90 Miles From Tyranny

Monday, August 22, 2022

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Visage à trois #424

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Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #606

Zuckerberg's Meta Rolling Out 40 Teams to 'Protect' Midterm Elections by Disrupting Groups and Censoring Content

Facebook is rolling out its rules for the midterm elections in a post from Meta about how it plans to throw its weight around in the weeks leading up to the November midterm elections.

According to a post published last week from Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, 40 teams will be monitoring the elections.

The post cites one side of the forces allegedly trying to disrupt an election by noting that Meta has “banned more than 270 white supremacist organizations, and removed 2.5 million pieces of content tied to organized hate globally on Facebook in the first quarter of 2022.”

No specific mention was made about Facebook banning content from left-wing groups or their activities.

For the midterms, Clegg’s post said the company will employ “advanced security operations to fight foreign interference and domestic influence campaigns, our network of independent fact-checking partners, our industry-leading transparency measures around political advertising and pages, as well as new measures to help keep poll workers safe.”

“As we did in 2020, we have a dedicated team in place to combat election and voter interference while also helping people get reliable information about when and how to vote,” the post stated.

Facebook will partner with the Biden administration as well, through an alliance with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, according to the post.

The company will also work with the National Association of Secretaries of State, which is led by Tahesha Way, the New Jersey secretary of state who was embroiled in a lawsuit with former President Donald Trump over the conduct of her state’s election s in 2020.

Another partner Facebook identified was the National Association of State Elections Directors, which is headed by...

A new NPR opinion poll (by Ipos) and accompanying article argues that many Americans wrongly believe immigrants use “public benefits” at higher rates than the U.S.-born. NPR should have done its homework, as it is certainly not “false and misleading” to think that immigrant households make heavy use of welfare programs. In fact, it is well established that immigrant-headed households access most public benefit programs at higher rates than native-headed households.

NPR cites no data to support its position. Instead, it simply states that many immigrants are barred from welfare programs. However, most legal immigrants have lived in the country long enough to access welfare or have become citizens. Moreover, all legal immigrants and even illegal immigrants can receive benefits on behalf of their U.S.-born children. An analysis of the Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) by the Center published last year, based on data collected before Covid-19, shows that immigrant households use nearly every type of welfare program at higher rates than U.S.-born households.

The heavy use of welfare programs by immigrant households is not because immigrants are lazy and don’t work, nor it is because they all came to get welfare. Rather, a larger share of immigrants have modest levels of education and are more likely to be poor. As a result, immigrants are more likely than the U.S.-born to turn to taxpayers to support themselves or their children.

In our prior analysis we looked at the following programs: Supplemental Security Income (SSI), Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) food program, free or subsidized school breakfast and lunch, food stamps (officially called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP), Medicaid, public housing, and rent subsidies. All of these are means-tested anti-poverty programs. (In an effort inflate the use rate of the U.S.-born, some advocates of high immigration have tried to argue that social insurance programs like Social Security and Medicare should be counted as welfare. But these programs are not means-tested – they are open to all participants who pay in to the system – and are therefore not welfare as traditionally defined.)

Summary information from our prior analysis: