Democrats and voting rights groups are sounding the alarm after the North Carolina Supreme Court on Tuesday blocked the state election board from certifying the Democratic winner of a Supreme Court race.
The court will decide in coming weeks whether to throw out tens of thousands of votes and thereby overturn the result of the Democratic incumbent justice’s victory.
Continue reading “North Carolina Dems Denounce ‘Astonishing’ State Supreme Court Move To Block Certification Of Dem Victory”As a follow up to my post below I want to return to a more technical point but one which is critical to understand as the baseline for any discussion about social media and “platforms.” “Network effects” are an inherent feature of the tech industry. You can go all the way back to what now seems like the quaintly primitive tech of VHS and Betamax. They are also embedded at the core of Silicon Valley/VC business culture in which 9 out of 10 investments fail but one (you hope) has staggering returns which make up for all the rest. “Hockey stick growth” is another side of this many-sided coin at the center of early 21st century capitalism. It is the hunt for a business proposition in which costs are chained to arithmetic growth and returns are exponential. If one of your ten bets holds something like that possibility, you can afford to invest in a bunch of dry holes.
Continue reading “The Economics That Define Social Media”This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.
The death of Jean-Marie Le Pen, former leader of the party once known as the National Front, occurs at a time when the mainstreaming of far-right politics in France seems almost complete.
Le Pen was, for most of his career, considered the devil in French politics. Yet today, his party, headed by his daughter and now called National Rally (Rassemblement National), is at the gates of power.
Le Pen became an MP in France’s national parliament in 1956, when he was just 27. He quickly became the face of the extreme right. After leaving for Algeria to fight against independence and being accused of torture during his military service there, Le Pen returned to French politics in the 1960s.
This was a time of social progress – and therefore a nadir for far-right politics.
In 1972, Le Pen was part of the group that created the National Front – essentially an attempt to unite various small extreme right organisations under one banner. He became the party’s first president as he was considered the least extreme of the contenders.
This was despite his having been found guilty of war crime apologia in 1971 for republishing a vinyl record of Nazi songs. Le Pen also routinely demonstrated a nostalgic attachment to the Nazi-collaborating Vichy regime of second-world-war France.
Racism was always at the core of Le Pen’s politics. However, as his party sought mainstream acceptance, the core became thinly concealed under veneers of anti-immigration concerns, patriotic pride or even pretence of defending women and France’s system of laïcité (secularism) against Islam.
The beginnings of the National Front were slow and the party struggled to be noticed until the mid-1980s. Its first national breakthrough was greatly aided by Socialist president François Mitterrand, who had been elected in 1981 on a radical platform but quickly turned to austerity to respond to a developing financial crisis.
Mitterrand’s approval ratings took a tumble as a result and, to stem the resurgence of the more moderate right, he actively and consciously helped Le Pen’s then-struggling party. With a view to splitting the vote on the right, Mitterand lent legitimacy to Le Pen’s extreme ideas by giving him a platform on public national media in particular. Most cynical of all, Mitterand changed the electoral system to a proportional one, which gave the National Front 35 MPs and a huge boost in visibility.
Yet the real shock was to come in 2002 when Le Pen reached the second round of the presidential election. Here again though, this said far more about the state of French politics and democracy than it did of the so-called “irresistible rise” of the National Front.
Le Pen’s actual vote had been stagnant since 1988. Although the Le Pen vote appeared to increase by 2.5% between 1988 and 2002, when turnout is taken into account, his share of the vote increased only by 0.19% – or less than 500,000 votes. This is certainly not negligible but far from the perceived “tidal wave”.
Instead, it was the growing unpopularity of the status quo and the major governing parties which paved the way for the earthquake. In 2002, the major centrist parties on the left and right collectively received fewer votes than the abstention rate.
Likewise, perspective is also needed on the 2007 election, which has always been depicted as Le Pen’s downfall and the triumph of the mainstream over the extremists. In reality, Nicolas Sarkozy had siphoned a significant portion of the far-right vote by openly positioning himself as direct competition to Le Pen. Sarkozy’s constant attacks against immigration and Islam earned him the nickname “Nicolas Le Pen” in the Wall Street Journal.
As Marine Le Pen, Jean-Marie’s daughter and – at the time – campaign director, said on the night of the first round when asked how bad a defeat this was: “This is the victory of his ideas!”
So while Jean-Marie Le Pen was seeking to render his politics more palatable by moving away from his most incendiary discourse, the mainstream parties were helping his cause by taking an ambivalent attitude towards his messaging in order to win back his voters. Le Pen also provided a welcome diversion away from the crises mainstream parties proved unable to address.
This situation continued to worsen as Marine Le Pen replaced her father as party leader in 2011. She eventually changed the name of the party to National Rally and evicted him in 2015 when she could no longer defend his comments about gas chambers being a mere “detail” of the second world war.
But by then Sarkozy had mainstreamed much of the FN’s discourse. The election of Socialist François Hollande as president did nothing to turn the tide in 2012 as he also tried to act “tough” on the far right’s pet issues, including immigration and Islam in response to a deadly wave of terrorist attacks.
Arguably no president, however, has proven as zealous as Emmanuel Macron in his attempts to defeat the far right by absorbing its discourse, while claiming to be a bulwark against it. In 2020, he appointed an interior minister who accused Le Pen of being “too soft on Islam”. This marked a new low – the mainstream was outbidding rather than mimicking Le Pen.
Meanwhile, Marine Le Pen has benefited not only from the mainstream’s pandering to her own politics but the hype around her rival on the far right, Eric Zemmour, during the 2022 presidential election campaign. The heightened attention devoted to Zemmour effectively obscured the genuine threat posed by Le Pen and her far-right ideology, which, by comparison, appeared almost moderate and reasonable.
Now, Le Pen, despite being embroiled in a damaging trial, appears the de facto kingmaker, supplying the votes Macron’s government needs to survive in a fractured parliament.
The death of Jean-Marie Le Pen occurs therefore at a time when French politics is facing one of its worst crisis. Far from being a bulwark against the far right, Macron has paved the way for the National Rally by mainstreaming its discourse and politics.
As much of the mainstream elites seem to have accepted that the rise of the far right is irresistible, the only choice left is whether it will be the far right or mainstream politicians implementing far-right politics. These are the options: the bad and the worse. That is until France takes seriously the threat posed by the far right and the need for a radical change.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
I noted yesterday how Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is rushing to jump on the Trump tech bandwagon. He signaled this again when he announced that Meta is getting out of the content moderation business and adopting Musk-Era Twitter’s “community notes” model. He further added that he would relocate the remaining content moderation operations to Texas where people are less biased — yes, he really said that.
I want to make a broader point. The issue here is that one of the richest men in the world and one of the very most powerful has made himself and his vastly powerful tech platforms appendages of the Trump political machine and dedicated himself to flowing money to the Trump family directly. But let’s not get too upset about his “content moderation” decisions. The content moderation pivot is an example of the former decision, a carefully timed signal to curry favor. But it’s not some big disaster. The whole existence of it was just a ploy to get out from under his company’s last PR disaster back in 2017 and 2018. And on a more specific level we should be agnostic at best about whether Meta does “content moderation” at all. We should always have been highly skeptical of any corporate-backed effort at scale to determine what is and isn’t accurate information. This isn’t a new thought on my part. It goes back to what I was saying in 2018 and before.
Continue reading “Zuck’s ‘Content Moderation’ Was Always A Crock”A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
President-elect Donald Trump raced to the Supreme Court this morning to try to get the high court to block his sentencing Friday in the hush money case in New York.
Trump’s latest move to avert sentencing came after he was rebuffed by an state appeals court judge Tuesday. In a 30-minute emergency hearing scheduled on a hour’s notice, Trump argued that his entire conviction was defective, that presidential immunity precluded his prosecution, and that sentencing him during the presidential transition was disruptive. TPM’s Josh Kovensky was in the courtroom for the hearing.
The prospect of the uber-conservative Supreme Court coming to Trump’s rescue from criminal accountability yet again raises the specter of an even more unbound Trump being sworn in on Jan. 20. Furthermore, it may not be the only Trump-related case the Supreme Court has to consider before inauguration. Also potentially on tap is whether Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report to Attorney General Merrick Garland can be made public.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon continued her series of extraordinary interventions in the Mar-a-Lago case, purporting to block the public release of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report. In an unprecedented order issued at the urging of Trump’s co-defendants, Cannon barred the Justice Department from releasing the report until three days after the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals disposed of the matter.
Trump’s co-defendants had urged both Cannon and the 11th Circuit to intervene. The 11th Circuit gave Smith a deadline of this morning to respond. It’s timetable beyond that is unclear. Trump has since moved to intervene in the case himself. In an almost comic move, after the won relief from Cannon, Trump’s co-defendants reiterated to the 11th Circuit to that they prefer the appeals court let Cannon handle the matter herself. Of course.
Cannon arguably has no jurisdiction over the Mar-a-Lago case while it’s on appeal, yet she acted anyway. Still, the most alarming aspect of her ruling was that she seems to be blocking the release of Smith’s report not just as to the Mar-a-Lago, but also as to his Jan. 6 case in Washington, D.C., over which she never had any jurisdiction.
Jay Bratt, 65, a counterintelligence prosecutor and a key member of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team on the Mar-a-Lago case, retired on Friday, after 34 years with the Justice Department, the NYT reported.
Reuters: ‘Three senior U.S. Justice Department officials committed misconduct in the final months of Donald Trump’s first presidency by leaking details about a non-public investigation, a move that may have been intended to sway the 2020 election, the department’s internal watchdog concluded in a new report.”
Trump held one of his rambling, untethered, make-of-it-what-you-will press conferences at Mar-a-Lago yesterday. If you’re inclined to freak out, there was plenty to freak out about. If you’re taking more of a wait-and-see-what-he-actually-does approach, there was still plenty to freak out about:
In the face of threats from the Trump and the right, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta is abandoning content moderation on Facebook:
Henry Farrell, on the social media crisis:
We tend to think of the problem of social media as a problem of disinformation – that is, of people receiving erroneous information and being convinced that false things are in fact true. Hence, we can try to make social media better through factchecking, through educating people to see falsehoods and similar. This is, indeed, a problem, but it is not the most important one. The fundamental problem, as I see it, is not that social media misinforms individuals about what is true or untrue but that it creates publics with malformed collective understandings. That is a more subtle problem, but also a more pernicious one.
The Forward: “The Heritage Foundation plans to ‘identify and target’ volunteer editors on Wikipedia who it says are ‘abusing their position’ by publishing content the group believes to be antisemitic, according to documents obtained by the Forward.”
Mother Jones: “The Republican majority on the North Carolina Supreme Court on Tuesday temporarily blocked the state election board from certifying the victory of one of the court’s own members—Democratic Justice Allison Riggs. In doing so, the state’s highest court laid the groundwork for potentially overturning the election and handing the seat to Riggs’ GOP challenger.”
TPM’s Kate Riga: Louisiana: Racism Doesn’t Exist Anymore, So Let Us Racially Gerrymander
“I think being president of a public university in a red state right now is one of the hardest jobs in higher education.”–Michael Harris, professor of higher education at Southern Methodist University
Dire warnings of an extreme wind event in Los Angeles proved prescient Tuesday with entire neighborhoods overrun by flames; cars hastily abandoned in a panicked retreat being shoved aside by a bulldozer so emergency workers could reach the fire zone; a school, a synagogue, and a landmark restaurant burned to the ground.
Three major fires were burning in Los Angeles overnight, with winds expected to ebb some later in the day but none of the fire were close to being contained yet. Casualty figures were remarkably low but it was still early and with the extent of the damage had yet been surveyed.
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President Trump has created a massive gulf in America.
No, I am not talking about the half baked promise “to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America” that Trump announced in his news conference on Tuesday. The gulf that our country actually is going to have is the one between our current reality and the one we will be experiencing when Trump takes office on Jan. 20.
Continue reading “Off The Rails And Off To The Races “We’re seeing a lot unfold all at once today. It seems overwhelming and it’s meant to seem overwhelming. That’s the central point — not just a side effect of a lot of things happening at once. I think of it like being in an iMax theater. Maybe even one of those more immersive ones where there’s percussive sound and the seats shake. One of those movies where you’re on a roller coaster or maybe hang gliding. You know you are sitting in a theater, not in motion at all. But the visual stimulus is so overwhelming you cannot help gripping the arm rests like you’re a thousand feet in the air or in free fall.
Of course it’s not exactly the same. This isn’t just a movie. Something real is happening. A lot of real things are happening. We’re not just sitting in a theater. But the point of all of this is to create the apparently overwhelming and unchallengeable feeling that Trump is all-powerful, that his team is all-knowing and have everything figured out, and that nothing can stop him.
That’s simply not true. So don’t forget that, entirely by design, you’re being overwhelmed with sensory stimulus. It’s not real.
Continue reading “Team Billionaire Lets Loose”Republican state officials and legislators in Louisiana argued to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday that the state has moved past racial discrimination in voting — and so should be allowed to suppress Black voting power with impunity.
Continue reading “Louisiana: Racism Doesn’t Exist Anymore, So Let Us Racially Gerrymander”Donald Trump failed on Tuesday to persuade a New York appeals court to block his Friday sentencing in the Manhattan hush money case.
Continue reading “Trump Loses Bid to Block Friday Sentencing”You’ve likely seen that Mark Zuckerberg, newly re-branded as Donald Trump’s fluffy lap monkey, has announced that Facebook and Meta’s other properties are getting out of the content moderation business. They’ll move in the direction of “community notes,” semi-functional community moderation which Elon Musk pioneered at Twitter. What interested me much more was the Axios run-down of the news: “Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are of one mind. The most powerful global information platforms should be governed by free speech — and the people — not by the platforms themselves.”
Who are we kidding here?
I’ve always been wary of the whole concept of “misinformation” in the context of corporate platform moderation. Not against precisely, but highly skeptical that you can actually come to such open and shut definitions at scale. But it’s all basically an impossible skein to untangle because of the unavoidable scourge of the platform monopolies themselves. These are private companies, not any kind of actual public square. Let them do whatever they want. Don’t do them the favor of granting the premise that their advertising and data platform is a public good. And yet the freedom to spin up untrammeled monopolies makes the conceit half true. There’s simply no extracting a “free speech” from these engines since they’re algorithms all the way down.
But again, who are we kidding here?
Continue reading “Zuckerberg Achieves Trump Lap Monkey Badge And Other Platform News”
