Day: January 7, 2025

In a shameless act of genuflection toward the incoming Trump administration, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday that his social media platforms — which include Facebook and Instagram — will be getting rid of fact-checking partners and replacing them with a “community notes” model like that found on X. 

There could be little doubt about whom Meta aimed to please with these changes: Donald Trump and his far-right political movement.

In a video message explaining the announcement, Zuckerberg framed the new policies in the Republican lexicon of “free expression” against “censorship,” echoing right-wing talking points about how the social media platform’s third-party fact checkers have been prone to “political bias.”

And ending the fact-checking program was a direct demand of Trump’s pick for Federal Communications Commission chair and current FCC commissioner, Brendan Carr, according to The Verge. 

Then there was the venue: News of the changes was first shared by Meta’s chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan in an exclusive on “Fox & Friends,” Trump’s favorite show. 

Zuckerberg and his executives’ naked pandering is worthy of contempt. As is the tech mogul’s decision last month to donate $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund.

Zuck is just one of the most prominent Silicon Valley billionaires making moves to lick the president-elect’s boots. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Jeff Bezos’s Amazon both donated $1 million to the Trump fund. And Elon Musk’s ultra-MAGA performance needs no mention. There’s nothing surprising about the machinations of the mega-rich when it comes to aligning with power.

When it comes to shifting their businesses to be less accountable, the full effects remain to be seen, but we can be confident it will poison the discourse with even more right-wing garbage.

Meta platforms will now follow in the footsteps of X and become more filled with unchecked, reliably racist conspiracy theories, a proliferation of neo-Nazi accounts, hate speech, and violence. Zuckerberg himself admitted in his announcement that “we’re going to catch less bad stuff.”

None of this, though, should lead us to draw the wrong conclusions about the value of social media fact-checking, or fact-checking more broadly, when it comes to combating the far right and the appeal of its conspiratorial world view. For a decade now, liberals have wrongly treated Trump’s rise as a problem of disinformation gone wild, and one that could be fixed with just enough fact-checking.

A case in point is Trump’s forthcoming second term itself: He won back the White House while spewing unfounded, racist lies about Haitian immigrants stealing and eating pets, among other falsehoods — lies that were again and again debunked by every establishment media outlet.

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Facebook and Twitter Finally Do Slightly More Than Literally Nothing About Trump

An entire liberal cottage industry of fact-checking Trump and his allies on news and social media, even removing Trump from major social media platforms, did not diminish his support nor expunge dangerous disinformation from the echo chambers primed to receive and propagate it.

The end of the fact check era, however, is worth examining because of how it heralds another liberal failure with little to offer in the way of alternatives. It is just another capitulation in the battle against fascism. Liberals, it turned out, were never really the “resistance” that they pretended they were.

The idea that Zuckerberg is acting out of a renewed, conveniently timed commitment to “free speech” is laughable, and we’d be wise to expect further bending to Trump and Republican whims.

Big Fact Check

Facebook introduced its third-party fact-checking program in 2016, following Trump’s first election victory. The system relied on 90 organizations worldwide to address “viral misinformation.”

In 2021, in response to Trump’s role in the January 6 Capitol attack, Meta banned the then-president from its platforms. Around that time, over 800 QAnon conspiracy groups were also removed from Facebook. Social media censorship became a hot button for the grievance-driven Trump and his far right.

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Meta’s Israel Policy Chief Tried to Suppress Pro-Palestinian Instagram Posts

None of the right-wing’s agenda, however, was about free speech for all. Consider that, at the same time, the right was rallying behind book bans in schools. They didn’t utter a peep when, as The Intercept reported in 2020, dozens of left-wing and antifascist groups were also banned from Facebook. And Meta has been engaging in what Human Rights Watch called “systematic and global” censorship of Palestinian and Palestine-solidarity content on its platforms.

Nonetheless, the right has successfully created a victim narrative out of content moderation. 

Enter Zuckerberg and the utter lack of subtlety in his announcement. These new policies were clearly not meant to serve the political left or censored pro-Palestinian users. “We’re getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate,” Zuckerberg said, issuing a thinly veiled signal that anti-trans, anti-immigrant hate would face fewer roadblocks.

With history as a guide, it’s hard to imagine that pro-Palestinian speech, alongside speech for environmental, racial, and gender justice won’t face policing under a Trump administration. The Republican-led Congress is already chafing at the bit to condemn such activism as terrorism.

Smashing Liberal Shibboleths

On the eve of Trump’s second term, liberal shibboleths about speaking truth to power are worse than outdated. Meta imitating X’s permissive approach to right-wing fearmongering is not a welcome development, nor is the loss of funding that journalistic and research organizations got for partnering with Meta on fact checks. Yet fact checks were never going to deliver us from the political context in which far-right propaganda thrives — one of alienation, austerity, inequality, and fearfulness. 

I’m not the first to point out that narratives about the current scourge of disinformation, largely propagated by establishment media outlets fearful of their diminished authority, failed to account for why certain conspiracies and falsehoods were able to appeal to huge but specific swaths of the population.

Disinformation, though, has been a convenient narrative for a Democratic establishment unwilling to reckon with its own role in upholding anti-immigrant narratives, or repeating baseless fearmongering over crime rates, and failing to support the multiracial working class.

In an essay questioning popular narratives around “big disinformation,” Joe Bernstein recounted that posts labeled as false by Facebook only saw an 8 percent reduction in sharing — showing how the designation doesn’t stop information from spreading. Bernstein noted that the story of disinformation was one that tech giants could use to their advantage, as its very premise — that social media content has a nearly all-powerful ability to convince and persuade users — is a helpful narrative when appealing to advertisers. It’s also largely unfounded.

The persuasion power of social media posts has been overstated, while the political, socioeconomic contexts in which conspiracies thrive has been significantly understated in the disinformation discourse. QAnon appeals disproportionately to evangelicals, for instance, and Covid skepticism gained a foothold because of the experiences that formed Americans’ opinions of public health authorities. “There is nothing magically persuasive about social-media platforms,” Bernstein wrote.

The nails are firmly in the coffin, and the coffin has been buried — so long dead is the idea that social media platforms like X or Instagram are either trustworthy news publishers, sites for liberatory community building, or hubs for digital democracy. Instead, we need to think about the internet as a place driven exactly by the motives of the people who own — and profit from — these platforms.

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“The internet may once have been understood as a commons of information, but that was long ago,” wrote media theorist Rob Horning in a recent newsletter. “Now the main purpose of the internet is to place its users under surveillance, to make it so that no one does anything without generating data, and to assure that paywalls, rental fees, and other sorts of rents can be extracted for information that may have once seemed free but perhaps never wanted to be.”

Social media platforms are huge corporations for which we, as users, produce data to be mined as a commodity to sell to advertisers — and  — and government agencies. The CEOs of these corporations are craven and power-hungry. 

Zuckerberg, lest we forget, is still facing an antitrust Federal Trade Commission lawsuit over claims that Meta bought Instagram and WhatsApp to crush competition. Luckily for him, Trump responds well to bootlicking. 

The post Facebook Fact Checks Were Never Going to Save Us. They Just Made Liberals Feel Better. appeared first on The Intercept.

(NewsNation) — A rapidly moving wildfire in the Pacific Palisades area of Los Angeles has spread to more than 2,900 acres, prompting mandatory immediate evacuations of nearby residents. 

There were no injuries reported due to the fire as of 3:45 p.m. local time, Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Kristin Crowley confirmed at a media conference.

There are 250 LAFD firefighters on scene, including 46 engines, three trucks and five helicopters, officials said. Roughly 30,000 residents from 10,000 households have been ordered to evacuate.

More than 13,200 structures are threatened by the fire. Click here to view the LAPD’s interactive evacuation zone map.

Palisades fire causes state of emergency declaration

“Angelenos should be advised that the windstorm is expected to worsen tonight through tomorrow morning and to heed warnings, stay vigilant and stay safe,” the city recommended.

Gov. Gavin Newsom said he reached out to President Joe Biden, who was in California when the blaze began and has started the process for receiving emergency funds. Newsom has declared a state of emergency.

As FEMA announced a Fire Management Assistance Grant has been approved, Biden confirmed he has been briefed on the fire.

“I am being frequently briefed on the wildfires in west Los Angeles. My team and I are in touch with state and local officials, and I have offered any federal assistance that is needed to help suppress the terrible Pacific Palisades fire,” the president said in a post on X.

The blaze was first reported as a vegetation fire around 10:30 a.m. PT but had spread 200 acres by the next hour due to strong winds, according to Los Angeles Fire Department spokesperson Erik Scott, reported NewsNation local affiliate KTLA.

By 2:30 p.m. PT, the fire had spread to more than 772 acres. An hour later, the blaze had spread to 1,262 acres.

The fire’s reach more than doubled to 2,921 acres by 6:30 p.m. PT. 

Palisades wildfire map: Who has evacuated?

CALFIRE ordered evacuations for the entire community down to the Pacific Ocean for an “immediate threat to life” as of 3 p.m. PT. Later evacuation orders included Malibu, Calabasas and Santa Monica.

Los Angeles has declared a state of emergency for the winds produced by the flames.

Authorities shut down the Pacific Coast Highway from the Interstate 10 freeway to Topanga Canyon, allowing only limited access to facilitate the movement of evacuees and emergency vehicles.

“Fire is burning westward near the Pacific Palisades Highlands community with Rustic Canyon to the East & Topanga Cyn to the West are all under Evacuation warning,” Scott said, according to the outlet.

City officials said they have had to move vehicles left abandoned on Sunset and Palisades to provide clear access. Almost 100 vehicles were left abandoned at the intersection, according to an alert.

KTLA reported that a bulldozer moved around 200 cars out of the way.

“This is pretty much the worst possible scenario for a firefight,” David Ortiz of the LAFD said.

Newsom said he anticipates other fire events happening concurrently due to the wind and that the worst is yet to come.

Santa Ana windstorm fueling Los Angeles fire

The National Weather Service said what could be the strongest Santa Ana windstorm in more than a decade began Tuesday across Los Angeles and Ventura counties and peaked in the early hours of Wednesday when gusts could reach 80 mph. Isolated gusts could top 100 mph in mountains and foothills.

“The President has been briefed on the wildfires in Los Angeles and at his direction his team is in contact with state and local officials to offer any federal assistance as needed. In response to the Governor’s request, FEMA has just approved a Fire Management Assistance Grant to support the impacted community and help reimburse California for firefighting costs.”

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass issued a statement on X, calling the wildfire a “very dangerous situation.”

“Firefighters are now actively and aggressively responding to the palisades fire with support from regional partners. Angelenos in the area are urged to heed evacuation warnings and follow direction from public safety officials. Due to increasing winds, this is a very dangerous situation,” she said.

Electricity providers have initiated planned power shutoffs to limit further fire starts. About 4,000 customers in Los Angeles and Ventura Counties have seen shutoffs, according to Southern California Edison, reported the Los Angeles Times.

San Diego Gas & Electric is considering cutting off power to more than 60,000 customers beginning Tuesday, mostly for those located across inland San Diego County, according to the outlet.

Several school districts, including the Los Angeles Unified School District, are temporarily relocating students due to the fire.

Nearby Eaton fire prompts more evacuations

A fire erupted around 7:30 p.m. PT in the Eaton Canyon area north of Altadena, California, roughly 40 miles east of the Pacific Palisades’ blaze.

The fire, which has quickly spread to 400 acres, prompted mandatory evacuations, per the Angeles National Forest’s X account.

What is the Pacific Palisades?

Pacific Palisades is a neighborhood in Los Angeles that is home to many high-profile entertainers. Residents were finding their escape routes congested and slow-moving, KTLA reported.

Pacific Palisades’ current honorary mayor, actor Eugene Levy, told the Los Angeles Times that the “smoke looked pretty black and intense over Temescal Canyon,” adding that he “couldn’t see any flames but the smoke was very dark.”

Actor Steve Guttenberg urged residents to “band together” and help everyone get to safety in an interview with the outlet.

“Don’t worry about your personal property, just get out, get your loved ones and get out,” he pleaded, adding that he had friends in the area who were under evacuation orders but were currently stuck without a clear way out.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

A lottery for six affordable artist studios in Gowanus— the first of more than 100 such studios slated to come to the neighborhood in the next few years — is now open. 

The studios, built as part of a Community Benefits Agreement signed ahead of the Gowanus rezoning, are set to open this spring at a new coworking space, The Shop, at 420 Carroll St. 

Priced at around $1.66 per square foot per month, the studios will rent for between $275 and $331 per month, or $3,300 and $3,800 annually. Per the CBA, rents can only increase by 2% per year. 

That’s well below market rate for the area, said Johnny Thornton, executive director of Arts Gowanus, which helped orchestrate the CBA and is overseeing the lottery and the affordable studios. 

Listings for arts studios in the area show rents two or three times higher than what’s expected at The Shop — a 220 square foot studio in Sunset Park costs $775 per month, where the largest affordable studio at 420 Carroll, at 223 square feet, costs $275 per month. A membership and a private studio at the Gowanus Studio Space runs at least $630 per month. 

Gowanus used to be an affordable haven for artists, and still has a thriving arts scene. But as the neighborhood changed, rents started to creep up, forcing creators to move elsewhere. When the Gowanus rezoning was proposed, locals worried more artists would be displaced, either by high rents or by developers buying and knocking down the buildings they worked out of. 

But as part of a 2021 agreement reached just before a critical City Council vote, ten developers agreed to include subsidized studio spaces in about a dozen new buildings around the nabe. More than three years later, the studios at 420 Carroll — a mixed-use building with housing and commercial space —  are the first to come to fruition. 

Anne Olsen, Director of Coworking at The Domain Companies — the developer behind 420 Carroll — said the company “couldn’t be more excited” to provide the studios.

“Place based development is a major priority for us, the opportunity to work with the existing community to preserve what makes Gowanus special was incredibly appealing to us,” Olson told Brooklyn Paper. “The Community Benefits Agreement and the subsequent studios through Arts Gowanus has helped us get connected with the community organizers on the forefront in this neighborhood. It is truly a wonderful chance to support their existing efforts within the new development and we are eager and excited to continue to connect with more people and organizers as we move toward opening.”

“It all seems like an abstraction that’s finally becoming real, like, you can see it,” Thornton said. “When I first get to open one of the doors and go into these studios, it’ll blow my mind, because it’s been such an abstraction for years.”

Each artist is essentially a small business, Thornton explained, and while many work at home, a dedicated studio space allows them to expand their work, meet with curators and other business partners, and become part of a community of artists. 

“Having a giant cost because of your dream, your passion, come out of your paycheck every month is a really difficult thing,” Thornton said. “So having [studios] that are affordable really can create a lot more flexibility, and create a lot more reasons to stay an artist and stay in New York City. That’s kind of one of our goals, to keep artists here, and keep them creating.” 

The studio lottery, and an even more affordable option

The lottery for the studios isn’t quite as strict as for affordable housing, Thornton said, and it’s available via the Arts Gowanus website, not a city portal. The studios are meant for “fine artists,” per the site, who must prove that they’re actively working by providing photos of their recent pieces and either an artist statement and biography, CV, or a letter from someone established in the arts who can back the applicant. 

An algorithm used to sort the applications will give more weight to artists who can prove they were previously displaced from Gowanus, and those who are part of an underrepresented community will also be given priority. 

Arts Gowanus will interview top applicants remotely, but the final determination will be made by the landlord or property owner — who may ask for their own application and credit or background checks. The rent includes heating, cooling, ventilation, electricity, and shared Wi-Fi — plus a communal kitchenette, bathrooms, and slop sink. 

Applications for the first round of studios close on March 1, 2025. Applicants who don’t get studios will be kept in the system for future lotteries, since all are in the same neighborhood, and won’t have to re-enter. 

There’s one more open space at 420 Carroll, for the Arts Gowanus Fellowship Program. 

Before the Fellowship Program, one studio in each location was subsidized even further, for artists making below 50% of the Area Median Income. But that still presented a barrier for some in the nabe, Thornton said.

Instead, Arts Gowanus itself will rent those further-subsidized studios and pay all costs for its fellows, plus offer career counseling and other opportunities. All low-income Brooklyn artists will be considered, but the org will prioritize those living locally, especially at Gowanus Houses, Warren Houses, Wyckoff Gardens, and Red Hook Houses. 

The fellows will have to commit to ten hours in the studio per week for one year, and participate in Arts Gowanus Programming and other workshops and events. Arts Gowanus is offering two fellowship spaces this spring, one at 420 Carroll and another at the Arts Gowanus office at 540 President St. 

Looking ahead

“We couldn’t be more excited about both of these things, it’s really been a long time coming,” Thornton said. “So, this being the first ones that are coming online, it’s just a really special time and it’s taken a lot of work.” 

With the studios at 420 Carroll set to be completed this spring, Thornton expects more studios in other buildings to start coming online later this year. Arts Gowanus’ new headquarters and community center, which will also include three free studios, will likely open in late 2026 or early 2027.

Justin Trudeau had a special bond with Canadians, who had known him since he was born, on Christmas Day in 1971, as the son of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.

That bond helped him get his Dad’s old job. In his first federal election as Liberal leader in 2015, his Conservative opponents warned Canadians that he was a lightweight, a celebrity with nice hair but no relevant work experience. Yet Trudeau had grown up in public, and he brought a welcome dose of glamor to the humdrum world of Canadian politics. Voters liked him, felt they knew him, and decided to give him a chance, in the form of a majority government.

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It was a remarkable triumph, unprecedented in Canadian politics. Trudeau—a former high school teacher with an unimpressive resume—managed to take his Liberal Party from third place in 2011, its worst showing in history, to first with a resounding mandate, an echo of the “Trudeaumania” that gripped the country when his father won government in 1968.

Justin’s election was a restoration of his father’s vision of Canada as a bilingual, multicultural northern social welfare state. But in the place of his father’s Jesuitical intellectual precision, he brought glamour, openness, and fun. Trudeau promised Canadians “sunny ways” after a decade of dour, business-oriented Conservative government, and successfully pursued an ambitious progressive agenda, winning two more elections. But after nine tumultuous years as Canada’s leader, he was forced to announce his resignation on Monday to avoid a revolt from Liberal Members of Parliament, who are facing certain defeat in an election that must be called by October.

Trudeau will stay on until his replacement is chosen. But his stubborn refusal to recognize that his time was up has left him, his party, and his country in a terrible situation, with Donald Trump and Elon Musk bullying him and threatening to make Canada the 51st state. He will govern as a lame duck in the first months of Trump’s presidency while his party chooses a leader to take on the combative Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre, who has had a double-digit lead in the polls for more than two years.

Trudeau leaves his country in peril, which means Canadians are not in the mood to celebrate his accomplishments as Prime Minister. He did do some things, though.

He enjoyed a long honeymoon, was briefly a global media darling, and won support for reducing child poverty, increasing taxes on the rich, and cutting taxes on the middle class. He legalized marijuana, brought in a carbon tax to cut emissions, and worked to improve the lives of Indigenous Canadians, whose difficult living conditions are a continued source of national shame.

Trudeau successfully managed the first presidency of Donald J. Trump, carefully negotiating a trade agreement similar to the one Trump inherited, and got the country through the COVID-19 pandemic, putting money in people’s pockets so they could stay locked down until the worst had passed.

But if Trudeau managed crises reasonably well, he also produced them regularly. He broke ethics rules with an ill-considered holiday on the Aga Khan’s private island, made a disastrous trip to India that was set up like a royal tour, was revealed to have worn blackface more times than he could say, lost two ministers and several senior aides in a scandal over an attempt to sideline the prosecution of SNC Lavalin, a corrupt engineering firm.

Yet what did him in was the post-pandemic cost-of-living crisis. Like Joe Biden, Rishi Sunak, Emmanuel Macron, and practically every other incumbent in the West, Trudeau’s poll numbers went underwater with people’s household budgets.

Economic growth has been slower than in the U.S., and his mismanagement of immigration made matters worse. Canada has long prided itself on its careful and successful integration of newcomers, with Trudeau’s father Pierre making Canada the first country to introduce official multiculturalism. But to inject energy into the economy after the pandemic, Trudeau carelessly opened the gates too wide, letting in record numbers of temporary foreign workers and international students that exacerbated what was already one of the world’s worst housing crises.

His doom started to be clear in June when he lost a byelection in a normally safe Toronto neighborhood, and became clearer when he lost another in Montreal in September. Liberal MPs called for him to quit. He ignored them, shuffled his cabinet, tried out a holiday sales-tax-cut and mulled $250 checks for all working Canadians, but nothing he did could change the numbers.

Then it all came to a head in December. After Trump threatened to impose ruinous 25% tariffs on all Canadian imports, Trudeau flew to Mar-a-Lago, hoping his charm would win the day. Trump responded by repeatedly bullying him, threatening to annex Canada. With little support at home, Trudeau could not find a way to respond effectively.

Read More: Donald Trump on What His Second Term Would Look Like

Canadians had had enough of him, and he wouldn’t get the message. His growing number of unhappy former ministers felt he had a bad case of l’etat c’est moi. Trudeau has “gotten to a place now where he actually believes what he’s doing is good for the country, irrespective of anything else, which I think is hugely scary and problematic,” one told me.

Eventually, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, who saved the day during trade negotiations with Trump years earlier, forced the issue. She resigned on Dec. 16 amid disagreements over how to handle the incoming Trump Administration, triggering a crisis of legitimacy for Trudeau.

For years, Trudeau had been telling anyone who would listen that he had to stay on to fight the next election against Poilievre, whose right-wing policies and harsh attacks are outside the tradition of Canadian politics.

Trudeau despises Poilievre, sees him as a threat to the Canada his father built. He wants to fight him. And he is a fighter. The towering 6 ft. 2 in. Trudeau first won the Liberal Party leadership in 2013 after proving his toughness and unexpectedly triumphing 3-1 in a charity boxing match.

“I’m a fighter,” he said Monday. “Every bone in my body has always told me to fight because I care deeply about Canadians.”

But Trudeau had to acknowledge that it was time to throw in the towel. “It has become obvious to me that with the internal battles that I cannot be the one to carry the Liberal standard into the next election,” he said.

That was an understatement. On Wednesday his MPs were to demand his exit. The polling has been so bad for so long that the Liberals need a new leader. Canadians need someone to manage the relationship with the U.S, which suddenly looks more difficult than at any time since the War of 1812.

But voters are clear they want someone else to do that.