Jones’ efforts began in 2017 with a YouTube channel, where he pitched himself as a “nationally recognized authority on border security and transnational crimes.” His one-man show, Tripwires and Triggers, lacked sophisticated production. Early videos featured primitive graphics, poor lighting, and awkward jump cuts. Many received fewer than 500 views. 

Then, in 2019, Jones landed a gig with Breitbart, a Trump-aligned media outlet that hired him to write about border security. Around that time, he met Lara Logan, an Emmy Award winner and former CBS correspondent who has become a darling of the MAGA-sphere. She interviewed Jones for her show, Lara Logan Has No Agenda, before being let go from Fox News after comparing Dr. Anthony Fauci, of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to a sadistic Nazi doctor.

Soon, the former lawman, despite his rudimentary Spanish, was being regularly featured as an expert on Mexican drug cartels on primetime Fox News programs, including Tucker Carlson’s show. In 2021, he became a correspondent for Newsmax, a once-fringe Fox rival that grew into a MAGA media powerhouse following the 2020 election. In June, a Reuters Institute study found that 8 percent of Americans—about 25 million—consulted Newsmax at least weekly. (That’s about the same number who report reading the Wall Street Journal weekly. Its online-only reach is similar to NPR’s, the same study showed.) 

As a Newsmax correspondent, Jones hasn’t always nailed the details in his reporting, often misspelling words and names. In one broadcast, his graphics misidentified Bubba Shelton—the sheriff of McMullen County—as the sheriff of “McAllen County” (McAllen is a Texas border city, not a county). In the title of a recent YouTube video, Jones misspelled Lukeville, Arizona—an unincorporated community on the international border and one of the state’s only ports of entry—as “Luthville.”

But, in MAGA-aligned media, it seems to be consistent political messaging that matters—not specifics. As a former DPS officer, Jones enjoys favorable treatment from the state police agency, including access to helicopters and police intelligence of which other journalists could only dream. He often features DPS helicopters, aircraft hangars, or personnel in movie trailer-style videos. In one video on his YouTube channel, Jones totes a large bundle of seized drugs on his shoulder, transporting the illicit goods from a DPS helicopter to a U.S. Border Patrol pickup. In another, Jones runs behind a state police officer, up and down boulders and through thick brush and creosote bushes—as if he, too, is part of the law enforcement team.

During many of his dispatches, Jones wears the same brown-and-black checkered scarf as DPS airmen, from whom he regularly receives intel: The division’s head pilot, Stacy Holland, texts Jones on a regular basis, according to records obtained by the Texas Observer. (In 2012, then-captain Holland was maneuvering an agency helicopter when a trooper shot at a speeding pickup, killing two Guatemalan migrants and injuring another, according to police video obtained for a previous Observer investigation.)

Most DPS officers decline interviews, instead directing journalists to the agency’s media office, which often ignores press inquiries. Holland, on the other hand, has a close relationship with Jones, often sending him photos and videos. The exchanges show that Jones has obtained access to a stream of intelligence, including suspicious activity reports, screenshots of a helicopter’s aerial view cameras, and photos of tracking devices from a DPS computer.

Jones calls Holland “bro” and praises him for his contributions, some of which are not public information. “I like it!” Jones replied to one photo. “Anything new from the field coming in lately? We should ramp that up again.” In text conversations, the two refer to migrants as “bodies,” as if they were corpses and not living human beings.

Referring to fellow human beings as “bodies” is not unusual for Jones. On a chilly December night—a few days before Christmas 2023—Jones filmed a scene from a 47-acre park in Eagle Pass, where local children and families played baseball and soccer before the Texas National Guard turned it into a de facto military base for Governor Greg Abbott’s multi-billion dollar, multi-agency border security initiative, Operation Lone Star. That night, the park was lined with concertina wire, its entrance was barred, and the fields were filled with hundreds of migrants, most of whom had few possessions and slept on the ground under emergency blankets. “So you got big groups of bodies that come in here about every 10 to 15 minutes,” Jones said. “Every silver blanket or bump on the ground is a body,” he added, referring to asylum-seekers. 

Jones’ access to DPS and to Operation Lone Star military activities—which serve as popular Hollywood-style backdrops for “border invasion” content creators—helped put him on the radar of Trump’s allies, including Tom Homan, who was an acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Trump’s first administration and who was recently named the president-elect’s new “border czar.”

“We can just grab ’em, pick ’em up and remove ’em out of this country.”

In July 2023, Homan founded a nonprofit called Border911, and he later named Jones vice president of the organization, which included other former state and federal law enforcement officers as team members who crisscrossed the country spreading the false narrative that criminal terrorists are invading the United States at the invitation of the Biden administration and Democrats. Border911 members also received government security contracts and speaking gigs for themselves or for companies that employed them, as revealed in a prior investigation in this series. The group argued that only Trump could save America, laying the groundwork for his reelection.

Jones’ DPS contacts were crucial in this pro-Trump messaging. In Border911 videos posted on social media channels and promoted at events, Jones and Homan sweep across the Texas borderlands in state police aircraft, set to a thunderous soundtrack fit for a thriller. “Whether you like President Trump or not, you can’t argue with his success,” Homan says in one video from March 2023, before it cuts to another scene: an airplane hangar in West Texas, where he, Jones, and DPS airmen in flight gear walk in slow motion toward a helicopter.

As of early December, other Border911 team members were being considered for key positions in the incoming Trump administration, including former Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott, who was tapped to lead Customs and Border Protection. With Homan as incoming “border czar,” and assigned by Trump to oversee border enforcement and mass deportations, Jones is uniquely positioned to influence homeland security strategy and messaging in Texas and beyond. 

Trump and his allies have made clear that the right wing’s most extreme ideas are now on the table, from constructing deportation camps in Texas to designating Mexican drug cartels as “foreign terrorists.” Classifying cartels as terrorists has, in Jones’ own words, been one of his goals since retiring from DPS in 2016. For nearly two decades, some Texas Republican officials have tried to convince the federal government to make this decision, but they’ve always been rebuffed partly because it would spark conflict with Mexico, the United States’ closest trading partner. 

Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a professor at George Mason University and author of Los Zetas Inc., a book about one of Mexico’s most feared drug cartels, said she does not consider Jones to be a true border authority.“He’s unknown to me. … I don’t consider him an expert,” she told the Observer. But she considers the ideas that Jones and others have espoused, including labeling cartels as foreign terrorists, to be dangerous propaganda that could well be used to justify bombings or other incursions on Mexican soil. 

In an essay for the Observer about such proposals, she wrote: “Nobody denies that extreme levels of violence and brutality in Mexico are connected with the drug trade. Something needs to be done, but deploying U.S. troops would only escalate a costly and ineffective drug war and put many innocent lives at risk.”

In the ballroom of a San Antonio Embassy Suites last October, Daniel Korus, a dean at Del Mar College in the coastal city of Corpus Christi, introduced Jones as the keynote speaker for a South Texas regional policy conference, stating that Jones had a 25-year career in border intelligence. “Now, he educates the rest of us,” said Korus, a former high-ranking naval officer.

Jones did not correct the introduction, though most of his time in the state police was actually spent in non-intelligence roles away from the border, according to DPS records. His only recorded formal DPS training course specifically on the subject was “Intelligence Gathering/Sharing/Mapping,” according to the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement, and he took that just a few months before his retirement. 

Nonetheless, Jones promotes himself as a border intelligence expert and profits from it. With the All American Speakers Bureau, a platform for hired experts, Jones lists himself as charging $30,000 to $50,000 per speaking gig, though Korus said Jones was paid $10,000 or less for the San Antonio appearance. 

Dressed in black leather cowboy boots and a matching suit, Jones paced in front of his audience, telling tales of the borderlands and the violence between rival organized crime groups in Mexico. “What happens there is coming here, and I’m gonna show you,” he said.

On a projector screen, Jones displayed graphic videos and told stories about drug cartel members committing lurid acts of violence in Mexico: decapitations with a fillet knife, a head bashed in with a sledgehammer, and the wiping out of most of a town. 

“These people live in Texas. We have been dealing with this for many years—but you have not been told,” Jones warned, before moving to the next PowerPoint slide.

Throughout his presentation, a table full of sheriffs in cowboy hats nodded along in agreement as others in the ballroom gasped at the violent scenes. Twice, he paused to ask the audience some version of the question: “Is this a drug trafficking organization—or is this a terrorist organization?”

He told the audience what the foreign terrorist designation would accomplish: expedited investigations into bad actors that would allow police to skirt due process protections, to obtain more resources, and to freeze more organized crime organizations’ assets abroad.

“We’re gonna take this country back.”

Jones has repeated similar arguments in various venues, including a hearing of the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee, Newsmax, the Dr. Phil show, and Tucker Carlson’s former show on Fox News.

To Jones, the most important aspect of the foreign terrorist label seems to be that it could enable hastened deportations for people in any way associated with Mexican drug cartels. “You can’t be a terrorist in our country,” he told Dr. Phil last year. “We can just grab ’em, pick ’em up and remove ’em out of this country, and go after ’em anywhere in the world, and that’s what we really need to do.”

But many of his assertions about the foreign terrorist designation—a process codified in federal law and overseen by the U.S. Department of State—are incorrect, according to experts interviewed by the Observer. Some actions Jones described can already be taken by the government without the foreign terrorist label, such as freezing assets, said former State Department official Jason Blazakis. Whether a suspect is affiliated with a foreign terrorist organization or another criminal network, individuals have a right to due process, he added.

“I think he doesn’t understand how terrorism investigations work,” Blazakis said. “He’s trying to make the designation look like some kind of special panacea.”

During his speech, Jones also informed the audience that the cartels deploy a threat, “plato y plumo”—a misstatement of “plata o plomo” that changes the meaning from a menacing choice between a bribe or a bullet to a perplexing offer of a plate and a nonsense word.

Jones emphasizes different credentials depending on his audience. Sometimes he speaks as a correspondent for Newsmax, and other times as a member of Border911. In legislative settings, he often emphasizes his DPS career, such as when he advocated designating drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations at a press conference outside the Arizona Capitol. (Representative Steve Montenegro introduced a related bill about a week later.) 

Much of Jones’ work for Newsmax relies on strategically edited footage, meant to portray the border as a frightening place and asylum-seekers as criminal invaders.

Last January, volunteers at a humanitarian camp for asylum-seekers near the border in the unincorporated community of Sasabe, Arizona, were surprised to see Jones roll up with a cameraman. As shown in footage aired by Newsmax and separate videos a volunteer provided to the Observer, Jones was accompanied by armed and masked men from Mayhem Solutions Group, a private security firm, who flanked him as he recorded his content. The Mayhem men were mostly dressed in military fatigues, and some wore hats with patches bearing the insignia of Texas DPS Intelligence and Counterterrorism—the division Jones worked in before retiring. 

The appearance of these men in Arizona puzzled the volunteers, especially when the arrivals claimed to be part of a state or federal “task force.” One volunteer, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, said the armed Mayhem personnel left asylum-seekers with the impression that they were police because they wore tactical vests and patches emblazoned with the word “investigator.” Those armed men said they had been hired to collect information, and they “were going around telling people that they were obligated to give them their information, implying that they were a federal agency,” the volunteer said, as previously reported in The Border Chronicle, on the day the men came to the camp. “They said multiple times that they were going to citizen’s arrest us if we tried to interfere with what they were doing, and that they would bring the U.S. forces in if we didn’t step aside.” 

Meanwhile, Jones continued to film, the volunteer said. “While these guys were intimidating people, he was talking about all ‘these illegals invading the country.’” 

When volunteers asked Jones about his armed companions, he provided little information. “I’m with Newsmax,” the volunteer recalled him saying. “You guys are doing your thing. We’re doing ours.” 

The Observer reached the founder of Mayhem Solutions Group, but he claimed he did not know Jones. A state contract database and public records requests show that Mayhem Solutions Group has never held a contract with Texas DPS. The agency did not respond to a request for comment about the security company employees wearing DPS insignia on their hats. The federal Department of Homeland Security stated it held no formal agreement with the company. 

In some settings, Jones introduces himself as CEO of Omni Intelligence, which he founded in 2017. The company has been described by the right-wing Texas Public Policy Foundation as a provider of “intelligence and analytics services to government agencies and media.” Omni Intelligence has no website, and its business address has alternated between rental homes and P.O. boxes across Central Texas. (Letters sent to two of his business addresses were returned as undeliverable.)

A search of public records revealed one Omni customer: No Greater Love, a nonprofit based in Wimberley that says it educates “millions of Americans daily about the truth of open borders” and holds occasional teach-ins for doomsday preppers at a local Veterans of Foreign Wars post. Over a two-year period, the group paid Omni Intelligence $45,000, according to its IRS Form 990 tax filings. Its website heavily features Jones’ video content. 

It is unclear if Omni has any employees, aside from Jones’ personal assistant, who lives in the Philippines. 

One of the firm’s former unpaid consultants was Ammon Blair, a recently retired Border Patrol agent. Blair was also featured in one of Jones’ YouTube videos and on Newsmax. While still at Border Patrol, Blair said he passed intelligence to Jones, and one of those stories went “viral.” 

Jones did not respond to repeated requests, via email, letter, and phone for an interview for this story. He also denied a request made in person at the San Antonio conference, saying he was unavailable that day and for the following several weeks, but that he might have time later. Jones never replied to the Observer’s subsequent inquiries.

Last April, Jones appeared with Homan and Trump at the now-president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago Club during a fundraising gala for Border911. As Homan’s sidekick, Jones has identified allies among sheriffs at the border and beyond, as well as other county and state officials who could support and potentially financially benefit from Trump’s mass deportation plans. 

In Arizona, Jones describes Pinal County Sheriff (and failed U.S. Senate candidate) Mark Lamb as a “close friend,” and Jones once embedded with Lamb’s agency for a week. Jones also moderated a panel including Lamb and Mark Dannels, a right-wing border sheriff who has referred to deporting undocumented people as a “cleanup.” In Texas, Jones spoke at a rally with Kinney County Sheriff Brad Coe, whose department has collaborated with vigilante groups, stocked up on pepperball guns to shoot migrants, and sued the Biden administration over immigration policy. 

In Florida, Jones found another powerful ally: Richard Mantei, a state prosecutor who helped lead a year-and-a-half-long grand jury investigation, a non-criminal probe of policies to address illegal immigration. Records show Mantei sent Jones money via Venmo for “Florida expenses” last fall. (The Florida Attorney General’s Office said it lacked records of any related invoice or receipt, and it refused to release any affidavits or grand jury testimony records signed by Jones.) When the same grand jury completed its final policy recommendations, Mantei emailed the document to Homan.

In some video clips, Jones appears as Homan’s right-hand man. Homan often heralds Jones as a premier border expert because of his DPS experience. At a January 2023 press conference outside the Arizona Capitol, Homan introduced Jones as a good friend and a top authority on crime and the drug trade, after citing Jones’ DPS career.

“I’m gonna walk around the country with these men here in this organization,” says Homan in one of Border911’s signature trailers from March 2023, over footage of himself, Jones, and DPS airmen near an agency helicopter, “and educate American people on why the border is a disaster.”

At times Jones appears to have also coached DPS airmen on how—and when—to take videos so he could better use the footage. “Hey, being advised you may have up to 2,000 surging the border in El Paso bro,” Jones wrote to Holland, the chief DPS pilot, in March 2023. “Can you get some video from helicopter ASAP?” In iMessages to Holland in February 2024, he praised state police for the videos they provided. One reads: “Tell the crew great job for me. Best field production of all time.”

In a September 2023 message, Jones invited DPS to steer the narrative he portrays on Newsmax. “I’ll run it Monday,” he replied to a message from Holland. “Anything you want me to say specifically?” 

Holland and his airmen have apparently returned the favor for Jones’ flattering coverage by furnishing him with the backdrops for his propaganda videos. In one January 2024 clip, Jones and Homan walk perfectly framed between two DPS aircraft on a tarmac at sunset in West Texas, with mountains in the background.

“You know Tom, this border, it’s gotta get fixed. It’s absolutely unsustainable,” Jones says solemnly, walking beside Homan with the sunset as a backdrop, the sky painted in hues of blue and purple.

Homan responds matter-of-factly: He wakes up every morning pissed off, but at least they’ve got Border911. “We’re gonna take this country back, we’re gonna secure the border, we’re gonna protect our national security,” Homan says. 

“We’re not going to get rich doing it,” he adds, not mentioning how Jones and other members of Border911 have already benefited from various government contracts and speaking gigs.

“But what a team we built.”

The post The Border Propagandist appeared first on Coda Story.

But empires are also built from the margins, and no one knows this better than Vladimir Putin. 

This week, Putin scored a huge geopolitical victory when the party the Kremlin was rooting for in Georgia pulled off a seemingly impossible electoral win. 

 “Georgians have won. Attaboys!” posted Margarita Simonyan, head of RT and the Kremlin’s chief propagandist on X. 

“I woke up in Russia. How can I go back to being Moscow’s slave?” a devastated friend texted the morning after the vote. 

The ruling Georgian Dream party, run by an oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili secured a parliamentary majority. Ivanishvili made his fortune in Russia in the 1990s, earning in the process the nickname “anaconda” for being methodical and relentless at eliminating rivals. 

He moved to Georgia shortly after Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000, and became one of the country’s most impactful philanthropists. He supported culture and arts, paid for hospitals, kept the entire Opera House on his payroll and stepped in every time the government’s coffers didn’t stretch far enough to pave a road or build a school. He was also a recluse, until in 2012 when he set up the Georgian Dream party and scored a landslide victory against Mikhail Saakasvhili, Georgia’s former president whom Putin famously promised to “hang by the balls” and who is currently in jail in Tbilisi.  

Since the 2012 victory, Ivanishvili has been methodically moving Georgia back into Russia’s orbit:  covertly and slowly at first, openly and aggressively in more recent years. 

This caused a lot of friction with the society: Georgians had tired of Saakashvili’s government, which was becoming autocratic, but many were set on a turn towards Europe. For centuries Georgian luminaries have cultivated the idea of Europe as the way of protecting the Georgian language and identity from oppression by its neighbors. The modern Georgian constitution calls for a closer alliance with the west, in particular the EU and Nato. The country’s entire cultural identity is built around the story of struggle against historic oppressors: Persians, Ottomans and, for the past two centuries, Russians. 

By the time Russia launched the full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, many Georgians were disillusioned in Ivanishvili but they were still shocked when the government chose to openly side with Moscow against Kyiv. Ukraine had stood by Georgia through all of its wars, including the most recent Russian invasion in 2008. The government’s position felt like a betrayal. 

But then the Georgian Dream went even further, passing some of the most repressive Russian-style laws, launching brutal crackdowns on activists, targeting the LGBTQ community and unleashing dirty disinformation campaigns straight out of the Kremlin playbook. By 2024, hundreds of thousands were taking part in regular anti-government demonstrations led by the youth demanding that Georgia stays on its European course. 

This election, the only democratic way of getting the country out of Ivanishvili’s and Russia's tightening embrace, became the most pivotal vote in the country's history since the independence referendum in 1991.  Polls, including traditionally reliable exit polls, put the opposition in a clear lead. On the day of the vote, the turnout was so high that in some polling stations people queued for hours to cast the ballots.  

And yet, the Central Election body announced that the Georgian Dream party beat the country’s pro-European opposition and secured a fourth term. “This seems to defy gravity,” a friend in Tbilisi commented.  

In the next few weeks, the opposition in Georgia will work to galvanize supporters and try to prove that the election was stolen. The list of recorded irregularities is long, and include suspicious discrepancies in numbers, violence and ballot stuffing. Despite the evidence, fighting for justice in courts controlled by an oligarch is likely to be futile. 

The opposition also faces the reality that the Georgian Dream did perform better than anyone has expected, in part at least thanks to an aggressive pre-election campaign that focused on fear: the governing party’s singular message equated opposition with another war with Russia.  Their campaign included billboards that juxtaposed ruins of Ukrainian cities with peaceful landscapes of Georgia.  It proved effective in the country, where Russia still occupies 20% of the territory and memories of the 2008 invasion, as well as previous wars,  are very much alive.

The election results may defy both logic and hope for many Georgians but they align disturbingly well with the broader trajectory of the world. For this is not a story of a rigged post-Soviet election, but rather the story of a larger, systemic game that has been rigged against us all. 

Over the past decade, the interplay of oligarchic alliances, disinformation, abuse of technology, and selective violence have all eaten away at the foundations of all societies. These interconnected trends, often obscured by the noise of our news cycle, are part of a larger authoritarian web that is enveloping the globe, and polarizing our communities from within. Connecting the dots between them reveals a pervasive threat that extends far beyond any single event.

In this rigged game, the losers aren’t just the Georgian opposition and their supporters, but everyone who believes in the value of freedom: whether it is the freedom to speak out without being beaten or imprisoned, or the freedom of a newspaper to endorse a presidential candidate. The real winners aren’t the Georgian politicians or even the oligarch who pulls their strings, but anyone who puts money and power above shared values. 

In the case of Georgia, the biggest winner is the Kremlin, who has just won a battle in its global war against liberal democracy.  Ahead of the US elections, there is a warning here too. Georgia has always been the place where the Kremlin has rehearsed its global playbook. 

Throughout the 1990s, it was in Georgia  that Moscow ignited wars and transformed them into frozen conflicts, a precursor to the tactics later employed in Ukraine. As Putin’s Russia grew more assertive, it occupied territories and meddled in elections, using methods that would then spread to Europe and the United States.

It was in liberal, progressive Georgia, where the Kremlin first piloted anti LGBTQ+ narratives, teaming up with the members of the American and European religious right and carefully targeting traditional parts of the society and testing ways to spin marginal homophobia into a larger culture war that  eventually took root in the West. 

Yet, for all the lands Putin has seized and the narratives he has spun, his true success hinges on two tools handed to him by his own adversaries in the West. The first is our information system that is fuelled by social media platforms, which are run on profit-driven algorithms built to spread disinformation, conspiracies, and lies. The second–fueled in part by the first–is the dwindling attention span of those who can and should want to help.

Georgian opposition is unlikely to succeed, unless it gets focused attention from Europe and the United States. But with the tragedy that has enveloped the Middle East, the drama of the US elections and the urgency of the increasingly unsustainable war in Ukraine, events in Georgia will struggle to compete for attention. And yet, the reason empires crumble from the margins is because true resistance always comes from the edges. Helping Georgia bring back its democracy will keep it alive elsewhere.

A version of this article previously appeared in the Guardian newspaper.

The post From the Margins to Power: Georgia’s Elections and the Kremlin’s Empire appeared first on Coda Story.

Judy Estrin has been thinking about digital connectivity since the early days of Silicon Valley. As a junior researcher at Stanford in the 1970s she worked on what became the Internet. She built tech companies, became Cisco’s Chief Technology Officer, and served on the board of Disney and FedEx. Now, she’s working to build our understanding of the digital systems that run our lives.

We can’t live without air. We can’t live without water. And now we can’t live without our phones. Yet our digital information systems are failing us. Promises of unlimited connectivity and access have led to a fractionalization of reality and levels of noise that undermine our social cohesion. Without a common understanding and language about what we are facing, we put at risk our democratic elections, the resolution of conflicts, our health and the health of the planet. In order to move beyond just reacting to the next catastrophe, we can learn something from water. We turn on the tap to drink or wash, rarely considering where the water comes from–until a crisis of scarcity or quality alerts us to a breakdown. As AI further infiltrates our digital world, a crisis in our digital information systems necessitates paying more attention to its flow.

Water is life sustaining, yet too much water, or impure water, makes us sick, destroys our environment, or even kills us. A bit of water pollution may not be harmful but we know that if the toxins exceed a certain level the water is no longer potable. We have learned that water systems need to protect quality at the source, that lead from pipes leach into the water, and that separation is critical–we don’t use the same pipes for sourcing drinking water and drainage of waste and sewage.

Today, digital services have become the information pipes of our lives. Many of us do not understand or care how they work. Like water, digital information can have varying levels of drinkability and toxicity–yet we don’t know what we are drinking. Current system designs are corroded by the transactional business models of companies that neither have our best interests in mind, nor the tools that can adequately detect impurities and sound the alarm. Digital platforms, such as Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube, don’t differentiate between types of content coming into their systems and they lack the equivalent of effective water filters, purification systems, or valves to stop pollution and flooding. We are both the consumers and the sources of this ‘digital water’ flowing through and shaping our minds and lives. Whether we want to learn, laugh, share, or zone-out, we open our phones and drink from that well. The data we generate fuels increasingly dangerous ad targeting and surveillance of our online movements. Reality, entertainment, satire, facts, opinion, and misinformation all blend together in our feeds. 

“Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral."

Digital platforms mix “digital water” and “sewage” in the same pipes, polluting our information systems and undermining the foundations of our culture, our public health, our economy, and our democracy. We see the news avoidance, extremism, loss of civility, reactionary politics, and conflicts. Less visible are other toxins, including the erosion of trust, critical thinking, and creativity. Those propagating the problems deny responsibility and ignore the punch line of Kranzberg’s first law which states, “technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral." We need fundamental changes to the design of our information distribution systems so that they can benefit society and not just increase profit to a few at our expense.

To start, let us acknowledge the monetary incentives behind the tech industry’s course of action that dragged the public down as they made their fortunes. The foundational Internet infrastructure, developed in the 1970s and 80s, combined public and private players, and different levels of service and sources. Individual data bits traveled in packets down a shared distributed network designed to avoid single points of failure. Necessary separation and differentiation was enforced by the information service applications layered on top of the network. Users proactively navigated the web by following links to new sites and information, choosing for themselves where they sourced their content, be it their favorite newspaper or individual blogs. Content providers relied heavily on links from other sites creating interdependence that incentivized more respectful norms and behaviors, even when there was an abundance of disagreements and rants.

Then the 2000s brought unbridled consolidation as the companies that now make up BigTech focused on maximizing growth through ad-driven marketplaces. As with some privatized water systems, commercial incentives were prioritized above wellness. This was only amplified in the product design around the small screen of mobile phones, social discovery of content, and cloud computing. Today, we drink from a firehose of endless scrolling that has eroded our capacity for any differentiation or discernment. Toxicity is amplified and nuance eliminated by algorithms that curate our timelines based on an obscure blend of likes, shares, and behavioral data. As we access information through a single feed, different sources and types of content–individuals, bots, hyperbolic news headlines, professional journalism, fantasy shows, and human or AI generated–all begin to feel the same.

Toxicity is amplified and nuance eliminated by algorithms that curate our timelines based on an obscure blend of likes, shares, and behavioral data

Social media fractured the very idea of truth by taking control of the distribution of information. Now. Generative AI has upended the production of content through an opaque mixing of vast sources of public and private, licensed, and pirated data. Once again, an incentive for profit and power is driving product choices towards centralized, resource intensive Large Language Models (LLMs). The LLMs are trained to recognize, interpret, and generate language in obscure ways and then spit out, often awe inspiring, text, images, and videos on demand. The artificial sweetener of artificial intelligence entices us to drink, even as we know that something may be wrong. The social media waters are already muddied by algorithms and agents, as we are now seeing “enshittification” (an aptly coined term by Cory Doctorow) of platforms as well as the overall internet, with increasing amounts of AI generated excrement in our feeds and searches.

We require both behavioral change and a new more distributed digital information system–one that combines public and private resources to ensure that neither our basic ‘tap’ water or our fancy bottled water will poison our children. This will require overcoming two incredibly strong sets of incentives. The first is a business culture that demands dominance through maximizing growth by way of speed and scale. Second is our prioritization of convenience with a boundless desire for a frictionless world. The fact that this is truly a “wicked problem” does not relieve us of the responsibility to take steps to improve our condition. We don’t need to let go entirely of either growth or convenience. We do need to recommit to a more balanced set of values.

As with other areas of public safety, mitigating today’s harms requires broad and deep education programs to spur individual and collective responsibility. We have thrown out the societal norms that guide us to not spit in the proverbial drink of the other, or piss in the proverbial pool. Instead of continuing to adapt to the lowest common decency, we need digital hygiene to establish collective norms for kids and adults. Digital literacy must encourage critical thinking and navigation of our digital environments with discernment; in other words, with a blend of trust and mistrust. In the analog world, our senses of smell and taste warn us when something is off. We need to establish the ability to detect rotten content and sources–from sophisticated phishing to deep fakes. Already awash in conspiracy theories and propaganda, conversational AI applications bring new avenues for manipulation as well as a novel set of emotional and ethical challenges. As we have learned from food labeling or terms of service, transparency only works when backed by the education to decipher the facts.

The artificial sweetener of artificial intelligence entices us to drink, even as we know that something may be wrong.

Mitigation is not sufficient. We need entrepreneurs, innovators, and funders who are willing to rethink systems and interface design assumptions and build products that are more proactive, distributed, and reinforcing of human agency. Proactive design must incorporate safety valves or upfront filters. Distributed design approaches can use less data and special purpose models, and the interconnection of diverse systems can provide more resilience than consolidated homogeneous ones. We need not accept the inevitability of general purpose brute force data beasts. Human agency designs would break with current design norms.  The default to everything looking the same leads to homogeneity and flattening. Our cars would be safer if they didn’t distract us like smart phones on wheels. The awe of discovery is healthier than the numbing of infinite scrolls. Questioning design and business model assumptions require us to break out of our current culture of innovation which is too focused on short term transactions and rapid scaling. The changes in innovation culture have influenced other industries and institutions, including journalism that is too often hijacked by today's commercial incentives. We cannot give up on a common understanding and knowledge, or on the importance of trust and common truths.   

We need policy changes to balance private and public sector participation. Many of the proposals on the table today lock in the worst of the problems, with legislation that reinforces inherently bad designs, removes liability, and/or targets specific implementations (redirecting us to equally toxic alternatives). Independent funding for education, innovation, and research is required to break the narrative and value capture of the BigTech ecosystem. We throw around words like safe, reliable, or responsible without a common understanding of what it means to really be safe. How can we ensure our water is safe to drink? Regulation is best targeted at areas where leakage leads to the most immediate harm–like algorithmic amplification, and lack of transparency and accountability. Consolidation into single points of power inevitably leads to broad based failure. A small number of corporations have assumed the authority of massive utilities that act as both public squares and information highways–without any of the responsibility.

Isolation and polarization have evolved from a quest for a frictionless society with extraordinary systems handcrafted to exploit our attention. It is imperative that we create separation, valves, and safeguards in the distribution and access of digital information. I am calling not for a return to incumbent gatekeepers, but instead for the creation of new distribution, curation, and facilitation mechanisms that can be scaled for the diversity of human need. There is no single answer, but the first step is to truly acknowledge the scope and scale of the problem. The level of toxicity in our ‘digital waters’ is now too high to address reactively by trying to fix things after the fact, or lashing out in the wrong way. We must question our assumptions and embrace fundamental changes in both our technology and culture in order to bring toxicity levels back to a level that does not continue to undermine our society.

The post Stop Drinking from the Toilet! appeared first on Coda Story.

I was in the crowd, reporting for the BBC at the time, as hundreds of thousands of people came out to greet George W. Bush in the main square of the capital Tbilisi. It must have felt refreshing to Bush, by then already hated by so much of the world for the disasters caused by the “war on terror”, to arrive in Georgia to a genuine hero's welcome. Georgians embraced Bush, because they needed him to fight their own existential battle against constant, ongoing threats from Russia.

Tens of thousands turned up and stood for hours in the heat as they waited for George W Bush to come out into the main square to give public support to Georgia and send a message to Moscow that the country was not alone in the face of Russian aggression. 

Among those in the square was 27 year old Vladimir Arutunian. According to this FBI report, which is full of rather brilliant detail, he “stood for hours in the hot sun, wearing a heavy leather coat and muttering and cursing to himself, part of a huge crowd waiting for President Bush to speak …He was clutching to his chest a hand grenade hidden in a red handkerchief. He was planning to kill the President.”

As soon as Bush started speaking, Arutunian “pulled the pin and hurled the grenade in the direction of the podium. It landed just 61 feet from where the  President, First Lady Laura Bush, the President and First Lady of  Georgia, and other officials sat”

Compared to the unforgettable scenes that unfolded in Pennsylvania, the assassination attempt against Bush was pretty anticlimactic. The grenade failed to detonate, no one on stage even realized it had been thrown, President Bush’s speech went uninterrupted, and afterwards, Arutunian went home to the apartment he shared with his mother in a sleepy Tbilisi suburb. 

His miscalculation, FBI would explain later, was that he tied his red handkerchief a bit too tight around the grenade, preventing the firing pin from deploying fast enough.

It didn’t take long for the FBI and the Georgian security services to track down Arutunian. A few months later, Arutunian who was unemployed and spent most of his days  experimenting with chemicals and explosives in his makeshift home laboratory, appeared in a small stuffy courtroom overflowing with reporters. He had already confessed to throwing the grenade and said he didn’t regret a thing because he hated the Georgian government for “being a puppet of the US.”

What I remember most vividly from the trial is Arutunian, thin with a black beard, pacing back and forth in his two by two meter metal cage in the corner of the courtroom. I counted his laps to keep myself awake in the airless room, as the judge began to read the verdict. A couple of my colleagues in the back tried to stay awake by chatting to each other, which got the rest of us in trouble. The judge forced everyone to stand up as he very slowly and very monotonously read the entire verdict. It took him four hours. I lost count of the laps, because Arutunian never stopped pacing. 

I reported at the time that as he was led out of the courtroom, he was asked by one journalist if he considered himself a terrorist or an anti-globalist. "I don't consider myself a terrorist, I'm just a human being," he replied.

Today, the man who could have changed global history, is in the 20th year of his lifetime sentence. He spends his days making crafts: tiny soldiers and tanks and occasional portraits of Lenin, Stalin and Che Guevara, according to his mother who spoke to our reporter, Masho Lomashvili, the day after Trump’s assassination attempt. 

Masho called the 83 year old Anjela Arutunian to ask whether she had spoken to her son and whether he had heard about the Trump assassination attempt. “Someone tried to kill Trump? I hadn’t heard, I have mostly been watching football,” said Angela Arutunian “Is he okay?” she asked.

Additional reporting by Masho Lomashvili.

The post Almost an assassin  appeared first on Coda Story.

With the correct codes input, the doors to the missile silo open, pointing a bomb at the sky. Sweat shines on their faces. For the missile to fly, both must turn their keys. But one of them balks. He picks up the phone to call their superiors.

That’s not the procedure, says his partner. “Screw the procedure,” the dissenter says. “I want somebody on the goddamn phone before I kill 20 million people.” 

Soon, the scene — which opens the 1983 techno-thriller “WarGames” — transitions to another set deep inside Cheyenne Mountain, a military outpost buried beneath thousands of feet of Colorado granite. It exists in real life and is dramatized in the movie. 

In “WarGames,” the main room inside Cheyenne Mountain hosts a wall of screens that show the red, green and blue outlines of continents and countries, and what’s happening in the skies above them. There is not, despite what the servicemen have been led to believe, a nuclear attack incoming: The alerts were part of a test sent out to missile commanders to see whether they would carry out orders. All in all, 22% failed to launch.

“Those men in the silos know what it means to turn the keys,” says an official inside Cheyenne Mountain. “And some of them are just not up to it.” But he has an idea for how to combat that “human response,” the impulse not to kill millions of people: “I think we ought to take the men out of the loop,” he says. 

From there, an artificially intelligent computer system enters the plotline and goes on to cause nearly two hours of potentially world-ending problems. 

Discourse about the plot of “WarGames” usually focuses on the scary idea that a computer nearly launches World War III by firing off nuclear weapons on its own. But the film illustrates another problem that has become more trenchant in the 40 years since it premiered: The computer displays fake data about what’s going on in the world. The human commanders believe it to be authentic and respond accordingly.

In the real world, countries — or rogue actors — could use fake data, inserted into genuine data streams, to confuse enemies and achieve their aims. How to deal with that possibility, along with other consequences of incorporating AI into the nuclear weapons sphere, could make the coming years on Earth more complicated.

The word “deepfake” didn’t exist when “WarGames” came out, but as real-life AI grows more powerful, it may become part of the chain of analysis and decision-making in the nuclear realm of tomorrow. The idea of synthesized, deceptive data is one AI issue that today's atomic complex has to worry about.

You may have encountered the fruits of this technology in the form of Tom Cruise playing golf on TikTok, LinkedIn profiles for people who have never inhabited this world or, more seriously, a video of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy declaring the war in his country to be over. These are deepfakes — pictures or videos of things that never happened, but which can look astonishingly real. It becomes even more vexing when AI is used to create images that attempt to depict things that are indeed happening. Adobe recently caused a stir by selling AI-generated stock photos of violence in Gaza and Israel. The proliferation of this kind of material (alongside plenty of less convincing stuff) leads to an ever-present worry any image presented as fact might actually have been fabricated or altered. 

It may not matter much whether Tom Cruise was really out on the green, but the ability to see or prove what’s happening in wartime — whether an airstrike took place at a particular location or whether troops or supplies are really amassing at a given spot — can actually affect the outcomes on the ground. 

Similar kinds of deepfake-creating technologies could be used to whip up realistic-looking data — audio, video or images — of the sort that military and intelligence sensors collect and that artificially intelligent systems are already starting to analyze. It’s a concern for Sharon Weiner, a professor of international relations at American University. “You can have someone trying to hack your system not to make it stop working, but to insert unreliable data,” she explained.

James Johnson, author of the book “AI and the Bomb,” writes that when autonomous systems are used to process and interpret imagery for military purposes, “synthetic and realistic-looking data” can make it difficult to determine, for instance, when an attack might be taking place. People could use AI to gin up data designed to deceive systems like Project Maven, a U.S. Department of Defense program that aims to autonomously process images and video and draw meaning from them about what’s happening in the world.

AI’s role in the nuclear world isn’t yet clear. In the U.S., the White House recently issued an executive order about trustworthy AI, mandating in part that government agencies address the nuclear risks that AI systems bring up. But problem scenarios like some of those conjured by “WarGames” aren’t out of the realm of possibility. 

In the film, a teenage hacker taps into the military's system and starts up a game he finds called "Global Thermonuclear War." The computer displays the game data on the screens inside Cheyenne Mountain, as if it were coming from the ground. In the Rocky Mountain war room, a siren soon blares: It looks like Soviet missiles are incoming. Luckily, an official runs into the main room in a panic. “We’re not being attacked,” he yells. “It’s a simulation!””

In the real world, someone might instead try to cloak an attack with deceptive images that portray peace and quiet.

Researchers have already shown that the general idea behind this is possible: Scientists published a paper in 2021 on “deepfake geography,” or simulated satellite images. In that milieu, officials have worried about images that might show infrastructure in the wrong location or terrain that’s not true to life, messing with military plans. Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists, for instance, made satellite images that included vegetation that wasn’t real and showed evidence of drought where the water levels were fine, all for the purposes of research. You could theoretically do the same for something like troop or missile-launcher movement.

AI that creates fake data is not the only problem: AI could also be on the receiving end, tasked with analysis. That kind of automated interpretation is already ongoing in the intelligence world, although it’s unclear specifically how it will be incorporated into the nuclear sphere. For instance, AI on mobile platforms like drones could help process data in real time and “alert commanders of potentially suspicious or threatening situations such as military drills and suspicious troop or mobile missile launcher movements,” writes Johnson. That processing power could also help detect manipulation because of the ability to compare different datasets. 

But creating those sorts of capabilities can help bad actors do their fooling. “They can take the same techniques these AI researchers created, invert them to optimize deception,” said Edward Geist, an analyst at the RAND Corporation. For Geist, deception is a “trivial statistical prediction task.” But recognizing and countering that deception is where the going gets tough. It involves a “very difficult problem of reasoning under uncertainty,” he told me. Amid the generally high-stakes feel of global dynamics, and especially in conflict, countries can never be exactly sure what’s going on, who’s doing what, and what the consequences of any action may be.

There is also the potential for fakery in the form of data that’s real: Satellites may accurately display what they see, but what they see has been expressly designed to fool the automated analysis tools.

As an example, Geist pointed to Russia’s intercontinental ballistic missiles. When they are stationary, they’re covered in camo netting, making them hard to pick out in satellite images. When the missiles are on the move, special devices attached to the vehicles that carry them shoot lasers toward detection satellites, blinding them to the movement. At the same time, decoys are deployed — fake missiles dressed up as the real deal, to distract and thwart analysis. 

“The focus on using AI outstrips or outpaces the emphasis put on countermeasures,” said Weiner.

Given that both physical and AI-based deception could interfere with analysis, it may one day become hard for officials to trust any information — even the solid stuff. “The data that you're seeing is perfectly fine. But you assume that your adversary would fake it,” said Weiner. “You then quickly get into the spiral where you can’t trust your own assessment of what you found. And so there’s no way out of that problem.” 

From there, it’s distrust all the way down. “The uncertainties about AI compound the uncertainties that are inherent in any crisis decision-making,” said Weiner. Similar situations have arisen in the media, where it can be difficult for readers to tell if a story about a given video — like an airstrike on a hospital in Gaza, for instance — is real or in the right context. Before long, even the real ones leave readers feeling dubious.

More than a century ago, Alfred von Schlieffen, a German war planner, envisioned the battlefield of the future: a person sitting at a desk with telephones splayed across it, ringing in information from afar. This idea of having a godlike overview of conflict — a fused vision of goings-on — predates both computers and AI, according to Geist.

Using computers to synthesize information in real-time goes back decades too. In the 1950s, for instance, the U.S. built the Continental Air Defense Command, which relied on massive machines (then known as computers) for awareness and response. But tests showed that a majority of Soviet bombers would have been able to slip through — often because they could fool the defense system with simple decoys. “It was the low-tech stuff that really stymied it,” said Geist. Some military and intelligence officials have concluded that next-level situational awareness will come with just a bit more technological advancement than they previously thought — although this has not historically proven to be the case. “This intuition that people have is like, ‘Oh, we’ll get all the sensors, we’ll buy a big enough computer and then we’ll know everything,’” he said. “This is never going to happen.”

This type of thinking seems to be percolating once again and might show up in attempts to integrate AI in the near future. But Geist’s research, which he details in his forthcoming book “Deterrence Under Uncertainty: Artificial Intelligence and Nuclear Warfare,” shows that the military will “be lucky to maintain the degree of situational awareness we have today” if they incorporate more AI into observation and analysis in the face of AI-enhanced deception. 

“One of the key aspects of intelligence is reasoning under uncertainty,” he said. “And a conflict is a particularly pernicious form of uncertainty.” An AI-based analysis, no matter how detailed, will only ever be an approximation — and in uncertain conditions there’s no approach that “is guaranteed to get an accurate enough result to be useful.” 

In the movie, with the proclamation that the Soviet missiles are merely simulated, the crisis is temporarily averted. But the wargaming computer, unbeknownst to the authorities, is continuing to play. As it keeps making moves, it displays related information about the conflict on the big screens inside Cheyenne Mountain as if it were real and missiles were headed to the States. 

It is only when the machine’s inventor shows up that the authorities begin to think that maybe this could all be fake. “Those blips are not real missiles,” he says. “They’re phantoms.”

To rebut fake data, the inventor points to something indisputably real: The attack on the screens doesn’t make sense. Such a full-scale wipeout would immediately prompt the U.S. to total retaliation — meaning that the Soviet Union would be almost ensuring its own annihilation. 

Using his own judgment, the general calls off the U.S.’s retaliation. As he does so, the missiles onscreen hit the 2D continents, colliding with the map in circular flashes. But outside, in the real world, all is quiet. It was all a game. “Jesus H. Christ,” says an airman at one base over the comms system. “We’re still here.”

Similar nonsensical alerts have appeared on real-life screens. Once, in the U.S., alerts of incoming missiles came through due to a faulty computer chip. The system that housed the chip sent erroneous missile alerts on multiple occasions. Authorities had reason to suspect the data was likely false. But in two instances, they began to proceed as if the alerts were real. “Even though everyone seemed to realize that it’s an error, they still followed the procedure without seriously questioning what they were getting,” said Pavel Podvig, senior researcher at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research and a researcher at Princeton University. 

In Russia, meanwhile, operators did exercise independent thought in a similar scenario, when an erroneous preliminary launch command was sent. “Only one division command post actually went through the procedure and did what they were supposed to do,” he said. “All the rest said, ‘This has got to be an error,’” because it would have been a surprise attack not preceded by increasing tension, as expected. It goes to show, Podvig said, “people may or may not use their judgment.” 

You can imagine in the near future, Podvig continued, nuclear operators might see an AI-generated assessment saying circumstances were dire. In such a situation, there is a need “to instill a certain kind of common sense” he said, and make sure that people don’t just take whatever appears on a screen as gospel. “The basic assumptions about scenarios are important too,” he added. “Like, do you assume that the U.S. or Russia can just launch missiles out of the blue?”

People, for now, will likely continue to exercise judgment about attacks and responses — keeping, as the jargon goes, a “human in the loop.”

The idea of asking AI to make decisions about whether a country will launch nuclear missiles isn’t an appealing option, according to Geist, though it does appear in movies a lot. “Humans jealously guard these prerogatives for themselves,” Geist said. 

“It doesn't seem like there’s much demand for a Skynet,” he said, referencing another movie, “Terminator,” where an artificial general superintelligence launches a nuclear strike against humanity.

Podvig, an expert in Russian nuclear goings-on, doesn’t see much desire for autonomous nuclear operations in that country. 

“There is a culture of skepticism about all this fancy technological stuff that is sent to the military,” he said. “They like their things kind of simple.” 

Geist agreed. While he admitted that Russia is not totally transparent about its nuclear command and control, he doesn’t see much interest in handing the reins to AI.

China, of course, is generally very interested in AI, and specifically in pursuing artificial general intelligence, a type of AI which can learn to perform intellectual tasks as well as or even better than humans can.

William Hannas, lead analyst at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown University, has used open-source scientific literature to trace developments and strategies in China’s AI arena. One big development is the founding of the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence, backed by the state and directed by former UCLA professor Song-Chun Zhu, who has received millions of dollars of funding from the Pentagon, including after his return to China. 

Hannas described how China has shown a national interest in “effecting a merger of human and artificial intelligence metaphorically, in the sense of increasing mutual dependence, and literally through brain-inspired AI algorithms and brain-computer interfaces.”

“A true physical merger of intelligence is when you're actually lashed up with the computing resources to the point where it does really become indistinguishable,” he said. 

That’s relevant to defense discussions because, in China, there’s little separation between regular research and the military. “Technological power is military power,” he said. “The one becomes the other in a very, very short time.” Hannas, though, doesn’t know of any AI applications in China’s nuclear weapons design or delivery. Recently, U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping met and made plans to discuss AI safety and risk, which could lead to an agreement about AI’s use in military and nuclear matters. Also, in August, regulations on generative AI developed by China’s Cyberspace Administration went into effect, making China a first mover in the global race to regulate AI.

It’s likely that the two countries would use AI to help with their vast streams of early-warning data. And just as AI can help with interpretation, countries can also use it to skew that interpretation, to deceive and obfuscate. All three tasks are age-old military tactics — now simply upgraded for a digital, unstable age.

Science fiction convinced us that a Skynet was both a likely option and closer on the horizon than it actually is, said Geist. AI will likely be used in much more banal ways. But the ideas that dominate “WarGames” and “Terminator” have endured for a long time. 

“The reason people keep telling this story is it’s a great premise,” said Geist. “But it’s also the case,” he added, “that there’s effectively no one who thinks of this as a great idea.” 

It’s probably so resonant because people tend to have a black-and-white understanding of innovation. “There’s a lot of people very convinced that technology is either going to save us or doom us,” said Nina Miller, who formerly worked at the Nuclear Threat Initiative and is currently a doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The notion of an AI-induced doomsday scenario is alive and well in the popular imagination and also has made its mark in public-facing discussions about the AI industry. In May, dozens of tech CEOs signed an open letter declaring that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority,” without saying much about what exactly that means. 

But even if AI does launch a nuclear weapon someday (or provide false information that leads to an atomic strike), humans still made the decisions that led us there. Humans created the AI systems and made choices about where to use them. 

And, besides, in the case of a hypothetical catastrophe, AI didn’t create the environment that led to a nuclear attack. “Surely the underlying political tension is the problem,” said Miller. And that is thanks to humans and their desire for dominance — or their motivation to deceive. 

Maybe the humans need to learn what the computer did at the end of “WarGames.” “The only winning move,” it concludes, “is not to play.”

The post When deepfakes go nuclear appeared first on Coda Story.

Desta and his colleagues did their best to treat them, but by the time many arrived at the hospital, it was too late. “We tried to save so many lives,” he recalled, “but in most cases we were not able to.”

These were Desta’s early years as a physician, when one-third of all maternal deaths in Ethiopia could be linked to unsafe abortions. Thousands of women died each year. Under pressure to reduce the maternal mortality rate, the Ethiopian parliament passed a groundbreaking law loosening abortion restrictions for a variety of health conditions in 2005. The policy brought about a dramatic reduction in the number of deaths from unsafe abortions, and the bleak and overwhelmed hospital units that Desta remembers so vividly eventually shut down. The closure of the wards was “a success,” he explained. “I am a living witness that abortion care saves lives.”

But lately, Desta, who is now the Ethiopia program director for the global reproductive health nonprofit Ipas, worries that the dark days of those wards could become a part of Ethiopia’s reality again. That’s because the country’s abortion law is on shaky ground, thanks to the efforts of an emboldened anti-abortion movement buoyed by a court ruling halfway around the world: The U.S. Supreme Court’s historic 2022 decision to limit abortion rights in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. 

The Dobbs ruling — which overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that established a constitutional right to abortion — marked an anomaly in the trajectory of global abortion policy making over the last 30 years, which has trended sharply toward liberalization. 

Since the ruling, there has been a wave of abortion-related policy shifts around the world. In France, lawmakers used Dobbs as the basis for a legislative proposal that would enshrine abortion rights in the French constitution. Mexico’s Supreme Court decriminalized abortion earlier this month, despite the country’s deep Catholic roots. There is mounting support for policies to protect legal access to the procedure in Argentina and Colombia.

Anti-abortion groups, meanwhile, see Dobbs as a signal that it may not be so difficult to roll back the gains made by abortion advocates. “The opposition has tasted blood in the water,” Lori Adelman, the acting executive director of Planned Parenthood Global, told me. In India, anti-abortion activists took to the streets of Delhi in the months after Dobbs, calling on the Indian government to repeal its 1971 law legalizing abortion. In Italy, pro-choice gynecologists are facing a fresh wave of harassment by an emboldened anti-abortion movement riding a post-Roe high. 

But nowhere has the anti-abortion movement been more energized by Roe’s overturning than on the African continent. While abortion is restricted across much of the region, those countries that have expanded access are now seeing a backlash.

In Kenya, opponents are already drawing on Roe’s reversal to challenge abortion policy. According to the international reproductive rights advocacy organization Fos Feminista, which recently published a report about Dobbs’ global impact, anti-abortion groups highlighted Dobbs as a reason to appeal a 2022 constitutional court decision in Kenya expanding abortion access. The ruling, which came out before Roe was overturned, affirmed abortion as a fundamental right in Kenya’s constitution, citing international jurisprudence on abortion, including Roe v. Wade. But opposition groups latched onto Dobbs as a reason to challenge the judgment, arguing that the judge who decided the case relied on “bad law” from the U.S. The decision is now stayed, pending appeal. “The fact that it was entertained is really worrisome to many that are working on the ground in Kenya,” said Kemi Akinfaderin, a global advocacy officer with Fos Feminista.

In Nigeria, the governor of the state of Lagos suspended policy guidelines about abortion care for life-threatening health conditions less than a month after Roe was overturned. Abortion opponents seized upon the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision, arguing that the governor should follow the ruling’s lead and revoke the provisions. In July 2022, he did. “The Dobbs decision has trickled down to Nigeria, and it’s very disappointing,” said Ijeoma Egwuatu, the communications director for the Nigeria-based reproductive health nonprofit, Generation Initiative for Women and Youth Network. 

For abortion opponents, the U.S. trajectory provides a possible model for reversing abortion gains.

“They are saying, ‘Dobbs is the wind we need behind our sails,’” Akinfaderin told me. “‘If we can do this in the U.S., we can do this anywhere else.’” For abortion advocates, it’s a glaring warning. “For the longest time, Roe has been seen as a gold standard,” Akinfaderin continued. “And so the fact that this can happen in the U.S. is a very clear indication to some in the feminist movement in Africa that it can happen here as well. These gains can be lost over time.”

Akinfaderin, who is based in Togo, believes that abortion opponents have strategically chosen where to focus their attention on the African continent. “They’re not making mistakes,” she explained. “They are targeting big countries, countries with political influence and countries with very strong religious communities.”

Enter Ethiopia, the second-most populous country in Africa after Nigeria and the home to the headquarters of the African Union. The country has a distinctive history and cultural legacy. It is one of just two countries on the continent that successfully resisted colonization. (Liberia is the other.) Ethiopia is also home to a distinct Christian Orthodox tradition dating back to the 4th century. Orthodox Christians are the country’s largest and most influential religious group, making up more than 40% of the population. One-third of the population identifies as Muslim and nearly one-fifth as Protestant. Abortion remains controversial in the country — surveys show the majority of Ethiopians, including Orthodox Christians, oppose the procedure. 

The policy reforms in Ethiopia in 2005 legalized abortion in a variety of circumstances, including if a woman was a victim of rape or incest, if her life is in danger, if she has physical or mental disabilities or if she is a minor and is not ready to have a child. The changes had a dramatic impact. Today, deaths from unsafe abortions make up just 1% of maternal deaths in Ethiopia, compared to over 30% before the law went into effect. 

But Ethiopian reproductive health advocates worry that those advances are now in jeopardy. Over the last year, the country’s anti-abortion movement has coalesced around a concrete goal. “They are targeting the abortion law,” said Abebe Shibru, a longtime reproductive health advocate and the Ethiopia country director for the international health nonprofit MSI Reproductive Choices. “Now, anti-abortion groups are intensifying their movement and they are targeting policymakers, health providers — anyone who might have a strong stake in sexual reproductive health services.” Because of this momentum, Shibru continued, “this existing abortion law is very vulnerable.”

Much of this organizing has taken place behind the scenes, according to Shibru, as leading anti-abortion figures attempt to influence lawmakers, government officials and the general population. But a few public demonstrations from anti-abortion groups in recent months offer a glimpse into the movement’s goals and direction.

In July, thousands of people took to the streets in the town of Hawassa, Ethiopia, to speak out against abortion and LGBTQ rights. Nearly two dozen churches in the city opposed to abortion and same-sex marriage organized the demonstration, according to local media. Participants carried signs and chanted slogans about fetal rights and explained that the protest was organized to “save the youth” from the “dangers” of same-sex marriage and abortion.

Weeks before the protest, healthcare workers began catching glimpses of vans parked near abortion clinics in Addis Ababa. The cars, emblazoned with the slogan “Praying to end abortion in Ethiopia,” written in Amharic, were spotted repeatedly throughout the city in June, according to Desta, from Ipas. “Whenever a provider sees this car parked next to the clinic, or a woman sees this information when trying to access services from these clinics, they're embarrassed, they are harassed,” he told me. It’s unclear who was behind this effort, but Desta believes it reflects a more confrontational strategy from the opposition post-Roe. 

“Before the decision, they were not boldly coming out in the media and talking about abortion. But now, they are in the media, on TV  and on social media,” Desta said. “They are very vocal, very organized, and boldly speaking out about abortion in Ethiopia.”

According to Desta and other observers, one group leading the charge to repeal Ethiopia’s abortion law is Family Watch International, a U.S.-based nonprofit that claims to be working to “protect and promote the family as the fundamental unit of society.” According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, it is an anti-LGBTQ hate group. The organization’s leader has compared same-sex marriage to drug addiction and argued that the “homosexual agenda is a worldwide attempt to justify behavior that is inherently destructive to both society and to the individual.” 

While headquartered in Arizona, the organization has long worked in Africa and maintains an active presence in Ethiopia with an office in Addis Ababa, according to interviews with several reproductive rights advocates working there. After Roe was overturned, Family Watch wrote on its website that the decision was a “historic victory for life and family.” The organization’s Africa chapter, it added, is “working to stop abortion being pushed abroad.” The group’s Africa director is Seyoum Antonios, a prominent Ethiopian physician who recently railed against “the LGBTQ, abortion, and child sexualization and transgender agenda of the European Union” in an August speech to the African Bar Association. 

As of now, Ethiopia’s law is still standing. The forces jeopardizing its survival may not ultimately succeed in toppling the policy, and the transnational anti-abortion coalition — though energized — still faces an uphill battle if it wants to reverse global trends in abortion policymaking.

But even without a change in the law, the opposition’s efforts already appear to be having tangible impacts on the country’s abortion landscape. Over the last year, Shibru and his colleagues have noticed that some healthcare workers in public clinics have ceased providing abortion services — a likely result of the amplified pressure campaign against them. Shibru told me that providers are facing harassment from “their friends, their families, and their communities.” He added, “​When you go into public facilities, we heard that this facility used to provide safe abortion, but not now. Because we used to get good support, but now no one is encouraging us.” 

Additionally, Shibru said that he and other reproductive health workers have documented an increase in the number of women seeking medical treatment for abortion-related complications over the last year. Fewer clinics offering services could cause women to seek out unsafe alternatives, Shibru explained, and medical care for procedures gone wrong. These scenarios, coupled with the abortion law’s shaky standing, fill Shibru with dread. 

“​​What does it mean if the law is reversed?” he asked. “We are going back 20 years. That means more maternal mortality. Hospitals will be occupied with abortion-related problems.The women in Ethiopia in danger.” Such a scenario, he continued, “will be a big moral crisis.”

The post Roe’s repeal has energized Africa’s anti-abortion movement appeared first on Coda Story.

Lundy thought the ad could educate social media users about the risk factors for breast cancer, but it never saw the light of day. Instead, Instagram rejected it for violating its policies on nudity and sexual activity.

For more than a year, Lundy’s company, Complex Creatures, has struggled to find a home for its content on Instagram. The platform has rejected scores of the company’s advertisements and posts since its account went live in June 2022. Lundy co-founded Complex Creatures with her sister, a breast cancer survivor, to raise awareness about the disease and provide health and wellness products for women undergoing breast cancer treatment. But the content rejections came rolling in as soon as she started posting. It didn’t take long for Lundy to realize that Meta, owner of Instagram, was nixing her content because of its subject matter: the breast. 

“How do you desexualize the breast?” she asked. “It’s so much of what we’re trying to do.” But platforms like Instagram, Lundy said, “don’t want to let us.” In a call over Zoom, she shared some screenshots of her company’s censored content. One was a post about how massages can improve breast health, featuring a photo of a woman’s hands fully covering her breasts. “But they’re allowed to do this,” she sighed, pulling up an advertisement from a men’s health brand for an erectile dysfunction treatment containing an image of a hand clutching an eggplant with the caption: “Get hard.” The censorship, she added, “is an ongoing challenge. We’re talking about breast cancer and breast health.” Access to the right information about the disease and its risk factors, she explained, can be a matter of “life and death.”

The censorship that Lundy routinely confronts on Instagram is part of a deeper history at Meta, which has long faced criticism for censoring material about breasts on Facebook. But it’s not just breast-focused content that’s not getting through. Lundy belongs to a community of nonprofits and startups focused on women’s health that face routine — and often bewildering — censorship across Facebook and Instagram. 

I spoke with representatives from six organizations focused on women’s health care globally, and they told me that while Meta regularly approves advertisements for material that promotes men's sexuality and sexual pleasure, it regularly blocks them from publishing advertisements and posts about a wide range of health and reproductive services aimed at women, including reproductive health, fertility treatments and breast care. Often, these posts are rejected on the grounds that they violate the company's advertising policies on promoting sexual pleasure and adult content.

This kind of censorship comes at an existential moment for the U.S.-based reproductive rights community after the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade — the nearly 50-year-old ruling that legalized abortion across the U.S. — in 2022. As I reported in March 2023, abortion opponents have sought to clamp down on abortion speech online in the post-Roe era, introducing policies in Texas, Iowa, and South Carolina that would prohibit websites from publishing information about abortion. That’s on top of censorship that reproductive rights groups already face when they try to post content about accessing abortion care on platforms like Instagram and Facebook — even in countries where the procedure is legal. 

According to Emma Clark Gratton, a communications officer for the Australia chapter of the international reproductive health nonprofit MSI Reproductive Choices, the organization is routinely blocked from running ads about abortion services on Facebook, often for violating the company’s advertising policy on social issues, elections, and politics. Abortion is “totally legal” in Australia, Clark Gratton explained, but on Meta’s platforms, it is “still very restricted in terms of what we can post.” The organization’s clinical team in Australia, she added, can advertise for vasectomy services on Facebook, “but they definitely couldn’t do an ad promoting abortion services, which is literally what they do. They’re an abortion provider.”

Women First Digital, a group that provides information resources about abortion globally, has dealt extensively with restrictions on social media networks. Michell Mor, a digital strategy manager with the organization, put it to me this way: “Because big tech is from the United States, everything that happens there is replicated around the world.”

The impact of these restrictions reaches well beyond social media, says Carol Wersbe, chief of staff for the Center for Intimacy Justice, a nonprofit that has been tracking Meta’s rejections of health-related ads. 

“Advertising represents so much more than just a company getting an ad on Facebook,” Wersbe told me. “It's visibility, access to information. If we can't advertise for things like pelvic pain and endometriosis, how do we ever reduce the stigma from those topics?” 

In January 2022, the Center for Intimacy Justice published a survey of 60 women’s healthcare startups about their experiences with censorship on Facebook and Instagram. The participating companies offer products and services for a range of women’s healthcare needs, from fertility and pregnancy support to postpartum recovery, menstrual health, and menopause relief. All of the companies surveyed reported having their ads rejected by Instagram and Facebook, and half said their accounts were suspended after Meta removed their ads. According to the report, ads were frequently taken down after they were flagged for promoting “adult products and services,” which are not permitted under the company’s advertising policies.  

Some ads that didn’t make the cut featured products to relieve side effects of menopause; another included background about consent in school sexual education courses. During the same time period, the report points out, Meta approved ads for men’s sexual health products, including treatments for premature ejaculation, erectile dysfunction pills promising to help consumers “get hard or your money back” and men’s lubricants to “level up your solo time.” The platform allowed these ads despite its own rules prohibiting ads from promoting products and services that “focus on sexual pleasure.”

Meta quietly updated its advertising guidelines after the report came out, stating that ads for family planning, contraception, menopause relief, and reproductive health care are allowed. Though the social media giant expanded the scope of permissible advertisements on paper, Wersbe says the status quo remains unchanged. “Across the board, we're still seeing our partners experiencing rejections,” she explained. The censorship that she and others in the field are observing cuts across languages, markets, and continents. “Facebook’s ads policy is a global policy, so when it changes something it affects their whole user base,” explained Wersbe. “We’ve seen rejections in Arabic, Spanish, French, Swedish, Swahili. It’s really pervasive.”

In March 2023, the organization filed a complaint with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, urging the agency to investigate whether Meta is engaging in deceptive trade practices by rejecting ads from women’s health organizations that comply with its stated advertising policies, while allowing similar advertisements promoting men’s sexual health. The complaint alleges that the social media giant is unevenly applying its ads rules based on the gender of the target audience. These removals, it argues, constitute discriminatory censorship and perpetuate “inequality of access to health information and services for women and people of underrepresented genders.” 

In reporting this story, I contacted Meta with questions about the Center for Intimacy Justice’s report, the Federal Trade Commission complaint, and the rejection of Lundy’s advertisements. A spokesperson responded and shared the company’s published Community Standards, but declined to comment on the record.

Alexandra Lundqvist told me that alongside the outreach challenges that these issues create, ad rejections also make it harder for women-led health companies to get a leg up among investors. Lundqvist is a communications lead with The Case for Her, an investment firm that funds women’s sexual health organizations worldwide, including the Center for Intimacy Justice. “The general Silicon Valley big tech investor is not going to go to a women’s health company, especially when they can’t really advertise their work because they get blocked all the time. When these companies can’t advertise their work, they can’t scale, they can’t get funding,” Lundqvist explained. That exacerbates inequities that women and nonbinary entrepreneurs already face in securing investments from the male-dominated venture capital industry, creating a negative feedback loop for companies marketing products by and for women. “There is a big systems impact,” she added.

Lundy, who says her breast health company continues to experience widespread rejections despite Meta’s policy update, believes the censorship has a corrosive effect on consumers and creators alike. The content takedowns make it harder for entrepreneurs like herself to reach customers, make money, and attract investors. But they also prevent people from learning potentially life-saving information about breast cancer.

“There’s not a lot of information out there about breast health,” she said, describing her own lack of awareness about the disease prior to her sister’s diagnosis at age 37. “We had no family history,” she told me. “Her gynecologist missed it and she had never had a mammogram.” The experience, she continued, “really illuminated how much we didn’t know about our breasts.”

Lundy and her sister founded the company in part to address the information vacuum that left them both in the dark — to reach people before diagnosis and support those with the disease through treatment. But Meta makes that mission harder. “We want to normalize the breast,” she said, “but it’s almost like the algorithm and the people making the algorithms can’t think about a breast or a woman’s body in any way other than sexuality or arousal.” The censorship that Complex Creature routinely faces for posting material on Instagram about breast health, Lundy told me, “feels like the patriarchal system at work.”

The morning after our call, Lundy emailed me an update: a photo of two squashes meant to resemble breasts hanging side by side — the visual for an Instagram ad about her company’s summer sale. The post, she wrote, “was rejected last night. They’re gourds.”

The post Advertising erectile dysfunction pills? No problem. Breast health? Try again appeared first on Coda Story.

It was February 2009, and a disaster was about to occur 500 miles above Siberia: A dead Russian satellite, Cosmos-2251, was on a direct collision course with a communications satellite operated by Iridium, an American company.

The orbits of the two wrapped around the globe, their paths forming a giant X. As they approached one another, it would have been clear to anyone watching that they were headed for exactly the wrong place at exactly the wrong time. 

But no one was watching. The satellites crashed into each other, at a relative speed of more than 22,000 miles per hour.

They immediately broke into thousands of pieces.

Lisa Ruth Rand was watching the news of the dramatic breakup just as she was beginning graduate school. When the two spacecraft crashed, they formed two streams of debris that continued along the orbital paths they’d once traveled. It made Rand, who today works as an historian of technology at the California Institute of Technology, realize that Earthlings only have limited dominion over this part of the universe. 

“Human beings, yes, can design and control objects to a certain extent,” Rand told me. “Ultimately, nature plays a role as well.”

And there nature was, slinging brand new space trash around the planet.

Either Russia or the U.S. could have worked a little harder to prevent the collision: Both countries did some satellite tracking and collision warning, but the pending Cosmos-Iridium doom wasn’t on their radar.

The debris that the Cosmos-Iridium crash left in its wake has posed potential collision risks for other satellites ever since. And that garbage has plenty of company. For decades, countries and companies have launched satellites, let them live out their useful lives and then kept them in orbit long after they were “dead,” or inactive. They’ve also left behind spent rocket bodies and whirling debris from other crashes past. In low Earth orbit — the part of space where satellites are closest to the Earth itself — accumulating debris poses a crash risk but cannot, on its own, get out of the way. Alongside it are thousands of live satellites that must avoid both the debris and one another.

And the issue is only going to get worse. On August 23, an Indian spacecraft became the first to land on the moon’s south pole region. Just days before, a Russian craft attempting a similar feat crashed into the moon’s surface. The two events herald the start of a new space race, which brings with it the threat of adding even more space junk into the mix.

Just as car accidents are more likely to happen at rush hour, space collisions are bound to increase as active satellite and spacecraft traffic ramps up, littering the celestial road with trash. Crashes are more likely than ever today because there are more spacecraft in the near orbits. And even though most of us can’t see it, the picture up there isn’t pretty.

The number of active satellites in Earth’s orbit has jumped from around 1,000 in 2009, when the Cosmos-Iridium crash occurred, to nearly 7,000, thanks to satellite “constellations”: sets of dozens, hundreds or thousands of small spacecraft that work together to perform a single task. About 4,000 of the satellites currently in orbit are in constellations run by Starlink, the satellite internet service owned by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

When you’re on Earth’s surface, you reap the rewards of satellite infrastructure without thinking too much about what’s going on above you. But if that infrastructure, or parts of it, stopped functioning, you’d think about it a lot.

Imagine if GPS went down. Though GPS satellites don’t sit in the most crowded orbits where the big constellations are, their part of space nevertheless has its own share of crash risk, and a cascading set of events could cause them to malfunction. Without a live navigation system, aircraft couldn’t get from place to place. Weapons systems couldn’t aim at targets. Drones wouldn’t know where they were or where to go. You couldn’t find your way to the grocery store in a different neighborhood or use Tinder in any neighborhood. GPS satellites also act as ultra-precise clocks, sending out timing signals that industries across the world rely on. Without those time stamps, the electrical grid could freeze up, financial transactions couldn’t go through, and data packets flowing through the internet and mobile networks wouldn’t work right. 

Communications satellites would cause even more issues on Earth if they stopped doing their jobs. Soldiers, ships and aircraft could lose access to secure communication channels. Civilian pilots couldn’t talk to air traffic control. Cargo ships couldn’t speak to those on land. People in conflict zones would have difficulty getting information from, or providing information to, the outside.

On top of the disruptions to services that rely on communications satellites, without orbital infrastructure, humans would lose access to key weather forecasting data, leaving us relatively blind to signs of oncoming natural disasters. Lots of intelligence is gathered from above too: Without satellites, nations would lose insights into what’s happening on the ground in times of war – satellites offer key information on things like troop buildup or movement. Earth observation companies help with acquiring some of that intelligence and also collect images and data that help with climate change monitoring, agriculture, mining, piracy, illegal fishing, deforestation and disaster aid. But they can only do that if their satellites work properly.

All told, a major collision in space could spell catastrophe on the ground. The only way to avoid serious crashes and the creation of more debris is to make sure that the orbit doesn’t get too crowded — and that the crowd already up there stays safe from itself.

After the Cosmos-Iridium crash, the U.S. amped up its collision-avoidance capabilities and began issuing collision warnings to satellite operators all over the world, including to foreign governments. The number of warnings that the U.S. government sends out has increased greatly since 2009, alongside the jump in orbiting spacecraft. 

Despite the growing orbital population, though, only a patchwork of regulation and governance exists for “space traffic management.” The International Telecommunication Union governs the use of the electromagnetic spectrum — regulating the frequencies on which satellites communicate and the use of the Earth’s orbit as a resource. But it has no enforcement powers. The U.N.’s Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space also weighs in on space traffic issues periodically and is attempting to ramp up this work, but it does not issue enforceable standards either. While the U.S. alert system exists, it is not equipped to be the space traffic manager for the whole world.

“It’s pretty minimal,” said Victoria Samson, the Washington office director for the Secure World Foundation, a think tank dedicated to safe, sustainable and peaceful uses of space. “There is no requirement for action when receiving those conjunction warnings,” she told me. “And there is no one coordinating any of it.”

No two active satellites have ever crashed into each other to date, except a spacecraft that collided with the Mir space station while trying to dock there. The Cosmos-Iridium crash involved one active satellite and one dead one. But without clear authority or protocols, mishaps inevitably occur, and as the amount of stuff floating in space increases, so does the likelihood of a major crash.

People like Samson and Lisa Ruth Rand worry that the existing regulatory system may not be comprehensive or international enough to make sure satellites stay safe in this new era. If another big crash, or a set of crashes, did happen, the results on the ground could be hugely disruptive. 

“That infrastructure is so invisible,” Rand told me. “It’s not the same thing as when the lights go out. But when the satellites go out, that’s going to be a pretty big deal.”

“There will eventually need to be a more formal coordinating mechanism,” said Samson, “rather than two-party discussions on an ad hoc basis.” 

A recent SpaceX fiasco offers a cautionary tale: In 2019, SpaceX had just 60 Starlink satellites in orbit. Predictions showed that one of those 60 had a relatively high likelihood of colliding with a European Space Agency satellite called Aeolus. The space agency saw this coming – having projected the spacecrafts’ predictable paths into the future – and reached out to SpaceX about a week in advance, asking if the company intended to move to a safer spot. SpaceX said it had no such plans: The likelihood of a crash was, at the time, about 1 in 50,000. 

But as the days went by, that probability rose, reaching around 1 in 1,000 — still not likely but not a number to play around with.

The European Space Agency repeatedly tried to reach SpaceX again as the situation evolved.

They heard nothing back. 

They sent 29 alerts to SpaceX. Still, there was no reply.

As the day of the potential collision grew closer, with no word from SpaceX, the European Space Agency decided to change its own object’s trajectory. 

SpaceX, it turns out, had a bug in its notification system, and the company was on a holiday weekend. No one was checking their email.

SpaceX doesn’t need any particular one of its Starlink satellites to continue to provide internet: It has thousands of satellites in part to make individual satellites expendable and redundant. But if it had impacted Aeolus, or any satellite that doesn’t have such redundancy, the crash could cut capabilities — and the debris from the collision could put many more spacecraft at risk.

SpaceX has so far avoided all crashes because it can propel its Starlink satellites away from danger. Nevertheless, it has been implicated in a lot of potential crashes. In 2021, with just 1,700 satellites in orbit — in contrast to today’s 4,000 — the company was already involved in half of all close-approach alerts, known as “conjunction alerts,” according to Hugh Lewis of the astronautics research group at the University of Southampton. 

And 4,000 is far from the final figure that SpaceX is aiming for. The company’s initial constellation will boast 12,000 satellites, and in its final form could involve 42,000. Today, the satellites provide internet and communication access for people in rural areas and in conflict zones like Ukraine — at least when Musk keeps the services turned on.

When the remainder of the initial set of Starlink satellites are in orbit, Musk’s enterprise could be implicated in 90% of all collision warnings, Lewis estimates.

Since 2020, Lewis has been analyzing Starlink satellites’ conjunction rates and measuring how often satellites have to maneuver around potential problems. In one recent dispatch, his data showed that the satellites have had to perform more than 50,000 moves since the end of 2020 to avoid potential crashes.

Lewis’ data indicates that as the number of Starlink satellites increases, the cumulative number of avoidance maneuvers increases at an approximately exponential rate. In other words, a few more satellites equals many more moves and a greater potential for disaster.

“On the basis of probability, something bad is going to happen,” he said.

There is a paradox here: Creating more satellite infrastructure to enable more connections and capabilities on Earth could be precisely what threatens those connections and capabilities. One way to dull that double-edged sword is to get satellite makers to coordinate — internationally and by law — to make sure their proposed constellations can play nice.

There are options for fixing the mistakes of the past. For instance, we could take the trash out now. Humans could clean up the space around our planet by removing our old debris — transporting dead satellites to “graveyard” orbits where they won’t bother anything, or “deorbiting” them by sending them to burn up in the atmosphere.

But such a proposition is tricky. The U.S. can only touch trash that the U.S. created. Russia can only touch its own trash. The same goes for China or anyone else. 

Touch someone else’s trash without permission, and you could create a full-on international incident. Sometimes, too, if you touch your own trash without telling others you plan to, you may stir global tensions. 

In 2021, China’s Shijian-21 spacecraft spent months hovering around an orbit, getting close to other satellites — with the country staying mum about its actions. Finally, Shijian-21 sidled up to a defunct Chinese navigation satellite, docked with it and towed it to a graveyard orbit. 

That’s an example of what scientists call “space debris mitigation,” and it’s technically good: That satellite was no longer a part of the traffic and no longer presented a risk to other spacecraft. But if a satellite can get that close to and physically move another spacecraft, it could do so to any spacecraft, regardless of who it belongs to. The same technology could also be weaponized to damage or deactivate a satellite. 

Brian Chow, a space policy analyst, says China shares information about its commercial activities but is “evasive about those that can enhance its military capability,” like the Shijian-21 incident. 

“China has been secretive in the development and tests of its rendezvous and proximity operations,” Chow said. And that secrecy — alongside the opacity surrounding China’s other space activities with military implications — is unlikely to change.

The lack of communication from China concerns officials from other countries because of China’s ability to potentially conduct an attack in space or cause space “situational awareness” problems. From a traffic perspective, without direct information from the country, managing potential crashes becomes more difficult: Space traffic trackers can make better predictions and give better warnings if they receive direct information from satellite operators about a spacecraft’s position or planned maneuvering. The Shijian-21 event and the silence around it, however, are typical of China’s lack of transparency. 

In another example, earlier this year, Lieutenant General DeAnna M. Burt of the U.S. Space Force said that when the U.S. sends warnings about conjunctions that could affect China’s space station, they get crickets in return.

“Many authoritarian countries that don’t share information with the populace don't share it internationally,” said Darren McKnight, a senior technical fellow for LeoLabs, a private company that performs its own space traffic tracking and management on behalf of satellite companies and space agencies. “And so I’d be concerned if China and Russia started putting up 10,000-, 13,000-satellite constellations that they would be as open about what they’re doing.”

Imagine a constellation that would add exponentially to the crash risk, like SpaceX does, but whose operators wouldn’t coordinate or share precise information that cannot be gathered from afar.

China does, actually, have a plan for such a constellation: a 13,000-spacecraft herd called Guowang that will, like Starlink, provide internet service. For Guowang to work well for the world, the country needs to become a part of space traffic dialogue and share information. 

Chow believes they will. “If China does not collaborate or share information, the U.S. would have to rely on its own warning system and ability to maneuver,” he said. “On the other hand, as this constellation will primarily be used for commercial purposes, China will likely share information to avoid these satellites from being hit so that they can perform their missions cheaper and better.”

That could lead to more formal crash-avoidance coordination that Samson, of the Secure World Foundation, sees coming. But whatever that system looks like, it can’t be the only protective mechanism in place. “There will also have to be rules of the road established,” Samson said. “If two satellites are heading toward each other, who moves?” The newer satellite? The larger one? “And continued sharing of space situational awareness data is key to have a common understanding of the orbital environment,” she said.

Making sure that space stays safe is key to protecting life on the ground too. The modern world would cease to turn without satellites, and catastrophic crashes could move us closer to that point. Regulation, cooperation and public awareness are ways to step back and keep space traffic running smoothly, without stifling the good parts of orbital infrastructure — like increased connectivity on Earth.

Cleaning up orbit and orbital behavior may seem daunting, but it’s possible: It happened, for instance, with the oceans. Until the middle of the 20th century, people thought these bodies of saltwater were so large that mere human pollution could never alter them. When it became clear that the seas could indeed get slimy, people rallied to curtail the dumping of waste into the oceans.

While those initiatives have been far from perfect (see: the Great Pacific Garbage Patch), collective awareness of our ability to negatively impact the planet is much greater than it used to be.

The same could be more broadly true of space in the future. After all, environmental awareness of space is as old as environmental awareness on the planet. Earth’s environmental movement came about at the same time as the Space Age, around the 1960s, and the two shaped each other. “There’s been an almost explicitly environmental consciousness of outer space from the very beginning of the Space Age,” said Rand, the environmental historian.

That idea even shows up in what little international regulation exists in orbit. “There’s parts that are evident in the Outer Space Treaty,” Rand said, referring to the U.N. document signed by 113 nations about how to behave beyond Earth. For instance, the treaty has a provision stating that states “shall avoid harmful contamination of space and celestial bodies,” things like creating debris, causing crashes and making things too crowded for comfort.

The Outer Space Treaty also treats orbit as an international place — a common resource that no one owns but for which everyone bears responsibility. A coordination system that recognizes that responsibility could keep orbit, and everything satellites help us do on Earth, safe for the future.

The post How space traffic in orbit could spell trouble on Earth appeared first on Coda Story.

Since May, migrants on the Mexico side of the U.S.-Mexico border who are hoping to apply for asylum have been required to make their asylum appointments through a mobile phone app operated by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, known as CBP One. The new system has effectively oriented the first — and for many, the most urgent — stage of the asylum process around a digital tool that is, by many accounts, glitchy and unreliable.

On July 27, immigrants’ rights groups filed a class action lawsuit against the Biden administration over its use of the app, setting the stage for a legal showdown over the government’s decision to shift the first stage of the asylum application process into the realm of automation.

The plaintiffs include 10 migrants who sought asylum along the border but were turned away by U.S. immigration officials because they hadn’t made appointments using CBP One. Their suit alleges that the U.S. government’s use of CBP One has created steep, and in some cases insurmountable, technological obstacles that have prevented migrants from pursuing their right to asylum. As a result, they’re often left with little choice but to remain in Mexican border towns, where violence and crime targeting migrants is notoriously high. 

CBP One became the primary entry point into America’s asylum system after the Biden administration lifted Title 42, a Trump-era policy that barred most people from seeking asylum in the U.S. because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Now, in order to be eligible for protection, migrants must possess an up-to-date smartphone, internet access, mobile data and the ability to read and write in English, Spanish or Haitian Creole — the only three languages the app offers. These requirements, the lawsuit argues, disadvantage refugees who don’t have or can’t afford a smartphone and those who lack the requisite language skills. The suit also argues that the government has established new criteria for asylum applications that do not align with asylum laws that were vetted and approved long before the dawn of the smartphone. Imagine telling the authors of the modern asylum system, which was created after the Holocaust, that this guarantee is only accessible to people who arrive at the border with a miniature computer in their pocket.

And that’s nothing to say of the technology’s myriad flaws. As I reported in June, the app is notoriously unreliable, with facial recognition software that misidentifies darker skin tones and has a tendency to crash, freeze and log users out while they are trying to schedule their asylum appointments. 

“If I could give negative stars I would,” a user seethed on CBP One’s App Store review page, where the app has just 2.6 stars. “My family are trying to flee violence in their country and this app and the photo section are all that’s standing in the way.”

Critics have been sounding the alarm about these problems since the Biden administration announced the policy. Amnesty International argued that the government’s use of the app violates international human rights law by placing unnecessary technical and practical barriers in the way of migrants seeking to exercise their legal right to apply for asylum.

Immigration attorney Nicole Ramos spoke with me about the technical and linguistic challenges that asylum seekers encounter when they attempt to schedule an appointment on the app. Ramos is the Border Rights Project director for the immigrant’s rights group Al Otro Lado, which provides legal support to asylum seekers on both sides of the US-Mexico border.

“There are days where the app is unable to be used due to system-wide glitches,” she said. “There are days and weeks where people keep getting an error message that says that they need to be closer to the border in order to make an appointment and they are literally standing at the port of entry.” 

Asylum seekers who don’t speak or read in English, Spanish or Haitian Creole are left to try to make sense of the error messages and the app’s directions on their own. The government does not provide translation support to people who do not speak a language supported by CBP One. 

“The government is putting all the onus for language access on the asylum seeker themselves and already overburdened nonprofit organizations,” Ramos said. She explained that Al Otro Lado hires interpreters to help applicants who don’t speak any of the languages that the app offers but noted that this responsibility should fall on the government, not organizations like hers. “They are externalizing their responsibility to afford language access to individuals trying to access our legal system.” 

The government’s policy grants exceptions for asylum seekers with “exceptionally compelling circumstances,” like acute medical emergencies or risk of death, and says that those individuals should be permitted to ask for border officials for asylum without a CBP One appointment. But in practice, the plaintiffs say, the app has effectively become the only pathway to access asylum, even for people who are eligible for the government’s exceptions. Ramos said Al Otro Lado has seen border officials turn away asylum seekers without appointments who were in the middle of medical emergencies, including a man in the middle of an epileptic seizure at the port of entry. “The Red Cross was called, police were there and they were aware of the situation and they still refused to process him,” she said. Ramos also shared the story of an asylum seeker who was killed in Mexico while waiting for a CBP One appointment. When the victim’s surviving family members approached border officials with the person’s death certificate in hand and asked to apply for asylum without using the app, they were instructed to schedule an appointment on CBP One. 

The lawsuit alleges that border officials are “almost uniformly requiring asylum seekers to have a CBP One appointment in order to be inspected and processed, regardless of whether they may be eligible for an exception.” It describes two separate instances in which immigration officials rejected asylum seekers’ requests for special consideration after they were kidnapped by criminal groups in Mexico and missed their scheduled appointments. One of the victims escaped but left behind all of his valuables, including his cell phone, according to the lawsuit. When he appeared at the port and asked for asylum, border officials “emphasized that he needed to sign up through the app and denied him any opportunity to explain the exigencies of his situation.”

The post Migrants take the US to court over its glitchy asylum app appeared first on Coda Story.

It served her well when she worked in child protective services in Hobbs, a small oil town in southeastern New Mexico.

She looks at it this way: “If you give in to emotion, the job’s not going to get done. You don’t process emotion. You walk in on a scene, and the first thing you see isn’t a tragedy. The first thing you see is a checklist of things you need to do to resolve the issue.”

But when Woodward looks back on all the horrible things that she witnessed as a caseworker, the weight of the decisions she had to make is almost too much to bear.

“Each decision that you make changes your life. Every single, solitary decision that I made, I still carry it,” Woodward said when we met in the spring.

Woodward used to work for the state of New Mexico’s Children, Youth, and Families Department, supporting children who had been the victims of abuse or neglect. She was part of the CYFD staff teams that deliberated on whether to take kids away from their parents and put them into foster care.

Woodward is still haunted by the memories of one little girl in particular. Woodward had reason to believe that the girl, who was living in foster care with her grandfather, was being abused.

But something stood in the way: It was a safety assessment tool that the state requires caseworkers like Woodward to use. Formally known by its somewhat clunky brand name — “Structured Decision Making” — the tool is meant to help determine whether a child is in great enough danger to be removed from their home. 

Her concern was based on more than just a hunch. The girl’s mother had told Woodward that the grandfather was an abuser – he had raped her when she was young. Woodward took this information to her team and called for another office to send a caseworker to investigate. But that caseworker’s report, based on the tool, indicated that there was no reason for concern about the girl’s safety. Despite Woodward’s pleas, CYFD staff decided to keep the girl with her grandfather.

It became clear months later that Woodward was right — the little girl’s grandfather had been sexually abusing her all along. The girl was eventually taken away from her grandfather and placed in a different foster home.

The agency is adamant that the tool isn’t meant to supersede a caseworker’s judgment. “It's not about giving the job of a caseworker to an electronic tool,” said Sarah Meadows, the head of the agency’s research, assessment and data bureau. “That’s 100% not what it’s intended to do.”

But in cases like this one, it felt to Woodward as if the tool had won out.

“You can no longer go on all of your training, all of your experience in the field. It’s a moot point because the tool said so,” Woodward told me.

“You're going off of a scoring system now. And if the family doesn’t meet the score, you have to turn around and walk out.”

Across the U.S., child welfare agencies are looking to algorithms and risk assessment tools to help support the arduous labor of caseworkers in child protective services agencies. The hope is that these tools will help caseworkers make better and more equitable decisions that will ultimately improve outcomes for vulnerable children. But these agencies’ problems run deep. Oftentimes, there is no single tool or policy solution that can fix them.

Facing high rates of child abuse and neglect, the New Mexico Children, Youth, and Families Department rolled out the Structured Decision Making safety scoring tool in 2020. The goal was to help the agency decide whether or not children are safe living with their parents and to assess the risk of future abuse if a child remains in their home. But in the face of severe staffing shortages and a push to remove kids from their families in only the most extreme cases, former CYFD staff and children’s attorneys in New Mexico say that the safety scoring tool has been replacing caseworker judgment and leaving some kids in harm’s way.

New Mexico had the 15th highest rate of child abuse or neglect in the 2021 fiscal year, a drop from the 8th highest in 2020. About a third of children who died from abuse, neglect or homicide between 2015 and 2021 had prior involvement with child welfare, according to the New Mexico Department of Health.

One of them was named James Dunklee Cruz. There were countless warning signs that the little boy was at risk of harm. When he was just a few months old, caseworkers found ample evidence of neglect: The home where he lived with his mother was roach-infested and strewn with trash and dog feces. 

In October 2019, when Dunklee Cruz was four, he was brought to the hospital with multiple injuries, including a black eye, a bruised penis and an injured shoulder. He told a CYFD investigator that he had been abused by three people in his life. But somehow those allegations were declared unsubstantiated. The Strategic Decision Making tool classified Dunklee Cruz as “safe with a plan,” allowing him to stay with his mother.

Two months later, James Dunklee Cruz died as a result of blunt force trauma to his head and torso at the hands of Zerrick Marquez, one of the men he had named as his abuser two months before. Marquez pleaded guilty to killing Dunklee Cruz and was sentenced to 30 years in prison.

CYFD conducted nine investigations into allegations of abuse and neglect during the boy’s short life. Caseworkers put what they call “safety plans” in place for Dunklee Cruz, but this wasn’t enough to keep him safe. These details appear in a publicly posted child fatality review summary report. The section of the document drawing on the child’s autopsy also describes a litany of injuries, including “healing jaw fractures and healing subdural hemorrhage indicating significant blunt head trauma that occurred earlier than the acute injuries” — in other words, injuries that didn’t kill him but proved that Dunklee Cruz was at risk of serious harm before his final days.

A wrongful death lawsuit is also working its way through the court. A complaint filed in December 2022 in a federal district court in New Mexico accuses CYFD of failing in their duty to protect the boy and states that Dunklee Cruz’s mother repeatedly violated the safety plans CYFD put in place. The complaint also specifically points to the Structured Decision Making tool. 

It reads: “Over the span of his four years of life, CYFD investigators repeatedly failed to rely on accurate and well-documented facts when it utilized the agency’s Safety Risk Assessment Tool, causing its repeated contacts with James to result in flawed and underestimated risk assessment and flawed decision-making resulting in James’ death.”

When I asked about the boy’s case, CYFD offered this response: “The death of James Dunklee Cruz is tragic. The loss of any child is felt deeply and grieved by our caseworkers and staff. Regarding the function of the tool in this case, he was identified as safe with a plan. This means that the safety assessment tool identified at least one danger indicator and that in order for the child to stay in the custody of the parent, a plan was required. Our caseworkers worked with James’ mother to find a safe place for her to live and alternative childcare for James to mitigate against the threats that were identified by the caseworker.”

What happened to James Dunklee Cruz reflects the most significant problem that former CYFD workers raised when they talked to me about the Structured Decision Making safety tool: It doesn’t always convey how much danger kids are truly facing.

The tool’s launch coincided with a change in the agency’s approach to decision-making about when to remove a child from their family’s home. This was a part of a nationwide shift with the passage of the federal Family First Preservation Services Act, a policy that was designed to keep children “safely with their families to avoid the trauma that results when children are placed in out-of-home care.”

The safety tool doesn’t tell caseworkers what to do. It is meant to facilitate a conversation between the worker and their supervisor about whether to declare the child “safe,” “safe with plan” or “unsafe.” The tool sets the tone for what, ideally, should be an extensive, in-depth dialogue between people from across the agency. But due to staffing shortages, it doesn’t always play out this way. The tool “doesn’t take into account that there's not enough workers, there's not enough supervisors,” said Matt Esquibel, a regional manager at CYFD.

Some former caseworkers have told me that, in this context, the assessment takes on an outsized role in determining a child’s fate.

“It's not meant to streamline or fast-track decisions, but it helps focus the conversations, which is helpful to supervisors and to workers,” said Meadows, the head of the agency’s research, assessment and data bureau.

Former CYFD workers told me that the risk and safety assessments did not always match what they observed about the level of danger a child was facing, particularly when it came to substance abuse, domestic violence or repeated involvement with child protective services.

“We saw issues with the safety tool immediately,” said one former CYFD worker who had knowledge of the tool and reviewed investigations in which it was used. She requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation. 

The former CYFD worker said she would see cases in which she thought a child should have been removed from the home but the safety tool didn’t reflect that.

“I’m reading a report that comes and I’m reading their notes that they’ve entered. And then I’m looking at their safety assessment, [and it] does not match what I’m reading,” she said.

Workers are only allowed to check off a danger on the safety tool if they can observe or otherwise prove it. But investigators don’t always have time to do multiple home visits or to gather more information, said Esquibel. They may not be able to gather all the details right away, and children may not initially disclose abuse. There is an “override” for the risk assessment that requires supervisor approval. If the worker thinks that the risk score is too low, they can bump the score up one level. CYFD’s Meadows emphasized that workers should use their judgment and critical thinking, work with supervisors and override the tool if necessary.

“I think the workers and supervisors do the best that they can when they’re out there,” Esquibel said. “But your assessment is only as good as what information you're gathering or who’s available at the time.” 

Ultimately, the former CYFD staff member who requested anonymity thinks the assessments are not capturing the seriousness of some cases and that the consequences for kids are real.

“I think it’s leading to dangerous situations for children,” she said. “I think the agency is leaving the children in situations based on that tool when they should be removing them.”

Meadows said that shouldn’t happen. “If a worker feels strongly that a child is unsafe and they don’t want to walk away from that child in that home, they shouldn't. Safety tool be damned,” she said.

Even though she’s moved on from CYFD, this all still weighs heavily on Ivy Woodward, who has worked with children for most of her career. Before working in child welfare, Woodward, who is Native American and Hispanic, taught elementary school on the Apache reservation in San Carlos, Arizona and in southwestern New Mexico. In 2017, CYFD brought her on as a permanency planning supervisor. This meant she worked on cases where the agency had credible evidence that a child was being abused or neglected at home. The work spoke to core elements of Woodward’s personality. 

“I’m a protector,” Woodward told me. “You can do a lot to me and get away with it. But if I see somebody doing something to someone else, that triggers my inner anger.” 

She calls it like she sees it and pushes back when she disagrees. “I don’t know what is broken in my head, but I question everything,” Woodward said.

When Woodward left CYFD in the summer of 2020, she and a colleague filed a lawsuit alleging that they faced retaliation after raising concerns about a case in which a child was severely injured after she and her siblings were returned to their parents. The agency settled the lawsuit for more than $300,000 without acknowledging liability.

Woodward has a fast, forceful way of speaking, a reflection of her often overly-caffeinated state. But when she talks about the kids she worked with at CYFD and the horrible things she heard or saw on the job, her voice gets a little higher. Her emotions begin to flow.

“You do have to be able to turn off the emotions and make those cold, hard decisions when the time comes to make them,” she said. “But until that time comes, you have to see people, not casework.”

Woodward now lives across the border in a tiny county in West Texas with her husband and two daughters. She works as the chief of juvenile probation and coordinates emergency management for the county.

In some ways, Woodward was an outlier among other CYFD staff. Many start working with the agency soon after college and have little or no experience in child welfare. The agency struggles to stay fully staffed — this spring, nearly a quarter of positions were unfilled. A July 2022 review by an outside consultancy found that CYFD employees felt overwhelmed by the work they were being asked to do. Staff said they would rush from one emergency to the next and had little ability to make progress on other cases.

This is not unique to New Mexico. A caseworker I spoke with in Indiana described feeling like he was stretched so thin that he would race from one emergency to the next without ever having time to put out the fires. He felt like he was just identifying a fire and then moving on to the next one.

The issues of understaffing and high turnover rates were top of mind for many CYFD workers. High turnover isn’t just bad for morale. It directly affects the ability of those who remain on staff to do their work. When one person leaves, those who stay have to absorb their caseload. It is daunting. The review described a “culture of fear” in which staff were afraid that if something bad were to happen with a case, they would be punished or “scapegoated.”

And the forced intimacy of the work can be grating and even traumatic. Caseworkers must regularly intervene in painful moments of struggle and conflict within families, and they are sometimes met with resistance. As agents of the state, they are caught between a bureaucracy that requires them to treat each situation as consistently and objectively as possible and real life-and-death conflicts in which people’s actions are largely driven by emotion.

For strained child welfare agencies, algorithms and risk assessment tools are an attractive solution to the vexing challenge of maintaining consistent decision-making practices.

Some states have experimented with predictive analytics, with limited success. Illinois used an algorithm to estimate the likelihood that a child would die or be seriously injured as a result of abuse or neglect. Social workers were flooded with cases erroneously determined to be urgent, while children that the algorithm deemed low-risk were dying. The state soon stopped using the tool after the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services declared it ineffective. 

A child welfare algorithm in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania is currently facing scrutiny from the U.S. Department of Justice. Using arrest records, Medicaid data and documented struggles with substance abuse, the algorithm generates a score from 1 to 20 that determines whether to open a neglect investigation. Reporting by the AP found that the algorithm disproportionately flagged Black children for neglect investigations. There was also evidence that the algorithm did the same for parents with disabilities.

Torn between pushback against opaque algorithms and the desire to use technology to streamline decision-making, some states are turning to scoring tools that are less opaque and less automated. New Mexico’s Structured Decision Making tool, created by the nonprofit Evident Change, is one of them. Oregon, New Hampshire and California also use assessment tools built by Evident Change.

Structured Decision Making offers a checklist that is meant to help the investigator understand “the risk of imminent and serious harm,” according to a CYFD progress and impact report. Children are ranked safe, safe with plan, which involves in-home services, or unsafe, which is grounds for removal. There’s also an actuarial risk scoring tool, which is meant to assess “the likelihood of any future maltreatment” and additional CYFD involvement in the next 18 to 24 months, if the child remains with the family.

The safety scoring tool asks about abuse or neglect, including physical or sexual abuse, failure to meet the child’s basic needs, unsafe living conditions, emotional harm or unexplained injuries. Both assessments are intended to guide caseworkers to think about risk factors, vulnerabilities and the impact on the child.

“What Structured Decision Making tries to do is to help workers and supervisors make accurate, consistent and equitable decisions at these high-stakes moments,” said Phil Decter, the director of child welfare at Evident Change.

Structured Decision Making is also “intended to reduce bias, whether that's related to race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, making sure that we're not conflating poverty with neglect,” said CYFD’s Meadows.

But in New Mexico, as the Dunklee Cruz case and insights from caseworkers make clear, the tool does not always work as intended. And the tool can't solve some of CYFD's biggest problems. The agency doesn’t have the workers to meet the needs of the population. Emblematic of a national trend, CYFD is chronically understaffed. Workers juggle heavy caseloads and often have precious little time to dedicate to each child’s case.

The safety tool isn’t meant to fix that. CYFD says hiring is a priority. “Structured Decision Making is not intended to replace human beings in terms of lightening their caseload,” Meadows said. “The role of it is to create consistency, making sure that we're looking at every angle of the case, every potential impact to a child.”

But for caseworkers racing from one emergency to the next, the tool begins to play a different role. It sometimes becomes a shortcut, they told me — a stand-in for real human decision-making, in a system already weighed down by the rigid requirements of the state.

Reed Ridens remembers everything about the day the state took him away from his father almost seven years ago. It was a typical January afternoon at school. About an hour before classes ended, Ridens, who was 15 at the time, was pulled out of orchestra practice and brought to a conference room. Waiting for him were two of his teachers, the school social worker, representatives from CYFD, a police officer and his dad. 

“I’m just looking around like, what is going on?” Ridens recalled. 

For nearly an hour, the adults in the room went back and forth about whether Ridens’ dad could take care of him. There were concerns, they said, about neglect and his father’s alcoholism. 

“The entire time, I was just sitting there, crying, like, ‘Hey, please don’t take me out of my home,’” Ridens said.  

His protests were futile. Ridens stayed in the foster care system until he was 18, moving between 15 different placements. It left him with a deep-seated trauma, compounded by his father’s death four years ago.

“I felt like the state was taking me out of my household and then not doing any better for me than my father did. And in fact, actually putting me in worse-off situations,” he said. 

“I don’t really feel like they saw me as a person,” he told me when we met in Albuquerque.

“I feel like they didn’t see me as more than a list of checkmarks. I feel like they didn’t see my dad as anything more than a monster.”

Today, kids in a position like Ridens’ are not only dealing with adults trying to decide what’s best for them. Their fate is also shaped by tools like Structured Decision Making.

How did New Mexico get here? In part, the objective was to prevent the wrong kids from entering foster care, said Beth Gillia, the former deputy secretary of CYFD. 

“Foster care really should be the absolute last resort in extreme circumstances where needs cannot be met in the home and where a child cannot be safe at home,” she told me.

The state paid the nonprofit organization Evident Change $1.3 million to develop a risk and safety assessment tool, according to a state legislative finance committee report. The nonprofit creates similar tools for criminal justice, education and adult protective services. 

After a pilot in some counties in 2019, including in the country where James Dunklee Cruz lived, Structured Decision Making was rolled out statewide in January 2020.

The tool works best in situations where there is plenty of time and staff capacity to dedicate to this kind of deliberation. But CYFD’s investigations unit was short almost 25% of its workforce as of May 2023, according to the state’s public statistics dashboard, and maintains a steep turnover rate.

“If a child welfare organization is not being resourced well, if it’s understaffed or if caseloads are high, it’s going to be hard for optimal work to happen in any situation,” said Decter, who previously worked in child welfare in Massachusetts. “Good decision-making takes time.”

A report presented to a CYFD steering committee found that, according to focus groups made of CYFD workers, Structured Decision Making is “not being used as it was designed to be utilized. They go out and do their investigation and then come back in and click whatever needs to be clicked to show it has been done.” 

A former investigator in Hobbs told me that the Structured Decision Making tool just added more work to her plate. 

“It didn’t take a whole lot of time, but it was just another tedious step that you’re going through when you’ve already made up your mind,” she said.

As a result, she said, some people rushed through checking boxes on the safety tool. 

“I watched people go click, click, click, click, click, and just move on,” she said. It wasn’t the deciding factor. But she did feel like it could be “manipulated” to justify a certain decision.

CYFD says this isn’t how it’s supposed to be used. “Safety assessment is not a quick activity,” said Meadows. “Workers should take their time with it, really do their best to engage the family to get as much information as possible so that the safety assessment is accurate.”

Ivy Woodward, the former supervisor in Hobbs, had concerns about the safety scoring tool from the very beginning. In particular, she worried about how it dealt with a caregiver’s substance use, which is not listed as one of the danger indicators that must be checked in order for the agency to remove a child. In a sharp pivot from New Mexico’s previous assessment, substance use is treated as a “complicating factor” rather than a deciding one.

The risk tool adds points if the parent struggles with substance abuse. However, the tool doesn’t weigh substances differently. Meth gets the same number of points as marijuana, for example. 

In the Structured Decision Making training, Woodward and some of the other experienced caseworkers challenged this, fearing that it would put children at risk. The discussion got so heated that the head of the agency came to intervene. Woodward said she was effectively shut down. It was clear that the agency would be using the tool, whether she liked it or not.

Other CYFD workers and child welfare attorneys also raised concerns about how the safety and risk assessments handle drug abuse, a factor affecting almost one-third of children who were victims of maltreatment in 2020, according to statistics from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. 

While investigators are supposed to consider substance use in their decision about removing a child, it’s not supposed to be the sole reason for removal. This is part of a recent change in the agency’s approach to substance use. Caseworkers are now told to focus not solely on substance use, but rather on the impact substance use has on the caregiver’s ability to care for their children, said Gillia, the former deputy secretary of CYFD. 

“It’s only if the substance use interferes with parenting that it becomes abuse or neglect,” Gillia said. “So I think what the tool is trying to do is force a look at what parenting behavior is impacted by the substance use.” 

Phil Decter at Evident Change says the safety tool also helps when it comes to an inexperienced workforce. It has detailed instructions that help workers decide whether to check ‘yes’ or ‘no’ for a danger indicator. It points staff without a background in child welfare in the direction of things to look for, he said. 

But out in the field, Woodward sees problems with this. The decisions are so monumental — literally life or death. For Woodward, the tool is not a substitute for a seasoned supervisor guiding less experienced staff through decisions.

“It becomes a crutch for a lack of confidence,” said Woodward. “I don't think that being armed with a piece of paper and a laptop is an adequate replacement for someone who's been in the trenches for 20 years and can tell them this is what you do.”

And the tool doesn’t capture the unspoken cues that an investigator may notice, like a child who can’t make eye contact with a family member or won’t answer open-ended questions, Woodward said. 

The safety tool has an “other” option where investigators can write in safety concerns not addressed by the nine danger indicators. But that should be used “rarely and infrequently,” said Decter. “That’s by design. The other danger indicators should be sufficient.”

The success of the tool depends on how it’s used, and this is where Woodward hit roadblocks in Hobbs. She said her supervisors would tell her she was paying attention to things that the safety tool said weren’t an issue, rather than focusing on what she was called upon to investigate. Woodward felt like she was being instructed to ignore history, context and other dangers that she knew were significant from past experience. 

Information about those more subtle cues may be presented to a judge if CYFD files a petition to remove a child. But if the tool indicates that the child doesn’t need to be removed, the case likely won’t reach that stage.

Former CYFD staff like Gillia emphasized that the agency wants to keep kids living with their families unless they are clearly at risk of imminent and grave harm. The agency settled a lawsuit in 2020 that accused the state of failing to take adequate care of foster children in CYFD custody.

But former caseworkers I spoke with worried that the tool was being used as a way to all but ensure that kids would remain in the home, even in cases where it might leave them at risk. The worry, for people like Ivy Woodward, was that the tool was being used to justify decisions that had already been made.

Evident Change emphasizes that “tools don’t make decisions, people make decisions.” But former CYFD workers told me they worried that this particular tool has an outsized impact on the agency’s final decision.

CYFD commissioned a report from an outside group, Collaborative Safety, to look at what went wrong in five specific cases from 2021 in which children died. In the report, released in July 2022, staff involved in those cases said that sometimes the Structured Decision Making tool would say the child is “safe,” even if the worker felt there were “significant concerns with the family.”

“This places staff in the position where they perceive they cannot act on those concerns as it would go against what the tool’s output is,” wrote the report’s authors.

“Investigators were just using the tool as the end-all-be-all to a decision and an assessment. That’s not correct. We don’t want it to substitute their good judgment,” former CYFD Secretary Barbara Vigil told members of the New Mexico House Appropriations and Finance Committee in February 2023. In response to the Collaborative Safety report, CYFD announced they would overhaul their training protocols and pledged to “make sure that every member of staff uniformly knows how to use the tool, including through enhanced training to investigators and supervisors statewide.”

The former CYFD worker I spoke to who requested anonymity saw this reflected in the investigations she reviewed. “I don’t even know how many cases I reviewed where it’s like, you should have removed that kid immediately. And they didn’t because of the safety tool,” she said. “We would always say, use your common sense. This is a guide.” But some workers and managers still put too much emphasis on the tool.

Esquibel said the tool played a major role in facilitating decision-making. “The weight is 100% on your safety assessment because that's really the snapshot of what happened the day that that worker was there,” he said.

CYFD’s Meadows put it differently: “It's not just a snapshot in time,” she said. “Safety assessments are not a one-off, one and done thing. Safety is assessed on an ongoing basis when we have an open case because sometimes it does take effort and time to learn more about a family or child situation.”

Woodward doesn’t think the tool should carry so much weight. Instead, it should be “something in your toolbox that you utilize to help you through the process,” she said. “I don't think they should be used as the ultimate decision maker.”

When Vanna was first removed from her parents at age five, the adults in her life told her that her parents were going on vacation. 

She remembers a woman pulling up to their house and talking to her parents. Her mother was crying, her father was trying to calm her down. The strange woman went up to her younger brother, who was four at the time, and said, “How would you like to go somewhere else?”

“I looked at her, I said, ‘You’re not taking my brother,” said Vanna. 

Vanna, who is now 21 and using a nickname to preserve her privacy, has been fiercely protective of her little brother since they were small. 

As the woman stood talking to her parents, Vanna tried to get him out of his car seat. “And I tried to run with him, and she started running after us. And she said, ‘I’m not trying to take your brother. I’m trying to take you both. You’re going to this lady. Your parents are going on vacation.” 

She didn’t realize until later that she wasn’t returning home. Vanna spent 13 years in foster care until she aged out at 18. She estimates she lived in more than 50 placements. 

In foster care, Vanna felt like she was treated like a case number. Someone else made decisions about every aspect of her life. Someone else had power over her.

“I got numb. I became this robot. You want me to be a puppet, guys? I’ll be a puppet. Pull my strings and do whatever you want because that’s how you treat me,” she said. 

Vanna would tell the adults around her what she wanted, but she didn’t feel like they listened.

“They would always say, ‘Honey, we wouldn't make any decision if it wasn't going to be safe for you or if we weren't keeping your best interests in mind,’” she said. “How do you know what my best interest is?”

The safety assessment that’s currently in place rolled out statewide the year Vanna aged out of the system. But when she looks back at her own experience, systems like this still worry her. She thinks the assessments used to make decisions need to be more personalized, otherwise they do more harm than good. 

“How do you put everyone in the same box, the same population? You put them under the same microscope, but they’re not the same. They’ve had individual situations,” she said.

If the assessments are too generalized, kids won’t end up getting the help they need, Vanna said. Just as the assessments used to evaluate their needs are flattened and standardized, the care kids get is too.

For people like Vanna, many aspects of the child welfare system were dehumanizing. Ernie Holland, who worked at CYFD for 25 years, thinks that by relying on assessment tools like Strategic Decision Making, the agency could make these effects even worse. When he left, he ran the Guidance Center, a nonprofit that offers mental health and other community-based services in Hobbs. 

Even as a young child protective services investigator, the weight of the decisions he was making never escaped him. He shares Ivy Woodward’s belief that “each decision you make changes your life.”

“Unless you’ve gone around the block three or four times to screw up your courage to knock on somebody’s door and ask them why they sodomized their infant, you don’t know what it’s like,” he said. “I’ve been there, done that, and I know what it's like. And I know you’re risking some of yourself doing that work.”

That pressure never goes away. Holland still remembers a family whose case he managed nearly 50 years ago. He’s still not sure he made the right decision. 

As the agency relies more on standardized assessments, he worries humanity gets removed from the equation. 

For Holland, there’s a big difference between being able to say, “I made the decision based on this tool” and “I made the decision.”

“If you can hide behind an assessment tool,” Holland told me, “it’s not personal anymore. If you get it to where it’s not a personal decision, the kid loses. If you’re making life and death decisions, you damn well better own ‘em.”

This project was supported by the Global Reporting Centre and The Citizens through the Tiny Foundation Fellowships for Investigative Journalism.

The post Inside New Mexico’s struggle to protect kids from abuse appeared first on Coda Story.

The investigation comes at a time when the Tennessee state government has been proposing a barrage of legislation to limit access to healthcare for trans people. On July 8, a ban on gender-affirming care for minors went into effect. A block on the ban by a federal district judge was temporarily overturned by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, a higher federal court, in a split decision after an appeal by Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti.

In such a hostile atmosphere, Skrmetti’s demands for records from the Vanderbilt’s Clinic for Transgender Health have alarmed patients.

Chris Sanders, executive director at Tennessee Equality Project, an LGBTQ advocacy organization, told me that the parents of young trans people have expressed fears that their children might be targeted. “When you’re a parent intent on defending your child, this looks like danger coming down the road,” said Sanders. 

States with aggressive anti-trans laws like Texas and Florida have been seeking large swathes of data on trans people. In the wake of the VUMC revelations, people are asking if Tennessee is taking a similar path. 

In September 2022, VUMC battled claims on social media, including by conservative politicians and religious leaders, that their gender-affirming care services were morally and legally objectionable and amounted to “money-making schemes.” Nashville, due in part to the VUMC clinic, has been seen as a haven for people seeking gender-affirming options in Tennessee. In response to allegations of illegal conduct, Attorney General Skrmetti said he would “use the full scope of his authority to ensure compliance with Tennessee law.” 

VUMC was required by law to turn over records to Skrmetti’s office. In response to a request for comment, the Tennessee Attorney General’s office directed me to its statement on June 21: “This investigation is directed solely at VUMC and related providers and not at patients or their families. The records have been and will continue to be held in the strictest confidence, as is our standard practice and required by law. This same process happens in dozens of billing fraud investigations every year.”

But on social media, many feared that Skrmetti’s data sweep was a gross violation of the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and that VUMC could have done more to protect confidential information. In one tweet, a person who said VUMC had shared their data and that they were “terrified” claimed to have “challenged it with a HIPAA violation report.” In another tweet, containing a news clip from Nashville’s WKRN station in which the mother of a trans teen says she felt betrayed by the VUMC, several of the comments suggested VUMC had committed a HIPAA violation.

Jolynn Dellinger, senior lecturing fellow on privacy law and policy at Duke University School of Law, says that while HIPAA “is a pretty good law it’s widely misunderstood.” It only applies, she told me, “to a very small number of covered entities. The vast majority of health data is not covered by HIPAA.” 

As VUMC is a hospital, HIPAA does in fact protect its patient records, conversations with healthcare providers, and billing information. This means that the information cannot be shared without consent, but exceptions are made for law enforcement requests such as subpoenas and court orders. In this instance, a VUMC spokesman told reporters, the Tennessee Attorney General had the necessary legal authority to obtain the data.   

According to Dellinger, laws that are looking to criminalize access to gender-affirming care and abortion care leave the door open for authorities to seek people’s health data. On June 16, attorneys general from 19 states, including Tennessee, signed a letter addressed to the Secretary of Health and Human Services voicing their objection to a proposed expansion of HIPAA protections that would prevent states from exploiting their authority to fish for data. The dissenting attorneys general insist that the rule change “would unlawfully interfere with States’ authority to enforce their laws, and does not serve any legitimate need.” While focused on access to abortion, the complaints of Republican-governed states apply equally to those seeking gender-affirming care. 

Laws that restrict bodily autonomy, whether it is access to gender-affirming care or abortion, leave people vulnerable to a set of threats from state authorities that very much include demands for digital data.

Dellinger fears that laws that criminalize access to health care disincentivize people from seeking the care they need because they feel they can’t trust their doctor or that their medical records will be seized. Dellinger also said, “Once criminalization comes into play, privacy risks grow.” In their letter, the 19 state attorneys general argue that HIPAA recognizes that “privacy interests must be balanced against the ‘public interest in using identifiable health information for vital public and private purposes.’” 

Despite Tennessee Attorney General Skrmetti’s assertion that the VUMC patients’ records will be held in the “strictest” confidence, it is unclear how long that data will be held by authorities and whether it will continue to hold the data even after its investigation is complete. For now, though, Tennessee has taken another step in the legislative war that it appears to be waging against healthcare for trans people.

The decision this month by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals is the first time a federal court has overturned a block on the banning of gender-affirming treatment. Courts have unanimously blocked such bans, points out the American Civil Liberties Union, in Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Alabama and Kentucky. In a statement, the ACLU’s Tennessee chapter described the court’s decision as a “heartbreaking development for thousands of transgender youth, their doctors, and their families.”

Since 2015, reported the Washington Post, “Tennessee has enacted at least 14 laws that restrict LGBTQ rights — the most in the nation in that time frame.” On June 22, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by a group of trans women from Tennessee who wanted the right to change the designated sex on their birth certificates. 

“It’s hard to exist as a transgender person in Tennessee at this moment,” said Jaime Combs, one of the plaintiffs. And now the state is asking the trans people whose rights it seeks to restrict to trust it with their data.

The post Why trans people can’t trust Tennessee with their data appeared first on Coda Story.

On the last day of Pride Month, June 30, the court ruled to allow discrimination, under particular circumstances, against same-sex couples. By a majority of 6 to 3, the Court agreed that a web designer who opposes same-sex marriage could lawfully refuse to provide services for same-sex weddings.

This is just one in a litany of recent legislative and political assaults on LBGTQ+ rights. Conservative legislatures around the world have been targeting LGBTQ+ people, and especially transgender people, by denying them access to healthcare, dictating which public facilities are available to them, preventing them from speaking about their LGBTQ+ identities and, in the most severe cases, criminalizing their very existence. Here we reflect on Coda’s latest coverage of global LGBTQ+ rights and the trends these stories illuminate.

Florida, United States

In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis continues to target transgender youth through restrictive legislation, banning access to gender-affirming care to all children under 18 and dictating which books Floridians can read and which bathrooms they can use. 

Reporting from Tallahassee, Rebekah Robinson tells the story of one family whose lives have been upended by the state’s anti-trans legislation. Milo, 16, and his family have made the difficult decision to leave their home and move 1,200 miles away, to Connecticut, to ensure that Milo can continue to access the medical care he needs. 

It’s not just limited healthcare access that has forced Milo’s family to move. With the expansion of DeSantis’ Parental Rights in Education Bill — the so-called ‘Don’t Say Gay’ law — teachers in Florida can no longer discuss gender and sexuality in the classroom. In addition, trans people in Florida are now prohibited from using public bathrooms consistent with their gender identity.

Florida may be only one state out of 50, but Republican legislation hostile toward transgender youth is popping up all over the U.S and will likely be a hot button political issue right up to the 2024 presidential elections. 

Russia

While Russia has recently dominated international headlines thanks to an attempted mutiny by Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Russian legislature has also been quietly cracking down on trans rights. A bill is making its way to President Vladimir Putin’s desk that will ban all gender-affirming care for transgender Russians. 

Tamara Evdokimova spoke with Russian psychologist Egor Burtsev to understand what effects a blanket ban on gender-affirming care would have on the trans community. If the bill passes as expected, trans people in Russia will not be able to access life-saving treatments, ranging from psychological care to hormone therapy to surgeries. This will trigger a nationwide mental health crisis and likely provoke violence against transgender Russians. 

Russia’s ban on transition-related care marks the latest escalation in Putin’s war against Western values. In November 2022, he signed a law prohibiting any activities that discuss or promote LGBTQ+ relationships. As Russia continues to wage war in Ukraine and further isolates itself from the West, vulnerable communities inside the country will face ever-greater risks of discrimination, violence and erasure.

India

Mirroring Vladimir Putin’s “family values” rhetoric, India’s government, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has also been advocating against LGBTQ+ rights when it comes to marriage, arguing that permitting same-sex marriage would undermine Indian values. Some Indians have profited enormously by appealing to long-standing prejudice in Indian society against LGBTQ+ people, a prejudice seemingly endorsed, or at least tolerated, by the government. 

Alishan Jafri reports from northern India to tell the story of Trixie, a young transgender woman whose mother pushed her to undergo conversion therapy with a YouTube guru. Santosh Singh Bhadauria, better known as the “YouTube Baba,” specializes in conversion therapy and livestreams “healing” sessions to tens of thousands of viewers. Similar to televangelists, Bhadauria is a “godman,” a self-styled guru who has persuaded his followers that he possesses spiritual powers. 

Conversion therapy is illegal in India, and anyone subjected to it, as Trixie was, can take legal actions against the likes of YouTube Baba. The court system might offer some recourse to trans Indians, but with a federal government that advocates conservative, anti-LGBTQ+ views, homophobia and transphobia continue to prevail in many parts of the country.

Uganda

In March, Uganda virtually outlawed LGBTQ+ identity by criminalizing same-sex relationships. The 2023 Anti-Homosexuality Bill imposes draconian penalties for engaging in same-sex relationships, discussing one’s LGBTQ+ identity and renting or selling property to LGBTQ+ people — and institutes the death penalty for sexual assault and for having sex with people under 18.

And this is not the only law targeting gay people in Uganda, Prudence Nyamishana writes. The Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill, first proposed in 2021, targets Ugandans seeking fertility treatment by requiring them to be legally married in order to qualify for treatments. This bill heavily constrains the reproductive rights of unmarried women and LGBTQ+ people who want to have children, as Ugandan law does not recognize same-sex marriage. 

Both bills underscore a push among Ugandan legislators to align national laws with their notions of “morality,” rooted in Christianity — or, as the legislation’s opponents suggest, Christian fundamentalism. 

The post The global rise of anti-trans legislation appeared first on Coda Story.

Three of the books, including the critically acclaimed graphic novel “Maus,” were flagged for review by the Nixa school board for potentially violating a new Missouri law that makes it illegal for school officials to provide minors with sexually explicit material. Librarians and educators who run afoul of the rule, which applies primarily to materials with strong visual components, like graphic novels and illustrated books, can face up to a year in prison and up to $2,000 in fines. The law did not apply to the other four books under consideration, which were flagged by community members for review by the board.

As I reported in April, Missouri’s law is part of a growing national movement, led by conservative parents’ rights groups, aimed at restricting access to books about gender, sexuality and race in public schools. In the first six months of the 2022-23 school year, state and local policymakers banned 874 books from classrooms and school libraries across the U.S., according to the nonprofit PEN America, which ranks Missouri as one of the nation’s top book-banning states. Since Missouri’s sexually explicit material law was enacted in August 2022, librarians fearful of criminal prosecution have removed nearly 300 titles from school library shelves.

In Nixa, a conservative town in southwest Missouri, a group of high schoolers decided to fight back against local efforts to ban books. Over the last 18 months, this student movement has led a campaign to defend books under siege by reading challenged titles, surveying students about their support for book bans and speaking up in support of contested books at school board meetings. Two of these students — Meghana Nakkanti and Glennis Woosley — attended the Nixa board’s June 20 meeting, where school officials voted on whether the Missouri law applied to three graphic novels: Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Holocaust memoir “Maus,” an illustrated adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Blankets,” a coming-of-age autobiography by Craig Thompson. The board ultimately voted to retain “Maus” but decided to ban the other two books as well as four text-only novels that parents and community members challenged. 

What is it like to be at the frontlines of one of the nation’s most divisive culture war battles? I spoke to Nakkanti and Woosley to find out and to ask what they have learned from the rage of the book banners. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Both of you attended the June 20 meeting. The board decided not to ban “Maus,” but they did choose to ban “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Blankets.” The board also banned the young adult novel “Unpregnant,” which is about pregnancy and abortion, and the children’s book “Something Happened in Our Town,” which is about police brutality. Which of these books generated the most conversation? 

Woosley: The conversation on “Unpregnant” was long. It’s the story of a girl, coming from a Christian conservative family, finding out that she is pregnant, and she’s a teenager. And so she and her friend try to get an abortion for her, and it takes place in Missouri in a very similar town as Nixa. So that’s why this book is so big and important around here. And she has to go to New Mexico to get an abortion. It’s a comedic book. And a lot of school board members were saying that they were taking the subject of abortion and making it light-hearted and normalized in ways they didn’t agree with. That was the main thing they talked about. Some of them also said that it was encouraging abortion, and they didn’t want students to be encouraged to have abortions. 

Did any students speak up? Was there space for that? 

Nakkanti: During their deliberation process, we were just flies on the wall. We weren’t allowed to say anything. But it was a very random conversation. One of the school board members took issue with the fact that Planned Parenthood is mentioned throughout the book and proceeded to describe how Planned Parenthood was created by a eugenicist. This was a fictional book, and it was like, that point has little to no pertinence to the subject matter at hand. And the same school board member took issue with the fact that there were no books about teenage girls who were pregnant and went to pregnancy centers. It was very bizarre. 

Woosley: She specifically had this mindset of, ‘there are books that are anti-police.’ So she was saying, ‘Why don’t we have books that are pro-police in our library if we have a book like that?’ 

Proponents say that the whole point of this law is to protect students from explicit sexual material. You are students. What’s your take? 

Woosley: I don’t like the law because it’s extremely vague. And because of that, what I don’t like is that some of these books that I am actually interested in reading I’m being restricted from reading. Thankfully, I come from a family that can provide me with those books. But I know a lot of my friends can’t do that. That’s why I don’t like the law, and I don’t think it’s benefiting us. It’s restricting people who want to read books from reading them. 

Nakkanti: I think the student body acknowledges that most of us don’t read. As high schoolers, we’re so busy with life and homework that we often don’t find the time to read. We say this all the time: Why do these people care so much? There are all these adults who probably have never even set foot in the high school or who have kids that are eight, who won’t be in the high school for six years, worried about this book that they think these kids are reading. It’s really not that serious.

Glennis, you will be a sophomore next year. You’re on break, you didn’t have to go to a long school board meeting over the summer. What’s motivating you to become involved in this? 

Woosley: My dad is a member of U-Turn in Education, which is one of the parent groups around here that is pro-books. And when I got into my freshman year in high school, I knew all about what was already happening. I heard about how all these students were going to meetings and speaking and keeping up with what has been happening. So I thought, I want to go and I want to try to help. Even if more books get banned, at least students are speaking out against what is happening. I think there’s real value in student voices being heard. 

Meghana, you’re going to go to college next year in another state. If you want to leave all of this behind, you probably could. I’m curious what you’re taking from this situation with you. 

I think the biggest thing that I’ve walked away with is the fact that speaking out isn’t always easy. And I know that a lot of people who live in environments where student advocacy is very welcome can’t necessarily relate to that reality. But here, some of us have to see if we’re being followed on the way home from board meetings. That’s not a reality for so many of the other school districts that we’ve been hearing about. Because they are in these urban centers that are primarily filled with groups that agree with them. 

I don’t think we’ve had a single win. We go to these meetings and we speak, and we lose every single time. But we show up anyway because we show up on principle. The school knows that there’s attention on them. Not only do we pay attention, but the country is paying attention as well.

You say you haven’t had any wins, but the board could have banned all the books.

Nakkanti: I guess they could have, but I think they’re trying to make everybody happy. Now it’s become very much like a two-party system in the worst way, where the individuals that need to be heard in my opinion — the students — are being completely disregarded because the board wants to appease these two pro- and anti-book-banning adult groups. Two groups that can vote and use their dollars to support their reelection campaigns. So it just becomes this game of politics with our library. It’s frustrating, but I guess it’s a microcosm of Washington.

At the same time, this spotlight on students can be sort of a double-edged sword. Meghana, you said some students have to worry about being followed home from school board meetings. Can you talk more about the pressures students have faced from adults because of their advocacy?

During the board’s May 2022 meeting, an adult came up to a person who was 16 at the time and told her that he could easily find her address and that she should ‘watch out.’ At this meeting, there was booing, jeering and clapping. Some of my friends weren’t sitting with students, and that’s where we heard all of this horrible commentary that these adults were making about kids who were minors at the time. I don’t think we took it too personally because they’re like 50 years old, and they’re making fun of children. So ultimately, we’re still winning. These adults can’t figure out how to process their frustration in a manner that doesn’t degrade the existence of other people.   

I think that meeting really damaged the credibility of the pro-book-banning folks because they were yelling at and threatening children. While there are some voices on the book-banning side that are loud, angry and even violent, I think there are a lot of good people who are pro-book ban but might be misguided. I think it’s made me more empathetic in many ways. I believe that the vast majority of these people are just fighting for something they believe but don’t acknowledge the harm of their actions. 

The post Missouri teenagers are on the front lines of the war on books appeared first on Coda Story.

At barely 16, Milo is the proud holder of a Florida learner’s permit, a state-issued driving permit. He has just finished 10th grade. His favorite class is journalism. He enjoys roller skating with friends. Milo is also transgender.

He glances in the rearview mirror as we drive away from Common Ground Books, Tallahassee's only LGBTQ and feminist bookstore. The family, whose names we’ve changed to protect their privacy, bought half a dozen books to help pass the time on an upcoming road trip, most of them science and historical fiction.

The city is small. In less than 10 minutes, we pull into an empty parking lot next to a complex of sports fields and tennis courts that belong to Milo’s high school. The grounds are quiet — summer break has just begun. He points to an empty red running track on the perimeter of a football field, down the hill from the main school building. 

“That one dude, who’s doing everything wrong, is like right there.” He’s talking about Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who lives just five minutes away. DeSantis often runs the track early in the morning while his security detail waits nearby.

In a few days’ time, Milo and his family will load up their car and say goodbye to Tallahassee, Florida, the only place their family has ever called home. They will begin the aforementioned road trip: a 1,200-mile journey to Connecticut, where they are hoping to build a new life, far away from the scorched-earth anti-trans laws that have become a hallmark of the DeSantis administration.

Milo is one of an estimated 16,000 transgender teenagers in the state who have become prime targets of DeSantis’ campaign to ensure, in his words, that Florida becomes a place “where woke goes to die.” Along with restricting access to gender-affirming healthcare for transgender people, his administration has placed legal limits on what can be taught in schools, which books can stay on the shelves of public libraries and which bathrooms people can use.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has urged legislators to protect young transgender people’s ability to receive “comprehensive, gender-affirming, and developmentally appropriate health care that is provided in a safe and inclusive clinical space.” The American Medical Association has written that gender-affirming care is medically necessary and that it can “improve the physical and mental health of transgender and gender-diverse people.” But Florida’s legislature still approved Senate Bill 254, a law that prohibits healthcare providers from administering gender-affirming care to anyone who receives health insurance through Medicaid, and for all people under 18, except for those who had already started treatment before the law was enacted. The policy went into effect in May 2023.

After the families of three transgender teens took the state to court, a federal judge issued an injunction that blocked the law from affecting the plaintiffs in the case beginning on June 6, 2023. While the case has yet to be decided, the judge wrote that Florida’s law likely runs afoul of constitutional protections against identity-based discrimination. 

But for now, state officials say the law remains in effect for everyone but the plaintiffs, and uncertainty prevails. Healthcare providers are unsure of what treatments they can offer. The fear of losing medical licenses or even facing felony charges has led clinics to turn transgender patients away. Some have shut down altogether, leaving young transgender Floridians with nowhere to turn. For many, the costs of seeking care out-of-state are simply too prohibitive. Milo is one of the lucky ones.

“I am just flying under the radar. I know other trans people at school who didn't transition as early as I did,” Milo told me when we met last month in Tallahassee. “I consider myself incredibly lucky to have the parents and the health care that I do.” 

Milo came out as transgender when he was still in elementary school. Having supportive parents who were able to work together with his doctors made a huge difference, he told me.

Milo’s doctor became a critical figure in their lives. “He really helped us a lot,” his mother Beverly said. “He was one of the only people I found here in town that would adhere to the time frame that we wanted in terms of medical intervention.”

With careful guidance from his doctor, Milo began taking testosterone when he was 13. Since Florida’s law has an exception for those already receiving gender-affirming care, it doesn't affect Milo directly, at least for now. But with some providers declining to serve transgender patients and others discontinuing their practices altogether, his parents worried that Milo’s ability to get adequate healthcare could still be in jeopardy.

For Milo’s family, an early sign of trouble came in June 2022, when Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo wrote a letter to the state medical board arguing that there was a lack of medical evidence showing that gender-affirming treatments could be beneficial for young people grappling with gender dysphoria. Ladapo insisted that the leading medical guidance from organizations including the American Academy of Pediatrics followed a “preferred political ideology instead of the highest level of generally accepted medical science.”

“We didn't see a course forward that would allow us to keep our promise,” said Beverly, Milo's mom. “When we started this whole journey, we said, ‘We will do whatever it takes for you.’ We didn't feel that was any longer going to be possible in Florida.”

Legal actions targeting education also put the family on notice. Milo recalled a moment when his younger sister came home in the middle of the semester with a note from her biology teacher, explaining that students would no longer be required to read “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.” This award-winning study on racist policies and practices in medical research in the U.S. became optional after Florida began vetting all school curricula and library books to ensure they’re free of pornography and “race-based teachings.”

Soon after, DeSantis signed an expansion of the Parental Rights in Education Bill, the so-called ‘Don't Say Gay’ law, which prevents teachers from discussing ideas related to gender and sexual identity at any grade level. The law is set to go into effect this summer. Another law, also passed before the close of this year’s legislative session, will prohibit trans people from using public bathrooms consistent with their gender identity.

Senate Bill 254 was born out of a recommendation issued by the state's medical board that had similar parameters — it advised doctors to deny minors access to puberty-blocking medications or hormones. The recommendation was an unusual move for the medical board, a group of state-appointed experts that has traditionally overseen the administration of licensing for physicians in the state and periodically issued recommendations to healthcare providers on public health-related issues, like the Covid-19 pandemic. The board has gone so far as to call itself “vociferously apolitical.” But an investigation by the Tampa Bay Times revealed that Governor DeSantis handpicked eight of the 14 board members, all of whom donated money to his gubernatorial campaign.

WUSF Public Media’s Health News Florida revealed that members of the American College of Pediatricians — an innocuous-sounding organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated as a hate group — were paid tens of thousands of dollars by the DeSantis administration to provide “expert” reports, witness testimony and talking points discrediting the science behind gender-affirming care.

The medical board recommendation process constituted a unique route to banning gender-affirming care. Instead of starting out at the legislative level, DeSantis took advantage of the supermajority within his state to push his agenda through the executive branch. He then went on to codify the medical board recommendations with Senate Bill 254, officially banning gender-affirming care for minors and for anyone receiving health insurance through Medicaid.

The Republican supermajority in the Florida legislature, and at various levels of state and local government, has been in place for decades. Milo’s dad said it is wearing down people who are advocating for the rights of trans people. 

“It looks like an intentional undoing of democracy when they're not listening to their constituents,” he told me. He wonders if the next election will bring more people out to vote and elect people willing to engage with public testimony rather than toeing the party line.

“DeSantis, more than anything, has really taken advantage of gubernatorial power that no one has in the past,” said Charles Barrilleaux, a political science professor at Florida State University. For him, the governor's power shifted in the 1990s under Jeb Bush’s administration. And with the help of redistricting, Republicans gained more substantial control in local government. 

When you combine a supermajority with a politically ambitious governor, the voices of those who don't agree with the government get drowned out. “Political competition matters, and when you don't have competition because of districting, you don't have representation of your own ideas,” said Barrilleaux.

State Senator Shevrin Jones has spoken out against the abundance of anti-LGBTQ legislation pushed through in Florida this year. As a Democrat, Jones is a minority in Florida’s Senate and has voted against adopting the gender-affirming care ban. In a January 2023 NPR interview, he said, “Florida is just the testing ground, but people across the country should be concerned that legislatures and governors across the country are going to do exactly what Florida is doing.”

For Milo’s mom, the onslaught of legislation further solidified the family’s decision to leave the state.

“You think to yourself, ‘Do I really need to uproot my whole family? Did I need to put my kids through all of this? Do we really need to change jobs to get new insurance? Did we really need to sell our house? Do we really need to spend all our savings on a new house? Is it really necessary?’” she said. “And then, something new happens every day, so I'm so glad we're moving.”

The possibility of these kinds of laws spreading across the country was not lost on Milo’s family. When it came time to decide where to move, they struggled. Hostile legislation was constantly popping up around the country, especially in states with predominantly Republican legislatures. They started looking north. Maryland was safe but surrounded by less-certain places. California felt too far away. Other states looked like they were hanging in the balance, one election away from tipping toward transphobic policies. Eventually, they decided on Connecticut, where they also had some family. They chose a house in a quiet suburb, near the home of Milo’s cousins.

Milo and his parents talked to me about the immense privilege they had in being able to move their family. The move depended on job flexibility and on the sheer financial capital required to uproot and resettle in a more expensive state.

While I was in Tallahassee, I met others whose lives and families were directly affected by the law but who were not in a position to leave. Fenix Moon, a trans man and a visual artist, originally from Orlando, was one of them.

“I do want to go, but I can’t right now,” he told me. “Right now I’m on a one-year lease. I'm just getting stable from the pandemic exactly three years ago,” he said, alluding to financial burdens.

He told me his brother had begged him to leave Florida, fearful of what the legislation would mean for Moon’s health. What would make it possible for him to go?

“If I could wave a magic wand, if I had all the money, I'd probably go to New York,” he said. “I feel like that community would protect me,” he said. 

Moon sees leaving Florida as a powerful political choice too. “We shouldn't sacrifice our health and our bodies, when in reality, the greatest pushback would be to relocate, if that is the case, and be stronger, and fight from wherever we are, right where we have the most strength,” Moon said. 

When people decide to leave a city, they take social and economic capital with them. “We're losing a lot of talent, we're losing a lot of people who contributed a lot to their local communities. We're losing people in all kinds of fields,” said Melinda Stanwood, who teaches government classes at the Tallahassee Community College. 

Stanwood has two trans children. Her son, who is in his twenties, had to scramble to find a new doctor after his long-time provider at a Tallahassee Planned Parenthood clinic stopped serving transgender patients earlier this year. For now, both children plan to stay in Florida. But Stanwood is worried for them and has been vocal on the issue. “That strength that you have in the community, the diversity of support is being eroded gradually,” she said.

It's hard to know exactly how many families are leaving, but Rick Minor, a Leon County commissioner, suspects that the numbers are rising.

“I do think it’s gonna have an impact in terms of bringing new businesses into the state that are looking for markets that are diverse and thriving,” Minor said.

He believes that Tallahassee can be an attractive place for businesses because it is home to several universities with diverse populations and lots of young people. But he says that’s not enough to convince businesses to come: “The types of communities like the one we have here in Tallahassee also exist in other states that don't have these policies being passed.”

When I asked Milo what he'll miss most when he leaves, he talked about his friends. 

“I have a whole group of friends that I didn't have last year. Last year, I was a freshman, so I was still building everything,” said Milo. “Now, I'm a sophomore, so I have stuff already put in place, and I don't want to leave that.”

“It's hard to see that as a parent and to know that you're changing those friendships that could have been richer if you had stayed. But we can't continue here,” Beverly told me. “Friendships won't be enough for what he needs.”

Milo’s school itself holds a lot of traditions for the family. His mother and grandmother are alumni. From where he sits in his math class, if he looks out the window, he can even see the building where his parents got married.

But the school also sits just a 15-minute walk from the state capitol and the governor's mansion. DeSantis’ physical proximity to their community is “kind of crazy,” Milo told me.

“If Florida wasn't being Florida, then I would stay here for sure,” Milo said. “But Connecticut is going to be safer ultimately.”

At school, Milo has never told his classmates or teachers that he is transgender. But during the past semester, Milo slowly started coming out to more friends. “I want to be honest with them because I've known them for a while, and I don't want to have to lie to them about why I'm moving because I care about them,” he said.

His parents tread even more carefully. “In some cases, I said, we have to leave Florida. It's a family issue. And I left it at that,” Phil told me. But, when it comes to their family and others familiar with Milo and his trans identity, Phil found that he didn't have to explain much.

“I just said, I'm leaving Florida, and universally the response from everyone was, ‘I don't blame you.’ Every single person said the exact same thing,” Phil said.

Toward the end of the school year, with moving day looming, Milo wanted to enjoy his last days doing what he loves best. Going skating, hanging out in parks and walking around Railroad Square, the city’s small, mural-covered arts district. When I asked what he was looking forward to about the move, he talked about his hope for getting more involved in the school community at his new school. 

“My focus is just like finding a social group,” Milo said. “As far as school, I have always had pretty good grades. But I just want to find a good friend group and join the newspaper at my new school.”

In spite of all that the past year has brought, Milo is optimistic about what the future holds for him.

“There will be new places, new people, and a new culture. I'm curious about up north, apprehensive and excited,” he told me. “I’m not going to stop being me if I move, right?”

The post Fleeing Florida appeared first on Coda Story.

Threlkeld, a history professor at Denison University in Ohio, teaches a seminar for first-year students focused on how American history has been taught through the centuries, parsing textbooks to explain how national narratives evolve. The course dissects some of the country’s most notorious battles in the great culture war over historical memory — from the 1990s-era clashes about how to commemorate the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the conservative uproar in the mid-2010s over a U.S. history course framework emphasizing the country’s legacy of racism. The last few years of her course have coincided with a new front in America’s culture wars: how this legacy is discussed in public schools.  

Since 2021, at least 18 states have passed laws banning schools from teaching critical race theory or “divisive concepts” about racism and sexism. In the same period, universities and colleges have become a key battleground for conservative lawmakers intent on codifying an “anti-woke” view of history in the classroom, with nearly two dozen states introducing bills targeting history instruction and diversity training in higher education. 

Threlkeld’s students have been studying these fights in real time and reflecting on the future of a country afraid of its past. I spoke to her about what they make of this fraught political moment and the continuities between history wars of the past and present.

When you started teaching this class nearly a decade ago, what was the dominant history war captivating the public? And do you see any connections between that feud and what people are fighting over today?

Starting around 2010, the College Board decided to revisit the AP U.S. history framework. So they brought in historians and teachers and all the kinds of people you would expect. And it was a multi-year process that was all done by the College Board. And then in 2014, they released the revised framework around which schools could design the AP courses that fit with what they do in those districts. The right-wing reaction was exactly what you would expect, which was, ‘Why are these people listed and not these people?’ 

So for those first few years of teaching this class, I was able to show my students these reactions and to show them the responses from the College Board and the responses from school districts and ordinary teachers who were dealing with this in their classrooms every day. I could tell that students had never really thought about the politics behind all of this because they're just in class. They're just learning what they're being taught. One of the experiences that stays with me most strongly from this class is just seeing students realize how political history is.

Many students can probably study a specific battle over a textbook and not understand that history itself is often contested and politically weaponized. How do you explain this concept of history wars to your students? How do they react? 

It’s a hard thing to do. I’ve tried a lot of different ways over the years. The thing that I have done the last few times that I have taught the course is just to give them one of these bills. The last time I taught this course was the fall of 2022. And in the spring of 2022, the Ohio House of Representatives had proposed one of these ‘divisive concepts’ bills. So we talked through the process of how these bills work, and I just gave them the text and said, ‘Take a look at this and tell me what you think.’ And that was more powerful than anything I had tried before. 

Some of the other things I had done before were giving students two very different textbook excerpts of the same event and talking about why these excerpts would be so different. Even then, getting them to understand the political stakes always took more time. But with these bills, all I have to do is hand them the text of one, and they're just immediately thinking, ‘What is going on?’

Do students buy lawmakers’ rhetoric that these laws are intended to protect them from harmful and divisive concepts? 

Their first reaction is usually disbelief that anyone thinks that there are topics in U.S. history that high school and college students shouldn’t learn about. They are very thoughtful when it comes to thinking about younger children. But by the time students get to their age — 16, 17, 18 — they just can’t wrap their heads around the idea that there is something dangerous in learning about slavery or learning about racial discrimination of any kind. And some of them who come through this course and start to understand how little they know about American history, some of them are angry that they weren't taught the things that they're learning.

We do have some really interesting discussions about patriotism and what it means to be patriotic. Because they pick up on a lot of that rhetoric, too, that the purpose of public education is to make students patriotic citizens. And so, I do always get a couple of students who ask things like, ‘Well, how can I learn all these terrible things that the United States has done and still be patriotic?’ And I think that's an incredible question. Where a lot of them come to by the end of the semester is that they need to know these things in order to be patriotic. That being ignorant is not patriotism.

I grew up in California, but I have reported from and lived in the South. And while I was there, I learned that students were taught a very different version of Civil War history — including one that glorified the so-called ‘Lost Cause’ mythology of the Confederacy. For me, learning about the regional and geographic differences in U.S. history education was very eye-opening. Taking this a step further, I wonder what this course is like for students who aren’t from the U.S. Have they drawn comparisons to places they come from?

I love it when international students in this class feel comfortable enough to start talking about their experiences. At Denison, we have a lot of students from Vietnam, a lot of students from China, a lot of students from India. And when they do start to open up and start to reflect on the kind of history they were taught in high school, it's clear that they do understand how much of what they learn is controlled by the state.

I'm thinking about Vietnam in particular because I had this one really smart, thoughtful student in my class this past fall who was from Vietnam. And he was very conscious of the fact that in Vietnam, history education has been tied very closely to reunifying and rebuilding the country over the last 50 years. 

And so he was actually able to talk in a way that I don't think most 18-year-olds can about the political uses of history in that nationalist context. And for some of my students who are from the U.S., I could see the wheels turning in their heads, when they start to realize, ‘Oh, this stuff serves a political purpose. And what might be the purpose it's serving in my state? Let me think about that.’

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The post The politics of teaching US history appeared first on Coda Story.

Policymakers who pushed for the law say it will help protect kids from mental health issues and other risks that can arise from viewing certain kinds of material online. But what counts as “harmful,” exactly? The law is aimed at pornography, but it extends to virtually any commercial website with content that does not have “literary, artistic, political or scientific” value for minors and that makes up more than a third of all material on that site. With the law now in effect this month, anyone in Utah can sue violators if a minor accesses content on their website. Nonprofit-run sites, search engines and news-gathering organizations are exempt from liability.

Utah passed another law earlier this year to regulate minors’ access to social media platforms, which requires teens to get parental consent to use the platforms and prohibits them from using such platforms between 10:30 p.m. and 6:30 a.m. Research has shown that social media can be harmful to the mental health of young people. But age verification and time curfews might not be the best solutions to the problems that lawmakers have trained their focus on.

Heidi Tandy, a lawyer and First Amendment speech researcher, says it’s worrying that policymakers don’t consider kids’ rights. “It's very clear that there is a sliding scale of First Amendment rights for those under the age of 18,” Tandy told me.

On Twitter, Electronic Frontier Foundation researcher Jason Kelley pointed out that while politicians tend to frame these laws as protection for children, they apply to everyone under the age of 18. He warned against “lumping in 10 year olds with seventeen year olds who can work, apply for emancipation, and drive.” Older teens are much more likely to seek out sexual content online — and have legitimate reasons to do so — than kids who are just nine or 10 years old.

Kelley suggested that the Utah law might end up pushing well past pornography to cover things like sexual education materials or fiction that includes sexual themes.

“The goal is often not just to remove or block what most of us would consider adult content, but go beyond that,” he told me. Kelley says advocates have “a certain reasonable fear that larger swaths of sites would be swept up in the law.”

“You've seen that, with definitions of what’s considered pornography or adult content in places like Florida, they're removing books from libraries,” Kelley said, referring to recent legislation targeting books that are considered “sexually explicit” or that deal with gender identity, sexuality and related subjects.

Experts and adult film industry voices have also noted that these restrictions could send teens toward more obscure sites that parents or policymakers might not be aware of. This is a key argument that Pornhub makes, the Canada-based adult content site that consistently ranks among the most popular websites in the world. Earlier this month, Pornhub blocked access to videos on its site for all users based in Utah to show its opposition to the law. People in Utah who tried accessing the site were instead redirected to a video featuring adult film actress Cherie DeVille explaining the company’s objections to the law. Among other things, she noted that it could lead teens to sites with no protections against videos depicting things like sexual violence or child abuse.

There’s good reason to believe that rules like the one in Utah will soon spread to much of the U.S. The state of Louisiana was the first ever to implement this type of age verification law. A raft of similarly-worded age verification bills, what Kelley calls “copycat laws,” have been introduced in six states so far this year. All of these policies ostensibly require websites to introduce technical mechanisms for checking a user’s age before they can access that site’s content. Although the Louisiana law provides special guidance on this, Utah hasn’t established a standard for how sites should digitally verify a user’s age.

How should websites card their users, exactly? Utah recently implemented a pilot project for making driver’s licenses accessible on a mobile device that comes with an annual subscription cost. A digital ID works in tandem with a state's motor vehicle administration, so it can be considered a valid form of identification for buying alcohol or other age-restricted products.

Louisiana, meanwhile, requires sites to use “commercial age verification systems.” And there’s a burgeoning industry waiting to serve sites in states with these requirements. Third-party services like FaceTec and Yoti offer biometrics-driven age verification software that websites can pay for, but this software can be costly to buy and maintain, making it difficult for small businesses to comply with the law.

All of the solutions on the table thus far raise significant concerns about the privacy of young people’s data. As Coda has reported in the past, using biometrics to verify someone’s identity or assess their age often requires sites to hold troves of personal data that can become vulnerable to breaches or even targeted abuse, harming users in the near term or for years ahead.

“People who want age verification laws have the best interest of teenagers at heart,” Tandy told me. But, she said, “I don't think they're thinking through the privacy ramifications of what they're asking for.”

The post Utah’s online porn law puts teens’ digital rights at risk appeared first on Coda Story.

But the success of the e-commerce giant’s rapid-fire delivery model depends on what happens inside Amazon’s “fulfillment centers” — sprawling warehouses where workers sort and pack orders for shipment, all under the watchful eye of technical systems that track their every move. For years, workers have said that the company’s algorithmically-driven approach pushes them to the brink, treating them “like robots” in the service of meeting unattainable productivity quotes and driving up injuries in the process.

On May 16, lawmakers in Minnesota passed a pioneering workplace safety bill that could improve labor conditions for Amazon employees subjected to the company’s worker tracking system. Organizers behind the legislation say it will provide the strongest labor protections in the nation for people working in warehouses like Amazon’s.

Work in Amazon warehouses is overseen entirely by technology: Algorithms track workers’ speed and productivity, measure the so-called “time off task” that employees spend logged out of their workstations and alert managers when workers don’t meet their productivity quotas. Mohamed Farah, a 50-year-old Amazon employee who came to the U.S. in the mid-1990s as a refugee from Somalia, works a 10-hour shift packaging items for shipment at a Minnesota warehouse. He said the company’s grueling pace of work and “time off task” rules have worn on workers’ bodies and minds, including his own. “They say you have to pack a minimum of 80 boxes per hour, but you cannot do it,” he told me. “If you try to pack 80 per hour, you cannot go to the bathroom. If you go to the bathroom, the rate is down.” 

Amazon’s “time off task” measurement is a constant source of worry for many workers. The company tracks the time employees are gone from their workstations. If you spend too much time away from your station, you get in trouble. Internal company documents obtained by VICE revealed that Amazon can fire employees who accumulate 30 minutes of “time off task” on three separate days over the course of a year. The documents also showed that the company tracks the amount of time employees spend in the bathroom. Some employees have described needing to urinate in bottles while working to avoid penalties for using the bathroom.

Farah, who has worked for Amazon for seven years, said that workers get hurt trying to keep pace with packaging quotas. He has come home with three injuries over the last few years. “You go home feeling very tired. Headache, muscle aches, leg aches,” he told me. “They want us to work like robots.”

Farah’s experience is common across the company. A recent survey of more than 2,000 Amazon workers across eight countries found that the company’s performance monitoring and tracking system has taken a physical and emotional toll on employees’ well-being: 57% of respondents said their mental health suffered due to the company’s productivity monitoring, and 51% claimed it harmed their physical health. Amazon has twice the injury rate of comparable warehouses in the U.S., according to a recent analysis of injury data submitted to federal safety regulators.

“You do a lot of bending and back-and-forth walking for hours. You get thirsty, and you go to the bathroom, and it’s on a different floor,” explained Qali Jama, a 39-year-old Amazon warehouse worker who also hails from Somalia. “And then you go to the bathroom, which only has two toilets. If those toilets are occupied, you need to wait to go to the bathroom. The whole time you’re gone your time accumulates, it adds up. And next thing you know, the manager goes up to you and tells you a couple of days later, ‘You have time off task.’”

It was these conditions that fueled a raft of organizing efforts in Amazon facilities across the U.S., including the nation’s first successful union drive at a company warehouse in New York last year. Workers from East Africa, like Qali, were among the first Amazon employees in the nation to confront the company over its labor practices and have been at the helm of organizing efforts in Minnesota. 

The Minnesota bill, which state lawmakers passed on May 16, will not just apply to Amazon — though lawmakers who supported the legislation said it was spurred by reports of injuries at Amazon and a lack of transparency around the company’s productivity quotas. The policy will require any warehouse with more than 250 employees to provide employees with the quotas and work speed metrics used to evaluate workers’ performance. The law also requires for this information to be communicated in employees’ preferred language. Organizers say this will force Amazon to be transparent with its employees about the company’s often opaque workplace productivity metrics — a system they claim increases injuries among workers. The legislation also prohibits employers from imposing quotas on workers that prevent them from taking bathroom, food, rest and prayer breaks.

The law is the product of years of organizing by East African migrant workers, many of whom came to Minnesota as refugees escaping Somalia’s civil war in the 1990s and formed what became the largest Somali diaspora community in the United States. Somali workers now make up large numbers of Amazon’s labor force at warehouses. They were the first in the country to take on Amazon’s labor practices in 2018, when a cohort of workers in the Minneapolis area staged a walkout over working conditions at local warehouses, forcing the company to the negotiating table. 

“Before anyone in the labor movement, we took on Amazon,” said Abdirahman Muse, the executive director of the Awood Center, a Minnesota-based nonprofit that advocates for East African workers’ rights. “And everybody thought we were crazy. But we were not.” Muse compared the Minnesota Somali workers’ trajectory to “the story of David and Goliath” — a small group of refugees and immigrants “facing one of the biggest companies in the world.”

It was the realities of working inside Amazon’s warehouses that prompted Qali to begin organizing for better labor conditions last year. “When I started working there, I said, ‘This is not right what they are doing,’” she recalled. “I always felt like we were slaves there. I always fought against them, I knew my rights. I felt that there were people who have only been in the United States for 30 days. They need money. They come from hunger. They will take anything. And I think that’s what Amazon depends on.” 

“I want people when they come to America to know that they are still human,” she added. “This country does stand for what they believe, but you have to speak — and act.”

The post How Somali workers in the US are fighting Amazon’s surveillance machine appeared first on Coda Story.

In the U.S., one special breed of telehealth companies tends to focus on “wellness” issues common among people in their 20s and 30s: Companies like Cerebral, Hims & Hers, Keeps and Mindbloom offer a quick path to prescription medications for anxiety, depression, sexual health and skin-related issues. They also tend to feature a sleek, Instagram-friendly aesthetic.

Hims, launched in 2017, uses the tagline: “Telehealth for a healthy, handsome you.” For years, I’d noticed ads for Hers, its sister brand, dotting my social media feeds and featuring on the walls of subway cars. I finally visited the Hers website and found a banner stretched across the homepage: “Anxiety treatment, no insurance required. START YOUR FREE ASSESSMENT,” it read. Curious to learn more, I clicked on the link.

After a short intake assessment, the platform told me to wait for a provider evaluation that would also take place entirely online. If prescribed, the medication would be delivered to my door, as soon as possible. In the meantime, I could browse the site to see what kinds of drugs they prescribe. Brand names like Lexapro, Wellbutrin and Zoloft float across the sections for medication featuring the website’s calming, sage-green color palette. The site also sells health and sex-adjacent products like melatonin gummies (to help you “get the sleep of your dreams”) and USB-rechargeable vibrators (because “life’s too short for boring sex”). The familiar shopping cart icon in the upper right corner of the site reinforced the idea that I was here to buy something, not to seek a professional medical consultation.

It felt almost too easy. I didn’t see it through — I see a regular doctor at a regular brick-and-mortar clinic. But it left me wondering how other people might understand — or misunderstand — what the service really offers. Hims & Hers and companies like it often adopt the language of telehealth that we see coming from established healthcare providers, a practice that might give consumers the impression that the company has their best interests at heart. But these companies aren’t regulated in the same way that traditional healthcare providers are. And they are out to make money. In the first half of 2021 alone, venture capitalists invested nearly $15 billion into digital health companies.

In the eyes of Dr. Adrianne Fugh-Berman, a pharmacology researcher at Georgetown University, “there's real telehealth and there's fake telehealth.” Real telehealth, she explained, was an asset during the worst periods of the pandemic. And for years, it has helped people with limited mobility, or those who live in far-flung places, get access to specialist clinicians who tend to work in big city hospitals.

But then there are fake telehealth outfits, which Fugh-Berman described as “companies who are really just bypassing clinicians to provide drugs to patients.” 

“There's a prescriber involved,” she said, and that clinician does provide some level of safety. But she cautioned that they ultimately answer to the telehealth company, not to a traditional medical institution. “Their job is to prescribe you drugs,” said Fugh-Berman. If they deny a lot of people drugs, “they are not going to keep that job.” 

In traditional healthcare, patients typically see a primary care provider who can recommend treatment, medication or otherwise, with their full health status and history in mind. Although traditional healthcare institutions have been caught bending to the interests of big pharma — a major factor in the U.S. opioid crisis — there are regulatory measures in place to prevent this. New-fangled telehealth companies do not have the same guardrails.

Fugh-Berman runs Georgetown's PharmedOut program, a project to help educate healthcare professionals on pharmaceutical marketing practices. According to PharmedOut's resources, companies that use direct-to-consumer advertising are not subject to FDA regulations if they provide “disease awareness,” even though these sorts of campaigns can “lead to the overuse of marginally effective or potentially dangerous drugs for minor conditions.” PharmedOut warns that this practice can harm public health, especially as more companies rely on social media ads to get in front of potential customers.

Although it’s rare, plenty of the antidepressants that these companies prescribe can cause serotonin syndrome, a serious and potentially fatal response. The anxiety drug propranolol, described by Hims & Hers as a medication that can help you ace “a public speaking engagement, interview, or audition,” can trigger asthma attacks for people with the disease. Last year, Bloomberg investigated the telehealth company Cerebral, which focuses on mental health treatment, and found that patients were prescribed medications that led to complications and even death from overdoses. In short, the actual health risks that these companies might present for consumers are real.

Then there’s the matter of the telehealth companies’ business model. Alongside payments for the services they provide, companies like Hims & Hers also collect a good deal of customer data. We all know what it’s like to be asked to consent to the terms of service of data privacy agreements. They’re incredibly long, written in legalese and impossible to negotiate with. If you want the service, you select “I agree” and hope for the best.

The mere fact that these companies deal with people’s health data might make customers think that it will be covered by HIPAA, the U.S. federal law that requires healthcare and insurance providers to protect sensitive health information from being disclosed without patient consent. But just because you’re sharing your health data does not mean it’s protected. In fact, Hims & Hers’ privacy policy mentions that it is not a “covered entity” under HIPAA. This suggests that the company is collecting demographic data and medical information, as well as images and messages, all on behalf of the diagnosing providers and with no guarantee of privacy protection under U.S. law. We asked Hims & Hers for more information about their business and how they handle customer data but did not receive a response prior to publication.

What happens to your data after it is collected? Researchers have shown that it can be bought and sold by third-party data brokers. Last year, The Markup reported that private information about the medications prescribed through telehealth services (Hims & Hers was among those they tested) had been shared with Big Tech companies like Meta, Google and Snapchat. This data is often used to improve ad-targeting and prompt customers to purchase even more products or services based on their browsing habits. But it could be used or abused in other ways, too.

The lack of HIPAA oversight over some telehealth companies is a concern for Keith Porcaro, who researches law and technology at Duke University. He explained that these kinds of companies can get around privacy protections that traditional healthcare companies would otherwise be subject to and said that regulations need to catch up with the market.

“Companies like this are changing people's expectations about healthcare,” he said. “There's an assumption, especially if you talk to doctors, that there's sort of one model of getting care: You go to your doctor and rely on doctors for everything. Putting doctor shortages aside, there’s a lot of evidence that says that most people take care of most of their health problems on their own,” Porcaro told me.

Bypassing traditional healthcare routes in favor of for-profit, start-up companies may be making consumers more vulnerable to medical misinformation. Influenced by a growing self-care movement that has popularized the idea that “you know your situation best,” consumers increasingly turn to these companies. 

Porcaro puts some of this on people’s legitimate “mistrust of the medical establishment,” based on their negative experiences with traditional healthcare. In a 2022 Pew research study on race and disparities in healthcare, more than 70% of Black female respondents between the ages of 18 and 49 said that they had had a negative experience with healthcare providers, ranging from pain they reported not being taken seriously to being treated with less respect than other patients. The same report found that most Black Americans were skeptical of “medical researchers when it comes to issues of openness and accountability” and suspected that misconduct in medical research remains just as likely to happen today as in the past. Long-standing stigma may drive prospective patients to seek alternative routes to healthcare. But people looking for quick solutions might be willing to accept help from just about anyone. 

“People who are going to services like this, especially mental health or addiction treatment, are vulnerable,” Porcaro said. And they’re not just vulnerable to misinformation, he said, “they're vulnerable to actual harm.”

The convenience and branding of telehealth start-ups may have plenty of appeal for Gen Zers and people with legitimate reservations about the medical establishment. But they come with some serious trade-offs that could affect your health data — and your health itself.

CORRECTION [05/15/2023 11:08 AM EDT]: The original version of this story said Duke University lawyer and technologist Keith Porcaro. Keith Porcaro researches law and technology at Duke University.

The post Telehealth start-ups are monetizing misinformation – and your data appeared first on Coda Story.

It’s chilly inside the Creede Underground Mining Museum. For one thing, it’s winter. For another, the museum is located underground. That was the innovative idea of three local workers who decided to blast out the 10,000-square-foot space when the last of the town’s famous silver mines closed down. They wanted to show outsiders and younger generations alike what their lives, and the lives of their predecessors, were really like.

Heather Brophy, the facility’s director, is used to the museum’s cold: She spends all day down here. Sporting sophisticated pigtails and a nose ring on this winter day, the Creede native is 29, younger than one might expect for someone in her position. She is the keeper of information about an industry that — for all intents and purposes — died decades ago in Creede, Colorado. But growing up here, Brophy became fascinated by how mining had shaped her town.

Today, more than 30 years after the Bulldog Mountain Mine — the last stalwart — closed up shop, Creede’s long-gone industry might soon come alive and chisel a new story from its past.

Last year, the largest silver mining company in the United States, Hecla Mining, confirmed that it plans to dive back into the Bulldog mine, through its subsidiary, Rio Grande Silver. The mountain still holds plenty of metal, and the company is poised to extract it. Brophy wagers that as soon as the price of silver can guarantee a return on investment, Hecla will seek out its permits and head into production mode. “They will bring in crews,” said Brophy. 

The American government just might be ready for that moment, too. Right now, the country is largely reliant on foreign silver sources. But soon, it’s going to need a lot more of the metal than it currently consumes: The shiny stuff is a key component in solar panels, electric cars, charging stations and 5G infrastructure, along with consumer electronics. The desire to increase mineral supplies in the country, while silver demand is increasing, means the U.S. could use more stateside silver than it currently mines.

The U.S. is keen on increasing the minerals the country sources domestically so that the availability of the metal won’t be determined by whether one country invades another, the general vagaries of international trade or supply chain delays. 

Where to get it, though? 

Sometimes, it turns out, the best places to start new mines are on the backs (or in the bellies) of old ones — in this case, that can mean in the heart of old silver boom towns, like Creede, that have gone bust. There, the ground is already excavated, data on what’s beneath already exists, and companies know for sure someone struck it rich in the past. 

And so, that new work might happen in the shadows of the falling-down infrastructure of the past. Here in southern Colorado, where miners once pounded chisels — the risks to themselves and the earth largely unmitigated — a batch of hopefuls is trying to extract raw materials for the green energy economy while keeping a historically dirty business a whole lot cleaner than in the past.

Silver outwardly appears in things like jewelry, utensils or the coins your conspiratorial uncle hoards. But its physical properties make it useful, not just pretty. Silver reflects light better than any other metal and also better conducts heat and electricity. Plus, it’s antibacterial. It’s part of medical equipment and is an important ingredient in all kinds of electronics. It’s integrated into cars, cell phones, TVs. It’s in “everything that has an on-and-off switch,” said Michael DiRienzo, the executive director of the Silver Institute, an international nonprofit with members from across the silver mining industry. 

And it’s going to become even more important as energy sources transition away from fossil fuels and toward more renewable energy: Silver is integral to solar panels’ workings, and it’s also a key to the zippy cars of the future. Last year, according to DiRienzo, the automotive industry used somewhere between 60 and 65 million ounces of the metal. “The number is just going to continue to grow as electric vehicles and, down the road, autonomous driving vehicles become more prevalent,” he said, going so far as to describe silver as a “decarbonization metal.” 

According to a report from the International Energy Agency, an electric vehicle’s greenhouse emissions over its lifetime, including manufacturing and minerals, are half of those of a gasoline-powered car. There are some risks that come along with acquiring the minerals,  like loss of habitat for animals and plants, significant water usage and potential for water contamination, air pollution and noise pollution. On balance, the risks of remaining dependent on fossil fuels, or not investing in the materials that clean energy requires, seem higher — for people and for the planet. 

DiRienzo is bullish about the prospects. “The demand side in the last year was a new high,” he said. It shot up 17% from 2021. “The market was firing on all cylinders.”

Hecla, ensconced at the Bulldog Mine in Creede, agrees with the hopeful forecasting and its connection to decarbonization — or, at least, its documents agree. The parent company did not respond to my multiple requests for an interview.

In recent years, Hecla’s silver output has accounted for 40% of all silver mined in the U.S. And so, predictably, it’s hopeful about the current prospects. “We’re at an inflection point unlike anything we’ve seen in more than a century,” says a 2021 Hecla document called “Silver: The Story of Our Past, the Foundation of Our Future.” That inflection comes courtesy, the company claims, of the transition to clean energy.

The document may be company propaganda, but data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration backs up some of its key assertions. To keep up with solar panel production alone, the world will need 500 million ounces of silver by 2050. Meanwhile, American domestic silver production has stagnated. Just four mines in the U.S. produced silver as their primary output last year. The rest of the approximately 32 million ounces came from mines that primarily dig for lead, zinc, copper or gold. To be part of the potential impending boom, those numbers will have to change.

But these aspirations can get complicated: If a company wants to open a mine on federal land, for instance, there’s a lot of paperwork and waiting involved. 

“Starting a new mine is much more difficult now than it was a hundred years ago,” says Hecla’s report. “You can’t just dig a hole in the ground and start producing.”

In fact, according to DiRienzo, if you started the clock at zero when you found silver in the ground, “it would take you nearly 10 to 12 years before you finally get the permitting to go ahead.” Those permits are there for a reason, of course. “The process is to make sure everything's good,” he said. “You can’t just go in there and start destroying.”

But it can make things difficult for companies that won’t see any profit from their labor for many years. While what happens at any given site is different, and every state is different, the mining industry is in general subject to laws like the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires a detailed analysis of how a project on federal land will impact an area and its occupants. The Clean Air and Clean Water Acts deal with issues like dust and other particulate pollutants, along with stormwater runoff near mines and the disposal of water used in extractive operations.

Officially, the United States still operates on a legal framework for mining on federal lands that was written in 1872, but that could change. In 2022, the Biden administration released its principles for proposed mining reform, predicated on the idea that the U.S. needs to mine more of its own goods, create jobs and do so in a way that’s environmentally and socially responsible.

The “how” part of that plan includes making sure strict standards are in place, consulting with local tribes and communities, protecting places with sensitive ecosystems or Tribal Nations’ resources, recycling material that’s already been mined and processed and cleaning up the messes of extractions past.

Oh, and companies could have to pay royalties on their spoils, if they extract silver from land owned by the government, which is effectively taxpayers’ land. That money would go in part toward mitigating or preventing environmental and social impacts of mining, which today are still no small matter. 

Mines take up space that might otherwise be used by communities, flora and fauna. They also produce more waste material than they do metal. Water near silver mining sites regularly gets contaminated. According to the Government Accountability Office, abandoned hardrock mines have “contributed to the contamination of 40% of the country’s rivers and 50% of all lakes.” Historically, people have also used mercury, a pretty toxic substance, as part of the silver extraction process.

Reforms to the regulatory system and the long timelines, when coupled with the call for more domestic mining, irk Michael Feinstein, the founder of a geologic exploration company called MineOro. Produce things within the country, the government demands. “But the next breath they tie the hands of any potential domestic production,” Feinstein said.

As the largest silver producer in the country, Hecla can untie its hands better than most. And with the company’s purchase of the rights to 21 square miles of land in the Creede Mining District, Hecla has been working to make Bulldog’s old infrastructure accessible again. The company planned an exploration campaign for 2022 to figure out what metal was left in the mountain, where it was and how best to access it.

Brophy, the Creede museum director, details these efforts as she bustles about the caved, rocky interior of the museum, sending visitors — who’ve braved the incoming, days-long winter storm — out on the audio tour. Headphones on, they’ll wind their way through a U-shaped tunnel of exhibits featuring mannequins posing as miners throughout the decades. The first little group shows how Creede’s 19th century miners, seeking silver, used hammers and iron drills to hand-pound into the rock. Later, they transitioned to using hydraulic drills, affectionately known as “Widow Makers,” named for the silica dust they kicked up that got sucked right into the miners’ lungs. Then, farther into the tunnel, the inanimate miners show how life — and pulling material out of the planet — became easier and safer, as, for instance, mechanized equipment required less backbreaking labor. The industry also figured out that if you wet the material before drilling into it, you could reduce dust. From there, ventilation improved, and cave-ins became less frequent.

“There's a ton of history here,” said Brophy, a space heater blowing air toward her desk chair. “But that's pretty much all there is right now.”

Randy McClure, the current site and safety manager for Rio Grande Silver, is a third-generation Creede resident. His grandfather homesteaded near the town in the late 1800s, and McClure himself started working in the mines when he was 18. If the industry bounces back, it wouldn’t just change the state of the mine but also the state of the town. 

“A return of mining to Creede would bring back a solid year-around economy, families with kids to fill the school, and the characters that make a mining town great,” he said.

As mining declined and then ceased, Creede’s population shrank — today, there are just 700 residents. The town shifted to arts, theater and outdoor tourism to survive, meaning it is now home to a mix of people who’ve been around since the mining days and those who were attracted to its new offerings. The different groups are learning to coexist, Brophy says. If the Bulldog reopens, they may have to find a new equilibrium.

“Mining is our roots,” Brophy said. “It's what we came from. Without mining, this place never would have existed.” 

Anyone who likes Creede’s repertory theater and art, in other words, really has the town’s dirty, dangerous business of the past to thank. And they may have a modern version to thank for the town’s future.

Hecla’s re-exploration of this former boom site seems to mirror other efforts in the American West. Idaho’s aptly named Silver Valley is home to mines owned by Hecla and by a company called Sunshine Silver Mining and Refining that has gobbled up tens of thousands acres of mineral rights in the area. One patch includes the Sunshine Silver Mine that began in the 1800s and closed in 2001. In 1972, the mine was the site of one of the worst mining disasters in history, when a fire broke out underground. Sunshine Silver declined to comment for this story, stating that while it was exploring, it wasn’t actively mining.

In the small, adjacent towns of Silver Cliff and Westcliffe, Colorado, meanwhile, a Canadian company called Viscount Mining has been digging around old mining areas. These locales, along with nearby ghost towns, once hosted one of the biggest silver booms in the state. 

Silver Cliff was the third largest Colorado city in the late 1800s, as prospectors and miners flocked to the high-altitude valley, flanked by two mountain ranges. In the 2020 census, it had just around 600 residents. Westcliffe had 435.

The holes and mine-waste — loose piles of rocky leftovers (called tailings) that lay fan-shaped over mountainsides — that this silver boom left behind remain, easily visible on a drive through town. Both also appear in the deep woods on hikes. Today, the downtown area shared by the two towns is a bit bigger than Creede’s, and it also has live theater, art galleries and many burger joints for hungry climbers who probably failed to get to the top of the 14,000-foot peaks that point to the sky above town.

Like Creede, Silver Cliff hasn’t made much silver since those very early days. But that past is not so distant: When the dirt roads in town get graded, you can find miners’ abandoned tin cans or the occasional century-plus-old belt buckle. Decrepit wooden structures loom around the landscape, alongside badlanded tailings piles, all begging for photographs — and, apparently, begging at least one company to plumb their depths.

Viscount, which did not respond to multiple requests for comment, has invested in two silver exploration projects, both of which sit on 19th century boom spots. The company’s website has a gallery of images, showing two wooden structures left to decay and collapse, along with an old claim boundary, carved into rock, from the initial discoverer. It looks like a tombstone.

These modern explorers, currently drilling for samples, have at their fingertips tools that were unimaginable back during Silver Cliff’s previous boom, like surveying instruments that can provide a picture of what lies 1,500 meters (nearly 5,000 feet) or more underneath the shoes of the surveyor.

With this data in hand, the company suggests its Silver Cliff property could be home to one of the largest silver deposits in the entire U.S. 

If that’s the case, life in Silver Cliff, like life in Creede, could someday shift, looping back on itself like a time machine.

A new-old industry in towns like these could be an ultimate good: more jobs, more money, more renown. And getting silver from towns like these could, counterintuitively, be an ultimate good for the environment. If the silver has to come from somewhere, it might as well be a place with a number of environmental restrictions, controls and regulations — along with the current administration’s proposal to reform and improve policies that are already on the books.

For its part, Hecla claims to have the lowest carbon emissions in the industry per dollar of revenue. Most of the electricity it uses comes from hydropower, and it sucks out less water to produce an ounce of silver than the average person uses in a day. Mining in general is notorious for its water usage, accounting for 1% of all water usage in the United States. Hecla also generally backfills areas it mines — taking the waste that, in the past, might just have ended up stranded on a hillside, combining it with cement and filling up the empty, extracted places. That shore-up means that the land won’t collapse or be dotted by the abandoned pits that are so ubiquitous in the American West.

But Hecla has caused plenty of harm, too. In 2011, it paid $263 million to the federal government, the Coeur d’Alene tribe and the state of Idaho to settle a Superfund lawsuit about historical waste that its operations had discharged into the South Fork of the Coeur d’Alene River, causing harm to the water itself, fish and birds. In 2015, it paid $600,000 in fines after releasing heavy metals, in addition to other pollution, into the same river. Although no environmental fees have been levied against Hecla since then, the company has had more than a dozen workplace safety or health violations, for issues like using equipment beyond the capacity it was designed for or not correcting safety-relevant defects in machinery in a timely way.

Nevertheless, mining is safer and more friendly to the ground, water, animals and humans near its operations than it used to be.

Not everyone wants a mine in their backyard or as their employer. But as the final exhibit in the Creede Underground Mining Museum points out, it’s not so simple as yelling, “not in my backyard!”

If you like phones, and solar panels, and electric cars, the material that goes into them has to come from below someone’s backyard. “Since minerals exist randomly throughout the world, we do not always have the simple choice to mine or not to mine at home,” read the museum’s final panels.

But nor do people watching a potentially impending silver boom just have to sit back and let it happen, as it happens. Public information and engagement can make the industry better. It was agitation from the public, the museum’s signs point out, that helped usher in American environmental reforms that companies like Hecla and Viscount now have to abide by. Though companies in any industry can sometimes consider federal fines to be the cost of doing business, the Environmental Protection Agency can criminally prosecute, and jail, those who they can prove knowingly broke the rules.

For now, here in Creede, Hecla is waiting for the economics to tip in its favor, as they keep Bulldog’s underground infrastructure pumped free of the water that builds up underground and analyze how best to dig into the metal in the future. 

Brophy is ready for the next chapter of her town’s complicated industry — a potential resurrection of the town as it used to be, mixed with the way it has become. A condition that might be more accurately described as reincarnation.

“Mining is our past,” said Brophy. “And we hope that it's our future.”

The post How 19th century silver mines could supercharge the US green energy economy appeared first on Coda Story.

What counts as inappropriate? An official announcement on the Department of Education’s website says that parents should report lessons that focus on “race or ethnicity, rather than individuals and merit, promoting gender ideology, social emotional learning, or inappropriate sexual content.” The hotline closely mimics a project that Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin began in January 2022 and ended about eight months later due to receiving “little or no volume” of serious accusations, according to a Youngkin spokesperson.

The program was a key campaign promise of Arizona’s newly elected superintendent of public instruction, Tom Horne, whose platform focused on promoting right-wing notions of patriotism and attacking critical race theory. It is hard to come by an Arizona educator who would say that the scholarly theory — that race is a social construct used to oppress people of color — is taught in Arizona’s K-12 schools. 

Horne insists otherwise and is quick to assert his dedication to studying U.S. history. “If I hadn’t been a lawyer, I would have been a history teacher,” Horne told me in an interview. “I’ve been reading history every day since I was 14.” Horne, who served as the superintendent of public instruction from 2003 to 2011, was the only Republican in Arizona to win a major statewide role last November.

His campaign website could be a case study in 21st century American far-right spin. Offering only dubious citations, the homepage sets up a mock polemic between Horne and his predecessor, Kathy Hoffman, in which he trots out right-wing, fear-mongering narratives about gender, race, slavery and capitalism in America, and of course about Covid-19. He attacks Hoffman for closing Arizona schools during the pandemic, offering social support for LGBTQ+ students and encouraging teachers to assign Nikole Hannah-Jones’ Pulitzer Prize-winning 1619 Project.

‘If they’re teaching about slavery, what are they supposed to say?’

The hotline was billed as a solution to these so-called problems. But Arizona public school teachers — the state employees whose work most directly affects student outcomes — have largely been left out of the discussion. What will the hotline mean for their work in the classroom? Teachers I spoke with expressed confusion about the program and fears that they would be subject to investigations concerning “inappropriate lessons.”

“Teachers are on a daily basis reaching out to us as union officers and asking if it’s okay to teach things in the approved curriculum,” said Kelley Fisher, who has taught kindergarten for 24 years. “If they’re teaching about slavery, what are they supposed to say? What can and can’t they say in their classrooms? They’re scared, and that should not be what happens in a classroom. Teachers should not be afraid to teach students to think for themselves.”

Others worry that the hotline will cause parents to complain to state officials rather than addressing their concerns directly with teachers or administrators, creating a dynamic that could foster distrust and make it harder to resolve conflicts.

“There are already very well established ways for parents to bring concerns directly to teachers, or, if necessary, the school principal or administration,” said Emily Kirkland, a spokesperson for the Arizona Education Association. “The hotline goes around those existing systems entirely and leaves teachers with no due process at all. It’s really poorly thought out.”

Amber Gould, who has taught English for 12 years in the Glendale Union High School District and serves as treasurer for the Arizona Education Association, was among several educators who said they had received no guidance about what to expect from hotline reports or how to respond to investigations. In an interview, Horne confirmed that the department has not issued guidance to teachers.

Horne is primarily concerned about parents who feel they aren’t listened to, not teachers, he told me. “This has been intended to be a way for parents to communicate with us,” he said. He acknowledged concerns about bypassing existing systems, adding that parents with complaints should go to teachers and principals first. “[The hotline] wasn’t intended to do that,” he said. With regard to the process, Horne said he believes that the department would call the principal first, then the teacher, who would be asked to stop teaching whatever had triggered the call. “If they persist, theoretically we would make a discipline referral to the state board,” he said.

For Kelley Fisher, the hotline is an effort that neither helps teachers nor ensures that students are receiving the best instruction possible.

“This hotline was about appeasing the people who got [Horne] elected,” said the veteran kindergarten teacher. “It’s not about transparency in the classroom, it’s not about making sure teachers are doing a good job.”

Attacking standard K-12 teaching techniques

Perhaps most worrisome to educators is Horne’s vilification of social emotional learning, a key method used by teachers to help students learn to communicate, solve problems and act with compassion toward others. With little concrete evidence, Horne has alleged that teachers are using social emotional learning techniques to disguise their teaching of critical race theory, echoing narratives from right-wing organizations like the Center for Renewing America.

Several teachers expressed confusion about the link between critical race theory and social emotional learning, which they say are completely different. Abby Knight, a kindergarten teacher in the Kyrene School District, said the current discourse has created a deep misunderstanding about what social emotional learning is.

“There is a level of disconnect when you’re not in the classroom and you’re not doing it,” she said. “SEL is made up of really basic concepts that, if you’re not an educator, you don’t realize are crucial to teaching young kids.” 

She explained that you need to teach kids how to communicate effectively, problem solve, consider others and understand what constitutes an appropriate behavior for a given circumstance, in order to foster an effective learning environment.

“Learning really doesn’t take place unless there’s a lot of behavioral work that goes into a classroom,” Knight said. 

Empowering pranksters while leaving teachers behind

What has the hotline actually achieved since its mid-March launch? It has seen plenty of action but almost no reports of “inappropriate” lessons. Instead, its staff have been bombarded by thousands of prank calls from outside Arizona and about 1,000 calls from within the state, the vast majority of which also came from pranksters. In an email, Arizona Department of Education spokesperson Rick Medina said that as of April 10, the department had received only a handful of calls that warranted investigation.

Horne said there was one serious hotline case he was aware of: “Someone called us about [a teacher] evangelizing in the classroom. We called the principal who said he was aware of it already, so we dropped it.”

Meanwhile, Arizona educators continue to face very real pressures that the hotline isn’t going to fix. The state is facing a critical shortage of teachers — one in five positions is unfilled — and wages haven’t kept pace with economic changes. Nevertheless, state-mandated responsibilities keep rising.

“People are leaving because it’s not feasible mentally or financially," Knight said.

“It’s about the way teachers are being treated and it’s driving them out of the classroom,” Kelley Fisher said. “There are plenty of people in this state who are certified to be teachers, but they just don’t want to be teachers right now. It’s really sad.”

Amber Gould, who began teaching at the end of Horne’s last stint as the public schools superintendent, said she felt deja vu about his return to office. “I would hope that we’re able to have conversations with [Horne], because at the end of the day I hope that he wants to do what’s best for kids and not necessarily for his political talking points.”

It remains to be seen whether the hotline will fizzle out like in Virginia or lead to actual investigations into teacher conduct.

“I honestly feel like it’s more of a publicity stunt for Superintendent Horne and his office, but when the fight comes, we’re going to be ready,” Gould said. “We know our rights and we know that in the end, we’re going to do what’s best for kids.”

The post A hotline to report teachers ratchets up tensions in US schools appeared first on Coda Story.

While it’s true that ByteDance, TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company, is beholden to Chinese law, there’s no publicly available evidence that the Chinese government itself has spied on people in the U.S. through TikTok. Last year, ByteDance was found to have tracked the IP addresses of journalists covering the company, though the employees who took part in this effort were fired soon after the news came to light. 

TikTok has been under intense regulatory scrutiny since 2019, with policymakers especially concerned about where and how it stores data belonging to U.S. users. As of now, the company says, it sits in its data centers in Virginia and Singapore. However, it’s also working on “Project Texas”: a $1.5 billion plan to route all U.S. user data through the servers of the Austin-based computing giant Oracle, managed through a separate entity called TikTok U.S. Data Security.

At the hearing, Chew said this would act as a “firewall” to protect U.S. user data. But legislators appear unconvinced. Their security concerns have led to a place where U.S. sanctions on TikTok seem like a real possibility. Legal experts caution that a ban might not have legs, due to free speech protections under the First Amendment. But even if it doesn’t stand up in court, restrictions on the app could have significant ripple effects for other China-owned companies, both in the U.S. and other Western countries.

Political posturing among legislators like McMorris Rodgers make it look as though Washington is ready to ban all sorts of Chinese technology from U.S. territory. But this is easier said than done. Chinese technology has become deeply embedded in the West, whether in stand-alone products like Hikvision security cameras or in the individual parts used to make networked technologies, ranging from mobile phones to smart speakers.

The case of Huawei might offer some clues. The Chinese telecommunications infrastructure firm was effectively banned by the Trump administration in 2019 over fears of espionage. While the Shenzhen-based company was initially allowed to continue developing 5G networks in Britain, this was swiftly overturned following analysis by the U.K. government’s National Cyber Security Centre — and amid the trade war between the U.S. and China emerging at the time. 

“Many in the U.K. said, ‘Don’t worry, Huawei isn’t a problem,’” explained Sam Olsen, the CEO of the Evenstar Institute, a London-based business strategy and geopolitical think tank. “But the actions of the U.S. created a business case for U.K. companies to move away from Huawei and Chinese technology more broadly.”

So far, many of the U.K.’s bans on Chinese technology have been restricted to government property: TikTok has been banned on civil servants’ work devices and government departments are barred from installing Hikvision surveillance cameras at sensitive sites.

But Olsen believes more sanctions are on the way. He cites cellular components of networked devices commonplace in the home and the office: smart thermostats, refrigerators and connected security systems, often referred to as the Internet of Things, some of which capture copious amounts of user data by design. Key parts of these products are made in China by companies like Quectel and Fibocom. Most have geolocation capabilities. “By their nature, these devices contain sensitive data: a car that’s parked outside a government location could potentially reveal an agent’s identity and behavioral patterns,” he said.

Chinese technologies that can track cross-border metrics are in the firing line, too. China’s dominance in global trade means it possesses immense logistics data. For example, LOGINK, a Chinese transport and logistics platform, links shippers internationally on a closed platform. “The software is integrated into China’s 93 ports in 53 countries, meaning it has access to the visibility of global supply chains,” said Olsen. “From a national security angle, China could divert sensitive cargo thanks to the platform's data.”

Likewise, Beijing-based Nuctech builds security scanning technology used at EU borders and major international sporting events. The U.S. Transportation Security Administration banned the equipment in American airports in 2014, but most Western allies are yet to follow. “The technology is scanning everything going in and out of Europe, giving China huge data to work from,” said Olsen.

According to Olsen, cheap manufacturing and a market of 1.5 billion people meant it initially made business and political sense for Western allies to cozy up to China. However, he says, there has been a collective naivete regarding China’s longer-term goals, which “never wanted to settle as a bit player in a Western feudal system.”

Now, under Xi Jinping’s leadership, the “wolf warrior diplomacy” style of figures like Zhao Lijian, an ex-foreign ministry spokesman, is on full display: coercion, confrontation and conflict as China asserts its status as a true global superpower. After decades of investment in Chinese technology for its high quality and cheap price, some political forces in Western nations want to backtrack. But this may force them to choose between market pressures and national security interests.

“U.K. government enthusiasm for Chinese investment and trade partnerships has, for 20 years, rubbed up against cybersecurity concerns,” said Tim Stevens, a reader in global security at King’s College London. “But now, the cybersecurity aspects of Chinese state-firm relations are too serious for any government or firm to ignore: There are few, if any, restrictions on what data the Chinese government can obtain from ‘private’ companies, and no independent oversight of those relationships.”

While sanctions on Chinese technology ramp up, a complete disentanglement is unlikely, if not impossible. Chinese tech isn’t only embedded in Western devices — but in its economies, too. Olsen says one way of easing reliance on China is the Biden administration’s CHIPS and Science Act: the $280 billion investment to boost semiconductor manufacturing in the U.S. “If that ran its course, the U.S. would be able to export to its allies, gain self-sufficiency and encourage the likes of Apple to diversify its tech away from China.”

It’s unclear if we’re entering another Cold War, says Richard Harknett, a professor of political science and the director of the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Cincinnati. However, the nature of technology and cybersecurity mean the devices we all use can be leveraged by global superpowers in the name of espionage: digital frontlines in which a live shot is never fired. “Unauthorized data collection, data manipulation and manipulating computer networks are the ways superpowers are trying to gain advantages against each other,” Harknett said. “We’re in a new phase of strategic competition across all countries. Cyberspace is allowing states to use digital means to undermine each other’s economies, militaries and trust in government.”

Through that lens, for the National Security Agency Director Paul Nakasone to compare TikTok to a “loaded gun” makes sense from a U.S. geopolitical perspective. Olsen, however, says the platform has become more of a totem for the current freezing of U.S.-China relations. “It’s a symbol of Chinese data and influence in the West,” he said.

The post Can the West curb its addiction to Chinese tech? appeared first on Coda Story.

"Everybody is in a kind of chaos right now,” said Joseph Knoll, a nurse practitioner and the CEO of Spektrum Health, a community-based health center located in central Florida that specializes in medical and mental health services for the LGBTQ community and beyond. He told me that the new rules leave healthcare professionals who provide this care “feeling helpless.”

Doctors and other practitioners who violate the ban could lose their medical license and be hit with hefty fines. Many are even considering leaving the state, given the uncertainty of future restrictions on their practice. Part of the dismay comes from feeling that the deck has been unfairly stacked. Local news outlets have reported that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis appointed all the members of the “vociferously apolitical” Board of Medicine, several of whom made contributions to his campaign totaling $80,000. DeSantis is reportedly considering running for president in 2024 and gender-affirming care is an issue that many conservative lawmakers have been pushing across the country.

Florida is now one of 10 or more states that have passed similar legislation. In Utah, the state passed a law at the beginning of the year to ban any healthcare professional from providing any gender-affirming treatments to minors or face a felony charge. In February, South Dakota passed a similar law for minors in which medical professionals providing such treatments stood to lose their licenses. Georgia followed in March. And just days ago, West Virginia enacted a ban on gender-affirming therapies, though it made exceptions for teenagers considered to be at risk for self-harm or suicide. 

Florida, unlike the other states, initially chose not to take a legislative route, instead moving ahead via state medical boards. A bill, though, is currently making its way through the Florida House of Representatives to codify the ban on gender-affirming care. This bill also includes a ban on changing the sex as recorded on a birth certificate, prohibits health insurance providers from covering any treatments related to youth transitioning and prohibits organizations that provide transition-related healthcare to minors from receiving public funds. 

Already, this has led to clinics shutting down preemptively. Outlets reported that the Johns Hopkins All Children Hospital in St. Petersburg and Nicklaus Children's Hospital in Miami, among others, stopped accepting new patients into programs that provided hormones or puberty blockers well before the law went into effect. The fear of prosecution leaves few providers still offering these services.

With clinics closing and the high potential consequences for providing care, medical professionals are increasingly forced to choose between staying in an environment that makes it challenging to provide the necessary medical care to their patients or leaving to continue practicing elsewhere. 

"Our primary service line is gender affirming treatment,” Knoll, the Spektrum Health CEO, told me, “but we're a community healthcare clinic that does primary care as well." He says he is now faced with the choice of abandoning all patients because his clinic’s survival is at stake. “Gender affirming treatment represents somewhere between 50% and 60% of our services,” he said. “Obviously, our biggest concern is the care of people that need to access our services, but we have to be realistic. We don't have room in our budget to have half of our revenue gone."

He told me he’s heard of colleagues who are taking the option to leave Florida. The consideration weighs heavily for his transgender staff members. "For them to stay in the state of Florida,” Knoll said, “they have to accept the lack of access to health care while working at a healthcare organization. I mean, it's nonsense." 

Nurse practitioners like Knoll play an essential role in this equation. They can prescribe medication, promote disease prevention and diagnose common ailments, often providing this care directly in clinical settings. In 2020, Florida passed a law that grants nurse practitioners full authority to autonomously practice primary care. Losing these healthcare professionals drastically affects the communities they serve. 

Vernon Langford, the president of the Florida Association of Nurse Practitioners, wrote in an email that the state has "a bad shortage of healthcare professionals now and it is not getting better anytime soon.” It’s hard to know exactly how many medical professionals are leaving and what their exact reasons are for doing so, but a 2021 report for the Florida Hospital Association estimates that the state will face a shortage of nearly 6,000 primary care physicians by 2035. The lack of physicians makes it difficult for all patients seeking care in Florida, especially those in rural areas. Additionally, more care providers will be needed as the population increases and ages. A state facing significant shortages in care needs to be able to attract and retain talent. 

The new rules are not helping. Langford said Florida needed to remove barriers to accessing care, not create additional hurdles. "The culture wars have seeped into healthcare,” he said, which introduces more restrictions for the work of nurse practitioners. There has been an increase, he added, “in the desire to relocate to states that have more favorable practice environments.” 

As bans and restrictions on gender-affirming spread around the country, perhaps the only option left for patients who need this care is to file legal challenges. Four anonymous transgender minors sued the state this month, arguing that the medical bans “violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment” and should, as unconstitutional legislation, be thrown out. “It is,” Langford told me, “a very sad thing to see when vulnerable populations are being targeted."

The post Florida’s ban on transgender care pushes doctors to leave the state appeared first on Coda Story.

She looked at the uniformed man in disbelief. She was the mother of a toddler and a long-time public servant. The scene of the alleged offense was not an adult bookstore or the dark web. It was a high school library. The officer explained the situation. A parent had told the police that she was circulating pornography to students through the books in the school’s library collection. The policeman, a school resource officer employed by both the Wentzville School District and the O’Fallon Police Department, came to the library to investigate the claim. He came back again six months later, prompted by similar complaints from another parent at the school. The visit did not lead to any disciplinary action against Amy. But it left her deeply unsettled. 

“It just honestly shook me,” Amy, who asked to be identified only by a pseudonym, told me. “The audacity to claim that I was making pornography available to kids, it was just devastating. Like, what is this going to do to my reputation if this is what people truly think I’m doing?”

The Wentzville School District and the O’Fallon Police Department did not respond to my requests for comment.

At the time of the officer’s visit, it was illegal under Missouri law to give pornography to minors. But what enraged a parent enough to call the police was a school library book — Amy never found out which one. At the time, library workers were trusted to choose books based on school board-approved selection criteria.

But that changed in August 2022, when the Missouri state legislature passed a law banning books that contained “explicit sexual material.” Under the new rules, police visits to libraries may become a more regular occurrence — and librarians found guilty of violating the policy could even end up behind bars. The statute, Senate Bill 775, has led to the removal of hundreds of children’s books across the state and caused library workers to aggressively self-censor under the threat of incarceration.

“This has struck fear into the work that many of our members are doing professionally,” said Tom Bober, the vice president of the Missouri Association of School Librarians, which represents hundreds of library specialists statewide. To Bober’s knowledge, no one has been criminally charged under the new rules yet — my reporting indicated the same. But the message the rules send is clear to him. 

“What we have with SB 775 is politicians saying, ‘We are going to determine what books should sit on your library shelves and be available to your students. And if you go against what we said there are criminal implications,’” Bober said.

Such a scenario would have been unthinkable for Amy when she began working in the field 15 years ago. But over the last several years, the conditions for library workers in Missouri and across the United States have taken a dramatic turn for the worse. The Missouri law is part of a much broader movement, largely driven by conservative politicians and parents’ rights groups, whose primary target is books dealing with race, gender and sexuality. PEN America found that more than 80% of the 1,648 books banned from schools in 2021 and 2022 focused on, or featured, LGBTQ+ characters and people of color, and attempts to ban or restrict access to books from school and public libraries since 2020 have shattered previous records.

The movement’s secondary target is the workers who make those books available to students. As I reported for Coda last year, librarians have been subjected to online harassment and verbal attacks, accused of grooming children and promoting pornography, inundated with hateful messages, threatened with physical violence and, increasingly, targeted with hostile laws like SB 775.

The Missouri law is among the most extreme of the state policies singling out library work, although states like Tennessee and Oklahoma have also passed new laws targeting “obscene” materials in school libraries and databases. Tacked on as an amendment to a bill aimed at combating child sexual exploitation and protecting sexual assault survivors, the Missouri law makes it a Class A misdemeanor for librarians, school officials and teachers to provide students with “explicit sexual material.” Any librarian or educator found in violation of the policy faces steep penalties: a yearlong prison sentence and up to $2,000 in fines.

State library associations and library workers I spoke with described the law’s rollout as chaotic and panic-inducing. Librarians and school officials scrambled to make sense of the sweeping language of the bill, which defined “explicit sexual material” as any visual image that showed sexual intercourse, masturbation or genitalia, except for images that appear in books on anatomy or biology. Districts’ interpretations and applications of the law varied widely. According to Bober, whose organization surveyed hundreds of librarians statewide about their experiences with the law, some librarians received lists of titles to remove from district administrators and attorneys, while others were left in the dark and instructed to interpret the statute themselves.

Statewide, nearly 300 books — a disproportionate number of which are written by or about LGBTQ+ people — have been removed from school library shelves in response to SB 775, the nonprofit PEN America found. And the lack of guidance from state officials has become visible on library shelves. Some school districts have chosen to ignore the law or remove just a handful of books, while others have interpreted it more broadly. Wentzville, where Amy works, pulled 220 books after the law went into effect — more than any other district in the state. The long list of removals included a handful of Holocaust history books, scores of graphic novels and comic books, illustrated adaptations of Homer’s “Odyssey” and Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” and more than 70 art history books featuring works by the likes of Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Vincent van Gogh. PEN America has a complete list of the books banned on the basis of SB 775.

Mernie Maestas, the lead librarian for the Wentzville School District, said the district’s middle school and high school librarians were given two weeks to go through their entire collections and remove any books that could potentially violate the law or lead to prosecution. “We had one librarian who began pulling absolutely everything because the fear became so overwhelming,” she said. “Others wound up shutting down their library for periods of time just so they could ensure they had gone through everything.” 

Amy told me that she was in tears as she pored over the books in her school’s library, confused and overwhelmed about how to evaluate the material on her bookshelves. “Do I pull a picture because there are breasts on the page? Are breasts included with genitalia? Who decides?” she said. “It was just a mess because you didn’t know what you were looking for.” 

Amy decided not to ask other library staff to help make decisions about what books to keep because she didn’t want anyone else to be liable for potential criminal charges. So she went through it all by herself. She estimates she set aside about 30 books to be reviewed by the district’s legal team. The entire process “felt so wrong, like I was being used for something I did not support,” she explained. But she felt she had no other option. She had a kid. She didn’t want to end up on the wrong side of the law. “What do you do when you think you could go to jail?” she asked.

Following a public outcry, most of the Wentzville titles that were taken down — including an illustrated children’s version of the Bible — have been put back on the shelves. But 17 have been permanently banned, including the graphic memoir “Gender Queer” and illustrated adaptations of “The Handmaid's Tale” and “Slaughterhouse-Five,” according to a list compiled by PEN America, which has been tracking statewide book removals. 

Wentzville librarian Maestas said the law has caused library workers to rethink which books they add to their collections. “You second-guess everything that you’re purchasing so you wind up self-censoring, even though that’s not our goal,” she said. “But you’re fearful.”

Maestas runs a reading club at the elementary school where she works. One day, a parent contacted the school to complain about a book on the group’s reading list, which explores themes related to sexual identity. The parent withdrew their child from the club and accused the district of promoting an “agenda.” 

Maestas worries about how the children in her school process that kind of language. “The kids absorb what’s happening in their home,” she explained. “And so when parents feel like the library has potential evil in it, so do the kids.”

So far, Maestas has not removed any books from her library under SB 775. I asked if she worries about the possible consequences of her decision. “Yes,” she replied. “All the time.” When she became a librarian nearly two decades ago, she added, “never would I have ever thought that the library could land me in jail. For people to think that I’m a monster and a villain, it stabs at your heart.”

For some, the pressure is too much to sustain working in the field. Amy had planned to be a librarian until she reached retirement age, but instead she is leaving the profession at the end of the 2022-2023 school year. She said the police visits, as well as SB 775, played a role in her decision to switch careers. She told me that the restrictions imposed on librarians under SB 775 left her unable to adequately carry out her job’s responsibilities, including providing students with material that could help them make sense of their identities, such as books about LGBTQ+ experiences.

But Amy also feels conflicted about the decision to leave the field: “In many ways, it feels like a cop out,” she confessed. “It is this war of, ‘Am I doing the right thing?’ I don’t know. It’s been very difficult in the last couple of years and I’m just choosing something different.” To be a librarian in Missouri feels like a precarious tightrope walk, where criminal prosecution is always a looming threat. Some, like Amy, are choosing to walk away.

But others are fighting to put librarians on more stable ground. Last month, the Missouri ACLU sued the state over SB 775 on behalf of the Missouri Library Association and the Missouri Association of School Librarians, arguing that the law is vague to the point of being unconstitutional and puts educators in the position of violating students’ First Amendment rights or exposing themselves to criminal prosecution. Just last week, a top Missouri Republican lawmaker responded to the lawsuit by threatening to cut the entire state budget for public libraries in his proposed state funding package. On Tuesday, the Missouri House of Representatives approved the lawmaker’s budget. If approved in the state senate, it will strip public libraries of $4.5 million in state aid that they were slated to receive in the next year. The Missouri secretary of state has also proposed a rule change that would force public libraries to adopt a variety of “age-appropriate” checkout policies for minors or lose public funding. 

Joe Kohlburn, an academic librarian at Jefferson College in Missouri, said the array of policies targeting public library employees has prompted many in the field to search for jobs out of state. He mentioned a colleague who recently fled Missouri for Florida. “It’s pretty bad when you move from Missouri to Florida,” he chuckled. “I definitely am getting the message the Missouri state government is sending, that they don’t value librarians and are antagonistic towards our foundational ethics. And who wants to work in that situation?”

At the center of all of this are the students themselves, the subjects of so many of these laws, book challenges and policies — who rarely get airtime to weigh in on what they want to read, despite their starring role in the debate. But some are speaking out. When a set of proposed book bans came to a high school in Nixa, a conservative town in southwest Missouri, a group of high school students decided to push back. In preparation for a school board vote on the books, they asked hundreds of their classmates about their position on the restrictions and discovered the vast majority of students opposed the bans. 

Then, they put themselves to work, reading each and every book on the list, like Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” and Yaa Gyasi’s “Homegoing,” which explores the legacy of colonialism and slavery in the African diaspora. They also read Stephen Chbosky’s “The Perks of Being a Wallflower.” Thomasina Brown, a high school junior, said the coming-of-age story resonated with her as an “important representation of the adolescent experience,” helping teens process themes like grief, trauma and mental health in their own lives. If the district banned the book, “I felt like maybe kids wouldn’t be exposed to things they might deal with later in life,” she told me. 

Brown’s classmates also brought their observations to the school board meeting, describing the books and characters that reflected parts of their identities and life experiences or introduced them to new perspectives. But the meeting quickly descended into chaos, with some parents booing loudly, shouting over the students and calling on the school’s librarians to resign. 

Meghana Nakkanti, a high school senior who took part in the meeting, likened the situation to a role reversal: The students were showing more maturity and capacity to deliberate on the issue than the adults in the room. But the board ultimately voted to remove several books. 

The students found the adults’ vilification of the librarians they knew especially painful. One meeting stood out to them. A parent stood up and declared that the school’s two librarians should be placed on a sex offender registry. One of the librarians, who was present in the room, burst into tears and rushed for the door. Someone had to accompany her to her car because she was so distressed, the students recalled. That’s when the severity of the situation dawned on them: These librarians were being named, confronted and run out of public meetings in tears. Not just by adults, but by parents. 

Nakkanti told me it was hard to watch the librarians smeared because “of a few people who aren’t willing to read more than a few pages of a book that someone told them they shouldn’t like.” The students in the group, she added, are “trying to make people realize that the words that people say and the implications that are surrounding this have real meaning. These are people and they deserve to be respected.” 

A classic lesson from an adult to a child — turned upside down.

The post Missouri librarians are risking jail time – for doing their jobs appeared first on Coda Story.

Now White Castle could be on the hook for upward of $17 billion. 

On February 17, the Illinois Supreme Court made a decision on Cothron’s case that sent the state’s business community reeling. According to the court, every time a company collects an individual’s biometric data without getting informed written consent, it counts as a separate BIPA violation with potential damages from $1,000 to $5,000. In the past, courts interpreted the law to mean one violation per person. Now, if an employee uses their fingerprint to sign into work, or every time they clock in and out for shifts or breaks, the number of infractions rack up quickly, and so does the amount of money to be paid out in damages. 

“So now six times a day, 340 days a year for five years, one person is potentially a $1 million risk,” said Jason Stiehl, an attorney who works on litigation, technology and brand protection for Crowell & Moring LLP in Chicago.

Justices on the Illinois Supreme Court acknowledged that the extent of damages could be “harsh, unjust, absurd or unwise” but said the court is bound to interpret laws as they are written by state legislators.  

This court decision in the White Castle case comes on the heels of another decision in Tims v. Black Horse Carriers. The ruling, announced on February 2, set the statute of limitations for BIPA violations at five years. Previously, that number had been unclear, but the courts had largely interpreted it to be about two years. So now not only are the damages potentially much higher but the number of incidents in violation could be much larger.

BIPA has been held up as the gold standard for consumer privacy acts. But the court’s latest interpretation of the Illinois law shows the pitfalls of some of its key aspects. The rulings underscore the risks of creating vague regulations for evolving technology and illustrate the tension between business interests and privacy. 

When Ted Claypoole, an Atlanta-based data, technology and privacy lawyer, heard the news about the court’s ruling in the White Castle and Black Horse Carriers cases, his first thought was “Oh crap.” 

But as a lawyer who advises clients on compliance with data laws, the court’s decision wasn’t a surprise to Claypoole. BIPA is vaguely written, and issues like the statute of limitations or whether violations are measured per person or per scan aren’t clearly written out.

“It’s not a crazy reading of the statute. It just is a crazy result,” said Claypoole. 

BIPA has been around since 2008, and Claypoole and privacy advocates consider it to be one of the most important privacy laws in the U.S. because it allows individuals to sue companies using their biometric information without written consent. 

But consumers or employees don’t actually need to show that they were harmed by their data being collected, thanks to a 2019 ruling by the Illinois Supreme Court in a case involving the Six Flags theme park. 

After that decision, there was an increase in the number of BIPA complaints filed because anyone whose biometrics had been collected without proper consent could file a lawsuit. 

This led to what Jeff Keicher, a Republican in the Illinois State House of Representatives, called “an obscene shakedown of business communities.” 

Many of these cases have been large class-action lawsuits, resulting in companies like McDonald’s and its franchises across the state paying millions in damages. 

In the first case to go to trial, BNSF Railway had to pay $228 million after truck drivers brought a class-action suit over the company’s policy of scanning their fingerprints when they went to BNSF rail yards. 

But the recent decision in the White Castle case brings the potential damages to another level. Trade associations in Illinois are raising alarms that these large settlements will drive companies out of business and force Illinois residents out of their jobs.

 “Getting a $2 million complaint is one kind of problem. Getting a $10 billion award against you is a whole other kind of problem,” said Claypoole. “It's not just that it's higher. It's that it is existential. It's life threatening to a business.”

Since the rulings, the number of BIPA complaints filed has gone up, according to Anne Mayette, a labor and employment lawyer who advises clients on BIPA compliance at Husch Blackwell, a national law firm. The number of cases expanded after the Six Flags ruling determined that plaintiffs don’t need to prove that harm was inflicted by the use of their biometrics, but the pace slowed down after a while. After the two latest decisions, Mayette estimates she sees 3 to 10 BIPA suits a day, compared to a few per week previously.    

It’s not all panic for businesses though. Many of the companies who were vulnerable to lawsuits have already built policies to be compliant with BIPA. 

Stiehl, the attorney, also sees a “silver lining.” The amount in damages is discretionary, not mandatory, meaning a jury can decide to order a smaller payment. Stiehl thinks the White Castle case will go on to trial court, and the company will not be hit with the full $17 billion in damages. “It sends a larger message,” he said, “saying this is not your pot of gold.” 

The typical pattern is for regulation to lag behind technology. BIPA is the opposite. In the years since the law passed in 2008, biometrics have changed significantly. That’s why Keicher, the house representative, thinks that it’s time to make some changes to the Illinois law. 

“We're dealing with a statute that's 15 years old that didn't even foresee any of the technological advances that we have today,” he said. “To say that it doesn't need any attention, I think, is naive to the way our society is progressing.”

Keicher has brought forward two bills regarding BIPA this year that decrease a company’s liability to BIPA lawsuits. One clarifies that a company only needs to get consent to collect a person’s biometrics once and makes it clear that BIPA doesn’t apply to biometrics that are stored as mathematical representations. The other says that if a company fixes the problem within 15 days of receiving notice of a violation of BIPA, it can’t be subject to legal action in pursuit of damages. 

In particular, attorneys like Claypoole and Stiehl want to get rid of the ability for individuals to directly sue companies through a legal mechanism known as the right to private action. It’s what makes Illinois law unique and allows for these types of suits with statutory damages in the millions. 

“Frankly, the easiest way is to take it out of the plaintiffs’ counsels’ hands,” said Stiehl. “ There are paths to still enforce these things in a reasonable way.”

A reckoning over BIPA could have an impact on potential legislation in states like New York, which is considering a similar law that includes the right to private action.

But BIPA isn’t the only model. Texas and Washington have similar biometric privacy laws, but they are enforced by the states’ attorney general, rather than individuals taking direct legal action against companies. 

Keicher, for one, thinks handing the enforcement power to the attorney general, particularly in cases involving the employees of a company using biometrics, is a good idea.

Keicher is hopeful that there will be some amendments to BIPA made by the time the legislative session wraps up in May. 

“I can't imagine we walk away at the end of the day without having some sort of accomplished guidepost of where this needs to go,” he said. 

But not everyone shares that optimism. Bills amending BIPA historically haven’t gotten very far.

“I'm fully convinced a company will have to be bankrupted by this for a change to be made,” said Mayette, the lawyer at Husch Blackwell. 

Keicher thinks that the current way BIPA is working in practice has gone beyond what the lawmakers who wrote the bill intended.

“I certainly don't think that the framers of the original bill would have wanted a $17 billion judgment against White Castle,” he said. “You can’t sell enough sliders to make that make sense.”

The artwork for this piece was developed during a Rhode Island School of Design course taught by Marisa Mazria Katz, in collaboration with the Center for Artistic Inquiry and Reporting.

The post Fingerprinting employees could cost Illinois businesses billions appeared first on Coda Story.

Last month, lawmakers in Texas introduced a bill that targets websites, people and companies that facilitate the dissemination of abortion-related information online with fines and other penalties.

This is among a handful of bills that show how abortion battle lines are being drawn around peoples’ virtual lives, with opponents moving to censor information about the procedure and deploy digital surveillance tools in order to enforce state-level bans. The Texas statute shares some similarities with a now-withdrawn Iowa bill that would have required internet service providers to block websites that publish resources about accessing abortion care, as well as a proposed South Carolina measure that would prohibit websites from publishing abortion-related information.

The Texas bill would also round out what is already one of the most conservative abortion regimes in the country. The procedure is banned in Texas, with no exceptions for rape or incest. Anyone found running afoul of the law by providing abortion care can face up to life in prison. The state has also enlisted Texans in its campaign against abortion with a so-called “bounty” law passed in 2021 that encourages private citizens to sue anyone who helps a person get an abortion. Another law currently pending before the state legislature would further expand people’s abilities to file such lawsuits.

The new, internet-focused bill would prevent people in Texas from accessing abortion-related information online in a variety of ways. In addition to criminalizing the purchase and sale of abortion-inducing drugs via the internet, the bill would make it illegal to create, edit, publish, host or maintain a website that “assists or facilitates a person’s effort in obtaining an abortion-inducing drug.” This would implicate not only the entities that run these kinds of sites — often non-profits that connect patients with clinicians — but would also extend to internet service providers like Comcast or Verizon, and possibly even to hosting services like Amazon or GoDaddy. Similar to the state’s anti-abortion “bounty” policy, the bill encourages Texans to sue any website that violates the proposed law — a provision that critics say is explicitly designed to suppress free speech by dangling the threat of litigation over people who publish abortion-related information online.

The Texas bill would compel internet service providers to block Texans’ access to websites that provide information about where, and how, to access abortion care, including through medication. The law could also affect social media platforms, where users can easily post such material, and even digital payment platforms, which some services use to collect payment for abortion medication.

Pressuring internet service providers to block websites may be a non-starter in the U.S. due to its First Amendment protections for free speech. But it is a time-honored tactic used by authoritarian governments from Azerbaijan to Venezuela, with a broader goal of getting people to stop publishing the information in question.

Hayley Tsukayama, an expert with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says “the law is systematically set up to silence people, to chill speech.” 

“It makes it a lot scarier for people to speak or to seek information” about abortion care, Tsukayama added. “When you’re talking about reproductive care, a lot of it is information that people, who are in a really vulnerable situation, are seeking.”

Tsukayama and staff at other digital rights groups monitoring state-level abortion and censorship policies say the Texas bill appears to be taking a new approach by focusing on telecommunications companies and seems to be the only law of its kind pending before a state legislature.

The Texas law also singles out six websites by name that internet providers would be required to ban under the law, including the site for Plan C, a campaign that provides information resources for people seeking medication abortions. Amy Merrill, the group’s digital director, said the bill marked the first time Plan C has been identified in anti-abortion legislation. Merrill told Coda that the organization consulted with legal experts about the proposal, which they believe is unconstitutional, and will continue to publish the information on their site as usual. 

“The way we see it is that any law that is attempting to prevent people from sharing public health information about abortion access is a clear violation of our First Amendment rights,” Merrill explained. “We refuse to be bullied by legislators who attempt to pass illegitimate laws and will continue to provide our research-based information on our website.”

The Texas bill’s decision to name Plan C and attempt to force internet providers to block its content comes as the site — and the topic of medication abortion more broadly — is experiencing historic levels of visibility in public life, according to Merrill.

“Things have become more enunciated and extreme in every direction,” she said. “The language of the laws has become more extreme. The level of activism and pushback has become heightened. And awareness of abortion pills has just skyrocketed.” When Plan C’s website went live in 2016, Merrill said there were just a handful of websites publishing resources about medication abortion. Fast-forward seven years and the number of websites coming online with information about abortion pills has increased exponentially, alongside explosive growth in Plan C’s website traffic. These factors may have influenced anti-abortion lawmakers’ efforts to take these websites offline. “The Genie is not going back in the bottle,” Merrill said. 

But even if this information remains public, the sites and companies that make it easy to find online may increasingly be subject to hostile state laws seeking to censor their information or take them offline. 

Globally, websites that offer information about obtaining abortion pills in countries with extremely restrictive abortion laws have long dealt with efforts to censor their work online. Women on Web, an international organization that sends abortion pills to people in countries where the procedure is illegal or highly restricted and operates a website with resources about medication abortion in more than two dozen languages, is no stranger to such efforts. Since 2019, the nonprofit’s website has been blocked by internet service providers in Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Turkey and Spain.

The group has come up with a simple workaround to circumvent censorship via website blockages. It publishes copycat websites with the same information as the blocked sites. If the government catches wind of the copycat site and blocks it, then Women on Web just creates a new one, like a whack-a-mole for digital abortion medication clearinghouses. Executive Director Venny Ala-Siurua says the labor is time-consuming but has allowed the organization to evade censorship attempts in these countries.

While this approach has helped Women on Web stay online in countries that have sought to shut them down, it’s unclear if U.S. counterparts like Plan C would ever need to employ such a strategy. Legal scholars and experts point out that both the South Carolina proposed law and the Texas bill are likely to face uphill battles in court because of the First Amendment. Emma Llansó, the director of the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Free Expression Project, says the Texas bill also is unlikely to survive constitutional scrutiny because of its especially broad mandate requiring internet service providers to implement website blockages — provisions that courts have struck down as unconstitutional in past legislative attempts.

Still, efforts to pass these kinds of laws could suppress constitutionally protected speech by making people, companies and organizations afraid to provide information online about abortion access.

“I think part of what’s concerning about these bills, even if they don’t ultimately pass, or they pass and get struck down, they’re a clear message from parts of the state government that they want to be able to go after anybody who is helping people get access to information about reproductive health care,” Llansó said. “And that pressure and implicit threat is part of what can create the chilling effect on online intermediaries from enabling access to that information.”

The post Texas lawmakers want to erase abortion from the internet appeared first on Coda Story.

Leveraging customer data this way has become a crucial growth area for top supermarket chain Kroger and other retailers over the past few years, offering much higher margins than milk and eggs. And Kroger may be about to get millions of households bigger.

In October 2022, Kroger and another top supermarket chain, Albertsons, announced plans for a $24.6 billion merger that would combine the top two supermarket chains in the U.S., creating stiff competition for Walmart, the overall top seller of groceries. U.S. regulators and members of Congress are scrutinizing the deal, including by examining its potential to erode privacy: Kroger has carefully grown two “alternative profit business” units that monetize customer information, expected by Kroger to yield more than $1 billion in “profits opportunity.” Folding Albertsons into Kroger will potentially add tens of millions of additional households to this data pool, netting half the households in America as customers.

While Kroger is certainly not the only large retailer collecting and monetizing shopper data through the use of loyalty programs, the company’s evolution from a traditional grocery business to a digitally sophisticated retailer with its own data science unit sets it apart from its larger competitors like Walmart, which also collects, analyzes and monetizes shopper data for brands and for targeted advertising on its own retail ad network.

“I think the average consumer thinks of a loyalty program as a way to save a few dollars on groceries each week. They’re not thinking about how their data is going to be funneled into this huge ecosystem with analytics and targeted advertising and tracking,” said John Davisson, director of litigation at Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) in an interview with The Markup. Davisson added, “And I also think that’s by design.”

Kroger did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Albertsons Companies’ vice president of communications Daphne Avila told The Markup in an emailed statement: “At Albertsons Companies, we appreciate the importance of privacy and take appropriate handling of our customers’ data seriously. We recently updated our Privacy Policy so customers can clearly understand our approach to privacy and the policies that we have put in place to protect their information.”

Walmart did not respond to a request for comment.

What Data Does Kroger Collect, and How?

As a Kroger shopper, your information can be collected both online and in person in their stores. 

When you enter a store: If you have a Kroger app on your phone, Bluetooth beacons may ping the app to record your presence and may send you personalized offers. Your location within the store can be tracked as well. (Kroger says your consent is required and the location tracking stops when you leave.) Kroger also says that in “select locations” store cameras are collecting facial recognition data (this is indicated with signs noting the use of the technology.) 

At the register: If you use your loyalty membership (such as Kroger Plus or Boost), detailed information about your purchases gets added to your shopping history, tied to a unique household identifier.

If you are shopping online at Kroger.com: Third-party trackers send your product page views, search terms, and items that you have added to your shopping cart to Meta, Google, Bing, Pinterest, and Snapchat.

According to the Kroger privacy policy, the company will “only collect information when needed for a particular purpose.” Here is some of the information that the company says it may collect, depending on the specific customer:

• Personal information: Information you provide when you sign up for the loyalty program: name, email address, mailing address, phone number, membership ID, and unique household identifier
• Purchase history: Historical in-store and online shopping purchases (with no time limits on how long the information is kept while you are a member)
• Location: Your precise physical location in the store (with your consent), including when you enter and leave a store (Kroger app, GPS, and Bluetooth beacons inside stores)
• Financial and payment information: “credit, debit, or other payment card numbers, bank account numbers”
• Health-related information: “Where permitted by applicable law, to serve you better we may make certain inferences about you based upon your shopping history that are health related”
• Mobile device data: Mobile advertising ID, IP address, browsing data, use of tracking pixels, and cookies
• Demographic data: “age, marital or family status (including whether your family includes children), languages spoken, education information, gender, ethnicity and race, employment information, or other demographic information”
• Biometric data: Facial recognition (in select locations, with signs providing notice)
• Behavioral inferences: “We create inferred and derived data elements by analyzing your shopping history in combination with other information we have collected about you to personalize product offerings, your shopping experience, marketing messages and promotional offers”

The company says in its privacy policy that the data collection is used to fulfill shopper requests, personalize product offerings, improve services, and “support our business operations and functions.” Kroger notes in disclosures to the Securities and Exchange Commission that “[t]hird-party entities do not have access to identifiable customer data.”

A Look at 84.51, Kroger’s Data Company

Founded in Cincinnati in 1883, Kroger counts 60 million households in the U.S. as regular shoppers at 2,750 stores under the nearly two dozen retail brands that it owns and operates (including Ralphs and Food 4 Less). The chain has stores in 35 states (and the District of Columbia) and had annual sales of more than $137 billion in 2021. Kroger noted in a promotional presentation highlighting the potential benefits of the merger that its “alternative profit businesses”—which include financial services (Kroger Personal Finance), retail advertising (Kroger Precision Marketing), and retail data operations (84.51)—could generate $1 billion in profits per year for investors, though in 2021 the company reported that “alternative profits” contributed “an incremental $150 million of operating profit.”

In 2003, Kroger partnered with Dunnhumby, a data science subsidiary of U.K. supermarket chain Tesco. Dunnhumby was an early innovator in the gathering of shopper data through loyalty programs. After a successful 12-year partnership, Kroger purchased a majority stake in Dunnhumby’s U.S. operations and rolled it into its own data science firm called 84.51, named after the longitude of Kroger’s Cincinnati headquarters. 

84.51 is considered a leader in the industry, selling insights to makers of the products sold in stores like Kroger’s. The company’s clients include more than 1,400 companies, including General Mills, Unilever, CocaCola, and Kraft Heinz. The data 84.51 provides to them is used to understand not just what the sales figures are for a given product but also the context of the purchase—context that can only be understood with data about the shopper.

Phil Lempert is the founder and editor of Supermarket Guru and studies trends in the retail grocery business. In an interview with The Markup, Lempert said the type of data that 84.51 sells can answer questions about a particular product: “What is it … that makes a consumer buy it? Is it just price, is it something else? It gives [brands] a road map on how to compete effectively, whether it’s against store brands or competing brands to understand that consumer behavior.”

2,000 Shopper Variables

On its website and marketing materials, 84.51 advertises both the scale and granularity of its data.

“We have collected over 2,000 variables on customers,” claims an 84.51 marketing brochure titled “Taking the Guesswork Out of Audience Targeting.” The historical reach of the data is another selling point, noting that the data includes 18 years of Kroger Plus card data. A page marketing 84.51’s “Collaborative Cloud” says the company has “unaggregated” data about individual product sales “from 2 billion annual transactions across 60 million households with a persistent household identifier.” It adds that this data is “privacy compliant.”

84.51 highlights the broad insights it has gleaned from its shopper data on its marketing pages. A graphic on Kroger Precision Marketing’s website highlights “Ethnic panels (Largest Hispanic panel),” product attributes such as low-sugar and kosher foods, and shopper attributes such as “Lifestyle, price sensitivity, generations, [Household] size and income.”

On a webpage promoting “behavioral analytics,” 84.51 claims “35+ petabytes of first-party customer data, our science—no crystal ball needed.” A petabyte is equal to one million gigabytes. For comparison, Kroger’s trove of customer data is 66 percent larger than the U.S. Library of Congress’s digital collection, which clocked in at 21 petabytes for 2022.

Albertsons’ Avila told The Markup that the company restricts some categories of ad segmentation, stating, “... we do not use groupings related to age, race, gender, ethnicity, income levels or financial status to create customer groups for either our own or third-party promotions.”

How Is Shopper Data Used?

Selling Shopper Insights

Experts told The Markup that companies that sell products in grocery stores don’t have much visibility into what happens after their items are placed on shelves. These brands want granular shopping data that only supermarkets have in order to gauge the success of the brands’ products. In recent years, this data has become harder to come by and therefore more valuable. 

“We’re in a situation now that we’re calling ‘data deprecation,’ ” said Mary Pilecki, an analyst at the market research firm Forrester who studies retail loyalty programs. “Privacy laws have increased globally. There are firms like Apple who are blocking ad tracking software, and of course Google keeps promising that the third-party cookie will go away.” Pilecki said this industry-wide scarcity of high-quality first-party data has left firms scrambling for new suppliers. “Companies are now saying, whoa what do I do? I’m not gonna have this data. Well, loyalty programs are actually a great way to collect this data.”

Targeted Advertising

For supermarkets, collecting intelligence on shoppers is useful not just for selling back to brands but also to enable highly targeted advertising to reach specific shoppers. According to Forrester, retailers and marketplaces were estimated to sell $40 billion in digital ads in 2022, with an expectation of that figure doubling in four years.  

Both Kroger and Albertsons run their own retail ad networks, which provide a way for advertisers to deliver ads to specific targeted segments of their shoppers, optimizing their ad spending. Kroger Precision Marketing (Kroger’s ad network) markets itself to brands and advertisers with the promise of reaching their shoppers via email, digital coupons, apps, online search, influencers, in stores, and even on shoppers’ televisions. For example, the streaming platform Roku launched a partnership with Kroger in 2020 to make “TV advertising more precise and measurable” using Kroger’s data.

One case study on 84.51’s website describes how a snack brand used the company’s data to measure the effect of ads it placed on Roku’s connected TVs. The analysis showed that households that saw the snack ads spent five times more on the brand than the average Kroger shopper. 

For Albertsons’ part, Avila told The Markup that while the company does have “revenue share agreements in place with retail analytics groups,” the company says it takes steps to ensure shopper privacy. “Importantly, we always ensure that customer information we share is de-identified and aggregated, in accordance with our publicly disclosed policy.”

There is at least one piece of evidence that Kroger has been sensitive to clueing shoppers in to its ability to target them this way. A marketing document linked to from Kroger’s website spells out the rules for advertisers participating in Kroger’s retail ad network. Under a section describing the “Tone of voice” to use in Kroger ads, the document notes, “Avoid copy that assumes customer can be identified by: lifestyle, activities, demographics, or gender.”

Regulatory Scrutiny

Kroger’s merger with Albertsons has shined a spotlight on its data collection. While regulators at the Federal Trade Commission are reviewing the proposed deal, lawmakers in Congress have made the companies’ data operations a focus of attention, albeit one that has taken a back seat to concerns about competition, food prices, and the impact of the merger on employees. At a November Senate subcommittee hearing about the merger, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) asked if Americans “really need a grocery store chain with wealthy owners who collect more of their personal data.”

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) asked Kroger CEO Rodney McMullen, in a letter following up on the hearing, how the combined companies would collect data. McMullen responded, “Our combined customer insights enable us to deliver more personalized promotion strategies, saving customers time and money.”

A witness at the hearing, Consumer Reports’ senior researcher Sumit Sharma, disagreed that the merger would provide any obvious new benefit in personalizing the shopping experience for consumers. “The difference seems to be that a combined Kroger Albertson will be able to analyze data from approx. 85 million households post-merger rather than 60 million households pre-merger. No evidence is presented to suggest that the ability to analyze data on an additional 25 million households would materially improve capabilities to personalize experiences,” he stated in his written response for the record, answering a question from Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC).

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), chair of the Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights, told The Markup in an emailed statement, “Most people have no idea that some stores are collecting data on what groceries they buy to sell to the highest bidder or using facial recognition technology to track them as they shop. This situation is especially concerning given how few options consumers have for grocery stores in many communities. Americans deserve protections against excessive surveillance and companies misusing their personal data. It’s time to pass federal privacy legislation to protect consumers.”

Privacy Concerns

Understanding the Value Exchange

Kroger’s loyalty programs are extremely popular with shoppers. The company says that 96 percent of all purchases at its stores are tied to a loyalty card. For shoppers, the loyalty program appears to offer a simple, worthwhile bargain: In exchange for your shopping data, the store will give you significant benefits in the form of discounted prices, coupons, fuel discounts, and a personalized shopping experience. 

“What isn’t necessarily disclosed,” said Stephanie Liu, an analyst at Forrester who researches consumer privacy, “is that it is not just tracking what you buy, it’s building audiences and segments off of that,” or in other words, bundling you with other shoppers based on a shared behavior, demographics, or inferred interests. Advertisers can then target these groups.

“Yes—you’re getting discounts, but the number of parties involved who are accessing your shopper data grows exponentially,” said Liu. Kroger’s privacy policy does not disclose how many companies Kroger shares data with.

Albertsons’ Avila told The Markup, “We have made significant efforts to be transparent about how we use customer information.” Avila added, “We understand the importance of privacy and take steps, such as the anonymizing and aggregation of potentially sensitive demographic information, to protect our customers’ privacy.”

Sensitive and Unique Data

While Kroger and Albertsons stress that they only share “de-identified” or aggregated shopper data, research has shown that the unique combinations of things we purchase, and the time and place of those purchases, can be as re-identifiable as mobile phone location data. A 2015 MIT study found that in a large set of anonymous shopping data, 90 percent of shoppers could be re-identified using as few as four purchases with a known price, purchase date, and store location. 

As supermarkets expand the variety of goods they sell to include health care and medical products, sensitive information about our lives, relationships, and finances can be gleaned by the patterns of what we buy there. 

“So I look at your shopping cart and I can tell if you’re a carnivore, if you’re vegan, if you like ethnic foods, if you only buy kosher foods,” said Supermarket Guru’s Lempert.

“You can infer if you’re a parent and what stage of parenthood you’re at depending on what size diapers you’re buying,” Forrester’s Liu said. “You can infer race, gender, and generation. And the kicker though is you can confirm a lot of that when you compare this data with third-party data.”

Shopping for sensitive items on Kroger’s website highlights another privacy concern. 

A Markup analysis of browsing and shopping for a pregnancy test on Kroger.com showed that searching for the product, viewing an individual product page, and adding the item to the cart all activated trackers that transmitted the product name and a user ID to Meta, Google, Pinterest, Snapchat, and Bing, among other companies. 

What Can You Do About It?

Thanks to various state privacy laws, residents of California, Nevada, and Virginia can opt out of data sales but still remain a member of Kroger’s loyalty program and continue to receive discounts. You can request to opt out here. California and Virginia residents can also request a copy of their data, and request that their data be deleted.   

Some grocery chains like Trader Joe’s choose not to offer loyalty programs and say that they do not sell shopper data. Trader Joe’s website notes “… we don’t have sales, we don’t offer coupons, and there are no loyalty programs or membership cards to swipe at our stores. Trader Joe’s believes every customer should have access to the best prices on the best products every day.” In a recent episode of the grocery chain’s podcast, a company spokesperson said, “We don’t collect any data on our customers.”

EPIC’s Davisson said regulators can play a role by forcing companies like Kroger “to minimize [the] collection, retention, transfer and use of … data to what is reasonably necessary to serve the consumer.”

Lempert suggests that there may not be much you can do as an individual if you want to avoid being tracked. “I would just say that if you’re concerned about privacy and a supermarket or any retail store being able to sell your data, don’t sign up for the frequent shopper card and pay with cash.”

This article was originally published on The Markup and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

The post Forget milk and eggs: Supermarkets are having a fire sale on data about you appeared first on Coda Story.

The proposed ban is part of a sweeping legislative package that builds off of the conservative governor’s ongoing campaign to control the parameters of how America’s legacy of racism is taught in public schools. In announcing the policy, DeSantis — a former history teacher whose views on the Civil War prompted students to create a parody video in which they pretended to be him and argued that the war “was not about slavery,” according to the New York Times — declared that the changes “will ensure Florida’s public universities and colleges are grounded in the history and philosophy of Western Civilization.”

In addition to eliminating diversity programs, the proposal would also give university presidents wide-ranging power over hiring, firing, and tenure decisions, and require colleges to prioritize majors that could lead to high-wage-earning jobs over degrees that promote “political agendas.”

Jeremy C. Young, a historian who works for the freedom of expression organization PEN America tracking censorship efforts in higher education, called DeSantis’ proposal an “all-out assault on the autonomy of higher education” that, if enacted, would impose the most draconian restrictions on public colleges and universities in the United States.

The proposed legislation is the latest attempt by DeSantis, a likely 2024 presidential contender, to limit classroom instruction on the history of racism in America. On January 12, the Florida Department of Education banned an advanced placement course for high schoolers focused on African American studies because it included coursework about reparations — a move DeSantis, who also signed legislation in 2021 prohibiting the instruction of critical race theory in public schools, staunchly defended.

But the effort to codify a so-called “anti-woke” view of history into policy is not just a Florida phenomenon. Since 2021, at least 18 states have passed laws banning schools from teaching critical race theory or "divisive concepts” about racism and sexism. Other states have attempted to create hotlines or websites to report teachers who violate critical race theory or divisive concept bans. Experts tracking these legislative efforts say they show no sign of slowing down this year as lawmakers in statehouses across the country propose bills aimed at restricting how teachers discuss the country’s past and present.

To better understand the national picture of America’s history battles, I called up PEN’s Jeremy C. Young. We talked about what distinguishes DeSantis’ proposed legislation from the laws that have already passed and why he sees the policy as lifting a page from the global authoritarian playbook. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

A lot of big news about higher education has come out of Florida in the last few weeks. DeSantis announced his intent to gut colleges of critical race theory and diversity programs, and the state’s Department of Education eliminated a high school advanced placement course on African American Studies. You have been monitoring these kinds of legislative actions across the country, and I’m curious how you compare these two efforts. Does one of them stand out to you as especially noteworthy or unprecedented?

It’s a race to the bottom. I think I would probably start with the higher education proposal, what DeSantis refers to as higher education reform, which would really result in the total capture and control of public higher education institutions in Florida by the state government.

Among other provisions, the proposals that DeSantis laid out would ban all diversity, equity and inclusion, and critical race theory initiatives in colleges and universities. It would ban any funding for them, including from private sources. It would effectively end tenure protections for faculty by giving boards of trustees the power to hire faculty members separate from those recommended by the faculty hiring committees, and it would also allow them to call a tenure review at any time for a tenured faculty member, essentially eliminating the protections of tenure.

It would also rewrite the mission statements of colleges and universities by the state. It would force colleges and universities to deprioritize certain majors which are considered by the government to be furthering a political agenda. If enacted, that package of proposals would be the most draconian restrictions on higher education probably in the history of the United States.

What distinguishes this proposal from other attempts to exert control over public university systems or their curricula? What makes this one so extreme?

The part of this that is unique is the attacks on the institutional autonomy of universities. In the United States, free expression at universities is guaranteed in part by institutional autonomy. That is to say, the government does not have day-to-day control over the inner workings and decisions made at the university, and those decisions instead are delegated to Boards of Trustees who in turn make those decisions through a process of shared governance, where all stakeholders at the university — faculty, staff, students, alumni, administrators  — work together to build policies. And those policies are then adopted by the Board of Trustees. 

We have seen waves of legislation, including in Florida in the past couple of years, that have restricted classroom instruction. But these policies go further because they also restrict the ability of governing boards to make their own decisions about their university. If you have the governor at a state rewriting college mission statements, you no longer have institutional autonomy. If they can't write their own mission statements, then they don't have any meaningful autonomy at all. 

So what really sets this apart from some of these other laws that restrict what can be taught in public universities is this attempt to subvert the public university system’s autonomy. This autonomy is, as you said, part of what fosters academic freedom in higher education. And that academic freedom – freedom from government and political intrusion in higher education – is part of what makes a democratic society. 

Our reporting at Coda has explored how educational censorship and book bans have taken root in backsliding democracies, such as Hungary and Turkey. When it comes to higher education, I would imagine there are parallels.

Hungary has banned entire fields of study and Poland has banned political history centers because the government doesn't like the research that they do. And what is being proposed here —  the state government being able to make these decisions about deprioritizing majors, rewriting mission statements, banning initiatives — is absolutely right out of the global authoritarian playbook. There is no meaningful difference between those provisions and what we see in those other countries. 

What about the elimination of the African American Studies course for Florida high schoolers? Did you see that coming?

There have been political controversies around advanced placement courses in the past. Most notably in 2014, when the College Board proposed a revision of the U.S. history course that was criticized by many conservatives as being an overly negative portrayal of American history. And the College Board responded to that, including some threats in Oklahoma and other states to disapprove the course, by adding a section in the course called American Exceptionalism that featured glowing statements that were positive about American history. So it's not surprising to see the College Board make these changes. They've made changes like this before.

What is surprising is for the governor of Florida and the state education department to outright reject a course. That’s never happened in the history of the advanced placement program, which goes back to 1952. And it's worth noting that there was a pilot classroom of this course going on at a lab school at Florida State University. The governor's office told the school that they had to cancel the pilot class that students were actively taking. So the willingness to deprive students of access to this causal material, including students who are already taking the class, is really unprecedented.

And this is all happening in tandem with all sorts of other state restrictions on what can be discussed in the classroom — more than a dozen states have passed legislation banning the instruction of critical race theory, or “divisive concepts.” I saw a headline a few days ago about a bill in Iowa that would attempt to create a website registry for parents to report teachers who violated the state's divisive concept bill that passed two years ago. Have you seen that elsewhere? What kinds of bills are you seeing?

We have definitely seen a variety of hotline provisions, including in states that don't even have these bills on the books, such as Virginia. These hotline provisions would involve people essentially snitching on their neighbors, on the teachers in their students’ classroom, to some kind of state authority who would then threaten their job for saying something that a particular parent didn’t like. And these bills, they've continued to proliferate this year. The rate this year of introduction is almost as great as the rate last year. We've seen over 70 [educational gag order] bills introduced already this year.

When I was talking to people about book restrictions in school libraries for my Coda piece, I was largely focused on elementary school, middle school and high school. And I asked historians and censorship experts if there was a historical precedent for the current volume of school and library book restrictions and bans. Several experts told me that a 1980s-era moral panic around Satanism led to a wave of book bans, but the last time that the country saw something of this magnitude was during McCarthyism. Do you see that historical parallel in higher education too?

I think McCarthyism is the right comparison. The laws promoted during that era — requiring faculty members to sign loyalty oaths saying that they were opposed to communism or laws restricting the teaching of particular subjects and government intervention in creating new, politicized departments in universities — were all hallmarks of the early Cold War and McCarthy era. 

And interestingly, many of those speech-related cases related to the loyalty oaths led to some of the most shining Constitutional jurisprudence in our history defending free expression in educational settings and elsewhere. And so the hope is that there will be some sort of legal protections around some of these areas that are being challenged. But just as it did in the McCarthy era, many of those decisions weren't rendered until the 60s or 70s, so it could be a long time.

The post Why Florida’s new university restrictions are ‘straight out of the global authoritarian playbook’ appeared first on Coda Story.

The premise of one of GenZ’s favorite new social apps is simple. BeReal sends a notification to your phone once a day, at a different time each day. “⚠️Time to BeReal ⚠️,” says the prompt, caution triangles included. You then have two minutes to share a picture of whatever you’re doing at that very moment, using both the front and back cameras on your smartphone. If your room is messy, too bad. It is only after you snap and post your picture that you can see what other users — whether they’re friends or random strangers — are doing that day.

When you select the “Discovery” tab, you can see exactly where complete strangers are at any given time. As I wrote this story, I could see a student studying for an exam in a village in southern Spain, a girl eating lunch in the Mariana islands in the South Pacific and the inside of a high school classroom in a French town on the Belgian border.

BeReal also lets you send a friend request to anyone who’s in your phone contacts — including people you may not want to see online or in real life. When my younger sister first showed me the app, it immediately reminded me of a jealous ex-partner who would demand to know where I was and who I was with at any given moment. How easy BeReal would make life for him, I thought. Gradually, if he was paying attention, he’d be able to build up a pattern. The city park where I take my solitary morning run, my favorite daily coffee spot, my bus route and my after-work wine bar — all could now be revealed on BeReal.

A viral tweet in October by the pop culture writer Engwari sparked a discussion of the same issue. “Am I crazy or does the BeReal app not seem like a stalker's wet dream to anyone else?” she wrote. “When I first found out how it works, it reminded me of those abusive partners who angrily/jealously text you ‘take a picture of where you are and who you're with RIGHT THIS SECOND,’” one person replied. 

Like many chat apps, BeReal strongly encourages users to sync their phone contacts with the app upon download. And while the default is private, BeReal encourages you to switch on the location settings when you post. What it doesn’t tell you is that this means your precise location, down to the square meter and even your longitude and latitude coordinates. Other apps like TikTok, Instagram and Facebook harvest and collect precise location data, but they don’t do it to this degree. On BeReal, unless you turn off the location settings, anyone following you can see exactly where you are and potentially find you. I spoke to a handful of people who had run-ins with stalkers due to these features.

Jem, a 22-year-old recent college graduate from North Carolina, kept her BeReal account private, but a stalker still found her profile through the contacts import feature. “I don’t have his number saved, in fact, it’s blocked. So it was shocking to see it would still recommend me as a friend,” Jem said. When she didn’t accept his request, he made a BeReal profile posing as one of her friends. “Because BeReal doesn’t show you friends’ lists or posts, I just assumed it was actually her and added her back. He then had access to my BeReal,” she said, describing how strange she felt once she realized he had been seeing her daily activity — and her precise location, which she had switched on. “Luckily he doesn’t live near me,” Jem said.

Until very recently, it was impossible to block someone on BeReal — which presented a serious problem for people facing harassment. You could report an abusive user, but this provided no guarantees. The other option was to unfriend them, but this wouldn't make you invisible, in the way that blocking might.

When Shomil Jain, a student at the University of California, Berkeley, noticed the app snowballing in popularity on his campus, he “did a little reverse engineering” and found something that scared him. On the app’s “Add Friends” page, BeReal gives suggestions for friends of your friends to add, similar to Facebook’s much-maligned “People You May Know” algorithm. Jain, who studies software engineering, was easily able to scrape the site and see an entire network of someone’s friends — and their friends’ friends. 

Without too much trouble, Jain found that it was technically possible to see the friends of pretty much every single user on the platform, including those who believed they were protecting themselves by keeping their posts private.

“The sheer amount of data that was exposed was pretty stunning,” Jain told me. “Facebook probably spent years building security around their friend graph, and these folks just casually made the whole thing available for the world to see.”

A BeReal spokesperson named Bryan told me he recommends people only add their close friends and family on the app. Bryan also said the company would soon be launching new settings that allow users to choose whether they prefer sharing an approximate or precise location with their followers.

“Unfortunately, all things of a social nature may attract ill-intended people,” he said. Indeed. In 2022, the app attracted all kinds of people — it topped 53 million downloads by the end of the year. The company, based in France, also raised $60 million in investment funding.

Founded by French tech entrepreneurs Alexis Barreyat and Kevin Perreau, BeReal first gained traction in French universities during lockdown in 2020. It then began snowballing on college campuses in Europe and the U.S. before breaking out into the world at large.

Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz staked $30 million on BeReal in 2022. Anne Lee Stakes, a partner at the firm, wrote a LinkedIn post last week hailing the campus strategy as an “experimental” and “iconic” technique combining “brute force,” word-of-mouth marketing with the student ambassador program. The company paid student ambassadors on campuses across the world “to spread the BeReal mission and support our growth.” At Harvard, students were invited to party at a burger joint and allowed entry and free food, provided they downloaded the app and added five friends.

BeReal doesn’t serve any ads or have a subscription model, so it’s yet to be seen how it will make returns for its investors. Sources close to the company told the Financial Times in September that investors were pushing BeReal to monetize and introduce new features to avoid becoming a flash-in-the-pan app like Clubhouse or House Party. A telltale sign that it’s caught on — and may become a real money-maker — is that other platforms are trying to emulate the premise. Instagram and TikTok have launched copycat plugins of the BeReal format, called “TikTok Now” and “Candid Stories.”

This all hinges on people’s willingness to really use the app every day. Unless you post something yourself, you can’t see what other people have posted that day either. This, the app’s makers say, is to discourage “lurking” — but it also pressures users to post each and every day, making it easier for anyone watching to build a more complete pattern of someone’s life. This could be your stalker. Or it could be a tech company looking to monetize people’s data.

This is a problem, said Jules Polonetsky, a lawyer and privacy expert and the CEO of advocacy group and think tank Future of Privacy Forum. “BeReal’s main legal risk is requiring its huge teenage audience to post a photo, or be blocked from their friends’ photos. This runs smack into privacy standards in Europe and California that require privacy by default for kids and teen services.”

Bryan at BeReal told me: “BeReal’s business model is not based on the monetization of its users’ personal data for the purposes of commercial profiling or targeted advertising.” But that leaves plenty of room for other kinds of data-driven profits.

“Clearly, you have to monetize something,” said Jon Callas, the director of public interest technology at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. While it may seem nice that these services are free of charge, “instead of paying for things in cash, we're paying for them in information.”

The coercive element of BeReal also caught Callas’ attention. 

“I thought it was a joke the first time I heard of it,” he said. What was the funny part, I asked him. “It’s using social coercion to say, ‘you have two minutes to drop what you’re doing and interact with social media.’”

Even the name “BeReal,” Callas said, added to that sense of artificial peer pressure — “because if we’re not doing this thing, we’re not Being Real. And who doesn’t want to be real?”

The post Be real or be stalked? Privacy pitfalls of Gen-Z’s favorite app  appeared first on Coda Story.

In many places, meteorologists on the local news are local celebrities, seen as trusted interpreters of the data provided by the National Weather Service, friendly personalities and loyal community boosters. Even in today’s sharply divided, partisan America, they are not usually seen as divisive figures.

No longer.

A vocal opposition has formed against TV weather forecasters and the science of meteorology.

Former political candidates have conjured claims that last October’s devastating Hurricane Ian was engineered by the "Deep State" to destroy Republican governor Ron DeSantis' reputation. Many in Florida’s Tampa region prepared for the landfall of Hurricane Ian, which, models had predicted, would hit their area. But storm path models rapidly evolved in the run-up to the hurricane, sparking spurious allegations from two Republican candidates: DeAnna Lorraine, who ran for election to the U.S. House in 2020, and Lauren Witzke, who campaigned for a U.S. Senate seat in Delaware. They claimed that the hurricane was, in fact, a political instrument targeting opponents of vaccine mandates and anti-transgender legislation — baseless and absurd claims that gained currency on social media, especially among some Republican supporters.

Weather manipulation conspiracies have been around for decades. One of the most durable has been the chemtrails theory, which holds that the U.S. government manipulates the weather for nefarious reasons by releasing chemicals into the atmosphere from aircraft. Chemtrail conspiracists often mistake the trails of water vapor expelled by airplanes flying overhead for chemicals.

This conspiracy has been re-upped many times in recent years, especially during moments of uncertainty or social panic, such as during the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. Chemtrail conspiracists often share the same messaging as other conspiracy theorists, like adherents of the “Great Replacement Theory.” Researchers have estimated that between 30% and 40% of Americans believe in elements of the chemtrails conspiracy.  

Adverse weather events like the latest catastrophic hurricane, heatwave or winter storm energize conspiracists. Many cite local weather to bolster their claims of climate change denial. 

"Weather is your mood, the climate is your personality. It's easy to conflate the two, if you don't understand the difference," said Dennis Mersereau, a weather journalist in Reidsville, North Carolina. "It's hard for folks to separate daily weather from long-term climate patterns, especially now that we're feeling the effects of climate change's influence on extreme weather."

Weaponizing weather has made meteorologists a target, and not only in the United States. 

Meteorologists in Sweden had faced backlash ahead of the country’s general elections last year because of a "misleading image" that falsely claimed to show proof of "climate hysteria." Screengrabs of weather forecasts are being manipulated to show weather patterns and temperatures that allegedly prove that climate change is not real. 

In Hungary, two meteorologists were fired over forecasts, ultimately inaccurate, that put a damper on patriotic celebrations, part of the government’s general crackdown on media in the country. 

In response, meteorologists have felt the need to get political themselves. A German meteorologist has centered climate change in his weather reports to counter growing climate change denial. “TV meteorologists, unlike news reporters, can demonstrate this connection in a way that's far more immediate and accessible," he told Politico Europe.

As climate change transforms coastlines, consumes forests and upends hundreds of millions of lives, it follows that the local weather report has become a cultural and political warzone. Added to their predictions of precipitation and reporting on snowfall measurements, meteorologists have begun to develop a televised discourse on climate change in an effort to combat climate misinformation. 

"Meteorologists are the most visible scientists in our daily lives. They're on television every day, and their forecasts are omnipresent whenever you hop online. That visibility makes them an easy target for someone looking to vent their rage," said Mersereau, the weather journalist.

And because climate change denialism has been linked to other forms of online extremism, meteorologists have a unique role in being able to bring familiar credibility to combat misinformation for a local audience. 

"Once you believe that even nature itself is under the control of a shadowy cabal, it gets easier to see how someone falls into the really dangerous stuff," said Mersereau.

"We've done a lot of work with TV meteorologists on understanding their audience," said Bernadette Placky, the chief meteorologist at Climate Central. "People's views on climate change do tend to be more aligned with politics than they do with science and education."

Climate Central provides resources for meteorologists to help educate their local audiences on matters of climate change. They collaborate with meteorologists abroad since these issues can also be transnational. 

It wasn’t that long ago that the majority of meteorologists had trouble believing in the human causes of climate change. In a research paper published in 2017, surveys of TV weathercasters suggested that “weathercasters’ views of climate change may be rapidly evolving.” The paper found that “in contrast to prior surveys, which found many weathercasters who were unconvinced of climate change, newer results show that approximately 80% of weathercasters are convinced of human-caused climate change. A majority of weathercasters now indicate that climate change has altered the weather in their media markets over the past 50 years, and many feel there have also been harmful impacts to water resources, agriculture, transportation resources, and human health.”

American audiences have also continued to shift, according to reports from the Climate Change Communication program at the Yale School of the Environment. The number of people who are “alarmed” by climate change is increasing, while those grouped as “dismissive” have trended downward. 

The challenge for meteorologists is to tease out the distinctions between everyday weather and long-term climate patterns, while still preparing their audience for the next extreme weather event. The outlook looks cloudy, with a strong possibility of storms ahead.

The post Conspiracy theorists target your local TV weather forecaster appeared first on Coda Story.

After the decision, red states moved quickly to ban or severely limit access to the procedure. This made the virtual sphere uniquely important for people seeking information about abortion, especially those living in states that have outlawed the procedure with little or no exceptions. 

Google searches for abortion medications increased by 70% the month following the court ruling. People flocked to social media platforms and websites with resources about where and how to end a pregnancy, pay for an abortion or seek help to obtain an abortion out of state. 

Despite state laws criminalizing abortion, these digital spaces are legally protected from liability for hosting this kind of content. That’s thanks to the landmark Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, the 26 words that are often credited with creating today’s internet as we know it. Thanks to Section 230, websites of all kinds are protected from lawsuits over material that users might post on their platforms. This legal shield allows sites to host speech about all kinds of things that might be illegal — abortion included — without worrying about being sued.

But the future of 230 is on shaky ground. Next month, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on a case that challenges the scope of the landmark internet law. The Court’s decision could have sweeping consequences for digital speech about abortion and reproductive health in a post-Roe America. 

THE BACKGROUND

When armed ISIS assailants staged a series of attacks in central Paris in November 2015, an American college student named Nohemi Gonzalez was among the 130 people who lost their lives. Her family has since taken Google (the owner of YouTube) to court. Their lawyers argue that the tech giant aided and abetted terrorism by promoting YouTube videos featuring ISIS fighters and other material that could radicalize viewers and make them want to carry out attacks like the one that killed Nohemi. Central to the case is YouTube’s recommendation algorithm, which feeds users a never-ending stream of videos in an effort to keep them hooked. Independent research has shown that the algorithm tends to promote videos that are more “extreme” or shocking than what a person might have searched to begin with. Why? Because this kind of material is more likely to capture and sustain users’ attention.

Section 230 protects Google from legal liability for the videos it hosts on YouTube. But does it protect Google from legal liability for recommending videos that could inspire a person to join a terrorist group and commit murder? That is the central question of Gonzalez v. Google. If the Supreme Court decides that the legal shield of Section 230 does not apply to the recommendation engine, the outcome could affect all kinds of videos on the platform. Any video that could be illegal under state laws — like abortion-related content in the post-Roe era — could put the company at risk of legal liability and would probably cause Google to more proactively censor videos that might fall afoul of the law. This could end up making abortion and reproductive health-related information much harder to access online.

If this all sounds wonky and technical, that’s because it is. But the Court’s decision has the potential to “dramatically reshape the internet,” according to Eric Goldman, a professor at California’s Santa Clara University School of Law specializing in internet law. 

Algorithmic systems are deeply embedded in the architecture of online services. Among other things, websites and social media platforms use algorithms to recommend material to users in response to their online activity. These algorithmic recommendations are behind the personalized ads we see online, recommended videos and accounts to follow on social media sites and what pops up when we look at search engines. They create a user’s newsfeed on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. They have become a core feature of how the internet functions.

WHAT ARE THE STAKES IN A POST-ROE AMERICA?

If the Supreme Court rules in the plaintiffs’ favor, it could open up a vast world of possible  litigation, as websites and platforms move assertively to take down content that could put them at legal risk, including speech about abortion care and reproductive health. Platforms then would face the threat of litigation for recommending content that stands in violation of state laws  — including, in thirteen cases, laws against abortion. 

“That's going to dramatically affect [the] availability of abortion-related material because, at that point, anything that a service does that promotes or raises the profile of abortion-related material over other kinds of content would no longer be protected by Section 230, would be open for all these state criminal laws, and services simply can't tolerate that risk,” Goldman explained. 

In this scenario, technology companies could not only be exposed to lawsuits but could even find themselves at risk of criminal charges for algorithmically recommending content that runs afoul of state abortion bans. One example is Texas’ anti-abortion “bounty” law, SB 8, which deputizes private citizens to sue anyone who “aids or abets” another person seeking an abortion. If the Court decides to remove Section 230’s shield for algorithmic amplification, websites and platforms could be sued for recommending content that helps a Texas resident to obtain an abortion in violation of SB 8. Most sites would likely choose to play it safe and simply remove any abortion-related speech that could expose them to criminal or legal risks.

The abortion information space is just one realm where this could play out if the Court decides that Section 230’s protections do not apply to algorithmic promotion of content. Anupam Chander, a law professor at Georgetown University who focuses on international tech regulation, explained: “Making companies liable for algorithmically promoting speech when they haven't themselves developed it will lead to the speech that is most controversial being removed from these online services.”

Goldman had similar concerns. “We’ve never had this discussion about what kind of crazy things could a state legislature do if they wanted to hold services liable for third-party content. And that's because Section 230 basically takes that power away from state legislatures,” he said. “But the Supreme Court could open that up as a new ground for the legislatures to plow. And they're going to plant some really crazy stuff in that newly fertile ground that we've never seen before.”

Consider the #MeToo movement. Section 230 protects platforms against defamation lawsuits for hosting content alleging sexual harassment, abuse or misconduct. Without the law’s shield, the movement could have had a different trajectory. Platforms may have taken down content that could have exposed them to lawsuits from some of the powerful people who were subjects of allegations.

“That kind of speech, which we have seen the internet empower over the last decade in ways that have literally reshaped society, would lead to the kind of liability concerns that would mean that it would be suppressed in the future,” Chander added. “So, when someone claims that Harvey Weinstein assaulted them, companies are in a difficult position having to assess whether or not they can leave that up when Harvey Weinstein's lawyers might be sending cease and desist and saying, ‘we're going to sue you for it for defamation.’” 

Proponents of Section 230, who have long argued that changing or eliminating the law would end up disproportionately censoring the speech of marginalized groups, are hoping to avoid this scenario. But it’s hard to predict how the Supreme Court justices will rule in this case. Section 230 is one of the rare issues in contemporary American politics that doesn’t map neatly onto partisan or ideological lines. As I reported for Coda in 2021, conservative and liberal politicians alike have taken issue with Section 230 in recent years, introducing dozens of bills seeking to change or eliminate it. Both U.S. President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump have called for the law to be repealed. 

“This is not just a left-right issue,” Chander explained. “It has this kind of strange bedfellows character. So I think there's a real possibility here of an odd coalition both from the left and the right to essentially rewrite Section 230 and remove much of its protections.”

If the Supreme Court decides that platforms are on the hook legally for recommendation algorithms, it may be harder for people seeking abortions to come across the information they need, say, in a Google search or on a social media platform like Instagram, as those companies will probably take down (or geoblock) any content that could put them at legal risk. It feels almost impossible to imagine this scenario in the U.S., where we expect to find the world at our fingertips every time we look at our phones. But that reality has been constructed, in large part, on the shoulders of Section 230. Without it, the free flow of information we have come to expect in the digital era may become a relic of the past — when abortion was a constitutional right and information about it was accessible online. The Supreme Court’s decision on this tech policy case could, once again, turn back the clock on abortion rights.

The post What a law designed to protect the internet has to do with abortion appeared first on Coda Story.