monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Never Trump Grifters Fully Expose Themselves With Latest Gambit

That new con, for at least a portion of these Never Trumpers, was something called the Lincoln Project. Bill Kristol, Rick Wilson, George Conway, and a myriad of other lobbyists and campaign consultants (who never seem to have worked on a winning campaign) are involved.

Now, if they weren’t so already, they’ve been fully exposed for exactly what they are with their latest gambit.

The one thing the Lincoln Project is good at is leveraging thirst for this narrative into earned media. Everything else is pretty suspect. https://t.co/Mzc2qgWzvS

— Liam Donovan (@LPDonovan) May 28, 2020

As Twitter checks Trump, Khamenei account left alone, despite plea from Israel

Iranian leader’s tweets calling Israel ‘cancerous growth’ to be ‘uprooted and destroyed’ left unchecked as social media firm clashes with US president over labeling his posts

Got it.

well thst's pretty typiucal,

As a teen in the early 2000s, I spent a lot of time on online message boards. They were funny, chaotic places where my fellow nerds and I spent hours arguing about everything under the sun: sports, music, video games, the latest episode of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

No matter the topic, there was one universal experience: On every board, some divisive issue would inevitably erupt into conflict, and an angry group of users — often led by a single, vocal one who felt they were being treated unfairly — would lead a rebellion against the “mods,” the moderators who had the privileges to delete posts, ban unruly users, and set the rules of the board.

Sometimes, the mods quelled the fight or struck a compromise, and brought the board back into harmony. Other times, the angry users broke off and started their own forum, or the board simply became so intolerable that everyone left.

That internet is long gone now. Social media apps killed the messy, unruly message boards and replaced them with slick personalized feeds. The new mods are mostly robots. And the people who make the rules — Jack Dorsey of Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Susan Wojcicki of YouTube, and a handful of others — have become some of the world’s richest and most influential people, with the power to shift global politics and curate the information diets of billions.

This week, President Trump declared war on the mods after Twitter appended a fact check to his tweets for the first time. On Thursday, he issued an executive order threatening to narrow legal protections for platforms that censor speech for ideological reasons, and sent his followers after an individual Twitter employee he accused, wrongly, of censoring him. And he made it clear that he would seek to punish Facebook, YouTube, or other platforms that interfered with his ability to communicate directly with his followers.

The war escalated early Friday morning, when Twitter took action against another of Mr. Trump’s tweets, this one a post about the protests in Minneapolis, which implied that looters could be shot. Twitter hid Mr. Trump’s tweet behind a warning label, saying that it violated the site’s policies against glorifying violence.

The question of what kinds of online speech a world leader should be allowed to post on social media is a mind-bendingly complex one, with tons of conflicting priorities and few easy answers.

But for me, at least, it helps to think of what’s happening as a high-stakes version of the drama we’ve all seen play out on neighborhood Nextdoor threads, fractious Facebook groups, and rowdy Reddit forums for years.

Looked at this way, Mr. Trump’s war on the platforms is a familiar refrain. A power user with a passionate following is lashing out against the moderators of his favorite internet services. He likes the way these services were run in the past, when he could stir up trouble and speak his mind without consequences.

Now, the mods are putting in new guardrails, and he’s upset. He wants what internet trolls and rebels have always wanted: to be allowed to post in peace, free of limits and restrictions. Most of all, he wants the mods to know who is really in charge.

In a 2017 article about divisions within the alt-right, Katie Notopoulos of BuzzFeed News summarized the phases of message board drama as a period of messy infighting over rules and regulations, followed by the formation of a “splinter board" where rebellious users went to escape what they saw as an overly restrictive environment.

“This trajectory typically happens after moderators of the board run afoul of devout users, usually by instituting hard-line rules or issuing bans on users,” she wrote.

One obvious difference between those niche message boards and today’s social media platforms is that the latter are enormous, market-dominating corporations whose products are used by billions of people. Their power gives unhappy users fewer options for breaking off, and gives the mods more leverage. (Even Mr. Trump seems to recognize that he needs Twitter, no matter how unhappy he is with its decisions.)

Also complicating matters: Mr. Trump is the sitting president, with the power of the executive branch at his disposal. Unlike a disgruntled Buffy fan or an angry Beanie Baby collector, he can create legal and regulatory headaches for the platforms he posts on, which makes moderating his misbehavior a bigger risk.

But looking at Mr. Trump as an aggrieved user of a fractious internet forum, rather than a politician making high-minded claims about freedom of speech, clarifies the dynamics at play here. Mod drama is never really about who’s allowed to say what, or which specific posts broke which specific rules. Often, it’s part of a power struggle between chaos and order, fought by people who thrive in a lawless environment.

In Twitter’s case, the company is enforcing rules it already had on its books — one prohibiting misinformation related to the voting process, and another prohibiting glorifying violence. They’re both clear, sensible rules, and Mr. Trump’s punishment for breaking them was relatively gentle. Twitter didn’t ban Mr. Trump or take down his tweets. It placed a small disclaimer on two of them — a pair of baseless tweets stating that mail-in ballots were ripe for voter fraud — and put a warning label on another.

But given Twitter’s history of permissiveness with Mr. Trump, any action to restrain him was bound to cause a stir. And Mr. Trump and his allies wasted no time going nuclear.

After the fact-check response, his campaign released a statement accusing Twitter of conspiring to “pull out all the stops to obstruct and interfere with President Trump getting his message through to voters.” He also signed an executive order calling for greater scrutiny of social media platforms, and threatening to limit Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the much-cited passage that gives legal immunity to internet companies for user-generated content that appears on their platforms.

These may be empty threats. Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are private enterprises, with no First Amendment obligations to users, and courts have consistently ruled that these companies can set their own rules, just as restaurants can require guests to wear shirts and shoes.

But Mr. Trump — whose entire online personality is built on pushing boundaries, and whose re-election campaign has already had some of its ads taken down for violating Facebook’s rules — has a strategic interest in getting the mods off his back, by intimidating social media executives into letting him post with impunity.

Facebook seems to have gotten Mr. Trump’s message. Before this week, it had very clear policies in place to prohibit voter suppression that even politicians, who are exempt from many of Facebook’s rules, were required to follow. But on Wednesday, Mr. Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, went on Fox News to say that the company would not fact-check Mr. Trump’s claim about mail-in voting, and that he was uncomfortable acting as an “arbiter of truth.” As of Friday morning, Mr. Trump’s statement implying that the Minneapolis protesters could be shot was still gathering likes on his Facebook page, with no warning labels in sight.

I’ll leave Mr. Zuckerberg’s motives for others to decode. But in my experience, mods who cede ground to bad-faith boundary-pushers have not found it easy to keep their communities on the rails.

I recently called Matt Haughey, the founder of one of my favorite early 2000s forums, MetaFilter. Having spent years overseeing a spirited online community, Mr. Haughey is a veteran observer and referee of message board drama. He said that Mr. Trump’s crusade against Twitter felt familiar.

“Every bad thing at MetaFilter happened with someone who had been testing the rules for a year or two,” he said. “Those are the ones who tend to blossom into super-trolls over time. They’ll see what they can get away with, they’ll figure out what the limits are, and just stay a step inside. It can go on forever. And when you inevitably break and say, this is a bad idea, they freak out, and try to play the victim.”

The stakes of Mr. Trump’s war on social media companies are significantly higher than the stakes of a random internet message board dispute. But the platforms can learn from their predecessors that some users do not want to compromise or be reasoned with. Their goal is power, not fairness. And if the mods are afraid to hold them accountable when they break the rules, they will keep pushing the limits again and again — until ultimately, the board is theirs to run.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. hospitals said they have pulled way back on the use of hydroxychloroquine, the malaria drug touted by President Donald Trump as a COVID-19 treatment, after several studies suggested it is not effective and may pose significant risks.

Early hopes for the decades-old drug were based in part on laboratory experiments and its anti-inflammatory and antiviral properties. But its efficacy has so far failed to pan out in human trials, and at least two studies suggest it may increase the risk of death.

Several hospitals that two months ago told Reuters they were using hydroxychloroquine frequently for patients with COVID-19 have cut back.

Orders for the drug have dropped to a tenth of the late-March peak, to about 125,000 pills last week, said Vizient Inc, a drug buyer for about half of U.S. hospitals.

The significant decrease in use is a sign that U.S. physicians no longer believe the drug’s potential benefit outweighs the risks. Some European governments this week banned hydroxychloroquine use for COVID-19 patients.

Dr. Thomas McGinn, deputy physician in chief at Northwell Health, New York’s largest healthcare system, told Reuters it decided to stop prescribing hydroxychloroquine at its 23 hospitals in mid-April, after clinical data began to emerge.

“People were in our hospitals, they were dying, and we wanted to do something,” he recalled. “But the minute the data came out ... showing no benefit and potential harm, I think we all needed to step back,” he said.

Seattle’s University of Washington hospital system has also stopped recommending hydroxychloroquine as a coronavirus standard of care, noting in its latest treatment guidelines that “recent clinical studies have not demonstrated virologic or clinical benefits.”

Trump has been a particularly strong supporter of hydroxychloroquine, calling it a “game changer” early on. He later said he was taking the drug to prevent infection despite no scientific evidence it could do so, after people who worked at the White House tested positive for COVID-19. He has also urged others to try the medicine.

Proponents of the drug as a COVID-19 treatment argue it may need to be administered at an earlier stage in the disease to be effective. Doctors are waiting for studies that might prove that.

President Trump on Thursday signed an executive order that could open the door for the U.S. government to assume oversight of political speech on the Internet, a broadside against Silicon Valley that a wide array of critics derided as a threat to free speech.

The new directive seeks to change a federal law that has spared tech companies from being sued or held liable for most posts, photos and videos shared by users on their sites. Tech giants herald these protections, known as Section 230, as the bedrock of the Internet. But Trump repeatedly has argued they allow Facebook, Google and Twitter to censor conservatives with impunity — charges these companies deny.

“We’re here today to defend free speech from one of the greatest dangers,” Trump said before signing the document.

The order signed Thursday encourages the Federal Communications Commission to rethink the scope of Section 230 and when its liability protections apply. The order also seeks to channel complaints about political bias to the Federal Trade Commission, an agency that the White House has asked to probe whether tech companies’ content-moderation policies are in keeping with their pledges of neutrality.

he order additionally created a council in cooperation with state attorneys general to probe allegations of censorship based on political views. And it tasked federal agencies with reviewing their spending on social media advertising.

While Trump has threatened to penalize tech companies for years, his signing of the order Thursday came in response to a decision by Twitter earlier in the week to mark two of his erroneous tweets with fact-checking labels. The small move set off a firestorm of tweets by the president threatening social media companies with regulations and other punishments.

rump’s directive now could set the stage for federal regulators to write new rules and issue new punishments for companies deemed to exhibit political bias. Depending on how the order is carried out, it poses the potential for wide-ranging consequences for a much broader segment of the Internet beyond just the social media giants, potentially affecting every website, app or service where users congregate online with new liability for the content on their platform.

A DER SPIEGEL Editorial by René Pfister

Not taking Trump at face value is naïve. And with the U.S. president now issuing constant warnings of voter fraud this fall, it is time to accept that he is laying the groundwork for his next attack on democracy.

29.05.2020

When Donald Trump was elected as the new U.S. president in fall 2016, many Europeans sought reassurance by telling themselves that it wouldn't be that bad. Sure, as a candidate he had accused Mexicans of being rapists and Chancellor Angela Merkel of being insane. He denied climate change and promised that he would back out of international treaties that his predecessor, Barack Obama, had painstakingly put together.

At the time, though, people said it was just campaign rhetoric and that Trump would quiet down once he was surrounded by serious advisers in the White House. "I would ask that we wait to see what concrete steps he takes," said Horst Seehofer, now Germany's interior minister, in November 2016. And plenty of people took the same approach, on both sides of the Atlantic.

The concrete steps that Trump then took inlcuded building a wall on the border with Mexico, backing out of the Paris Climate Agreement and imposing punitive tariffs on a number of countries, including Germany. One after the other, he got rid of all those independent voices in his government that people like Seehofer had hoped would rein him in. Most recently, he cut off U.S. funding to the World Health Organization right in the middle of the worst pandemic the world has seen in 100 years.

Trump is impulsive and often behaves like a 6-year-old, we've known that for a while. But those who continue to believe that he won't do what he says he is going to do are naïve at best. It isn't just mindless prattle when Trump complains day after day about how vulnerable the November presidential election is to voter fraud. No, it is an attempt to lay the groundwork for a coup. "I think there's a there's a greater risk of a real breakdown of democracy in the next six months than at any point, at least in the post-World War II period," says Jacob S. Hacker, a political science professor at Yale University.

According to surveys, more than half of American voters would like to vote by mail in November, more than ever before. In response, Trump has issued a constant stream of claims that this form of ballot casting is prone to manipulation, despite a lack of evidence for such assertions. It isn't even the case that Republicans would be disadvantaged by absentee voting. On the contrary, older Americans in particular value mail-in voting for its convenience. Trump himself has also voted by mail in the past.

Much Too Intemperate

When he nevertheless claims that the Democrats are preparing vast voter fraud, it demonstrates one thing above all else: He would like to hold open the option of ignoring the election results should it be close. Mail-in voting presents a perfect alibi for doing so: Should the counting of absentee ballots move slowly, Trump could prematurely claim victory. Or he could simply claim that his opponent's victory is based on manipulated mail-in ballots as an excuse for refusing to accept the results.

Those who think such a scenario is nothing more than a political fantasy should take a look back to 2016. During the campaign, Trump refused to say that he would accept a loss. Later, he claimed that the race against Hillary Clinton was only close because she had profited from millions of fraudulent votes. There is no proof for that claim either.

Today, Trump has a Republican Party behind him that is willing to provide cover for every act of capriciousness that the president decides to commit. Attorney General William Barr is mostly focused on protecting cronies of the president from long stays in prison and Trump has managed to install two confidants on the Supreme Court, where there is now a solid conservative majority. And it should not be forgotten that back in 2000, the court had the last say in who emerged victorious from a close election.

We in Germany should avoid gazing in arrogance at the at-times rather kooky and drama-prone American democracy. It is over 200 years old and has thus far survived all of the crises it has faced. Our first experiment with democracy collapsed after just 15 years -- and it was the Americans who resuscitated it after 1945.

Nevertheless, it would still be negligent to close our eyes in the face of reality. That democracy dies in darkness is one of the political shibboleths of our times. But nothing describes the situation in the U.S. as inadequately as this saying. Trump has never been cagey about his intentions; he is much too intemperate for that. Whatever goes through his head can be read just minutes later on Twitter. His opponents should not make the mistake of seeing him as nothing but a clown as a result of that immoderation. They would be better advised to carefully study his Twitter tirades. And to take them seriously.

And the president is committed to exacerbating conflict and fueling division,

He's nothing more than a troll.

PARIS (Reuters) - Sanofi has stopped recruiting new COVID-19 patients for two clinical trials on hydroxychloroquine and will no longer supply the anti-malaria drug to treat COVID-19 until concerns about safety are cleared up, it said on Friday.

That dealt a major blow to hopes for a treatment, touted by U.S. President Donald Trump, as drugmakers and governments race to find ways to treat patients and control the novel coronavirus.

Sanofi has been conducting two randomised, controlled clinical trials of hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19.

The first was expected to test 210 patients in United States, France, Belgium and the Netherlands who were not in hospital and suffering from the early stage of the disease while the second focused on hospitalised patients with moderate to severe COVID-19 in Europe. It was planned to include around 300 patients. ...

Sanofi and rival Novartis have pledged donations of tens of millions of doses of the drug for COVID-19. Last month, the French company said it had already doubled production capacity at eight sites and was poised to increase further.

Sanofi stops enrolling COVID-19 patients in hydroxychloroquine trials

Why I don't address most of your off topic crap: