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Voters cast their midterm ballots on Nov. 6, 2018, at Briles Schoolhouse in Peoria Township, Kansas. (photo: Whitney Curtis/Getty Images)
ew state laws tightening voting restrictions come in two basic varieties: those that make it harder to cast a vote, and those making it more difficult to get registered to vote in the first place.
In Kansas, one law effectively shuts down voter registration drives.
Now, it's a felony offense to impersonate an election official and the law creates a vague standard for breaking it, a standard that depends on impressions. It criminalizes engaging in conduct that might seem like something an election official would do.
Davis Hammet, president of the Kansas civic engagement group Loud Light, says that subjective standard would probably include work his volunteers do, which is approaching people with clipboards and registering them to vote.
"So, if someone accuses you of being an election official or saying they were just confused and thought you were one, and you were arrested, you would be charged with a felony," Hammet says. "And so, a felony means you lose your right to vote. So, you could lose your right to vote for trying to help people vote."
So Hammet suspended his organization's voter registration drives, just as they would normally be ratcheting up to register hundreds of incoming college freshmen. Other organizations have shut down in-person registration drives too, including the League of Women Voters of Kansas.
This knocks a big hole in efforts to register new voters, because county elections officials rely on volunteer groups to do outreach.
"I don't have the staff that can go out to fairs and art events and set up a voter registration booth," says Douglass County Clerk Jamie Shew.
Shew says those events and other volunteer efforts are the best way to bring non-voting citizens into the democratic process.
Kansas Republicans who pushed the law say shutting down voter registration drives was not their intent. GOP state Sen. Larry Alley says the idea was to stop random actors from cloaking themselves in sham authority through the mail, like sending out fake ballot applications bearing official-looking seals.
There hasn't been a problem with volunteers pretending to be elections officials. And Alley says they can stay out of trouble simply by making their identities clear.
"We want a fair and a secure and a transparent election to make sure that when you cast your ballot, you feel that you cast your ballot and it's going to be counted," Alley says.
Of course, Kansas isn't the only state changing election laws this year. And critics say these Republican-led efforts have less to do with secure voting than they do driving down vote totals for Democratic candidates.
Tammy Patrick has been tracking an avalanche of election-related legislation for the nonpartisan group Democracy Fund.
"There have been a little more than 3,000 bills introduced ... this legislative session and which is the most bills we've seen around election administration," Patrick says. "Many of them actually have included things very similar to the Kansas law."
That's new restrictions on who can register voters, and how forms have to be submitted. Patrick says some new laws even criminalize minor clerical errors sometimes made by elections officials.
In Kansas, voter registration groups are suing to stop the new elections law and have asked for a temporary injunction against enforcing the provision creating a felony offense for appearing to be an election official.
But in the meantime, new registrations have slowed, and Loud Light volunteer Anita Austin is frustrated.
"I'm a Black woman and it matters a lot to me because Black people have been disenfranchised," Austin says, clipboard in hand. "It is common day voter suppression. You know, we used to be able to just say, Blacks can't vote, women can't vote. Nowadays we got to come up with weird laws, like you're impersonating an election official."
Mark Zuckerberg. (photo: Mark Lennihan/AP)
The agency is getting a second chance to convince a federal judge that the social-media giant is a monopoly which needs to be broken up.
ast Thursday, the Federal Trade Commission got a second chance to convince James E. Boasberg, a district judge in Washington, D.C., that Facebook is a predatory monopoly. The do-over stems from a suit filed by the agency last December; it argued that the company has been engaged in anticompetitive behavior, buying up potential rivals such as WhatsApp and Instagram, and requiring third-party app developers to agree not to create products that could compete with Facebook. In June, Boasberg dismissed the suit, ruling that the agency had not sufficiently demonstrated that Facebook was, in fact, a monopoly. “Unlike familiar consumer goods like tobacco or office supplies, there is no obvious or universally agreed upon definition of just what a personal social networking service is,” he wrote. “It is almost as if the agency expects the Court to simply nod to the conventional wisdom that Facebook is a monopolist.” Shares of the social network rose more than four per cent after Boasberg’s ruling, sending the company’s market capitalization past a trillion dollars.
The December lawsuit, which was initiated by the Trump Administration, is being carried forward by Biden’s. (Regulating Facebook is a rare point of bipartisan agreement in Washington, though not necessarily for the same reasons.) The new head of the agency, Lina Khan, a former F.T.C. staffer and a professor at Columbia Law School, is—at the age of thirty-two—perhaps the nation’s most prominent advocate for using antitrust law to break up Big Tech. She was counsel to a House subcommittee that issued a four-hundred-page report, in October, 2020, which found that Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple “have become the kinds of monopolies we last saw in the era of oil barons and railroad tycoons.” On July 14th, a month after Khan was confirmed by the Senate, Facebook sent a petition to the F.T.C. requesting that she recuse herself from “any decisions concerning whether and how to continue the F.T.C.’s antitrust case against the company.” (Amazon made a similar complaint, two weeks earlier.) In a publicly released letter, the Democratic senators Elizabeth Warren, Richard Blumenthal, and Cory Booker, along with Representative Pramila Jayapal, chastised Facebook’s C.E.O., Mark Zuckerberg, and Amazon’s C.E.O., Andy Jassy, writing, “The real basis of your concerns appears to be that you fear Chair Khan’s expertise and interpretation of federal antitrust law.” They also accused the C.E.O.s of trying to sideline and discredit Khan in order to “evade accountability for any anti-competitive behavior.”
The amended complaint is sharper than the original. It points to the rise of mobile Internet as the impetus for Facebook’s “buy or bury” strategy. “Facebook’s leadership came to the realization—after several expensive failures—that it lacked the business talent required to maintain its dominance amid changing conditions,” the amended complaint alleges. “Unable to maintain its monopoly by fairly competing, the company’s executives addressed the existential threat by buying up new innovators that were succeeding where Facebook failed.” In a statement announcing the new filing, Holly Vedova, the acting director of the F.T.C.’s Bureau of Competition, wrote, “This conduct is no less anticompetitive than if Facebook had bribed emerging app competitors not to compete. The antitrust laws were enacted to prevent precisely this type of illegal activity by monopolists.”
Even if Boasberg is unswayed by the F.T.C.’s amended complaint, Khan’s tenure seems to already have invigorated an agency that had previously investigated only one of more than a hundred Facebook acquisitions. (In 2012, it probed the company’s purchase of Instagram, but did not block it.) Earlier this month, when Facebook tossed researchers from N.Y.U.’s Ad Observatory off its platform, Khan’s F.T.C. pushed back. The researchers, Laura Edelson and Damon McCoy, were using a browser extension that they’d built to examine Facebook’s Ad Library, a searchable database of advertisements running on Facebook products, to understand the social and political effects of those ads. “When Facebook shut down our accounts, we had just begun studies intended to determine whether the platform is contributing to vaccine hesitancy and sowing distrust in elections,” they wrote, in the Times. “We were also trying to figure out what role the platform may have played leading up to the Capitol assault on Jan. 6.”
Shortly before the November election, Edelson and McCoy found that, contrary to its own disclosure rules, Facebook was not labelling all political ads to show who had paid for them. Around the same time, Facebook sent them a cease-and-desist letter, claiming that they were violating user-privacy requirements, imposed by the F.T.C. in 2019, which Facebook had agreed to create after the company was found to be flouting an earlier F.T.C. order. In a pointed letter to Zuckerberg about Facebook’s decision to oust Edelson and McCoy, Samuel Levine, F.T.C.’s acting director of consumer protection, wrote, “Had you honored your commitment to contact us in advance, we would have pointed out that the consent decree does not bar Facebook from creating exceptions for good-faith research in the public interest.” He added, “We hope that the company is not invoking privacy . . . as a pretext to advance other aims.” It was an encouraging indication that Khan’s F.T.C. will not spend the next four years in thrall to Big Tech.
It is easy to forget, scrolling through photographs of puppies and babies, that everything that happens on Facebook and Instagram is used to sell stuff. As the amended complaint points out, “Facebook monetizes its personal social networking monopoly principally by selling surveillance-based advertising.” Some of the stuff being sold on these platforms are consumer goods, and some are ideas. The right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro, who has more followers on Facebook than the Washington Post does, and whose Web site, the Daily Wire, gets more likes and follows than any other publisher’s, has mastered the art of using Facebook’s microtargeting tools to amass an audience. According to a study by the digital investigative newsroom the Markup, Shapiro is using Facebook’s “look-alike audiences” feature to find people who are susceptible to conservative outrage—the way that a craft beer company, for example, might hunt for new customers among people who like artisanal ice cream and small-batch whiskey. The difference is that, by drawing his audience into his sphere of influence, Shapiro is capturing minds, rather than taste buds. As Francesca Tripodi, a professor at the University of North Carolina, told the Markup, the practice “creates this bifurcated or dual internet, and that allows for information to circulate unchecked.” To be clear, there is nothing illegal about this. Indeed, Shapiro and the Daily Wire could be a business-school case study on how to use Facebook to successfully promote one’s brand.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post has reported that Republican candidates and elected officials have been raising money with Facebook advertisements that blame rising COVID-19 cases on undocumented immigrants, a claim that has no basis in truth. According to the Post, these ads “illustrate the platform’s inconsistent approach to defining coronavirus misinformation, especially when elected officials are involved.” (Facebook does not remove political ads that contain misinformation.)
Edelson and McCoy’s findings were likely to provide more evidence that Facebook looked the other way as its platform was being used to plan and incite violence, and that it continues to enable bad actors to use its advertising products to circulate information that compromises public health. But it would be a misreading of the F.T.C.’s current authority to assume that it can sufficiently regulate information and advertising on Facebook. One of its strategic goals is to “protect consumers from unfair and deceptive practices in the marketplace,” but social media presents an unprecedented problem of scale. Whereas the F.T.C. may hold advertising agencies and Web designers liable for individual ads that contain false or deceptive claims, pursuing every deceptive ad would be like playing a game of whack-a-mole.
Congress could change this. It could pass the Social Media DATA Act, which gives researchers like Edelson and McCoy, and also the F.T.C., greater insight into the impact of ad targeting. It could follow the lead of the European Union, which is considering banning targeted political ads altogether; a similar legislation seems highly unlikely here, given that politicians themselves benefit from those ads. Congress could also give the F.T.C., a twentieth-century creation, more money and authority to address the twenty-first-century trade practices that have so far eluded its governance.
But the F.T.C., which was founded as a trust-busting agency, is mandated to address anticompetitive practices as well as to protect consumers. So far, it has taken a hands-off approach to regulating the technology sector, buying into the belief—promoted by those companies—that regulation stymies innovation. Khan’s F.T.C. is poised to use the powers it has to reverse this trend, though the first obstacle is navigating laws that are more applicable to oil, tobacco, and other kinds of companies that spurred the agency’s creation than to companies like Facebook, the products of which are more ephemeral, even if their impact is not. If Boasberg remains unconvinced that Facebook is a monopoly and needs to be broken up, it will be one more indication that, against Big Tech, the law is a weak instrument that may itself need a do-over.
Supporters of President Donald Trump climb the West wall of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Jan. 6, 2021. (photo: Jose Luis Magana/AP)
“We have quite an exhaustive list of people,” committee chair Rep. Bennie Thompson said
he House select committee investigating the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol will seek electronic communications records of several hundred people, including members of Congress, according to the committee chair Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.).
According to CNN, which was first to report on the committee’s planning, the notices to telecom and social media companies requesting they preserve relevant documents are set to go out as soon as next week.
Thompson, who declined to name the companies or the lawmakers, said the panel will seek records phone, text and email records belonging to “several hundred people” and that the letters would request voluntary compliance and not include subpoenas yet.
“We have quite an exhaustive list of people. I won’t give you the names (of the companies). But, you know, in terms of telecom companies, they’re the ones that pretty much you already know, maybe the networks, the social media platforms, those kinds of things,” Thompson told reporters.
“I can tell you that we’ll look at everything that will give us information on what happened on January 6th,” Thompson told CNN. “We will look at all records at some point.”
Phone records of Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) — who both said they spoke to Trump the day of the riot — are expected to be sought.
Jordan told CNN he’d comply with a records request, saying, “I’ve got nothing to hide. I’ve said that along, I’ve nothing to hide.”
The committee has not met since its opening hearing last month when officers who responded to the insurrection testified. According to Thompson, a decision on when the next hearing might be announced could be made “before the week’s up.”
Relatives cry during the funeral of Imad Khaled Saleh Hashash in the occupied West Bank on 24th August 2021. (photo: Jaafar Ashtiyeh/AFP/Getty Images)
Palestinian teenager has been killed in the occupied West Bank after Israeli troops stormed a refugee camp.
Imad Khaled Saleh Hashash, 15, died on Tuesday of a gunshot to the head at the Balata refugee camp near Nablus in the West Bank, according to the Palestinian health ministry.
In a statement, the Israeli army said it had conducted a military operation in order to “apprehend a subject.”
“During the mission, live ammunition was fired at troops from rooftops. The troops responded with fire towards the sources of the shooting,” it said.
It said that a riot had broken out during the military operation.
“During the riot, a number of soldiers spotted a suspect on a rooftop holding a large object in his hands, attempting to throw it at an [Israeli] soldier standing underneath the building. One of the soldiers responded with live fire and a hit was identified,” it said.
The killing comes after increased tensions which have seen Israeli warplanes bombing the Gaza strip in response to incendiary balloons launched from the Palestinian enclave, which caused wildfires in Israel. In May, Egypt implemented a ceasefire after over 250 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed as Israel assaulted Gaza and Hamas fired rockets from Palestine.
Seventy-eight children Palestinian children have been killed since the start of 2021 – 12 in the occupied West Bank and 67 in the Gaza Strip, according to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).
Two Israeli children have were killed during the fighting in May, one aged 16 and one aged five.
Being tiny has meant that many threatened rodents and eulipotyphlans are sliding toward extinction unnoticed. The Cuban solenodon is currently listed as endangered. (photo: Miguel Landestoy/Flickr)
hink of a mammal that’s at risk of extinction. What comes to mind? A charismatic tiger, perhaps? Or a grand herd of majestic elephants? What about the Mount Lefo brush-furred mouse (Lophuromys eisentrauti), a rodent found only on Mount Lefo in Cameroon? Or the Sclater’s shrew (Sorex sclateri) that lives in Mexico?
Both the mouse and the shrew are critically endangered species. But if you haven’t heard of them, you’re not alone. Many small-bodied mammals, those typically weighing less than a kilogram (2.2 pounds), still remain poorly studied and understood, even by researchers and conservationists. This is despite the fact that two small-mammal groups — Rodentia (animals like rats, mice, beavers, porcupines, chipmunks, marmots, voles and muskrats) and Eulipotyphla (shrews, moles, hedgehogs and solenodons, among others) — together contain nearly half of all known mammal species.
Now, a new study has published an updated picture of both super-diverse mammalian groups. By mapping the distributions of rodents and eulipotyphlans, using the latest information from the IUCN Red List, researchers have identified hotspots where all of the globally threatened species from the two groups occur.
They’ve also identified regions that are home to rodents and eulipotyphlans whose conservation status is currently classified as data deficient, or DD. These are species for which we don’t have sufficient knowledge about population, distribution, or threats to their survival. In the absence of this information, we don’t know their conservation status.
“We hope that this study helps to direct people to hotspots where their actions can have the maximum impact,” said Rosalind J. Kennerley, the lead author of the study and co-chair of the IUCN’s specialist group for small mammals. “We’d like to see more people both choosing to do research on small mammals and of course taking part in active conservation efforts to conserve them.”
Being tiny has meant that many threatened rodents and eulipotyphlans are sliding toward extinction unnoticed. About 76 of the known 454 eulipotyphlan species are globally threatened. These include animals that are one of a kind, like the only two living species of the solenodon, one of the few venomous mammals on our planet. The Cuban solenodon (Atopogale cubana) is currently listed as endangered.
The study found that almost 40% of the at-risk eulipotyphlan species occur within just six regions: Cameroon, the Albertine Rift (covering parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, and Uganda), Tanzania, Ethiopia, Sri Lanka, and the Southwestern Ghats in India.
When it comes to rodents, 324 of the 2,231 known species are threatened with extinction. Nearly 34% of these threatened species are found in 10 regions, including Mexico, the Cameroon Highlands, Southwestern Ghats, Sri Lanka, Peninsular Malaysia, Sumatra, and Java.
The forests and deserts of Mexico, for instance, are home to 27 threatened species, including eight critically endangered ones, like the big pocket gopher (Orthogeomys lanius).
“We suspected that we would see these overall findings, but the number of hotspots still came as a wake-up call,” Kennerley told Mongabay in an email. “We have an enormous task on our hands to ensure small mammals are on the conservation agenda in all of these regions.”
Small mammals are, however, rarely the focus of conservation programs, the authors write. Even protected areas are seldom designed with mice, moles, shrews or other small mammals in mind.
“In general small mammals are relatively ignored if you compare them with some of the more obvious charismatic large mammals,” Kennerley said. “Megafaunas tend to be the ones where there’s more media coverage, there’s greater amounts of research, and there’s certainly more funding directed towards them. That inevitably means that when protected areas are being created and managed, it’s the larger species which people consider rather than the smaller ones.”
That’s not to say that small mammals don’t have any formal protection. Protected areas established for larger, more charismatic species do sometimes include the ranges of small mammals in the area.
“No doubt, rodents and shrews do not get the love they deserve,” Stuart Pimm, the Doris Duke professor of conservation at Duke University, who was not involved in the study, told Mongabay in an email. “But, we may be doing a good job of protecting them anyway.”
Pimm and his colleagues have previously mapped the distribution of small mammals and found that the world’s protected areas, both small and large, at least partially protect the ranges of several small mammals.
Even then, living inside a protected area doesn’t guarantee protection, especially if conservation and research efforts in the parks remain focused solely on the larger mammals, while their smaller counterparts continue to be ignored. Moreover, just because a protected area exists on paper, it doesn’t necessarily mean that that area is indeed well protected, said Kennerley: “On the ground there could be many different activities happening to damage species and habitats.”
Overall, the study found that five eulipotyphlans, such as the Sclater’s shrew, Phillips’ Congo shrew (Congosorex phillipsorum) and the Andaman spiny shrew (Crocidura hispida), and 44 rodents, such as the Elvira rat (Cremnomys elvira) and the emperor rat (Uromys imperator), have ranges that fall completely outside of any protected areas.
Clearly, small mammals are an understudied lot. But knowing which ones are threatened and where those species live can be useful to plan and kick-start conservation actions to better protect them, the authors say.
For several rodents and eulipotyphlan species, though, we have almost no information: nearly 17% of species in the two groups are currently listed as data deficient by the IUCN. That’s a higher percentage than mammals as a whole, where about 14% are listed as data deficient. Their populations could be increasing or declining. Some species may even be nearly extinct — we simply don’t know.
One big reason why small mammals are studied less is because, well, they’re small, Pimm said. “And they are often nocturnal, which makes things even worse.”
Many small mammals also live in hard-to-access landscapes. Then there’s the complexity of taxonomy, the science of describing and classifying different species. With the availability of better techniques to study taxonomy, what were once considered single species are now known to be made up of several, Kennerley said. “Whilst we are learning more about the true diversity within these, there is often still not a huge amount of information known about the newly described species, meaning that they are often listed as DD.”
According to the study, most data-deficient eulipotyphlan species occur within three regions: the Congo Basin, southern and central China, and Laos and Vietnam. On the other hand, most data-deficient rodents occur within 18 regions, including in the northern tropical Andes, Argentina, Brazil, Borneo, Sulawesi and New Guinea.
“In regions of high aggregations of DD species we want to encourage more researchers to focus on small mammals and undertake ecology studies,” Kennerley said. Knowing where these species are distributed, what their population trends look like, the kinds of habitats they prefer, and the threats they face, would be crucial to moving them out of the data deficient category, she added.
The authors say they hope the study will not just get people excited about working with small mammals, but also encourage funders to invest in conservation or research projects focusing on these long-neglected but species-rich animal groups.
“It’s great to now have this objective research to call upon, so that when we speak to potential funders, we can confidently explain why small mammals matter and be able to show proof of why certain regions or species are important to focus on,” Kennerley said.
“The diversity of small mammals is amazing, so the more people we can get enthused, the better!”
This article was originally published on Mongabay.
Citations:
Kennerley, R. J., Lacher Jr., T. E., Hudson, M. A., Long, B., McCay, S. D., Roach, N. S., … Young, R. P. (2021). Global patterns of extinction risk and conservation needs for Rodentia and Eulipotyphla. Diversity and Distributions, 27(9), 1792-1806. doi:10.1111/ddi.13368
Pimm, S. L., Jenkins, C. N., & Li, B. V. (2018). How to protect half of earth to ensure it protects sufficient biodiversity. Science Advances, 4(8). doi:10.1126/sciadv.aat2616
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