Facebook decisions 'setbacks for civil rights,' audit finds

SAN FRANCISCO — Auditors hand-picked by Facebook to examine its policies said that the company had not done enough to protect people on the platform from discriminatory posts and ads and that its decisions to leave up President Donald Trump’s inflammatory posts were “significant setbacks for civil rights.”

The 89-page audit put Facebook in an awkward position as the presidential campaign heats up. The report gave fuel to the company’s detractors, who said the site had allowed hate speech and misinformation to flourish. The audit also placed the social network in the spotlight for an issue it had worked hard to avoid since the 2016 election: that it may once again be negatively influencing American voters.

Now Facebook has to decide whether its approach to hateful speech and noxious content — which was to leave it alone in the name of free expression — remains tenable. And that decision puts pressure on Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, who has repeatedly said that his company was not an arbiter of truth and that it would not police politicians’ posts.

“Many in the civil rights community have become disheartened, frustrated and angry after years of engagement where they implored the company to do more to advance equality and fight discrimination, while also safeguarding free expression,” wrote the auditors, Laura Murphy and Megan Cacace, who are civil rights experts and lawyers.

The audit, which was the culmination of 2 years of examination of the social network, was another signal of how power by the largest tech companies is increasingly under scrutiny. Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon are all facing questions over how they are wielding their influence and what effects it has had. Later this month, the chief executives of all four companies are set to testify in front of Congress.

But the report was especially devastating for Facebook because its executives had pointed to it as a sign that the company was seriously grappling with the content of its site.

In the audit, Facebook was repeatedly faulted for prioritizing free expression on its platform over nondiscrimination and for not having a robust infrastructure to handle civil rights. The report homed in on three posts by Trump in May, which the audit said contained hateful and violent speech or which harmed voters. Facebook left those posts untouched, over objections by the auditors, the report said.

In doing so, the social network set a “terrible precedent” that others could copy and that could affect the November election, the report said. The move cheated the billions of other people who use Facebook out of equal treatment, giving powerful political leaders a special exemption to make false and divisive statements, it said.

“Facebook has made policy and enforcement choices that leave our election exposed to interference by the President and others who seek to use misinformation to sow confusion and suppress voting,” Murphy and Cacace wrote.

They added that they “would have liked to see the company go further to address civil rights concerns in a host of areas.”

In a post Wednesday about the audit, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, said the report was “the beginning of the journey, not the end.” She added, “What has become increasingly clear is that we have a long way to go. As hard as it has been to have our shortcomings exposed by experts, it has undoubtedly been a really important process for our company.”

Sandberg said Facebook was already taking steps to address its shortcomings, including banning ads with fear-mongering statements and prohibiting the spread of disinformation around the 2020 census. The company said it would also hire more civil rights experts, create a role for a senior vice president of civil rights leadership and direct voters to a “voting information center” that has accurate information.

Facebook’s difficulties have been compounded by civil rights groups organizing a campaign, “Stop Hate for Profit,” to urge its advertisers to boycott the platform. More than 300 advertisers, including Coca-Cola and North Face, have agreed to pause their spending on the site.

On Tuesday, civil rights leaders met with Zuckerberg and Sandberg with 10 demands, including appointing a civil rights executive. But attendees said the Facebook executives did not agree to many of their requests and instead spouted “spin.” Zuckerberg said that while the company would make some changes to its processes, it would not do so because of external pressure or threat of financial loss, said one person who attended the meeting.

“I don’t know if Mark appreciates that hateful speech has harmful results and that Facebook groups have real-world consequences,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League and one of the leaders of the “Stop Hate for Profit” campaign.

Civil rights groups including Free Press and Color of Change also met Wednesday with nearly 300 ad agency and brand marketing leaders about Facebook. In the session, they said the new audit report exposed holes in the company’s content policies and enforcement practices, according to attendees.

The audit “has laid bare what we already know: Facebook is a platform plagued by civil rights shortcomings,” said Vanita Gupta, chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “Facebook has an enormous impact on our civil rights — by facilitating hate speech and violence, voter and census disinformation, and algorithmic bias, and by shortchanging diversity and inclusion.”

In the report, the auditors credited Facebook for making progress on some issues over the past 2 years, including increasing the hiring of some in-house civil rights experts and creating an ad system that would no longer allow advertisers running housing, employment and credit ads in the United States to target users based on gender, age or ZIP code. Zuckerberg had also personally committed to building products that “advance racial justice,” the report said.

But Facebook had been too willing to let politicians out of abiding by its rules, allowing them to spread misinformation, harmful rhetoric and even calls to violence, the report said.

The auditors said their concerns had increased over the past 9 months because of decisions made by Zuckerberg and Nick Clegg, Facebook’s global head of policy and communications.

Last fall, Zuckerberg delivered a speech at Georgetown University about his commitment to protecting free speech at all costs. Since then, the report noted, Facebook had refused to take down inflammatory posts from Trump and had permitted untruthful political ads to be circulated.

“Elevating free expression is a good thing, but it should apply to everyone,” the auditors wrote. “When it means that powerful politicians do not have to abide by the same rules that everyone else does, a hierarchy of speech is created that privileges certain voices over less powerful voices.”

-The New York Times Company-

Leah Chase, Creole chef who fed US presidents, freedom riders, dies at 96

Leah Chase, the nation’s pre-eminent Creole chef, always knew what to feed her famous customers.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Sr. liked barbecued ribs, and James Baldwin preferred gumbo. Singer Sarah Vaughan ordered stuffed crab to go, and Nat King Cole always wanted a four-minute egg.

She once had to stop President Barack Obama from putting hot sauce in her gumbo — a real culinary sin — and, despite pressure from a city still angry over the federal government’s response to Hurricane Katrina, she fed President George W. Bush crab soup and shrimp Clemenceau on the second anniversary of the storm that nearly closed her restaurant, Dooky Chase, for good.

“In my dining room, we changed the course of America over a bowl of gumbo and some fried chicken,” she would often say.

Chase died Saturday at her son’s home near her restaurant in New Orleans, her daughter Stella Reese Chase said. She was 96.

Chase was much more than a gifted chef, although she would argue that there is no greater calling than feeding people. She spread her message through cookbooks, countless media interviews and television shows. Princess Tiana, the frog who wanted to own a restaurant in the animated Disney feature “The Princess and the Frog,” was based on Chase. It was the first African-American princess in a Disney movie.

Chase possessed a mix of intellectual curiosity, deep religious conviction and a will always to lift others up, which would make her a central cultural figure in both the politics of New Orleans and the national struggle for civil rights. “She is of a generation of African-American women who set their faces against the wind without looking back,” said Jessica Harris, an author and expert on food of the African diaspora and who Chase came to view as another daughter. “It’s a work ethic, yes, but it’s also seeing how you want things to be and then being relentless about getting there.”

Leah Lange was born in Madisonville., Louisiana, a small town on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, on Jan. 6, 1923. She was the oldest of 14 children of Charles Lange, a ship’s caulker, and Hortensia (Raymond) Lange, a homemaker and seamstress. Her parents valued hard work and education, admonishing the children to keep their elbows off the table and teaching them to read with books that her father had salvaged from the trash heap at a nearby school for white children.

Because her hometown had no schools for African-Americans past sixth grade, she was sent to live with an aunt in New Orleans to complete her education at a Roman Catholic high school.

Chase was, by all accounts, exceptionally smart, and by an early age had memorized the Latin Mass. She graduated from high school at 16 and two years later took a job at a French Quarter restaurant.

It was the first restaurant she had ever been in, and it sparked a love of food beyond home cooking and an appreciation of beauty that she would nurture for the rest of her life.

She met Edgar Chase Jr., a jazz trumpeter and band leader known as Dooky, in 1945. Three months later they were married and began a family. Edgar Chase died in 2016 at 88.

In the early years of their marriage his parents ran a sandwich shop and lottery business in New Orleans in the Treme, one of America’s oldest African-American neighborhoods. Once the couple’s children were old enough, Chase began working with her husband at the restaurant. She slowly pushed her husband and his parents to expand the business, to make it more like the finer restaurants she had worked at in the French Quarter.

In a city operating under the heavy cloud of Jim Crow laws, Dooky Chase’s became the only upscale restaurant where African Americans could gather.

“In these desegregated times it’s hard to imagine what it meant for Leah Chase to try to create a fancy restaurant for black people,” said Lolis Eric Elie, an author and filmmaker whose father was a prominent New Orleans civil rights lawyer and whose mother was a well-regarded educator.

“Even in the days when my parents were courting, black people had Little League championship teams, college graduations and date nights with special people,” Elie said. “Dooky Chase’s was the place you went to for those occasions at the time when Galatoire’s and Antoine’s didn’t serve ‘colored.’”

The restaurant became a gathering place for leaders of the civil rights movement to discuss strategy, often with their white allies. At the time, it was illegal for black and white people to mix.

At the restaurant, Chase fed hungry Freedom Riders fresh off the road and hosted meetings of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. She let a young Thurgood Marshall use her telephone to call Robert F. Kennedy even when phoned-in lunch orders were pouring in.

“We were trying to be accepted without hurting anybody,” Chase said in an interview with the National Public Radio program “The Splendid Table.” “In the ′60s, here come these young people — bam! — they would just go in there and break the door down. They were going to take chances, go to jail if they had to. We couldn’t understand that, but it worked. A lot of mistakes were made, but sometimes that’s what it takes to change a system.”

The era’s great musicians and actors, too, came through her door. The restaurant had such a hold on the cultural firmament of the time that Ray Charles rewrote the lyrics to “Early in the Morning Blues” in tribute to the restaurant: “I went to Dooky Chase to get me something to eat./The waitress looked at me and said, ‘Ray, you sure look beat.’”

Chase was as compassionate as she was strict, always adhering to a code shaped in large part by her Catholic beliefs. She held up Gen. George S. Patton of World War II fame as a hero and was a fan of baseball, which she often used as a metaphor.

“I just think that God pitches us a low, slow curve, but he doesn’t want us to strike out,” she said in a New York Times interview. “I think everything he throws at you is testing your strength, and you don’t cry about it, and you go on.”

She supported Tipper Gore’s campaign in the 1980s and ′90s against explicit and violent rock and rap lyrics and demanded that young people dress properly when they came to her restaurant, yet she didn’t leave the neighborhood when it fell on economic hard times in the 1980s, and an 896-unit public housing project opened up across the street. People urged her to move out. Instead, she renovated.

“If we would have moved off this corner, this whole community would have been gone a long time ago,” she told Carol Allen, a biographer. “Running away from it isn’t going to help anything or anybody. I say like this, If you can’t take a risk, you’re wasting God’s good time on earth.”

Chase believed in corporal punishment, opposed abortion and believed women should dress modestly. But she was always a champion of women, especially young women coming up in the kitchens of America’s restaurants. Her frequent advice to them was, “You have to look like a girl, act like a lady, think like a man and work like a dog.”

Chase won numerous awards for her civil rights work and her cooking, but she was perhaps proudest of the work she did to promote art, Harris said.

Chase was 54 when she first walked into an art museum.

“Museums were segregated, and you didn’t go there, so we knew nothing,” she said. Her guide was Celestine Cook, a New Orleans socialite and civic leader who was the first African-American to sit on the board of the New Orleans Museum of Art, which Chase would join in 1972.

Her husband gave her a painting by the late African-American artist Jacob Lawrence, and her love of collecting was set. The walls of her restaurant were soon filled with pieces by artists like Elizabeth Catlett and John T. Biggers. It was considered by many to be Louisiana’s best collection of African-American art.

A portrait of Chase chopping squash in her kitchen by Gustave Blache III is in the National Portrait Gallery, and her chef’s jacket and other artifacts from her kitchen are on display in the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington.

She often said she would “be as mean as a rattlesnake” without art.

“Art softens people up and warms them up to deal with each other in humane ways,” Chase told a congressional committee in 1995 in an effort to save funding for the National Endowment for the Arts.

In 2005, when New Orleans’ levees broke during Hurricane Katrina, floodwater filled the floor of the restaurant but didn’t touch the art, which a grandson was able to retrieve undamaged.

For nearly 18 months, Chase and her husband lived in a government trailer next to the restaurant while they struggled to repair it. By 2007, it was open again.

The flood was only one of many setbacks Chase countered by cooking. Her eldest daughter, Emily — her right hand at the restaurant — died giving birth to her eighth child in 1990. That child died a short time later. The day after her daughter died, Chase was scheduled to open the restaurant at 11 a.m. So she did.

“I lost myself in the pots,” she wrote in “The Dooky Chase Cookbook.” “I had more tears in the gumbo pot than I had gumbo.”

In addition to her daughter Stella, survivors include a son, Edgar III; another daughter, Leah Chase Kamata; 16 grandchildren and 28 great-grandchildren.

Friends knew Chase’s health was failing in April, when she did not show up for her annual Holy Thursday lunch, for which she had long served gumbo z’herbes, a special dish that requires 9 kinds of greens. Seats for the lunch were always booked a year in advance, and nearly 700 people would share the meal.

For the last several years, chef John Folse had made the gumbo with her oversight, but Chase always showed up and addressed the crowd. She had worked up until a few days before Holy Thursday, her daughter Stella said, but had to be hospitalized.

“She always said you have to do something every day for somebody else,” Folse said. “She told me she tried to never say no. That’s what the school of Leah Chase was all about. You just never say no, and you keep on going.”


2019 New York Times News Service

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Michelle Obama confident progress can't be stopped, urges girls to aim high

LONDON -- Former US first lady Michelle Obama expressed confidence on Monday that the social progress made by having the first black couple in the White House could not be overturned.

Without directly addressing her husband's successor, Donald Trump, Obama said change was "not a straight line" but the election of Barack Obama to the White House showed people were open to change.

Earlier in the day she encouraged some London schoolgirls to ensure they played a role in tackling the "the bitterness, the nastiness that we see in politics" by never wasting their vote.

Obama, 54, said she was surprised as anyone when her husband was elected the first black president, taking office in 2009 - especially because when "he was elected he looked like he was 12" - and hopes were high.

"We mistakenly thought Barack Obama was going to erase hundreds of years of history in 8 years," Obama told a full house of 2,900 people at the Southbank Centre's Royal Festival Hall as part of a tour to promote her memoir "Becoming."

"We made progress and going backwards doesn't mean it wasn't real," she said, adding that actions taken now helped to pave the way for people's grandchildren.

Receiving a standing ovation as she strode onto the stage, Obama spoke about everything from convincing her parents to let her eat peanut butter for breakfast, to her father talking about the joy of sex, to dealing with his death in 1991.

She also joked about breaking protocol when she touched Queen Elizabeth, wanting to sometimes push her husband out of a window, and her drive to protect her 2 daughters, now aged 20 and 17, from the public spotlight and online attacks.

But she also had a serious message about the need for girls to get a good education and to overcome self-doubt - particularly young black girls.

Earlier this year, Obama was named the world's second-most admired woman, behind Angelina Jolie, in a YouGov poll, but she said she still sometimes questioned if she was good enough.

"I still feel at some level I have something to prove because of the color of my skin, the shape of my body," she said.

NO FORGIVENESS

"My advice to young women is that you have to start by trying to get those demons out of your head," she said.

"Your task is to get yourself ready because people will try to hold you back ... it will crush you if you are not ready."

Obama, who brought up in a working class family in Chicago, said she watched girls strive as she had and she would continue her campaign for girls' education that became a passion while in the White House alongside her work on childhood obesity.

Returning to a central London school for girls - Elizabeth Garrett Anderson - that she first visited in 2009, Obama encouraged students to find their passion, mentors, and help each other, adding "there's no room for mean girls".

Obama said it was important to give young people a reason to hope, particularly in the current divisive political climate.

"The one challenge we have ... is harnessing the power we do have and not relinquishing that and by that I mean voting," Obama, a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School, told 300 rapt teenagers.

Asked often about her political ambitions, Obama makes it clear in her book she has no intention of going down that route.

"I have no intention of running for office, ever," she wrote. "I have never been a fan of politics and my experience over the past 10 years has done nothing to change that."

While Obama has not criticized Trump directly at events to promote her memoir, she does criticize him in the book.

Trump with "his loud and reckless innuendos" about her husband's birth certificate put "my family's safety at risk."

"And for this, I'd never forgive him," she wrote.

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Democrats stage sit-in protest on House floor over gun control legislation

WASHINGTON - Talks intensified in the U.S. Senate on Wednesday on compromise legislation to stop gun sales to people on some terrorism watch lists, as Democrats shut down the House of Representatives to protest their chamber's lack of action.

Several dozen U.S. House Democrats pushing for action on gun control protested on the floor of the House, chanting "no bill, no break!" and demanding that the chamber put off an upcoming recess until legislation is debated.

The protest was the latest move by Democrats to persuade the Republican majority in Congress to take up gun control in response to last week's mass shooting in Orlando, Florida, the deadliest in modern U.S. history.

The Democrats stood or sat at the front of the chamber, where such disruptive tactics are relatively rare. When the presiding House officer, Republican Representative Ted Poe, entered the chamber at about noon EDT (1600 GMT), he declared the House not in order. After banging the gavel several times in an attempt to clear the protesters, he announced the chamber would be in recess and left.

The Democrats remained on the House floor, calling for action before a vacation recess scheduled to start at the end of the week and run through July 5.

Assistant Democratic Leader James Clyburn, likened the push for gun control action to the civil rights movement of the 1960s when sit-ins and other civil disobedience prodded Washington to act on new protections for African-Americans.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton tweeted her support for the sit-in, saying, "This is what real leadership looks like."

Democrats in the Senate last week took control of that chamber for nearly 15 straight hours as they called for gun control legislation.

On Monday, the Senate failed to advance four gun measures, including one that would have prohibited gun sales to people on a broad range of government watch lists.

Senators from both parties now are pushing for a compromise. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he would schedule a vote on the measure by fellow Republican Senator Susan Collins that would prevent about 109,000 people on "no-fly" and other surveillance lists from purchasing guns.

They were holding private talks on the bill and Collins said it could be voted upon this week.

"We're doing some refinements, reflecting some suggestions that we've had from both sides of the aisle," Collins told reporters. She said one of the issues being negotiated was the question of protecting the constitutional rights of gun buyers.

Senator Orrin Hatch, a senior Republican, said there was a "robust discussion" of the Collins measure but he will not be voting for Collins’ proposal.

"I'm a pro-gun guy," Hatch said.

Senator John Thune, a member of Senate Republican leadership, told reporters: "I think it’s going to get a vote ... whether it can pass or not at this point is kind of a moving target."

The powerful National Rifle Association said it opposes the compromise bill and called it unconstitutional.

PRIMAL SCREAMS

House Republicans have declined to advance gun control legislation and House Speaker Paul Ryan said earlier on Wednesday he was "waiting to see what the Senate does" before discussing the topic.

Many House Republicans say they see the problem differently than Democrats. "We don't view the fact that someone becomes radicalized and decides to kill a bunch of Americans ... as a gun problem," Representative John Fleming of Louisiana said on Wednesday. "We view that as a terrorist problem."

The Orlando gunman, Omar Mateen, pledged allegiance to Islamic State during the June 12 rampage in which he killed 49 people and wounded 53 with an assault rifle and pistol at a gay nightclub before being fatally shot by police.

House Democrats frustrated by inaction on guns have staged several actions on the House floor in recent days. They interrupted a moment of silence in honor of the Orlando victims and unsuccessfully sought recognition to bring up bills on expanding background checks and preventing people on "no-fly" and other surveillance lists from buying guns.

Democratic Representative Bobby Rush, in a news conference with House leadership and gun control groups on the steps of the Capitol on Wednesday, recounted his son's 1999 shooting death in Chicago and the mother's primal scream when the doctor said the man had died.

"It's time to end this chorus of primal screams in our nation and the time to end it is now," Rush shouted. - report from Susan Cornwell and Timothy Gardner, Reuters

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com

Policeman who shot dead Ferguson teenager resigns

FERGUSON - The white policeman who shot dead an unarmed black teenager in the St Louis suburb of Ferguson has resigned, but it failed to deter angry protesters demanding justice and reform.

Darren Wilson left the force citing fears for the safety of local residents and fellow police officers, according to a letter published by local media Saturday. Wilson wrote in his letter that "it is my hope that my resignation will allow the community to heal."

A grand jury decision on Monday not to charge Wilson in connection with the August 9 shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown touched off days of sporadic violence in Ferguson as well as demonstrations in several major cities across the United States.

The decision revived long-standing questions about how police, especially white officers, interact with African Americans -- questions raised again after last week's shooting in Cleveland of 12-year-old Tamir Rice.

"It was my hope to continue in police work, but the safety of other police officers and the community are of paramount importance to me," the letter from the 28-year-old Wilson said.

Dozens of demonstrators again gathered outside Ferguson police station despite his decision to quit, with protesters setting fire to a US flag and jeering at police officers.

One man, who gave his name as "Kenny," said: "I'm mad as hell. Every night we're going to be here."

There was also a brief standoff outside a bar between demonstrators and riot police before organizers moved protesters along.



- Justice march -

Earlier Saturday, a core group of about 100 marchers, many from other US states, set out on a 120-mile (192-kilometer) "Journey for Justice," heading from Ferguson -- a mainly black suburb -- to the Missouri state capital Jefferson City.

The marchers, organized by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), are demanding the sacking of the Ferguson police chief, nationwide police reforms and an end to racial profiling.

"We will fight until hell freezes over, and then we will fight on the ice," NAACP president Cornell William Brooks told supporters at Washington Metropolitan A.M.E. Zion Church before setting out.

"What we're endeavoring to do here is seek justice for a grieving family as well as systemic, fundamental reform in terms of policing for an outraged community.

"When you have a 12-year-old child who is killed with a toy gun in his hand, there is something fundamentally wrong."

Eugene Gillis, a trumpeter who plays at the nightly protests, said young protesters feel alienated and reject the older generation of activists molded by slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Most of these young people say these people are out here for photo ops and that's what aggravates the issue," Gillis told AFP.

Brooks, dressed in neat jeans and a sweater, prayed and fell to his knees in reflection at Brown's memorial while surrounded by a media scrum.

Mobbed by TV cameras, he then led the march in one direction before turning around and heading back the opposite way, marching into West Florissant Avenue, where some of the worst looting and arson took place after Monday's announcement that Wilson will not be charged.



- Washington 'die-in' -

Outside Ferguson, others rallied in Brown's memory and called for change.

Hundreds of people demonstrated in and around the US capital Washington, including some who laid on the ground for several minutes in a "die-in" at a shopping mall near the Pentagon.

The NAACP wants police to use body cameras, changes to the system of equipping police with military hardware, a promotion of diversity on the force and an end to the use of major force in cases involving minor offenses.

Adrian West, a technology trainer, waited nearly two hours for the marchers to show up late, potentially missing a memorial service for a friend killed in a fight.

But he still expressed support, hopeful that nationwide protests would yet bring change.

"I think this is enough to get the federal government's attention, strong enough to make them listen, and it's quite possible Darren Wilson could end up getting indicted by the federal government."

A federal probe into whether Wilson violated Brown's civil rights is ongoing.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com