forward with all mail-in ballots. When Evers went ahead with the executive order, the state legislature filed a legal challenge, saying the governor was exceeding his constitutional authority.

Shortly after, a conservative majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court shot down the order, ruling that the election had to go forward on Tuesday.

In a separate ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked a federal court decision that would have extended absentee voting until April 13. The lower court’s decision had also received a legal challenge from the state’s Republicans.

In a 5-4 vote, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that extending the deadline for absentee voting “fundamentally alters the nature of the election.”

All four of the liberal justices dissented. In her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote a scathing review of the decision.

“The question here is whether tens of thousands of Wisconsin citizens can vote safely in the midst of a pandemic,” she wrote.

“With the majority’s stay in place, that will not be possible. Either they will have to brave the polls, endangering their own and others’ safety. Or they will lose their right to vote, through no fault of their own.”

Poll Workers and Condensed Locations

Similarly, there were also many concerns about the safety of poll workers and election officials as well.

While officials said they were taking precautions to protect their health at voting precincts, many also told reporters that all the legal back-and-forth created confusion and logistical problems.

That was made worse by the fact that thousands of poll workers said they will not work, with some reportedly saying they were being asked to risk their health.

According to the New York Times, “roughly 2,400 National Guardsmen were being trained as poll workers as late as Monday, it still won’t come close to the more than 7,000 who have already said they cannot work.”

The lack of poll workers has also prompted officials to shut down hundreds of polling stations. One of the most dramatic examples was in Milwaulkee, where the number of polling locations was cut from 180 to just five, despite the fact that election workers expected more than 50,000 voters to turn out.

The move forced those who did decide to vote in-person to wait in long lines and further risk exposing themselves to more people.

 Response

Many people took to Twitter to share videos of lines wrapping around buildings or spanning whole blocks.

A number of users argued that holding in-person voting during a pandemic was undemocratic or amounted to voter suppression.

Some directly accused the state’s Republicans of endangering their people, while others also condemned the U.S. Supreme Court decision.

Many of those points were echoed by presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).

“It’s outrageous that the Republican legislative leaders and the conservative majority on the Supreme Court in Wisconsin are willing to risk the health and safety of many thousands of Wisconsin voters tomorrow for their own political gain,” he wrote on Twitter.

Former Vice President Joe Biden has not said much since the decision, but on Thursday, he took a different stance.

“There’s a lot of things that can be done; that’s for the Wisconsin courts and folks to decide,” he told reporters, adding that both in-person and mail-in voting could be done safely.

However, there were some who applauded the decision to keep in-person voting. 

Others appeared to downplay the move, like one Republican county chair, Jim Miller of Sawyer County, who said the voting process would be like picking up food under Wisconsin’s stay-at-home order.

“If you can go out and get fast food, you can go vote curbside,” he said. “It’s the same procedure.”

President Donald Trump, for his part, also chimed in Tuesday morning, encouraging people to go out and vote for a conservative state Supreme Court justice who supported the Second Amendment.

What’s Next?

Currently, it is unclear how voter turnout has been impacted. As for the election results, those are not to be expected for several more days.

The federal judge that initially allowed absentee ballots to be sent until April 13 also ruled that election officials had to hold results until that same date. According to reports, the U.S. Supreme Court decision does not seem to have changed that.

That said, Biden has been pulling out a strong lead over Sanders in Wisconsin’s polls for a while now. FiveThirtyEight predicts that the former vice president has a 90% chance of winning the most votes.

Wisconsin will likely be crucial to the future of Sanders’ campaign. In 2016, Sanders won the state, which has 84 pledged delegates up for grabs.

Wisconsin is also a key battleground state. Trump won the state in the general election in 2016, turning it red for the first time in 30 years.

Besides being an important state in both the primary and general, Wisconsin also has much bigger implications for both parties.

“The state stands as a first test case in what both national parties expect to be a protracted fight over changing voter rules to contend with the pandemic — potentially the biggest voting rights battle since the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965,” the Times explains.

See what others are saying: (NPR) (The New York Times) (Fox News)

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FLOTUS Calls for Public to Take Cloth Mask Advice Seriously, President Chooses to Go Without

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3 days ago

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April 6, 2020

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  • The CDC has recommended that people wear cloth face coverings in public settings where other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain. 
  • The advice is aimed at stopping presymptomatic and asymptomatic carriers from spreading the coronavirus to others around them.
  • Officials have released DIY instructions for homemade masks that can be made at a low cost and can be washed.
  • President Trump stressed that the guidance is voluntary and said he will not wear a mask himself, though the First Lady has called for people to take the advice seriously. 

New Recommendation 

President Donald Trump announced Friday that the Center for Disease Control is advising everyone in the U.S. to wear face coverings in public settings to help slow the spread of the coronavirus, though he himself has chosen not to follow the voluntary measure.

“CDC recommends wearing cloth face coverings in public settings where other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain (e.g., grocery stores and pharmacies) especially in areas of significant community-based transmission,” the CDC’s memo reads.

Previous guidelines only advised healthcare workers to wear masks, as well as those who are sick or caring for a sick person who is unable to wear one. However, the CDC’s new recommendation is aimed at stopping presymptomatic and asymptomatic carriers from spreading the virus to others around them.

To avoid taking critical supplies like N95 respirators and surgical masks from healthcare workers, the CDC is advising that people use cloth face coverings which can be washed and made from household items at a low cost.

Wearing face coverings is a voluntary decision and the CDC noted that they should not be placed on “children under age 2, anyone who has trouble breathing, or is unconscious, incapacitated or otherwise unable to remove the mask without assistance.”

However, it’s important to note that wearing a face-covering is just an additional public health measure that can be taken to slow the spread of the coronavirus. It is not a substitute for social distancing. 

Homemade Masks 

Since that announcement, swarms of DIY instructions and videos have surfaced showing different ways to make masks at home. The CDC themselves posted both sew and no-sew instructions using items like cotton T-shirts, or a bandana and coffee filter. 

They even released a 45-second video with U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams quickly putting one together with rubber bands and folded fabric.

Their guidance says to use a covering that fits snug, can be secured with ties or ear loops, includes multiple layers of fabric, and allows for breathing without restriction. These masks don’t offer full protection, but some is better than none and they can be especially helpful when paired with other tactics like hand washing, not touching your face, and social distancing.   

There is little data so far on cloth or homemade masks in general, but the material most often recommended by experts is a tight weave or quilted cotton. 

Experts also warn that you should wash or dispose of your masks after each use. Don’t fidget with your masks when wearing then, be sure to remove them by the ear straps to avoid touching whatever may have landed on the front surface, and wash your hands thoroughly before and after. 

Trump Says He Won’t Wear a Mask 

When making the announcement, President Trump said that he himself was choosing not to wear a mask. 

“With the masks, it is going to be really a voluntary thing,” he said at the daily coronavirus briefing. “You can do it. You don’t have to do it. I am choosing not to do it. But some people may want to do it, and that’s OK. It may be good. Probably will — they’re making a recommendation. It’s only a recommendation, it’s voluntary.”

“I’m feeling good. I just don’t want to be doing it…I think that wearing a face mask as I greet presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens — I don’t know,” he added. “Somehow, I don’t see it for myself. I just dont, maybe I’ll change my mind.”

That was, of course, met with some backlash, but it highlighted the battle between the White House and CDC over the measures. For weeks, the White House coronavirus task force has debated whether or not to issue such a recommendation. 

Senior officials pushed to limit the guidance to high-transmission areas only, fearing that the call for the wide use of masks could cause unnecessary panic and provide a false sense of security. They also argued that even with the call for cloth coverings, the guidance might prompt people to try and get their hands on medical masks that are already in high demand at hospitals. 

But federal health officials and experts from the CDC said the guidance only makes sense if it is broadly applied. They argued that it is an additional way to slow the spread and prevent communities with low transmission from quickly becoming an area with a high volume of cases. 

FLOTUS Supports Cloth Masks

Despite the President’s remarks, First Lady Melania Trump has stressed the importance of wearing masks. On Friday, she tweeted, “As the weekend approaches I ask that everyone take social distancing & wearing a mask/face covering seriously. #COVID19 is a virus that can spread to anyone – we can stop this together.”

She made a similar call on Sunday, this time sharing the CDC’s information.

President Trump was asked about her tweets during a coronavirus task force press briefing on Sunday, replying, “It’s good, no, she feels that way.”

“Would you like me to wear one right now in answering your question?” He asked jokingly. “That would be a little awkward I guess. But no, I mean, I again, I would wear one if I thought it was important.” 

“She likes the idea of wearing it, yeah she does,” Trump continued. “A lot of people do. Again, it’s a recommendation, and I understand that recommendation, and I’m ok with it.”

Cities like New York and Los Angeles had already called for face coverings in public, but some areas are now strictly enforcing the measures. 

In Laredo, Texas, the city’s emergency mandate calls for anyone over the age of 5 to wear “some form of covering over their nose and mouth” when using public transportation, taxis, rideshares, pumping gas or when inside a building open to the public.  The penalty for violating the order is a Class C misdemeanor, punishable by a fine up to $1,000.

Other cities might soon start enforcing the measures as well, as numbers of cases and deaths continue to climb across the country. 

See what others are saying:(NPR) (CNET) (Vox) 

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