Tag: domestic alerts

Twitter threatens to sue hate-speech watchdog group | CNN Business

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Washington, DC
CNN
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Elon Musk has called himself a free-speech absolutist and has praised “even my worst critics.” But now Twitter has threatened to sue a nonprofit known for sharply criticizing the platform for its handling of hate speech and misinformation.

In a July 20 letter shared publicly Monday, Twitter threatened to sue the Center for Countering Digital Hate, accusing the group of a campaign to hurt Twitter by driving away its advertisers. The CCDH has published numerous reports about various social media companies’ approach to everything from vaccine misinformation to online racism and antisemitism.

The letter by Alex Spiro, an outside attorney representing Twitter owner Musk, alleges that CCDH has made “inflammatory, outrageous, and false or misleading assertions about Twitter and its operations” through its reports, which he argued lack scientific rigor.

To back up his claim, Spiro cited one report in which CCDH staff flagged tweets from 100 Twitter Blue subscribers to the platform as being harmful and found that after several days, the company had not taken action on the vast majority of it. The resulting CCDH report said Twitter had failed to act on “99% of Twitter Blue accounts tweeting hate.”

“This article leaves no doubt that CCDH intends to harm Twitter’s business by driving advertisers away from the platform with incendiary claims,” Spiro wrote to CCDH CEO Imran Ahmed, adding that Twitter is investigating whether it can sue the nonprofit for making false descriptions of the company.

CCDH tweeted Spiro’s July 20 letter along with the organization’s reply to Twitter — which Musk has since rebranded as X — that called the legal threat “ridiculous.”

“These allegations not only have no basis in fact (your letter states none), but they represent a disturbing effort to intimidate those who have the courage to advocate against incitement, hate speech and harmful content online, to conduct research and analysis regarding the drivers of such disinformation, and to publicly release the findings of that research, even when the findings may be critical of certain platforms,” wrote CCDH’s attorneys in a response dated Monday.

Spiro didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Since taking over Twitter, Musk has slashed roughly 80% of the company’s staff, including many working on the platform’s content moderation teams.

In December, Twitter shuttered its Trust and Safety Council comprised of outside experts on online safety, human rights, mental health, suicide prevention and child sexual exploitation.

Reports from multiple groups, including CCDH but also the Anti-Defamation League as well as researchers from Tufts University and the University of Southern California, have pointed to observed increases in hate speech.

Musk claimed that impressions of hate speech — which he described as based on a list of “bad words” — declined in the month following his takeover.

But concerns about the platform’s handling of hateful content under Musk last year have persisted, prompting many brands to pause their advertising on Twitter and contributing to sharp financial losses at the company.

Despite claiming in April that most of Twitter’s advertisers had returned, Musk acknowledged this month that Twitter’s ad revenue remains down by 50% and that the company is still cash-flow negative.

In addition, Twitter has made changes to its platform restricting how third parties can access its data, a move that has drawn widespread criticism from academic researchers who study extremism and other online harms. The changes, which require researchers to pay hefty fees, could inhibit studies on how misinformation, harassment and spam spread on Twitter, experts have said.

Threatening lawsuits has become a favored tactic for Musk as Twitter faces continued pressure. Earlier this month, Twitter threatened to sue Facebook-parent Meta over the launch of its competing app, Threads, accusing the company of copying Twitter’s product through trade secret theft. In May, Spiro sent a letter to Microsoft accusing it of over-using its ability to download tweets from the platform as Musk stepped up his criticism of the Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant as a perceived rival in artificial intelligence technology.

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April 12, 2021
Apple launches buy now, pay later service | CNN Business

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CNN
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Apple on Tuesday launched an option in its digital wallet allowing customers to pay for online purchases in installments, making it the latest company to embrace the buy now, pay later trend.

The new feature, called Apple Pay Later, lets customers split payments for purchases into four installments over six weeks, with the first installment due at the time of purchase. Apple users can also apply for a loan within the Wallet app, ranging from $50 to $1000, with no interest or fees, to make online or in-app purchases.

The payment option is rolling out to select users in the United States now, with plans to offer it to all eligible customers over the next several months, according to a company release. Apple first teased the feature last year.

Apple’s move comes as a growing number of consumers have turned to buy now, pay later services to stretch their budgets at a time of high inflation and broader economic uncertainty. Other popular services that offer the same payment option include Affirm, Klarna and Afterpay.

But some economists and consumer advocates have raised concerns that these services could cause shoppers to take on more debt.

The installment process makes it seem like someone is paying practically nothing for the goods or service they’re acquiring, Terri R. Bradford, a research specialist in payment systems for the Kansas City Federal Reserve, previously told CNN. “So the possibility is that you could, in your mind, think of everything that you’re buying in those four installments and, as a result, take on more debt than you would if you had to pay for them in full each and every time.”

But Apple says the new feature is “designed with users’ financial health in mind.”

“There’s no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to how people manage their finances,” said Jennifer Bailey, Apple’s vice president of Apple Pay and Apple Wallet, in Tuesday’s release. “Many people are looking for flexible payment options, which is why we’re excited to provide our users with Apple Pay Later.”

Apple users will be able to track and manage upcoming loan payments in the Wallet app. Any loan application can also be done in the app with no impact on credit, according to the company.

Apple’s Pay Later option is enabled through the Mastercard Installments program.

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April 12, 2021
Welcome to the era of viral AI generated ‘news’ images | CNN Business

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New York
CNN
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Pope Francis wearing a massive, white puffer coat. Elon Musk walking hand-in-hand with rival GM CEO Mary Barra. Former President Donald Trump being detained by police in dramatic fashion.

None of these things actually happened, but AI-generated images depicting them did go viral online over the past week.

The images ranged from obviously fake to, in some cases, compellingly real, and they fooled some social media users. Model and TV personality Chrissy Teigen, for example, tweeted that she thought the pope’s puffer coat was real, saying, “didn’t give it a second thought. no way am I surviving the future of technology.” The images also sparked a slew of headlines, as news organizations rushed to debunk the false images, especially those of Trump, who was ultimately indicted by a Manhattan grand jury on Thursday but has not been arrested.

The situation demonstrates a new online reality: the rise of a new crop of buzzy artificial intelligence tools has made it cheaper and easier than ever to create realistic images, as well as audio and videos. And these images are likely to pop up with increasing frequency on social media.

While these AI tools may enable new means of expressing creativity, the spread of computer-generated media also threatens to further pollute the information ecosystem. That risks adding to the challenges for users, news organizations and social media platforms to vet what’s real, after years of grappling with online misinformation featuring far less sophisticated visuals. There are also concerns that AI-generated images could be used for harassment, or to further drive divided internet users apart.

“I worry that it will sort of get to a point where there will be so much fake, highly realistic content online that most people will just go with their tribal instincts as a guide to what they think is real, more than actually informed opinions based on verified evidence,” said Henry Ajder, a synthethic media expert who works as an advisor to companies and government agencies, including Meta Reality Labs’ European Advisory Council.

Images, compared to the AI-generated text that has also recently proliferated thanks to tools like ChatGPT, can be especially powerful in provoking emotions when people view them, said Claire Leibowicz, head of AI and media integrity at the Partnership on AI, a nonprofit industry group. That can make it harder for people to slow down and evaluate whether what they’re looking at is real or fake.

What’s more, coordinated bad actors could eventually attempt to create fake content in bulk — or suggest that real content is computer-generated — in order to confuse internet users and provoke certain behaviors.

“The paranoia of an impending Trump … potential arrest created a really useful case study in understanding what the potential implications are, and I think we’re very lucky that things did not go south,” said Ben Decker, CEO of threat intelligence group Memetica. “Because if more people had had that idea en masse, in a coordinated fashion, I think there’s a universe where we could start to see the online to offline effects.”

Computer-generated image technology has improved rapidly in recent years, from the photoshopped image of a shark swimming through a flooded highway that has been repeatedly shared during natural disasters to the websites that four years ago began churning out mostly unconvincing fake photos of non-existent people.

Many of the recent viral AI-generated images were created by a tool called Midjourney, a less than year-old platform that allows users to create images based on short text prompts. On its website, Midjourney describes itself as “a small self-funded team,” with just 11 full-time staff members.

A cursory glance at a Facebook page popular among Midjourney users reveals AI-generated images of a seemingly inebriated Pope Francis, elderly versions of Elvis and Kurt Cobain, Musk in a robotic Tesla bodysuit and many creepy animal creations. And that’s just from the past few days.

The latest version of Midjourney is only available to a select number of paid users, Midjourney CEO David Holz told CNN in an email Friday. Midjourney this week paused access to the free trial of its earlier versions due to “extraordinary demand and trial abuse,” according to a Discord post from Holz, but he told CNN it was unrelated to the viral images. The creator of the Trump arrest images also claimed he was banned from the site.

The rules page on the company’s Discord site asks users: “Don’t use our tools to make images that could inflame, upset, or cause drama. That includes gore and adult content.”

“Moderation is hard and we’ll be shipping improved systems soon,” Holz told CNN. “We’re taking lots of feedback and ideas from experts and the community and are trying to be really thoughtful.”

In most cases, the creators of the recent viral images don’t appear to have been acting malevolently. The Trump arrest images were created by the founder of the online investigative journalism outlet Bellingcat, who clearly labeled them as his fabrications, even if other social media users weren’t as discerning.

There are efforts by platforms, AI technology companies and industry groups to improve the transparency around when a piece of content is generated by a computer.

Platforms including Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, Twitter and YouTube have policies restricting or prohibiting the sharing of manipulated media that could mislead users. But as use of AI-generated technologies grows, even such policies could threaten to undermine user trust. If, for example, a fake image accidentally slipped through a platform’s detection system, “it could give people false confidence,” Ajder said. “They’ll say, ‘there’s a detection system that says it’s real, so it must be real.’”

Work is also underway on technical solutions that would, for example, watermark an AI-generated image or include a transparent label in an image’s metadata, so anyone viewing it across the internet would know it was created by a computer. The Partnership on AI has developed a set of standard, responsible practices for synthetic media along with partners like ChatGPT-creator OpenAI, TikTok, Adobe, Bumble and the BBC, which includes recommendations such as how to disclose an image was AI-generated and how companies can share data around such images.

“The idea is that these institutions are all committed to disclosure, consent and transparency,” Leibowicz said.

A group of tech leaders, including Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, this week wrote an open letter calling for artificial intelligence labs to stop the training of the most powerful AI systems for at least six months, citing “profound risks to society and humanity.” Still, it’s not clear whether any labs will take such a step. And as the technology rapidly improves and becomes accessible beyond a relatively small group of corporations committed to responsible practices, lawmakers may need to get involved, Ajder said.

“This new age of AI can’t be held in the hands of a few massive companies getting rich off of these tools, we need to democratize this technology,” he said. “At the same time, there are also very real and legitimate concerns of having a radical open approach where you just open source a tool or have very minimal restrictions on its use is going to lead to a massive scaling of harm … and I think legislation will probably play a role in reigning in some of the more radically open models.”

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April 12, 2021
READ: Trump indictment and statement of facts related to hush money payment | CNN Politics

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Former President Donald Trump has been charged with 34 criminal counts in an indictment unsealed Tuesday.
Read the indictment here.

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April 12, 2021
Amazon is ‘investing heavily’ in the technology behind ChatGPT | CNN Business

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CNN
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Amazon wants investors to know it won’t be left behind in the latest Big Tech arms race over artificial intelligence.

In a letter to shareholders Thursday, Amazon

(AMZN) CEO Andy Jassy said the company is “investing heavily” in large language models (LLMs) and generative AI, the same technology that underpins ChatGPT and other similar AI chatbots.

“We have been working on our own LLMs for a while now, believe it will transform and improve virtually every customer experience, and will continue to invest substantially in these models across all of our consumer, seller, brand, and creator experiences,” Jassy wrote in his letter to shareholders.

The remarks, which were part of Jassy’s second annual letter to shareholder since taking over as CEO, hint at the pressure that many tech companies feel to explain how they can tap into the rapidly evolving marketplace for AI products. Since ChatGPT was released to the public in late November, Google

(GOOG), Facebook

(FB) and Microsoft

(MSFT) have all talked up their growing focus on generative AI technology, which can create compelling essays, stories and visuals in response to user prompts.

Amazon’s goal, according to Jassy, is to offer less costly machine learning chips so that “small and large companies can afford to train and run their LLMs in production.” Large language models are trained on vast troves of data in order to generate responses to user prompts.

“Most companies want to use these large language models, but the really good ones take billions of dollars to train and many years, most companies don’t want to go through that,” Jassy said in an interview with CNBC on Thursday morning.

“What they want to do is they want to work off of a foundational model that’s big and great already, and then have the ability to customize it for their own purposes,” Jassy told CNBC.

With that in mind, Amazon on Thursday unveiled a new service called Bedrock. It essentially makes foundation models (large models that are pre-trained on vast amounts of data) from AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Stability AI and Amazon accessible to clients via an API, Amazon said in a blog post.

Jassy told CNBC he thinks Bedrock “will change the game for people.”

In his letter to shareholders, Jassy also touted AWS’s CodeWhisperer, another AI-powered tool which he said “revolutionizes developer productivity by generating code suggestions in real time.”

“I could write an entire letter on LLMs and Generative AI as I think they will be that transformative, but I’ll leave that for a future letter,” Jassy wrote. “Let’s just say that LLMs and Generative AI are going to be a big deal for customers, our shareholders, and Amazon.”

In the letter, Jassy also reflected on leading Amazon through “one of the harder macroeconomic years in recent memory,” as the e-commerce giant cut some 27,000 jobs as part of a major bid to rein in costs in recent months.

“There were an unusual number of simultaneous challenges this past year,” Jassy said in the letter, before outlining steps Amazon took to rethink certain free shipping options, abandon some of its physical store concepts and significantly reduce overall headcount.

Amazon disclosed in a securities filing Thursday that Jassy’s pay package last year was valued at some $1.3 million, and that the CEO did not receive any new stock awards in 2022. (When Jassy took over as CEO in 2021, he was awarded a pay package mostly comprised of stock awards that valued his total compensation package at some $212 million.)

Despite the challenges at Amazon, however, Jassy said in his letter that he finds himself “optimistic and energized by what lies ahead.” Jassy added: “I strongly believe that our best days are in front of us.”

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April 12, 2021
The government wants to change how it collects race and ethnicity data. Here’s what you need to know | CNN Politics

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CNN
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If you’ve filled out a survey at any point in the last 25 years, chances are you were asked two questions about your race and ethnicity: Whether you are of Hispanic or Latino descent, and then separately, if your race is White, Black, Asian, Pacific Islander, Native American or another race.

A new proposal aims to change that, merging the two questions into one and adding a new category for people of Middle Eastern and North African descent. That would alter how the government – and by extension, the research community studying Americans’ demographics, opinions, voting habits and behaviors – measures and reports on the race and ethnicity of the American public.

The proposal put forth by a working group of government statisticians and methodologists is at least partly an effort to reduce the share of Americans choosing a nebulous “some other race” category that is required to be included in the decennial census and the American Community Survey, two of the key government studies measuring American demographics.

While some researchers say the proposed changes would improve the accuracy and depth of the data available on race and ethnicity, others – particularly those who advocate for the Afro-Latino community – fear the plan would make it harder to understand racially driven inequalities in the US.

Decisions about what gets measured and how reach far beyond the numbers that appear on the Census Bureau’s website: Data gathered through these questions drives the way racial disparities in housing, health care and employment are understood and tracked, how congressional districts are drawn, and how the resources of some government programs are allocated and assessed. It can affect policymaking at the federal, state and local levels.

“The simple fact is that if your community is not visible in the statistics, you are functionally invisible when it comes to political representation,” said Thomas Wolf, the deputy director of the democracy program at the liberal-leaning Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU law school.

The public comment period on the changes closes on April 27 after being extended. Nearly 18,000 comments had already been submitted on the Federal Register notice page as of Sunday morning. Once the comment period ends, the standards will be in the hands of the nation’s chief statistician, Dr. Karin Orvis. Final decisions on the standards are expected by the summer of 2024.

Here’s what to know about the proposals.

The Office of Management and Budget sets standards for both the wording of questions and the types of data government agencies and surveys must collect when they are gathering information about Americans’ racial and ethnic identities.

The existing standards, which have been in place since 1997, call for one question asking whether respondents have Hispanic or Latino background followed by a second question on racial identity, with options for American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Black or African American, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, and White.

Because of a congressional law passed in 2005, the decennial census and the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey are also required to include a “some other race” category in the second question.

Over time, the Census Bureau has seen a notable increase in the number of people choosing that option. In the 2020 census, “some other race” was the second-largest racial group with 49.9 million people opting for it. That trend has raised questions about whether the two separate questions accurately capture the racial makeup of the country.

“The ‘some other race’ category is intended to be a residual category for people who do not identify with any of the minimum OMB categories,” Merarys Rios-Vargas, the chief of the ethnicity and ancestry branch of the Census Bureau’s population division, said during a webinar on the proposed changes hosted by the NALEO Education Fund last month. “But when the residual category is the second-largest response group, changes need to be made, and we have identified a solution with the combined question.”

If implemented, the new standards would merge collection of race and ethnicity information into a single question, expand the categories used to measure race and ethnicity, and mandate the collection of more detailed information on race and ethnicity whenever possible.

The proposed combined question measuring a respondent’s race or ethnicity includes seven broad categories: White, Hispanic or Latino, Black or African American, Asian, American Indian or Alaska Native, Middle Eastern or North African, and Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander. Respondents can choose multiple categories from that list. The congressionally mandated “some other race” category would also continue for the decennial census and ACS.

Under the existing standard, respondents of Middle Eastern or North African, or MENA, descent were typically considered racially White. Census Bureau research conducted in 2015 suggested that without a distinct MENA category, roughly 12% of people who otherwise had been identified as MENA chose “some other race,” but that dipped to just 3% with the addition of a separate MENA category.

The proposed changes would also require the collection of more detailed information on national or tribal origin within each of the major racial or ethnic categories. An example provided by the working group includes checkboxes for some common subgroups (such as Italian under White, Puerto Rican under Hispanic or Latino, Korean under Asian, etc.) as well as an open-ended box in which respondents could write in any additional detail they wanted to share.

The proposed standards result from a review launched by the Office of the Chief Statistician of the United States last year, building on work conducted in the previous decade by the Census Bureau, the OMB and others. A working group of federal experts put together the proposed changes, and the OMB released the working group’s proposals for public comment in late January.

Part of the challenge in formulating these questions is that race itself is more a social than a scientific matter. As the Census Bureau puts it, the categories “generally reflect a social definition of race recognized in this country and not an attempt to define race biologically, anthropologically, or genetically.”

Because the questions used in government work set the standard for much other research, they can affect the way Americans classify their own racial and ethnic identity.

“The way that we talk about race in this country has been very much shaped by the way we ask about it,” said Mark Hugo Lopez, the director of race and ethnicity research at the Pew Research Center.

A Pew survey in January 2020 asking respondents to describe their race or ethnicity without offering categories found that about 8 in 10 gave responses that fit within the OMB’s race or ethnicity categories. When the same participants were separately asked about their race and ethnicity using questions from the 2020 census, nearly all respondents were consistent across the two formats, but the mismatch was significantly larger for those of Hispanic or Latino heritage.

The government’s working group noted that a “large and increasing percentage of Hispanic or Latino respondents” to both the Census and the ACS are skipping the race question outright or choosing “some other race.”

Recently released data from the 2020 census made public by the Census Bureau shows that 43.6% of the Hispanic population either skipped the race question or reported being “some other race” alone during the decennial count. The Census Bureau contends that its research shows this is because “a large proportion of the Hispanic population does not identify with any of the current Office of Management and Budget race categories.”

Wolf, of the Brennan Center, noted the challenge that type of mismatch could present to the usefulness of the data.

“If someone’s self-identification doesn’t map onto the categories that federal law recognizes, the data does not really help people activate and protect their civil rights,” he said.

Researchers outside the government are largely dependent on the OMB standards to frame questions on race and ethnicity in a way that allows comparisons with the gold-standard government studies that track American demographics. Some of these researchers are concerned that respondents who do not see themselves represented in the data may be less inclined to participate in surveys. Insights Association, a professional organization for market researchers, conducted testing on how to ask about race and ethnicity in a way that respondents prefer and found that a single question with more detailed response categories received the most positive feedback.

Cindy Neumann, the director of research for the Insights Association, said, “Where [respondents] feel that they’re included, we feel that they’re going to be a little bit more willing to participate in research, and engage a bit more.”

A 2015 test by the Census Bureau found that a combined question on race and ethnicity decreased the share of respondents choosing “some other race” or skipping the question entirely. For Hispanic respondents, a significantly higher share identified as Hispanic alone under the combined format, suggesting they could be less likely to select one of the race categories also offered in a combined question than they would have using separate questions.

Some are concerned that the proposed standards aren’t measuring the right information.

Many of the public comments submitted in response to the proposals or shared during a series of town halls OMB hosted in March have focused on the language used in the Black or African American category. A movement has emerged to add a category to measure those who are descended from enslaved people in the United States separately from people of African or Caribbean descent. The comments submitted reflect disagreement about the specific language and structure that would best capture the community, but suggestions have included adding categories for American Descendants of Slavery, American Freedmen, or Foundational Black American, separating Black American from African American, and adding a separate question asking whether a person is a descendant of enslaved people. Each could measure a part of the population that some feel is unrecognized under the current standards.

Among advocates for the Afro-Latino community, researchers worry that asking about Hispanic or Latino ethnicity within the same question as race could minimize the detail available about the racial makeup of the Latino community.

“If I, for example, a Black Latina, want to mark my Latinoness but also say that I’m a Black woman, then I have to choose Latino as my race and Black as my race and then I’m counted as multi-racial,” said Danielle Clealand, an associate professor at the University of Texas who studies Afro-Latino identity. “What it does is turn many of us who identify as Black or White or Native American as multi-racial, and that is not how we self-identify.”

Critics of the proposal say multiple questions are necessary to measure race, ethnicity and national origin, since a single question could muddy the measurement of those identifiers, even if responses related to each of those concepts are available for respondents to choose.

“You don’t measure two concepts with one question, and so by putting Hispanic ethnicity and race into one question, you are risking a huge undercount not only of racially stigmatized groups but also of the overall Latino origin population,” said Nancy López, a sociology professor at the University of New Mexico who directs and co-founded the school’s Institute for the Study of “Race” and Social Justice.

“It’s not going to help us know how you are treated, and if there’s an injustice that needs to be rectified,” she said.

The components of race and ethnicity that can affect how a person experiences the world may not be evident in their answers, according to critics of the proposal. A person’s racial or ethnic self-identification may not match the way they are perceived and treated by others, or may not align with their national origin or ethnic heritage. If the questions ultimately used in the government standards aren’t clear about which aspects they measure, their utility could be diminished, the critics say.

The stakes are extremely high. In making any changes to the way race and ethnicity are measured, the working group and the chief statistician will need to strike a balance between reflecting the ways Americans choose to identify themselves with fulfilling the need for data that allows the government to enforce its own laws.

“Does this allow us to do the things that the census is intended to do – voting rights, civil rights, allocation of congressional districts,” said Lopez from Pew. “Race and ethnicity is central to the work of folks who are in those spaces.”

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April 12, 2021
The Tennessee expulsions reveal the core divide in US politics. Here’s why. | CNN Politics

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CNN
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Rarely have the tectonic plates of American politics collided as visibly and explosively as they did earlier this month in Tennessee.

The procession of predominantly middle-aged or older White Republicans who rose almost two weeks ago in the Tennessee House of Representatives to castigate, and then expel, two young Black Democrats crystallized the overlapping generational and racial confrontation that underpins the competition between the political parties.

The Republican vote to expel those Black Democratic representatives, Justin Pearson and Justin Jones, encapsulated in a single moment the struggle for control over America’s direction between the nation’s increasingly diverse younger generations and its mostly White older cohorts. While kids of color now comprise just over half of all Americans younger than 18, Whites still constitute about three-fourths of the nation’s seniors, according to Census data analyzed by William Frey, a demographer at Brookings Metro.

That stark division – what Frey terms “the cultural generation gap” and I’ve called the competition between “the brown and the gray” – has become a central fault line in the nation’s politics. Particularly in the Donald Trump era, the Republican coalition has grown increasingly reliant on older Whites, while younger people of color are evolving into a critical component of the Democratic voting base.

The priorities and values of these two giant cohorts often clash most explosively in red states across the South and Southwest, like Tennessee, where Republicans now control state government. In those states, Republicans are moving aggressively to lock into law the policy preferences of their older, predominantly White and largely non-urban and Christian electoral coalition. That agenda often collides directly with the views of younger generations on issues including abortion, LGBTQ rights, limits on classroom discussion of race, gender and sexual orientation, book bans, and gun control.

Across the red states, the conditions are coalescing for years of escalating conflict between these divergent generations. From one direction, the Republicans controlling these states are applying increasingly hardball tactics to advance their policy agenda and entrench their electoral advantage. That strategy includes severe gerrymanders that dilute the influence of urban areas where younger voters often congregate, laws that create obstacles to registering and voting, and extreme legislative maneuvers such as the vote to expel Pearson and Jones. What Republicans in Tennessee and other red states “are trying to do is minimize the voices – minimize the sound, minimize the protest, and continue to oppress folks who do not agree,” says Antonio Arellano, vice president for communications at NextGen America, a group that organizes young people for liberal causes.

From the other direction, the youngest Millennials and first representatives of Generation Z moving into elected office are throwing themselves more forcefully against these GOP fortifications – just as Jones and Pearson have done. These young, elected officials have been shaped by the past decade of heightened public protests, many of them led by young people, particularly around gun safety, climate change, and racial equity. And more of them are bringing that ethos of direct action into the political arena – as Jones and Pearson did by leading a gun control protest on the floor of the Tennessee legislature. “This generation of politicians have been socialized through the crucible of Black Lives Matter and the [Donald] Trump era and political polarization,” says Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University in Atlanta who studies race and politics. “So it’s not surprising that they are usually going to be confrontational.”

In the red states, this rising wave of urgency and militancy among younger progressives is crashing headlong into the fortifications Republicans are erecting to solidify their control. Even with the ardor evident from Jones, Pearson and their supporters in Tennessee, most observers agree it will be very difficult any time soon for “the brown” to loosen the grip of “the gray” over political power in almost any of the red states. “In the short term there isn’t a risk” to the GOP’s hold on the red states, said Gillespie, “which is why you see these legislators flexing their power in the way they are.” And that could be a recipe for more tension in those places as the diverse younger generations constitute a growing share of the workforce and tax base, yet find their preferences systematically denied in the decisions of their state governments.

Like many analysts, Melissa Deckman, chief executive officer of the non-partisan Public Religion Research Institute, predicts that “what we saw in Tennessee was the first salvo” of escalating conflict as older white conservatives, especially in the red states, resist the demands for greater influence from the emerging younger generations. “An overwhelmingly White conservative legislature taking this remarkable and drastic step of expelling the two young African-Americans,” she says, “is a taste of what we are going to see in the future driven by those demographic changes.”

Those demographic changes are rooted in the generational transition rumbling through American life. Though the tipping point has drawn little attention, Frey has calculated that a majority of the nation’s population has now been born after 1980. And those younger generations are kaleidoscopically more diverse than their older counterparts.

The change is most visible on race. Because the US essentially shut off immigration between 1924 and 1965, nearly three-fourths of baby boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) are White, as are more than three-fourths of the remaining seniors from the older generations before them, according to Frey’s figures. By contrast, Frey has calculated, people of color comprise well over two-fifths of Millennials (born between 1981 and 1996), just under half of Generation Z (born between 1997 and 2012) and slightly more than half the youngest generation born since 2012. That youngest generation (sometimes called Generation Alpha) will be the first in American history in which racial “minorities” constitute the majority.

The transition extends to other dimensions of personal identity. The Public Religion Research Institute has calculated that while just 17% of Americans aged 65 or older and 20% of those aged 50-64 do not identify with any organized religion, the share of those “seculars” rises to 32% among those aged 30-49 and 38% among adults 18-29. In turn, while White Christians constitute about half of all adults aged 50-64 and three-fifths of seniors, they comprise only about one-third of those aged 30-49 and only one-fourth of the youngest adults.

Gender identity and sexual orientation follow the same tracks. Gallup has found that while less than 3% of baby boomers and only 4% of Generation X (born 1965-1980) identify as LGBTQ, that figure jumps to nearly 11% among Millennials and fully 21% among Generation Z. In all these ways, says Deckman, who is writing a book on Gen Z, “you have a younger group of Americans who are more diverse, less religious, care passionately about the rights of marginalized groups, and are watching rights taken away that they thought would always be there.”

Though the pace and intensity varies, these changes are affecting all corners of the country. Even in states where the GOP has consistently controlled most state offices such as Texas, Florida, Georgia, Arizona, and North Carolina, the share of adults younger than 45 who are unaffiliated with any religion now equals or exceeds the share who are White Christians, according to detailed results PRRI provided to CNN. By contrast, in those states’ over-45 population, White Christians are at least twice, and often three times, as large a share of the population as seculars.

Frey has found that in every state the youth population 18 and younger is now more racially diverse than the senior population 65 and older. From 2010 to 2020, in fact, every state except Utah and North Dakota (as well as Washington, DC) saw a decline in their total population of White kids younger than 18. Kids of color now comprise a majority of the youth population in 14 states and at least 40% in another dozen, Frey has found.

States on that list include many of the places where Republicans have been most forcefully imposing a staunchly conservative social agenda. Kids of color already represent about half or more of the youth population in Texas, Florida, Georgia, Oklahoma, Mississippi, South Carolina and Arizona and about two-fifths or more in several others, including Tennessee, Alabama and Arkansas. In many of those states the share of seniors who are White is at least 20 percentage points higher than the share of young people.

A similarly large “cultural generation gap” is also evident in many blue states, including Nevada, California, Colorado, Washington and Minnesota. The difference is that in states where Democrats are in control, the diverse younger generations are, however imperfectly, included in the political coalition setting state policy. Political analysts in both parties – from Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson to Democratic strategist Terrance Woodbury – point out that Democrats have their own problems with younger voters, who have never been enthusiastic about President Joe Biden, and are expressing disappointment that the party hasn’t made more progress on issues they care about. But in blue states the direction of policy on most key social issues, such as abortion, gun control and LGBTQ rights, aligns with the dominant views among younger generations. And in most blue states, Democrats have prioritized increasing youth turnout and, in many cases, reformed state election laws to ease registration and voting.

But in the red states, younger voters, especially younger voters of color, are largely excluded from the ruling Republican coalitions, which revolve preponderantly around Whites, especially those who are older, Christian, non-college and non-urban. In 2022, for instance, 80% of younger non-white voters (aged 45 or less) voted against Republican Gov. Brian Kemp in Georgia, 65% voted against GOP Gov. Greg Abbott in Texas, and 55% opposed Gov. Ron DeSantis in Florida, according to exit poll results provided by Edison Research. Yet all three men won decisive reelections, in large part because each carried about seven-in-ten or more of Whites older than 45.

In some ways, the generational tug of war between the brown and the gray symbolized by the Tennessee expulsions represents the classic collision between an irresistible force and an immovable object. In this case, the irresistible force is the growth in the electorate of the diverse younger generations. In 2020, for the first time, Millennials and Generation Z constituted as large a share of eligible voters nationwide as did the Baby Boom and its elders – though those older generations, because they turned out at much higher rates, still represented a larger percentage of actual voters. In 2024, Frey has projected, Millennials and Gen Z will comprise a significantly larger share of eligible voters than the boomers and their elders – enough that they will likely equal them as a share of actual voters. Already in several states, kids of color comprise a majority of those who turn 18 each year and become eligible to vote; Frey projects that will be true for the nation overall by 2024.

The immovable object is the GOP control over the red states. That’s partly because of the changes in electoral rules Republicans have imposed that create obstacles to registration or voting, but also because of their dominance among older Whites and their inroads into culturally conservative Latino voters in some of these states, particularly Texas and Florida.

Another challenge for Democrats is that youth turnout is often lowest in red states. Though youth turnout also lagged in some blue states including New York and Rhode Island, in an analysis released earlier this month the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) at Tufts University found that red states comprised all nine states where the smallest share of eligible adults aged 18-29 cast a ballot; Tennessee ranked the lowest of the states for which CIRCLE has data. Red states also have erected many of the most overt obstacles to youth participation. Eight Republican-controlled states, including Tennessee, Texas and recently Idaho, have sent a clearly discouraging signal to young voters by declaring that student IDs cannot be used as identification under state voter ID laws. A Texas Republican state legislator this year has proposed banning polling places on college campuses.

Abby Kiesa, CIRCLE’s deputy director, says that in both blue and red states, laws and social customs act in reinforcing ways to either promote or discourage youth voting. “The infrastructure and the state laws” in states that encourage youth voting like Michigan, Oregon and Colorado “create a stronger culture of engagement,” she said. “Because more people are voting, it is more of a norm, people are talking about it more, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.” In states with pronounced barriers to voting, she notes, an opposite cycle of disengagement can take hold.

The unlikelihood of overcoming the GOP’s red state electoral defenses in the near term will probably encourage more younger progressives to emphasize public protests, like the raucous rally for gun control that began the Tennessee confrontation, predicts Nse Ufot, who formerly led the New Georgia Project launched by Stacey Abrams.

“The young people in Tennessee … went to their legislators and said enough, and they had accountable, accessible leaders who heard what their demands were and took it to their colleagues and their colleagues didn’t like it,” says Ufot, who has now founded the New South Super PAC, designed to elect progressive candidates in the 11 states of the old confederacy.

Ufot uses a striking analogy to express her expectation of how this struggle will unfold in the coming years across the red states. Her mother, she explained, ran a shelter for battered women, and even as a young girl, she came to recognize “that the most dangerous time for victims of abuse is when they are preparing to leave, when they have made up their minds that they are done and they are making their exits. That when we see their abusers escalate to crazy tactics.”

Ufot sees the Tennessee expulsions, like the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and Trump’s broader effort to overturn the 2020 result, as evidence that those “who are afraid of what a diverse, reflective, democracy looks like” will likewise turn to more extreme responses as the challenge to their position grows more acute. But she also sees the movement that erupted around Pearson and Jones as a preview of how younger generations may resist that offensive. “Instead of responding with resignation like people who have come before them, [the two expelled representatives] have chosen to do something about it,” she said. “And that’s what happens when you are forged in the fire of protest and are accountable to the people [you represent].”

As the Republicans now running the red states race to the right, and younger generations lean harder on direct protest, more forging fires across this contested terrain appear inevitable.

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April 12, 2021
White House escalates political pressure on GOP as McCarthy unveils debt limit proposal | CNN Politics

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White House officials have spent weeks engaged in skirmishes with House Republicans over the looming debt ceiling battle.

Those skirmishes have now expanded into an all-out war.

President Joe Biden’s economic speech in Maryland on Wednesday, which leveled a series of policy and political attacks at House Republicans, serves as a critical marker for a White House moving quickly to escalate the political pressure on House Republicans as the calendar moves closer to the deadline to raise the nation’s borrowing limit.

Months of messaging and rapid response efforts to counter nascent House GOP debt limit proposals evolved this week into a full-scale effort to undercut Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s spending cut and debt ceiling proposal at the moment of its inception.

Biden’s remarks, though planned for several weeks, provided a window into the trigger for the escalation.

“Just two days ago the speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy went to Wall Street to describe the MAGA economic vision for American,” Biden said in reference to McCarthy’s speech Monday at the New York Stock Exchange.

McCarthy’s high-profile remarks, which broadly outlined the Republican push for steep spending cuts in exchange for a debt ceiling increase, set in motion the House Republican push to pass a proposal and shift the entrenched political dynamics.

“American debt is a ticking time bomb that will detonate unless we take serious, responsible action,” McCarthy said in his New York speech, which previewed a proposal that was made public Wednesday.

Biden’s remarks, at a union hall in Maryland, served as a clear response.

“Massive cuts in programs you count on,” Biden said of the outlines of McCarthy’s proposal. “The threat of defaulting on America’s debt for the first time in 230 years.”

The positions of the two sides remain unchanged – and completely incompatible. Biden and his top advisers say unequivocally they will not negotiate over a debt ceiling increase and will only accept a clean proposal to raise the nation’s borrowing limit. McCarthy and House Republicans have labeled that position a non-starter and are demanding significant spending cuts in order to sign on to any increase.

The irreconcilable positions underscore the central importance of winning the political and messaging battle that is set to dramatically intensify. With no pathway to reconcile the respective positions, both sides are pointing to the political pressure – and potentially catastrophic economic consequences that would result in a failure to a find a resolution – as critical to crack their opposition.

Biden’s speech was crafted to crystallize a clear political contrast and detail the legislative wins of Biden’s first two years in office and his agenda’s priorities for the years ahead.

But the speech was also tailored to directly attack McCarthy and the broad outlines of the California Republican’s forthcoming proposal at the same moment behind the scenes efforts to keep Democrats unified and escalate outside pressure.

“Folks, it’s the same old trickle-down dressed up in MAGA clothing,” Biden said of McCarthy’s proposal in his remarks. “Only worse.”

White House officials quietly circulated messaging and polling memos touting Biden’s budget and tax proposal earlier this week. Biden spoke by phone with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries Tuesday in what people familiar with the call framed as a discussion that was equal parts ensuring total alignment and mapping out the policy and political strategy ahead.

“President Biden, Leader Schumer, and Leader Jeffries agree that we won’t negotiate over default and Republicans should pass a clean bill like they did three times in the previous administration,” the White House said in a readout of the call Tuesday night.

Outside advocacy groups aligned with the White House are also set to ramp up their efforts to highlight Biden’s agenda while attacking the outlines of McCarthy’s proposal.

The tightly coordinated messaging and political escalation reflects a deadline that is growing closer, officials said. But it also underscores an understanding that McCarthy and his leadership team face their own critical intraparty moment as they attempt to coalesce around their own proposal ahead of a vote next week.

That House Republican plan, should McCarthy whip the votes to pass it, is dead on arrival in the Senate. White House officials view the proposal less as a tangible way to shift the entrenched political dynamics and more as an opportunity to launch a whole new array of policy attacks, officials say.

Republicans have made clear, however, they view the opposite as true. A House-passed bill should force Biden to the table and serve as a demonstration of Republican unity and resolve.

“President Biden and Senator Schumer have no right to play politics with the debt ceiling,” McCarthy said on the House floor Wednesday, calling on Biden and Democrats to enter negotiations.

McCarthy has insisted he can marshal the votes to pass his proposal. White House officials have privately been skeptical that’s the case given the fractious dynamics of the conference.

But at a critical moment in a fight that is set to envelope Washington in the months ahead, White House officials are intent on making McCarthy’s job as difficult as possible.

“The American people should know about the competing economic visions of the country that are really at stake right now,” Biden said.

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April 12, 2021
‘He’s lost that old twinkle:’ When a young Joe Biden criticized his opponent’s age | CNN Politics

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President Joe Biden, who at 80 has had to confront questions about his age and mental acuity as he is poised to launch a reelection campaign for president, once ran a campaign that sharply attacked his opponent’s age.

In 1972, Biden, then 29 years old and a local Delaware councilman, was running against incumbent Republican Sen. Cale Boggs who was 63 years old, a former two term governor and the state’s senior senator.

“Cale doesn’t want to run, he’s lost that old twinkle in his eye he used to have,” Biden said of Boggs, who had originally wanted to retire but was persuaded to run for reelection.

Biden used his opponent’s age against him in a way that was so explicit, one local reporter dubbed his approach, “Dear old dad.”

Biden was running to become one of the youngest people ever elected to the United States Senate. Now, the president is already the oldest person ever to serve in the office of the presidency, and, if reelected, would leave office at the age of 86. That would best the next oldest president by more than 9 years if he served a full second term.

The president’s age has been “omnipresent” in nearly every conversation, CNN reported in February, though that notion was disputed by a White House spokesperson.

In response to a request for comment, White House spokesman Andrew Bates told CNN that Biden has made “historic progress” that has been “enthusiastically welcomed by younger Americans – including his unprecedented investments in fighting climate change, his first-of-its kind police reform executive order, his actions to support community policing and decriminalize marijuana, and getting more Americans health coverage than ever before.”

In 1972, advertisements for Biden in local newspapers and on the radio hammered home a line, “he understands what’s happening today.” The ads targeted Boggs’ age by bringing up past historical topics from Bogg’s “generation,” like Joseph Stalin ruling Russia, jazz musicians using heroin, the development of the polio vaccine, and taxes from the 1940s.

“Cale Boggs’ generation dreamed of conquering polio, Joe Biden’s generation dreams of conquering heroin,” read one newspaper ad. “To Cale Boggs an unfair tax was the 1948 poll tax. To Joe Biden an unfair tax is the 1972 income tax,” read another.

One radio advertisement targeted Boggs as too focused on past threats from Russia, while ignoring domestic issues like crime.

“One of the biggest differences between Cale Boggs and Joe Biden is the things they worry about,” said the radio ad. “In Cale Boggs’ day when Stalin ruled, Americans had visions of the Russian soldiers in our streets. In Joe Biden’s day, Americans have visions of American criminals in our streets. Joe Biden, he understands what’s happening today.”

The approach drew pushback from Sen. William Roth, a Delaware Republican who Biden would work closely with for the next 30 years, according to the News Journal, and commentary from the media at the time.

Biden eventually won that race with the Associated Press declaring, “Biden stressed age to defeat Boggs.”

As Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Norm Lockman wrote, “The new campaign strategy, ordered by Biden himself, eases off the strident tub-thumping and finger pointing and uses an approach that says, in effect, “Dear old dad may have been right for his time – and I love him – but things are different now.’”

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April 12, 2021
UK blocks Microsoft takeover of Activision Blizzard | CNN Business

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The UK antitrust regulator has blocked Microsoft’s $69 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard, thwarting one of the tech industry’s biggest deals over concerns it will stifle competition in cloud gaming.

The Competition and Markets Authority said in a statement Wednesday that it was worried the deal would lead to “reduced innovation and less choice for UK gamers over the years to come.”

The acquisition would make Microsoft

(MSFT) “even stronger” in cloud gaming, a market in which it already holds a 60%-70% share globally, the regulator added.

Activision Blizzard is one of the world’s biggest video game developers, producing games such as “Call of Duty,” “World of Warcraft,” “Diablo” and “Overwatch.” Microsoft, which sells the Xbox gaming console, offers a video game subscription service called Xbox Game Pass, as well as a cloud-based video game streaming service.

The deal to combine the businesses has been met with growing opposition by antitrust regulators worldwide. In December, the US Federal Trade Commission sued to block the takeover over similar competition concerns. A hearing is scheduled for August. The European Union is also evaluating the transaction

Microsoft could seek to make Activision’s games exclusive to its own platforms and then increase the cost of a Game Pass subscription, the Competition and Markets Authority said.

“The cloud allows UK gamers to avoid buying expensive gaming consoles and PCs and gives them much more flexibility and choice as to how they play. Allowing Microsoft to take such a strong position in the cloud gaming market just as it begins to grow rapidly would risk undermining the innovation that is crucial to the development of these opportunities,” it added.

“The evidence available… indicates that, absent the merger, Activision would start providing games via cloud platforms in the foreseeable future.”

Both companies plan to appeal the decision. “Alongside Microsoft, we can and will contest this decision, and we’ve already begun the work to appeal to the UK Competition Appeals Tribunal,” Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick said in a statement.

Microsoft President Brad Smith added: “This decision appears to reflect a flawed understanding of the market and the way the relevant cloud technology actually works.”

The Competition and Markets Authority, which launched an in-depth review of the blockbuster deal in September, said Microsoft’s proposed remedies to its concerns had “significant shortcomings.”

“Their proposals… would have replaced competition with ineffective regulation in a new and dynamic market,” explained Martin Coleman, chair of the independent panel of experts conducting the investigation.

“Microsoft already enjoys a powerful position and head start over other competitors in cloud gaming, and this deal would strengthen that advantage, giving it the ability to undermine new and innovative competitors,” Coleman continued. “Cloud gaming needs a free, competitive market to drive innovation and choice.”

The UK cloud gaming market is expected to be worth up to £1 billion ($1.2 billion) by 2026, around 9% of the global market, according to the Competition and Markets Authority.

-— Josh du Lac and Brian Fung contributed reporting.

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April 12, 2021
Six months into Elon Musk’s Twitter: The fall of verification and birth of Twitter Blue in one very long chart | CNN Business

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CNN
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In the six months since Elon Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter, the billionaire has turned the platform on its head by overhauling how it decides which accounts to verify.

Once given out to authenticate a limited number of accounts from celebrities, government agencies and media organizations, the coveted check mark is now available for purchase through the company’s subscription service, Twitter Blue. The result: more checks and more confusion.

There were at least 550,000 Twitter Blue subscribers as of April 23, just days after Musk stripped all users of legacy blue checks, according to estimates provided to CNN by Travis Brown, a Berlin-based software developer. By comparison, more than 400,000 accounts were verified with the legacy blue checks before the purge.

But with Musk gifting some celebrities with the service, it’s unclear how many are actually paying customers. It’s also unclear how much more Twitter can grow subscriptions, which Musk has made central to his plan to boost Twitter’s revenue.

The change to Twitter’s verification process is just one of many ways Musk has shaken the company’s core after taking the helm of Twitter in October. He eliminated over 80% of its staff and reshaped the site’s policies, drawing criticism for the impact these moves could have on safety and transparency. Many top advertisers have left the platform, and Musk valued it last month at around $20 billion, less than half of what he paid for it.

But one of Musk’s boldest and biggest changes has been Twitter Blue. Touted as the successor to the old verification system, the subscription model lets anyone pay $8 per month for a blue badge and other features, like prioritized rankings in conversations and search.

The blowback has been swift. Twitter Blue has stoked chaos and confusion. The program was initially paused only days after its launch when an account impersonating pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly and Company tweeted “insulin is free now,” causing the stock to nosedive.

More recently, the purge of blue checks has led to a cultural change on the platform. Once a sought-after status symbol, many users find the blue badge is no longer cool. Last week, after the blue check began popping up on famous accounts, celebrities such as Lil Nas X and Chrissy Teigen vehemently denied paying for the service.

Here’s a look back at the rise and fall of Twitter’s blue badge:

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April 12, 2021
The 10 Senate seats most likely to flip in 2024 | CNN Politics

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Opportunity is ripe for Republicans to win back the Senate next year – if they can land the candidates to pull it off.

The GOP needs a net gain of one or two seats to flip the chamber, depending on which party wins the White House in 2024, and it’s Democrats who are defending the tougher seats. Democrats hold seven of the 10 seats that CNN ranks as most likely to flip party control next year – and the top three are all in states former President Donald Trump carried twice.

But this spring’s recruitment season, coming on the heels of a midterm cycle marred by problematic GOP candidates, will likely go a long way toward determining how competitive the Senate map is next year.

National Republicans got a top pick last week, with Gov. Jim Justice announcing his Senate bid in West Virginia – the seat most likely to flip party control in 2024. (Rankings are based on CNN’s reporting, fundraising figures and historical data about how states and candidates have performed.) But Justice appears headed for a contentious and expensive primary. And in many other top races, the GOP hasn’t yet landed any major candidates.

Democrats, meanwhile, are thankful that most of their vulnerable incumbents are running for reelection, while a high-profile House member has largely cleared the field for one of their open Senate seats.

Pollster asked Democrats who they like for 2024. Here’s what he found

The unknown remains West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin. Responding to Justice’s candidacy, Manchin – who has said he’ll decide about running by the end of the year – had this to say to CNN about a potentially messy GOP primary: “Let the games begin.”

The anti-tax Club for Growth’s political arm has already committed to spending $10 million to back West Virginia Rep. Alex Mooney in the GOP primary. And tensions between the club, which has turned against Trump, and more establishment Republicans could become a feature of several top Senate races this cycle, especially with the National Republican Senatorial Committee weighing more aggressive involvement in primaries to weed out candidates it doesn’t think can win general elections.

In the 2022 cycle, most of Trump’s handpicked candidates in swing states stumbled in the general election. But the former president picked up a key endorsement this week from NRSC Chair Steve Daines. The Montana Republican has stayed close with Trump, CNN has previously reported, in a bid to ensure he’s aligned with leadership.

Democrats defending tough seats have previously used GOP primaries to their advantage. Manchin survived in 2018 in part because his opponent was state Attorney General Patrick Morrisey. That wasn’t an accident. Democrats had spent big attacking one of his primary opponents to keep him out of the general election.

Last year’s midterms underscored that candidates really do matter after Republicans failed to harness favorable national winds in some key races. In a presidential year, the national environment is likely to loom large, especially with battleground states hosting key Senate races. It will also test whether some of the last remaining senators who represent states that back the opposite parties’ presidential nominees can hold on.

President Joe Biden, who carried half of the states on this list in 2020, made official last week that he’s running for reelection. The GOP presidential field is slowly growing, with Trump still dominating most primary polling. It’s too early to know, however, what next year’s race for the White House will look like or which issues, whether it’s abortion or crime or the economy, will resonate.

So for now, the parties are focused on what they can control: candidates. Even though the 2024 map is stacked in their favor, Republicans can’t win with nobody. But there’s plenty of time for would-be senators to get into these races. Some filing deadlines – in Arizona, for example – aren’t for nearly another year. And there’s an argument to be made that well-funded or high-profile names have no reason to get in early.

Here’s where the Senate map stands 18 months from Election Day.

Incumbent: Democrat Joe Manchin

Sen. Joe Manchin isn’t one to shy away from attention – and he’s getting plenty of it by keeping everyone guessing about his reelection plans. Assuming he runs, Democrats will have a fighting chance to defend this seat in a state Trump carried by 39 points in 2020. The senator has repeatedly broken with the White House – on Biden’s first veto and the White House’s debt ceiling stance, for example.

Without Manchin, Democrats know West Virginia is all but lost. Manchin raised only $371,000 in this year’s first fundraising quarter, which ended March 31, and Republicans are already attacking him, with One Nation – the issue advocacy group aligned with Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell – launching an ad campaign tying him to the Inflation Reduction Act. (The senator went on Fox News last week and threatened to back a repeal of his own bill.) Still, Manchin has nearly $10 million in the bank, as well as outside cover from Democratic-allied groups.

Republicans will likely be spending quite a lot of time and money attacking each other in the primary. The Club for Growth’s political arm is backing House Freedom Caucus member Alex Mooney, while Gov. Jim Justice will likely have backup from GOP party leaders. The wealthy governor, who was first elected as a Democrat before switching parties in 2017, has high name ID and is close with Trump. Mooney also has Trumpian credentials, having won a member-on-member House primary last year with the former president’s endorsement. The congressman is already attacking the governor in an ad as “Liberal Jim Justice,” using imagery of his opponent in a face mask.

Incumbent: Democrat Jon Tester

Democrats got welcome news with Sen. Jon Tester’s announcement that he’s running for a fourth term – and that he raised $5 million in the first quarter (more than a million of which came from small-dollar donors). Tester is running in Trump country – Montana backed the former president by 16 points in 2020 – but like Manchin he has a well-established brand to draw on, which includes breaking with Biden when he needs to. (Tester also voted for a GOP resolution to roll back a Biden administration ESG investing rule, which prompted the president’s first veto.) The GOP field is still taking shape. Republicans are interested in retired Navy SEAL Tim Sheehy, a businessman with the potential to self-fund, and state Attorney General Austin Knudsen.

Another potential candidate is Rep. Matt Rosendale, who lost to Tester in 2018 after winning the GOP nomination with the help of the Club for Growth, which has recently been at odds with Trump. Rosendale made a telling appearance at Mar-a-Lago in April for Trump’s post-indictment speech after snubbing the former president’s pick for House speaker in January when he didn’t back Kevin McCarthy. The congressman hasn’t said yet whether he’s running, but he raised only about $127,000 in the first quarter of the year – well short of what he’d need for a competitive Senate bid.

Incumbent: Democrat Sherrod Brown

Sen. Sherrod Brown is the only Democrat to win a nonjudicial statewide race in Ohio over the past decade, so the big question for 2024 is whether he can defy expectations again in his red-trending state. Trump has twice carried the Buckeye State by 8 points, and his handpicked candidate, JD Vance, defeated Democrat Tim Ryan by about 6 points in last year’s Senate race despite the Republican’s campaign struggles.

Brown is much more of an institution in Ohio than Ryan, and he’s built up relationships not just among White working-class communities but urban centers too. He raised $3.6 million in the first quarter of the year. Two wealthy Republicans are in the race to try to take him on – businessman Bernie Moreno, whom Trump has praised, and state Sen. Matt Dolan, whose family owns the Cleveland Guardians baseball team. Both men ran for Senate in 2022, but Moreno dropped out ahead of the primary. Dolan, who ran as a moderate conservative less than enthralled with Trump and his election lies, finished third in a crowded field. Rep. Warren Davidson and Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose could also jump into this year’s GOP race.

Incumbent: Independent Kyrsten Sinema

Arizona has the potential to be one of the most interesting races this cycle, but a lot depends on whether Democratic-turned-independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema runs for reelection. Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego, who’s running to her left, outraised the incumbent $3.8 million to $2.1 million in the first quarter. Sinema has a clear cash-on-hand advantage – nearly $10 million to Gallego’s $2.7 million.

Earlier this month, Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb became the first major Republican to enter the race, leaning into a law enforcement message. But the filing deadline isn’t until next April, so there’s still plenty of time for others to jump in. Some Republicans are anxious about the potential entry of Kari Lake, last year’s losing gubernatorial nominee, who still maintains she won. She’d likely be popular with the base in a state that’s become a hotbed of election denialism, but her candidacy could pose a serious risk for the party in a general election. The NRSC recently pushed her to move away from election conspiracy theories, CNN reported.

Former attorney general nominee Abe Hamadeh and Karrin Taylor Robson, who lost last year’s gubernatorial primary to Lake, have also met with NRSC officials, CNN reported. Also in the mix could be Republican businessman Jim Lamon, who lost the party nod for the state’s other Senate seat last year. Republicans would like to see Sinema run because she and Gallego would likely split the vote on the left. But they’ve got their work cut out from them in landing a candidate who can appeal to the GOP base without alienating the general electorate in a state that narrowly backed Biden in 2020.

Incumbent: Democrat Jacky Rosen

Democratic Sen. Jacky Rosen is, as expected, running for reelection, touting her middle-class roots and bipartisan legislative wins in an announcement video in April. “Nevada is always a battleground,” the senator says – a reminder that Democrats don’t want to take this state for granted. Rosen was first elected in 2018 – a midterm year – by 5 points. Last fall, her Democratic colleague, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, defeated former state Attorney General Adam Laxalt by less than a point.

The state tends to get bluer in presidential years, but Biden and Hillary Clinton both carried it only by about 2 points. Republicans don’t yet have a major name in the race, but they’re watching two defeated candidates from last year – Army veteran Sam Brown, who lost the GOP Senate nod, and attorney April Becker, who lost a bid for a redrawn House seat.

Incumbent: Democrat Tammy Baldwin

Sen. Tammy Baldwin announced earlier this month that she’s running for a third term, giving Democrats an automatic advantage for now over Republicans, who have no declared candidates in this perennial battleground state. Baldwin raised $2.1 million in the first quarter, ending with nearly $4 million in the bank.

Establishment Republicans have expressed strong interest in Rep. Mike Gallagher. Even Rep. Tom Tiffany, who recently bought Senate web domain names, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that he thought his fellow congressman should run. But there’s little sign that Gallagher, the chair of the new House select committee on the Chinese Communist Party, is interested. Two businessmen with the ability to tap into or raise significant resources could be in the mix – Eric Hovde, who lost the GOP Senate nomination in 2012, and Scott Mayer. And then there’s controversial former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, who could draw support in a GOP primary but seriously complicate a general election for Republicans.

Democrats are feeling good about the recent state Supreme Court election, which the Democratic-backed candidate won by 10 points, flipping control of the bench to liberals. Still, the competitiveness of this state – which Biden carried by about half a point after Trump had won it by a similar margin four years earlier – shouldn’t be underestimated.

Incumbent: Democrat Debbie Stabenow (retiring)

Rep. Elissa Slotkin has mostly cleared the Democratic field of major rivals in the race to succeed retiring Democrat Debbie Stabenow in another Midwestern battleground state. A few less-known names are in, and actor Hill Harper – of “The Good Doctor” and “CSI: NY” – could throw his hat in the Democratic ring, but it’ll be hard to rival Slotkin’s fundraising. She brought in about $3 million in the first quarter.

On the GOP side, State Board of Education member Nikki Snyder announced her campaign in mid-February, but she hadn’t raised much money by the end of the first quarter. Former Rep. Peter Meijer could run, but his vote to impeach Trump would likely kill his prospects of winning the nomination – unless it were a heavily splintered primary field. Other possible GOP names include businessman Kevin Rinke and former Detroit Police Chief James Craig, who finished second and sixth, respectively, in last year’s gubernatorial primary. (Craig was a write-in candidate after failing to make the ballot because of invalid signatures.)

Michigan Democrats did well last year – retaining the top three executive offices and flipping the state legislature – and they feel optimistic about their chances in the state in a presidential year. Still, Biden only won the state by less than 3 points. And while Slotkin has experience winning tough races, a lot may depend on whom the GOP nominates and which way the national winds are blowing next year.

Incumbent: Democrat Bob Casey

Democrats breathed another sigh of relief when Sen. Bob Casey, who disclosed a prostate cancer diagnosis earlier this year, announced that he was running for a fourth term. A former state auditor general and treasurer and the son of a two-term governor, Casey is well known in the Keystone State. He most recently won reelection by 13 points against a hard-line congressman who had tied himself closely to Trump.

This year, national Republicans are eyeing former hedge fund executive Dave McCormick, who lost the GOP nomination for Senate last year, as a top-tier recruit. Upon Casey’s reelection announcement, McCormick immediately attacked him, saying in a statement that a vote for Casey was “a vote for Biden and [Senate Majority Leader Chuck] Schumer.” The wealthy Republican has been on tour promoting his new book, “Superpower in Peril: A Battle Plan to Renew America,” and has hired staff but has yet to launch a campaign.

And consternation remains among national Republicans that losing 2022 gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano could jump into the race. An election denier who lost by 15 points last fall, Mastriano could jeopardize the race for Republicans. His candidacy would likely inspire a concerted effort by national Republicans to defeat him in the primary.

Incumbent: Republican Ted Cruz

Texas and Florida – both in a far different category of competitiveness compared with the rest of the states on this list – are trading places this month. GOP Sen. Ted Cruz is running for reelection after passing on another presidential bid. He raised $1.3 million in the first quarter – relatively little for a massive, expensive state – and ended March with $3.3 million in the bank. He’s proved to be a compelling boogeyman for the left, with Democrat Beto O’Rourke raising millions to try to unseat him in 2018, ultimately coming up less than 3 points short.

After a gubernatorial loss last year, O’Rourke hasn’t made any noise about this race. But Democratic Rep. Colin Allred, who raised about half a million dollars in the first quarter, is looking at it. State Sen. Roland Gutierrez, who represents Uvalde, is also weighing a bid, the San Antonio Express-News reported. Still, unseating Cruz in a state Trump won by nearly 6 points in 2020 will be a tall order.

Incumbent: Republican Rick Scott

Sen. Rick Scott has a history of close elections – he was first elected in 2018 by a fraction of a point following two prior narrow wins for governor. But GOP Sen. Marco Rubio and Gov. Ron DeSantis won commanding victories last fall, suggesting the state is getting redder.

Democrats don’t seem to have a major candidate as yet, but whoever opposes Scott is likely to use his controversial policy proposal – released last year during his NRSC chairmanship – against him. Scott’s plan had originally proposed sunsetting all federal programs every five years, but the senator later added a carve-out for Medicare and Social Security amid backlash from his own party. His most immediate headache could come in the form of intraparty attacks along those lines – and others.

Attorney Keith Gross has launched a primary challenge, alluding in his announcement video to Scott’s tenure as the head of a hospital chain company that the Justice Department investigated for health care fraud. While the company pleaded guilty to fraudulent Medicare billing, among other things, and paid $1.7 billion in fines, Scott wasn’t charged with a crime. It’s unclear how much of his own money Gross, who previously ran for office in Georgia as a Democrat, would put into a campaign.

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April 12, 2021
Twitter shifts course, allowing governments to post automated weather alerts and transit updates ‘for free’ | CNN Business

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Twitter said Tuesday it will permit public institutions such as transit agencies and the National Weather Service to post large volumes of automated tweets for free, provided that the accounts doing so are “verified gov or publicly owned services.”

The announcement marks another sudden pivot in Twitter’s attempts to charge institutional users for access to its platform — reflecting an apparent concession to those who warned that Twitter’s paywall plan would disrupt consumers’ ability to receive timely updates from first responders, weather agencies and other vital services for which Twitter has become an essential distribution channel.

Last week, New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority announced it would stop posting real-time transit alerts on Twitter, citing reliability issues with Twitter’s platform and saying it does not pay tech platforms for the ability to provide the updates. In recent weeks, multiple regional accounts run by the National Weather Service have also warned followers to expect fewer weather updates in connection with Twitter’s platform changes.

Tuesday’s shift comes amid a widespread backlash to Twitter’s paid plans, which cost as much as $2.5 million per year for top-level access privileges allowing organizations to download and post large volumes of tweets in an automated fashion.

The changes, which took effect in March, restricted third parties from easily accessing Twitter’s application programming interface, or the technology that allows outside software to plug into Twitter’s platform. The changes provoked especially strong opposition from third-party app developers whose projects depend on uninterrupted Twitter access, as well as from academic researchers that study platform manipulation and misinformation, who said even the most expensive new plans provided just a fraction of the data Twitter once offered at no or low cost.

On Tuesday, Twitter’s official account for developers acknowledged the impact the company’s paywall could have on civil society.

“One of the most important use cases for the Twitter API has always been public utility,” it said. “Verified gov or publicly owned services who tweet weather alerts, transport updates and emergency notifications may use the API, for these critical purposes, for free.”

But while Twitter appeared to be backing off from an attempt to charge vital services substantial fees for API access, the announcement left it ambiguous regarding how Twitter planned to ensure that critical public safety and transit accounts would be “verified.”

Requiring that the accounts be verified under Twitter’s paid subscription program, Twitter Blue, could still involve forcing institutions to pay to access Twitter’s API.

Twitter’s developer account didn’t immediately respond to CNN’s questions seeking clarification on the matter.

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April 12, 2021
How Congress lost control of the Supreme Court | CNN Politics

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A version of this story appeared in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.

CNN
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The Supreme Court holds more power than it used to and, thanks to its “shadow docket,” can make consequential decisions that affect every American without so much as a written decision.

That’s my takeaway from a fascinating and educational new book by Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas who is also a CNN contributor.

I talked to Vladeck about “The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic,” which publishes on May 16. Excerpts of our conversation, conducted by phone, are below.

WOLF: Can you explain to people what you mean by “shadow docket”?

VLADECK: The term is not mine. It was coined by University of Chicago law professor Will Baude in 2015.

Will meant it really as this umbrella term. Not as a pejorative, but just as a description of the fact that the vast majority of rulings that the Supreme Court hands down that we don’t pay attention to.

They’re not the fancy decisions on the merits docket. They’re not the cases where the court hears oral arguments and writes these lengthy rulings with concurrences and dissents.

The typical shadow docket ruling is an unsigned, unexplained order. And most of them are banal. But not all of them.

Will’s insight, which I have rather shamelessly appropriated, is that there’s a lot of really important stuff that happens through unsigned, unexplained orders. Just because they’re unsigned and unexplained doesn’t mean that we ought not to care about them, talk about them, study them and try to divine broader patterns from them.

WOLF: You write about how the court, without explaining itself, either invalidated or influenced congressional maps in the last election in three states: Georgia, Alabama and Louisiana. Right now, Republicans have a four-seat majority in the House. Do you feel like those decisions determined the outcome of who was going to control the House?

VLADECK: I think it’s close. We’re talking about two decisions from the court in cases from Alabama and Louisiana, and then those decisions were directly followed in Georgia.

There’s no question that, but for the court’s interventions, at least three House seats in the current Congress would likely have been controlled by Democrats as opposed to Republicans.

What I think is really hard to say is what other effects might have followed. The New York Times has suggested that those decisions affected control of as many as seven to 10 House seats. That, I think, is a little more circumstantial.

There’s no question that the decisions in the Alabama and Louisiana cases helped to give the Republicans the majority they currently have in the House. Whether they actually directly affected control, I think is a close call.

WOLF: Justice Samuel Alito is unapologetic about use of the shadow docket. Chief Justice John Roberts and other conservatives dislike it. How have things changed in recent months? Has it been used more or less since you stopped writing this book?

VLADECK: With regard to what I think is the problematic behavior on the shadow docket, I think we have seen less of that in the current term. And actually, I think we can see patterns of that go all the way down to October 2021, when Justice (Amy Coney) Barrett wrote this very, very cryptic concurrence in a case about the Covid vaccine mandate for Maine health care workers.

It was delphic in what it said, but signaled a bit of a break between Barrett and (Brett) Kavanaugh, who joined that opinion, and Justices (Clarence) Thomas, Alito and (Neil) Gorsuch in how often they were going to be willing to vote to intervene on the shadow docket and what kinds of cases they were willing to intervene in.

Last week, the stay in the Oklahoma death penalty case, Richard Glossip, there were no dissents from that intervention. Even the mifepristone ruling in April, there are only two public dissents.

One of the really interesting stories here is the court really does seem to have moderated at least some of its behavior. Part of that, I think, is because to at least some degree, the median justices have become convinced that some of the court’s prior behavior is problematic.

WOLF: Do you have thoughts on motivations behind the rise of the shadow docket, which you pegged to the seating of Justice Barrett and this new conservative supermajority? Do you think that there was some concerted effort by the more conservative justices to exploit this?

VLADECK: I think the short answer is no. But I know that there are going to be folks who disagree.

The book tries to unpack some of this chronologically, because I think the story makes a lot of sense when told in sequence.

Starting in 2017, the court was confronted with an unprecedented flurry of emergency applications from the Trump administration. It reacted to those applications iteratively, one at a time, without actually stepping back and looking at the whole waterfront, so the court actually kept digging itself in deeper and deeper.

Had the justices actually taken a step back and asked whether this was a practice they wanted to condone, they might not have said yes. And I think with each new intervention, with each successive case, what had previously been extraordinary became ordinary.

Without there necessarily having been any deliberateness or malice, the conservative majority just routinized the types of interventions that had until 2017 been completely unroutine.

It’s only when we get to the Covid cases in 2020 and 2021 that now it starts to look like some of this is willful, because it’s only in those cases where we see the court deciding legal questions on the shadow docket through emergency applications that were in front of the justices already on the merits docket.

There was nothing stopping the court from using merits cases to reach these questions about religious liberty, and the court did it through the shadow docket anyway.

I really think it started as just an unstructured off-the-cuff reaction to unusually aggressive behavior by the Trump administration and then just sort of morphed into something else as time went on.

WOLF: You point to the Obergefell decision (legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide) to argue that the court had already spoken on same-sex marriage through years of inaction. There was a patchwork of marriage laws the court had tolerated for a number of years. Reading that made me think we’re returning to that with abortion rights. And certainly with guns. The patchwork nature of rights in this country is growing not shrinking, despite the gay marriage decision.

VLADECK: I think it’s grown in some respects and is shrinking and others. The more that the Supreme Court constitutionalizes things, the less of a patchwork we have.

If you look at the Second Amendment context, I think it’s actually less of a patchwork, because more and more variances in how localities regulate guns are being struck down by the courts for violating the federal Constitution. Versus contests where the court is stepping away from constitutional enforcement, like abortion. It’s more contextual than sort of categorical.

WOLF: I’ve done a lot of writing about the filibuster, which is this custom that has evolved to be a major part of the US government and slowed or stalled legislation in Congress. Your descriptions of how the court has evolved reminded me of that. You argue the justices have essentially grabbed power from Congress over the last 100 years or so to gain more control over their docket.

VLADECK: When we look at the court today, we see a court that controls virtually all of its docket, a court that decides not just which cases it’s going to hear, but which issues it’s going to decide within the cases it chooses to hear.

For most of us, we’ve never known anything different. And so we just assume that that’s how the court is supposed to operate.

The reality is totally different. Until 1891, and really in practice until 1925, virtually all of the court’s docket was mandatory – the court had to decide any case over which it had jurisdiction.

That made it a lot harder for the justices to have an agenda. It made it a lot harder for the justices to target particular disputes and look around for cases. The rise of certiorari, of docket discretion, is actually a thoroughly untold but undeniable part of the story of why today’s Supreme Court is so powerful, despite the founders’ views that this would be the least dangerous branch.

The court today actually has a ton of power. Some of that story is about a power grab.

But a fair amount of the story is about acquiescence and abdication by Congress, which gave the court the certiorari power in the first instance; which never reined it in, even as the court has seemed to used it to claim more and more power; and which in 1988 took all the brakes off of certiorari and said, yep, just about all the court’s docket is going to be discretionary – and which has done absolutely nothing since then to exercise any modicum of control over the court’s docket.

That’s why the story that the book tries to tell is not just a story about the court. It is a story about the separation of powers and how the shadow docket is in some respects just a symptom of the broader disease of separation of powers dysfunction that we’re seeing right now.

WOLF: You come back to that 1988 law repeatedly in the book. I wonder what you think Congress should do now to change the court. There are proposals to change the number of justices, to change the terms of justices. What would be your prescription?

VLADECK: My prescription is sort of even sillier, which is I would just start by doing something. To me, the problem is that Congress has gotten completely out of the business of exercising any leverage over the courts, so much so that when Chief Justice Roberts was invited to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he responds and says that would raise the separation of powers concern.

No it wouldn’t! Justices testify all the time. Or at least they did historically, and no one ever thought that was unconstitutional.

There are specific things Congress can do, but the real thing Congress needs to do is just more than nothing. Exercise more control over the court’s docket. Use the budget, if necessary, as a cudgel.

If nationwide injunctions are a problem that’s responsible for why the court is behaving in this way, make it easier for parties to appeal nationwide injunctions directly to the court without having to go through the emergency application process.

There are so many things Congress could do. The problem is that we’re stuck in this post-1988 mindset that it is not Congress’ job. When we look at the court today, we look at the ethics issues, the docket issues, the legitimacy debates – a lot of what’s going on here is a court that’s just not remotely checked and not worrying about being checked.

And this is why I’m a bit more circumspect about adding seats to the court or term limits. I don’t think changing the composition of the court changes the basic problem, which is the power dynamic, the Madisonian idea in Federalist 51, that ambition must be made to counteract ambition.

That doesn’t change just because you have different bodies in those seats. The way that changes is Congress reasserts its clear constitutional prerogatives over the court. And that’s part of the story the book tries to tell.

WOLF: You also talked quite a bit about this idea that the court gets most of its power from the legitimacy it has in the public. What should it do to restore its legitimacy?

VLADECK: “Restore” is a little strong. I have not given up on the court. But I think there’s a lot that the justices can do to at least give a sense that they actually care about public perception, and that they should care about public perception.

First, I think it would be nice if the justices would stop attacking critics as seeking to delegitimize the court. If you think the criticisms are unfair, then respond on the substance as opposed to attacking the people who are criticizing.

When it comes to the shadow docket specifically, I think the justices can commit internally to norms about writings providing some rationale whenever the court’s going to grant emergency relief and actually upset the status quo.

I think the court can commit to taking pains to make sure in each case that it’s explaining how the relevant criteria for emergency relief are met, that it’s explaining why it disagrees with lower courts, who in many cases are writing lengthy opinions that are getting quashed in a sentence.

More generally, the justices could emulate better behavior when it comes to emergency applications and what the court’s role is in responding to them.

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April 12, 2021
How Meta got caught in tensions between the US and EU | CNN Business

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CNN
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Facebook-parent Meta has perhaps become the most high-profile casualty of a long-running privacy dispute between Europe and the United States — but it may not be the last.

Meta has been fined a record-breaking €1.2 billion ($1.3 billion) by European Union regulators for violating EU privacy laws by transferring the personal data of Facebook users to servers in the United States. Meta said Monday it would appeal the ruling, including the fine.

The historic fine against Meta — and a potentially game-changing legal order that could force Meta to stop transferring EU users’ data to the United States — isn’t just a one-off decision limited to this one company or its individual business practices. It reflects bigger, unresolved tensions between Europe and the United States over data privacy, government surveillance and regulation of internet platforms.

Those underlying and fundamental disagreements, which have simmered for years, have now come to a head, casting a significant shadow over thousands of businesses that depend on processing EU data in the United States.

Beyond its huge economic implications, however, the fine has once again highlighted Europe’s deep mistrust of US surveillance powers — right as the US government is trying to build its own case against foreign-linked apps such as TikTok over similar surveillance concerns.

The origins of Meta’s fine this week trace back to a 2020 ruling by Europe’s top court.

In that decision, the European Court of Justice struck down a complex transatlantic framework Meta and many other companies had been relying on until then to legally move EU user data to US servers in the ordinary course of running their businesses.

That framework, known as Privacy Shield, was itself the outgrowth of European complaints that US authorities didn’t do enough to protect the privacy of EU citizens. At the time Privacy Shield was created, the world was still reeling from disclosures made by National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden. His disclosures highlighted the vast reach of US surveillance programs such as PRISM, which allowed the NSA to snoop on the electronic communications of foreign nationals as they used tech tools built by Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, among others.

PRISM relied on a basic fact of internet architecture: Much of the world’s online communications take place on US-based platforms that route their data through US servers, with few legal protections or recourse for either foreigners or Americans swept up in the tracking.

A 2013 European Parliament report on the PRISM program captured the EU’s sense of alarm, noting the “very strong implications” for EU citizens.

“PRISM seems to have allowed an unprecedented scale and depth in intelligence gathering,” the report said, “which goes beyond counter-terrorism and beyond espionage activities carried out by liberal regimes in the past. This may lead towards an illegal form of Total Information Awareness where data of millions of people are subject to collection and manipulation by the NSA.”

Privacy Shield was a 2016 US-EU agreement designed to address those concerns by making US companies certifiably accountable for their handling of EU user data. For a time, it seemed as if Privacy Shield could be a lasting solution facilitating the growth of the internet and a globally connected society, one in which the free flow of data would not be impeded.

But when the European Court of Justice invalidated that framework in 2020, it reiterated longstanding surveillance concerns and insisted that Privacy Shield still didn’t provide EU citizens’ personal information the same level of protection in the US that it enjoys in EU countries, a standard required under GDPR, the EU’s signature privacy law.

The loss of Privacy Shield created enormous uncertainty for the more than 5,300 businesses that rely on the smooth transfer of data across borders. The US government has said transatlantic data flows support the more than $7 trillion dollars of economic activity that occurs every year between the United States and the European Union. And the US Chamber of Commerce has estimated that transatlantic data transfers account for about half of all data transfers in both the US and the EU.

The Biden administration has moved to implement a successor to Privacy Shield that contains some changes to US surveillance practices, and if it is fully implemented in time, it could prevent Meta and other companies from having to suspend transatlantic data transfers or some of their European operations.

But it’s unclear whether those changes will be enough to be accepted by the EU, or whether the new data privacy framework could avoid its own court challenge.

The possibility that US-EU data transfers may be seriously disrupted is refocusing scrutiny on US surveillance law just as the US government has been sounding its own alarms about Chinese government surveillance.

US officials have warned that China could seek to use data collected from TikTok or other foreign-linked companies to benefit the country’s intelligence or propaganda campaigns, using the personal information to identify spying targets or to manipulate public opinion through targeted disinformation.

But US moral authority on the issue risks being eroded by the EU criticism, a problem for the US government that may only be compounded by its own missteps.

Just last week, a federal court described how the FBI improperly accessed a vast intelligence database meant for surveilling foreign nationals in a bid to gather information on US Capitol rioters and those who protested the 2020 killing of George Floyd.

The improper access, which was not “reasonably likely” to retrieve foreign intelligence information or evidence of a crime, according to a Justice Department assessment described in the court’s opinion, has only inflamed domestic critics of US surveillance law, and could give ammunition to EU critics.

The intelligence database at issue was authorized under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — the same law used to justify the NSA’s PRISM program and which the EU has repeatedly cited as a danger to its citizens and a reason to suspect transatlantic data sharing.

While the US distinguishes itself from China based on commitments to open and democratic governance, the EU’s concerns about the US are not much different in kind: They come from a place of deep mistrust of broad surveillance authority and suspicions about the potential misuse of user data.

For years, civil liberties advocates have alleged that Section 702 enables warrantless spying on Americans on an enormous scale. Now, the FBI incident may only further validate EU fears; add to the existing concerns that led to Meta’s fine; contribute to the potential unraveling of the US-EU data relationship; and damage US credibility in its push to warn about the hypothetical risks of letting TikTok data flow to China.

If a new transatlantic data agreement is delayed or falls apart, Meta won’t be the only company stuck with the bill. Thousands of other companies may get caught in the middle, and the United States will have to hope nobody looks too closely at why while still trying to make a case against TikTok.

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April 12, 2021
Amazon looks to adapt Alexa to the rise of ChatGPT | CNN Business

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CNN
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For years, Alexa has been synonymous with virtual assistants that can interact with users and do tasks on their behalf.

Now Amazon is trying to keep pace with a new wave of conversational AI tools that have accelerated the artificial intelligence arms race in the tech industry and rapidly reshaped what consumers may expect from their tech products.

Amazon’s goal is to use AI “to create this great personal assistant,” said Dave Limp, senior VP of devices and services, in a recent interview with CNN. “We’ve been using all forms of AI for a long time, but now that we see this emergence of generative AI, we can accelerate that vision even faster.”

Generative AI refers to a type of AI that can create new content, such as text and images, in response to user prompts. Limp did not elaborate on how generative AI could be used in Alexa products, but there are clear possibilities.

In theory, this technology could one day help Alexa have more natural conversations with users, answer more complex questions, and be more creative by telling stories or making up song lyrics in seconds. It could also enable more personalized interactions, allowing the assistant to learn about the device owner’s interests, preferences and better tailor its responses to each person.

“We’re not done and won’t be done until Alexa is as good or better than the ‘Star Trek’ computer,” Limp said. “And to be able to do that, it has to be conversational. It has to know all. It has to be the true source of knowledge for everything.”

Alexa launched nearly a decade ago and, along with Siri, Cortana and other voice assistants, seemed poised to change the way people interacted with technology. But the viral success of ChatGPT has arguably accomplished that faster and across a wider range of everyday products.

The effort to continue updating the technology that powers Alexa comes at a difficult moment for Amazon. Like other Big Tech companies, Amazon is now slashing staff and shelving products in an urgent effort to cut costs amid broader economic uncertainty. The Alexa division has not escaped unscathed.

Amazon confirmed plans in January to lay off more than 18,000 employees as the global economic outlook continued to worsen. In March, the company said about 9,000 more jobs would be impacted. Limp said his division lost about 2,000 people, about half of which were from the Alexa team.

Amazon also shut down some of the products it spun up earlier in the pandemic, such as its wearable fitness brand Halo, which allowed users to ask Alexa questions about their health and wellness. Limp said the company also shelved some “more risky” projects. “I wouldn’t doubt we’ll dust them off at some point and bring them back,” he said. “We’re still taking a lot of risks in this organization.”

But Limp said Alexa remains a “North Star” for his division. “To give you a sense, there’s still thousands and thousands of people working on Alexa,” he said.

Amazon is indeed still investing in Alexa and its related Echo smart speaker lineup. Last week, the company unveiled several new products, including the $39.99 Echo Pop and the $89.99 Echo Show 5, its smart speaker with a screen. While the products feature incremental updates, Limp said Amazon’s current lineup contains hints of what’s to come with its AI efforts, beyond generative AI.

For example, if Alexa is enabled on an Echo Show, where it can rotate and follow users around the room, “you’ll see glimmers of where it’s going over the next months and years,” Limp said.

But generative AI remains a key focus for the company. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in a letter to shareholders in April that the company is focused on “investing heavily” in the technology “across all of our consumer, seller, brand, and creator experiences.”

The company is reportedly working on adding ChatGPT-like search capabilities for its e-commerce store. Amazon is also rumored to be planning to use generative AI to bring conversational language to a home robot.

While Limp didn’t comment on the report, he said the end goal has long been for Alexa to communicate with users in a fluid, natural way, whether it’s through an Echo device or other products such as its robotic dog, Astro.

The concept remains a “hard technical challenge,” he said, but one that is “more tractable” with generative AI. “There’s still some hard corner cases and things to work out,” he said.

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April 12, 2021
Top House progressive says Democratic leaders should be concerned about debt deal support | CNN Politics

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Washington Rep. Pramila Jayapal, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said Sunday that White House negotiators and Democratic leaders should be concerned about progressive support for the tentative deal to raise the debt ceiling for two years

“Yes, they have to worry,” Jayapal told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union,” referring to some of the concessions made by the White House to reach the agreement with Republicans.

Following the announcement of the deal Saturday night, the White House and Republican leaders in Congress have been mounting an intensive push to consolidate support. But the marathon is far from over, and there remains little certainty the nation will avoid a default.

Whether House progressives will ultimately support the deal depends on the specifics of the agreement, Jayapal said, including how many people would be affected by expanded work requirements for certain adults receiving food stamps. The deal would also expand exemptions for certain recipients.

“It is really unfortunate that the president opened the door to this, and while at the end of the day, you know, perhaps this will – because of the exemptions – perhaps it will be OK, I can’t commit to that. I really don’t know,” Jayapal said.

The Washington Democrat said that she was briefed by top White House official Lael Brainard after the current framework came together but that she will not make her position clear until she can see legislative text.

“That’s always, you know, a problem, if you can’t see the exact legislative text. And we’re all trying to wade through spin right now,” Jayapal said.

The deal – which would also freeze spending on domestic programs and increase spending on defense and veterans issues, among other things – was meant to include provisions that could sway members of both parties to vote for it.

Senior White House officials have been calling House Democrats since Saturday night to shore up support as some in the party say the Biden administration conceded too much.

Connecticut Rep. Jim Himes, the former chair of the pro-business New Democrat Coalition, told “Fox News Sunday” he was leaning toward a “no” vote on the tentative deal.

Himes said he did not want to validate the negotiating process used by Republicans, “which at the end of the day is a hostage-taking process,” adding that, “as the speaker said, there is absolutely nothing for the Democrats in these things.”

But in a positive sign for the White House’s efforts to wrangle in Democratic votes, New Hampshire Rep. Ann McLane Kuster, the current head of the New Democrats bloc, signaled that her 99-member group may support the plan.

“Our Members are encouraged that the two sides have reached an agreement, and are confident that President Biden and White House negotiators have delivered a viable, bipartisan solution to end this crisis,” Kuster said in a statement. “We are doing our due diligence as lawmakers to ensure that this agreement can receive support from both parties in both chambers of Congress.”

Republican Rep. Dusty Johnson of South Dakota, one of the GOP negotiators on the deal, maintained that there were “no wins for Democrats” in the agreement.

“There is nothing after the passage of this bill that will be more liberal or more progressive than it is today. It is a remarkable conservative accomplishment,” the chair of the center-right Republican Main Street Caucus said in a separate interview on “State of the Union.”

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April 12, 2021
Trump on tape: Here’s what it means and what’s next | CNN Politics
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CNN
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Former President Donald Trump’s history of making inappropriate or questionable comments on tape got another chapter on Wednesday with fresh revelations from his post-White House life.

The latest example emerged from CNN’s exclusive reporting that federal prosecutors have an audio recording of Trump acknowledging he held onto a classified Pentagon document after leaving office. The tape seems unlikely to dent his political position as the frontrunner for the GOP nomination in 2024. But it could have real consequences in the legal limbo where he lives.

Most people recall the “Access Hollywood” tape of Trump using vulgar language to argue that “stars” can grab women. The emergence of that tape just before the 2016 election didn’t hurt him politically. But he later defended that statement as true, “unfortunately or fortunately,” in a video deposition, and jurors in New York recently found him liable for sexual abuse after the deposition was played back to them.

And then there’s the recording of him asking election officials in Georgia to “find” votes to help him change the results of the 2020 presidential election. Those efforts to overturn President Joe Biden’s win in the Peach State are part of an ongoing investigation.

This latest tape could also end up as part of a criminal case. The recording is in the possession of the Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith, who’s investigating the retention of national defense information. Smith’s investigation has shown signs of nearing its end, although it hasn’t resulted in any criminal charges.

So why is this revelation so significant?

“First of all, prosecutors love tapes,” CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig, a former federal prosecutor, told Jake Tapper on “The Lead” Wednesday.

“If you have a subject on tape, that’s his own words, that’s his own voice. The defense can’t say, well, some witness is fudging the truth.”

The recording of the July 2021 meeting, which CNN has not listened to but was described by multiple sources, seriously undercuts Trump’s longstanding argument that he mentally declassified material he took with him from the White House. It also adds his Bedminster club to the potential locations where Trump had classified documents after leaving office.

The recording of the meeting captures the sound of paper rustling, sources said, though it is not clear if it was the actual document in question. That raises questions about exposure of the document since attendees at the meeting included people who did not have security clearances that would have allowed them to access classified information, sources said.

Smith has focused on the meeting as part of the criminal investigation into Trump’s handling of national security secrets, and prosecutors have asked witnesses about the recording and the document before a federal grand jury, CNN’s Katelyn Polantz, Paula Reid and Kaitlan Collins reported.

In response to the report, a Trump campaign spokesman said “leaks” are meant to “inflame tensions” around Trump.

The recording also recalls the chaos at the end of his presidency. On the tape, sources tell CNN, Trump points to a classified Pentagon document to try to refute the idea that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley had been trying to stop him from starting a war with Iran.

In July 2021, journalist Susan Glasser had reported that, near the end of Trump’s presidency, Milley had raised concerns about Trump trying to strike Iran and had told the Joint Chiefs to ensure Trump issued no illegal orders and that he be informed if there was any concern.

That New Yorker story outraged Trump. On the tape, he mentions the document, which he said came from Milley, in response to that story – arguing that if others could see it, it would discredit Milley, sources said. (The document Trump references was not produced by Milley, CNN was told.)

The document’s existence is hardly unusual. The Joint Chiefs of Staff has a directorate focused on developing and proposing strategies and plans for the chairman, and another that provides guidance about current plans and operations to commanders throughout the force.

“You could pick any country and scenario and there is likely a contingency plan,” a US official told CNN’s Haley Britzky.

It is even less unusual for Milley to have briefed Trump on those plans, the official added. As chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Milley’s job is to advise and brief the president on his military options as commander in chief.

“That does not mean that Gen. Milley is a warmonger,” Beth Sanner, a former deputy director of National Intelligence who was involved with intelligence briefings during her career, said on CNN. “Quite the opposite. I spoke to him many times during my role as an intelligence official, and he absolutely did not want to go to war with Iran.”

CNN’s report on the recording also includes the incredible development that investigators have questioned Milley, who is still the nation’s top general.

The most important thing here could be Trump’s acknowledgment that the document is classified, contradicting his argument that he had the unilateral power to declassify things and take them from the White House.

During a CNN town hall in New Hampshire earlier this month, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins asked Trump if he had shown anyone classified documents to anyone.

“Not really,” he told her, adding, “Let me just tell you, I have the absolute right to do whatever I want with them.”

He had said that any classified documents he had were declassified, which is apparently contradicted by the audio recording.

As CNN reported, Trump’s comments on the tape suggested he wanted to share the information but was aware of limitations on his ability post-presidency to declassify records, two of the sources said.

The documents case is hardly the only legal matter hanging over Trump.

The former president, and the country he wants to lead again, needs a color-coded calendar to keep track of all the legal developments involving him – and help separate potential trials and appeals from upcoming debate and primary dates.

Besides the ongoing investigations into the aftermath of the 2020 election, here’s what else is looming over Trump.
His criminal trial in New York, which stems from the investigation into his alleged role in a hush money scheme, will coincide with March primary contests.
More immediately, there’s an October 2023 trial for the New York attorney general’s $250 million lawsuit against Trump, his eldest children and the Trump Organization. The Trump Organization was already convicted of criminal tax fraud in December.
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April 12, 2021
Teachers are on the front lines of a battle to change how teens use social media | CNN Business

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A high school English class may not sound like the typical forum for educating kids on the risks of social media, but that hasn’t stopped Jennifer Rosenzweig.

Each school year, the 10th graders in her class at Scarsdale High School in New York watch “The Social Dilemma,” a 2020 documentary about the harms of social media. She also teaches her students about how companies can manipulate algorithms to make platforms addictive and is part of the school’s leadership team that hosts related social media training sessions for teachers and parents.

Rosenzweig argues the subject is so important that it should be discussed in all courses.

“It’s really important to give students lots of opportunities to talk about, think about, write about how social media affects their lives,” she said. “They just happened to be born in a really complicated, overstimulating and demanding time – and we handed them these devices without knowing what effect they would have.”

Rosenzweig is one of a growing number of educators who find themselves on the front lines of a fight to change how students use social media, both in schools and at home, after rising concerns about the impact these services can have on the mental health of teens. And recently, there has been a push for more schools to effectively follow their example and develop programs to help educate students on the dangers of social media.

As part of US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s watershed report last month on the “profound risks” of social media for teens, he recommended policymakers push for “digital and media literacy curricula in schools” that help students “recognize, manage, and recover from online risks” such as harassment, abuse and “excessive social media use.”

Other politicians have suggested the same. Last month, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed an education bill that prohibits students from accessing certain social media platforms on school Wi-Fi and requires instruction on the negative impacts of social media.

These efforts come amid heightened bipartisan pressure from lawmakers for social media companies to do more to protect their youngest users. But in the absence of any new federal legislation, the burden falls on parents and schools, the latter of which faces significant challenges to address the issue.

Schools must grapple with limited resources, students who develop online habits at a very young age and staff who may not be well versed to discuss the ins and outs of algorithmic rabbit holes and cyberbullying.

At the Roycemore School in Evanston, Illinois, conversations around the impact of social media are happening in the classroom on a daily basis, according to Chris English, the head of school.

Teachers openly remind students how their social media history lives on and how it can be perceived among colleges and employers, English said. Teachers also discuss how dopamine plays a role in why teens feel the need to keep checking platforms as well as general best practices.

“We are always thinking about the social-emotional learning component … and how it applies to social media use,” said English, referring to teaching kids skills to manage their feelings and relationships.

As with other education efforts, however, he believes social media literacy campaigns are much easier to do when class sizes in school are lower, allowing teachers to put more significant time and energy into each student.

The Roycemore school is one of hundreds of schools across the US leaning on programs such as The Organization for Social Media Safety to provide digital literacy assemblies to students. The organization offers practical steps to address the varying dangers they may encounter on social media, from bullying and hate to trafficking and pressured sexting, as well as how algorithms can push problematic content to young users. The program is part of the DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) curriculum.

“Many students don’t even understand most of these dangers,” said Marc Berkman, director of The Organization for Social Media Safety. “They can’t protect themselves from the dangers if they don’t know what they are.”

Devorah Heitner, author of “Screenwise, Speaker: Raising Kids in the Digital Age,” previously told CNN that schools of all sizes should embrace digital literacy because teens need to learn how to properly function in online communities, as that is the expectation both going into college and in their professional lives.

“Literacy should not just be ‘don’t look at pornography’ or ‘stay off bad sites’ or ‘don’t cyberbully;’ that’s so limited,” she said. “It should also be understanding how algorithms work, how teens can respond or what to do when feeling excluded, or if they’re feeling insecure. We need to help kids with all these things.”

The Organization for Social Media Safety provides parent workshops and community guidelines for guardians to reference as issues surface. Although Berkman said he’s encouraged by more teachers talking to students about the dangers of social media, he advises them to undergo formal training on the subject because it’s “not a check the box exercise” and requires “up to date knowledge on the rich landscape of how teens are using” these platforms.

Digital literacy is not only playing out in high schools. Gillian Feldman, principal of Brawerman Elementary School in Los Angeles, said the school works with the Organization of Social Media Safety to provide educational sessions for parents of pre-teen and younger students to help them navigate social platforms.

“Our kids are 12 when they leave our school, but they’re already using Fortnite and Roblox and other platforms which have social media components, with the ability to chat, post and Like things on these games,” Feldman said. “The [sessions] have been eye opening for parents and help them set better parameters for kids.”

Feldman said the school is also taking a social-emotional approach to teaching its young students about social platforms, such as how they shouldn’t rely on “someone else’s approval to fill up your own [emotional] bucket.”

While trying to teach students to develop a better relationship with technology, some schools are also pushing for them to ditch their devices entirely — at least during school hours.

In September, Rosenzweig and her colleagues at Scarsdale High School introduced “Off and Away for the Day,” an effort that encourages students to keep smartphones in their book bags during the day.

During free periods, the students are allowed to listen to music, podcasts or meditation apps but phones must be out of sight during class. Students can “briefly check phones if needed” during homeroom or lunch but not scroll social media or play games.

The decision came after teachers at Scarsdale High School observed a correlation between screen time and declining reading abilities and focus among its students. The school is currently working to develop consequences and formal guidelines, she said.

“I would never claim that everyone is supportive of this initiative, and yes, students do roll their eyes about it for sure,” Rosenzweig said. “But what I do strongly claim is that when you speak to students for more than five minutes about this topic, they appreciate that we are talking about it and really do want the help.”

English’s school has also embraced the “Away for the Day” policy, where students put smartphones out of sight while on campus. It’s part of a bigger grassroots movement of the same name developed by the co-producers of the 2016 documentary “Screenagers,” which looks at the lives of teens growing up in the digital age.

Sabine Polack, who spoke to CNN in 2021 about how her 14-year-old daughter was struggling with depression and had contemplated suicide stemming from pressures around social media, is now an advocate of the “Away for the Day” movement to create phone free schools.

“It’s especially relevant now that we have the Surgeon General issuing advisories which includes calling for ‘tech free spaces’ as a tool to help mitigate the mental health crisis our children are facing,” said Polack, who is on the board of nonprofit Fairplay, which aims to protect kids from harmful marketing and excessive screentime.

Rosenzweig said she aims to expand “Off and Away” to other schools in the Scarsdale School District and is hopeful it can be a leading force making a change in their community and beyond.

“Schools have so much power,” Rosenzweig said. “We are with these kids five days of the week and we can make those days look like whatever we can look like.”

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April 12, 2021
Instagram lifts ban on anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. after launch of presidential bid | CNN Business

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New York
CNN
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Instagram announced Sunday it had lifted its ban on Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the anti-vaccine activist who has launched a presidential bid, two years after it shut down Kennedy’s account for breaking its rules related to Covid-19.

“As he is now an active candidate for president of the United States, we have restored access to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s, Instagram account,” Andy Stone, a spokesperson for Instagram’s parent company Meta said in a statement.

Kennedy, who has a long history of spreading vaccine misinformation, was banned from Instagram in February 2021.

A company spokesperson at the time said Instagram had removed his account for “repeatedly sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines.”

While Kennedy’s Instagram account was banned, his Facebook account remained active. Both platforms are owned by Meta.

Kennedy was a leading anti-vaccination voice during the Covid-19 pandemic, using his social media platforms to sow doubt and misinformation about the shots.

He has promoted false claims about vaccine links to autism and in 2022 compared vaccine mandates to Nazi Germany.

His wife, actress Cheryl Hines, publicly condemned Kennedy’s remark as “reprehensible” after he invoked Anne Frank, who was murdered by Nazis as a teenager.

Hines distanced herself from him in January 2022, tweeting: “His opinions are not a reflection of my own.”

Kennedy’s return to Instagram, first reported by The Washington Post, will give him access to his more than 769,000 followers.

The decision comes as traditional media and social media companies attempt to navigate a 2024 election campaign fraught with accusations of misinformation and censorship.

On Friday, YouTube announced it would no longer remove content featuring false claims that the 2020 US presidential election was stolen, reversing a policy instituted more than two years ago amid a wave of misinformation about the election.

The decision to reinstate Kennedy comes amid a flurry of activity between the candidate and Silicon Valley.

On Sunday, Twitter

(TWTR) founder Jack Dorsey appeared to endorse Kennedy for president, tweeting a YouTube video titled, “Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. argues he can beat Trump and DeSantis in 2024.” Dorsey added in the tweet, “He can and will.”

On Monday, Kennedy is due to take part in a live audio chat on Twitter with the company’s owner Elon Musk.

Meta’s decision to allow Kennedy back on Instagram came a few days after the Democratic presidential candidate publicly complained that the platform was blocking his campaign from creating a new account.

Stone, the Meta spokesperson, told CNN on Sunday that the restriction was a mistake and that the company had resolved the issue.

Meta executives have long maintained they believe political candidates should be able to use its platforms to reach voters, even if those candidates sometimes break rules that would get other users banned from its platforms.

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April 12, 2021