Media Mentions

An article by Emma Svoboda ‘23: As dawn broke on Oct. 6 in Bishkek, the Kyrgyz capital, it was unclear who was running the country. Thousands of protestors had taken to the streets the previous day to protest the results of a parliamentary election widely viewed as fraudulent, which shut opposition parties out of government for the first time in Kyrgyzstan’s history. Photos from the city’s central Ala-Too Square show a sea of people holding up their cell phone flashlights. Later in the evening of Oct. 6, protests turned violent, with police using flash bombs and rubber bullets against protestors; more than 500 injuries were reported, along with at least one death. Demonstrators overtook state security guards and broke into the White House, Kyrgyzstan’s parliamentary building, where they were photographed drinking tea in ransacked government offices. Three days later, after tumultuous protests continued around the country, President Sooronbay Jeenbekov bowed to the pressures of protestors and indicated his willingness to resign. Jeenbekov, in a statement, signaled that he is prepared to step down as president as soon as “legitimate heads of the executive authorities are approved and the country takes the path of legitimacy” and committed to maintaining peace and tranquility in the country. Kyrgyzstan is a mountainous country of 6.5 million people tucked between China and Kazakhstan in Central Asia. Colonized by the Russian Empire in the 19th century, the country gained its independence after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Kyrgyzstan is one of the poorest countries in Central Asia, but also the region’s only true democracy—Jeenbekov came to power in a 2017 election in which he won only 55 percent of the vote, unlike the leaders of neighboring Tajikistan and Turkmenistan who have held onto power with sham elections.

Amy Coney Barrett told a Jacksonville University audience in 2016 that the Supreme Court is unlikely to overturn a woman’s right to an abortion, the key holding of the landmark Roe v. Wade decision. However, Barrett has written law review articles that outline arguments attorneys theoretically could use in trying to strike down that ruling and other precedents, though the writings are analyses that don't urge specific action or say how she would decide specific cases. Among them: She cited legal experts who do not count Roe v. Wade among "superprecedents" – Supreme Court decisions that are so ingrained in American life that they can't be overturned. The potential for Barrett to join a 6-3 conservative majority that could erase the controversial 47-year-old ruling is expected to be one flashpoint during her Senate confirmation hearings scheduled to start Monday...If the Senate confirms Barrett's nomination, could she provide the legal impetus to overturn the ruling? Legal experts who have examined her writings and court decisions offer conflicting scenarios. "I don’t doubt that Judge Barrett would be more prepared to overturn significant Supreme Court precedents than anyone on the current Court other than perhaps Justice (Clarence) Thomas," said Laurence Tribe, a Harvard Law School expert on constitutional law who had a young Barack Obama as a law school researcher.  "Her writing on the subject is admirably candid even if shockingly unconservative," Tribe said. "She strongly believes that a Supreme Court justice who believes a prior decision, whether about the Constitution or about the meaning of an act of Congress, was wrong should feel free to overrule it without any substantial concern for the importance of stability and predictability in the Court’s jurisprudence."

The Harvard Gazette interviewed Beatrice Lindstrom, a clinical instructor at the International Human Rights Clinic, about her still unresolved, decade-long efforts on behalf of the victims of the 2010 cholera outbreak in Haiti.

Facebook Inc.’s announcement Thursday that it had shut down a network of phony accounts attempting to influence the November elections reinforced fears that people are working to use social media to undermine U.S. democracy. But unlike 2016, when most attention focused on campaigns associated with the Russian government, this year’s wave of disinformation is coming largely from President Donald Trump and his American supporters, a growing body of research shows, raising new challenges for social media companies.  Facebook tied the campaign it exposed Thursday to Rally Forge, a U.S. marketing firm hired by Turning Point USA, a conservative youth organization that has already been linked to other attempts to manipulate online political debate, and an advocacy organization called the Inclusive Conservation Group. The social network removed 200 Facebook accounts, 55 pages, and 76 Instagram accounts. It also banned Rally Forge.  The fake accounts, created to look like real Facebook users, posted commentary parroting Trump administration talking points on the pages of news organizations...A study published last week by Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center showed how the president promoted disinformation largely by manipulating the mass media into repeating his claims. “There's no question that the leading force of this disinformation campaign has been President Trump himself,” said Yochai Benkler, the study’s main author, a stance that has been echoed by numerous other experts in the field. Benkler thinks the fixation on social media has overstated its relative importance compared to traditional news media in spreading disinformation. “We always focus on Twitter because that's the new shiny object in the media ecosystem, but when we actually looked at the last six months, Trump uses press briefings and news releases every bit as much as he uses Twitter,” he said.

Anthropologist Mary Gray, who said her research focusing on queer and other underrepresented communities often was seen as a "marginal topic" in some academic circles, never thought she would have access to a grant that would give her over half a million dollars with no strings attached. All that changed when Gray was chosen as one of this year’s MacArthur Fellows, which will provide her with a $625,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation that she can use in any way she chooses. The fellowship, commonly referred to as the MacArthur “genius grant," counts essayist Susan Sontag, journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates, filmmaker Errol Morris and playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda among its past recipients. This year, there are 21 fellows from fields as varied as astrophysics and choreography, and each will receive the same amount of money, which will be disbursed over five years. Gray, 51, is one of three LGBTQ MacArthur “geniuses” in the Class of 2020 who spoke with NBC News about their work, their plans for the grant money and the diversity of voices in this year’s class. She is joined by writer Jacqueline Woodson and econometrician Isaiah Andrews. “This is for every queer kid out there,” Gray said of her selection. “The last thing I would have thought was that the work I do would be acknowledged in this way.” Gray’s recent academic work explores how the digital economy has transformed labor, identity and human rights. Driving this research is her past research on how queer people in rural America have used the internet to form communities around their identities, which stems from her upbringing in California’s rural Central Valley. She is currently a faculty associate at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, while also maintaining faculty positions in the anthropology and gender studies departments at Indiana University.

EPA will make a high-stakes courtroom argument today in favor of a more restrictive view of the federal government's authority to control greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. The agency is coming before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit this morning in a long-anticipated hearing to defend the Trump administration's move last year to undo President Obama's landmark 2015 Clean Power Plan (CPP) and replace it with the Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) rule. EPA claims it can only take regulatory action that can be applied directly to coal-fired power plants, rather than take a systemwide approach championed by the agency under Obama... "What really heightens the risk for the government is that you have two judges on the panel that heard not just the agency making a different argument, but — even if in the end they didn't agree with the 2016 version of the agency's argument — they certainly spent a lot of time themselves examining the play in the joints [of the statute]," said Joe Goffman, executive director of the Environmental & Energy Law Program at Harvard University Law School and a key architect of the CPP. "That 4-year-old experience, I would argue, conditioned any judges who participated in that oral argument to see the language in dispute now as being more flexible than the EPA is now insisting that it is," he added.

A three-judge panel appeared divided Thursday on President Trump’s effort to repeal his predecessor’s regulations on planet-warming emissions from the power sector and replace them with far weaker controls. The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbiapanel, with two judges named by President Barack Obama and one by President Trump, could well agree to block the Trump administration’s plan, but the issue is almost sure to reach the Supreme Court if Mr. Trump is re-elected. Even if Mr. Trump loses next month, the arguments by the Environmental Protection Agency laid the groundwork for a protracted legal war over future administrations’ ability to cut the pollution responsible for climate change from the power sector, the country’s second largest source of greenhouse gas emissions... “The Trump administration has really taken a go-for-broke approach,” said Joseph Goffman, executive director of Harvard University Law School’s Environmental and Energy Law Program and a former E.P.A. official under President Barack Obama. If the administration’s arguments prevail, he said, “Then they’ve really advanced a broader project that the Trump administration has been pursuing to not only repeal individual rules, but to narrow the foundation of the federal government in doing any kind of regulation.”

Melissa Lavasani took “microdoses” of illegal psychedelic mushrooms to recover from postpartum depression in 2018. After her condition improved, she wanted others to have access to the treatment, working for months to get a ballot initiative decriminalizing it in front of D.C. voters. Initiative 81, also known as the Entheogenic Plant and Fungus Policy Act of 2020, made the ballot after months of wrangling over its legality and a nationwide debate about policing and the medical value of psychedelic drugs. If D.C. voters approve the measure, the nation’s capital would join a handful of cities decriminalizing certain psychedelic plants and fungi, including those known as “magic mushrooms.” ... Vocal opposition to the measure, which was endorsed by the D.C. Democratic Party earlier this month, has been muted. Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.), who fought marijuana legalization in the city, said in August that psychedelics had “some very limited medical value,” but added that he was concerned about the potential for abuse...Mason Marks, an attorney and physician who teaches health law at Harvard Law School, said “there will still be many critics, but it’s difficult to argue that decriminalization is a bad idea.” Racial justice protests over police shootings that galvanized the nation this summer have made the ballot initiative more relevant, he said. Lavasani, a D.C. Department of Energy and Environment budget officer, called the initiative the “only police reform measure on the ballot.” “Everyone is looking to see how we can improve policing in our jurisdiction, and this is one way to do it,” she said. “This is one step to ending the war on drugs. This is one way to exercise that will if you want to.”

An article by Ashley Nunes:  Without the heavy footedness and over-exuberant steering of human motorists, self-driving cars might seem to be the answer to all of our woes on the road. Algorithms can’t get drunk, drowsy, or distracted, which are the leading causes of road fatalities and are largely responsible for killing 1.3 million people in traffic accidents every year. They are not prone to road rage, eating while driving, or fiddling with the entertainment system. And they can move faster, yet more safely, through traffic, which decreases congestion. Computerised systems are also better than their human counterparts at choosing the most fuel-efficient route. They accelerate and brake more smoothly. These eco-friendly driving practices collectively save fuel, which ultimately reduces exhaust pipe emissions. This all sounds great. After all, cars, trucks and buses currently account for nearly 30% of the US’s global warming pollution. Motor vehicles are also a major source of air pollution in cities around the world. It is easy to see why some see the precision and predictability that comes from handing control of vehicles to algorithms as a solution to not only the safety issues, but environmental problems that road transport faces. But realising this reality means overcoming numerous challenges. Here are three of them.

Environmental law likely won't get the same attention as abortion or health care at next week's Senate hearings for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett. But her confirmation, tilting the already-conservative court even further to the right, could have a major impact on the government's ability to address climate change. Nearly all of President Trump's climate rollbacks have been challenged, and several are likely headed to the high court. And some conservative allies with ties to the fossil fuel industry say they'd like to relitigate a key decision that underpins climate regulations. It's difficult to predict how Barrett would rule on specific cases. Environmental law was not her focus as a professor, and not something she dealt with a lot during her time on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit...Barrett's judicial philosophy shows skepticism of government and favors deregulation over regulation, according to Jody Freeman, who directs the Environmental and Energy Law Program at Harvard Law School and also served in the Obama administration. "I think, generally speaking, it's going to be a corporate court — good for business, good for corporations," says Freeman. Barrett is skeptical of federal agencies stretching their authority under laws where Congress hasn't given them clear direction, but Freeman says agencies need flexibility. "Even when Congress passes new laws there are always ambiguities," she says. "There always is new science, new understandings, new risks, new problems, new data. And it's impossible to specify each and every small decision that the agencies make."

Veterans kicked out of the military due to negative behavior related to post-traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injury and sexual trauma have been upgrading their discharges after a 2017 law change, but there are potentially thousands of others left without access to care or benefits because of less-than-honorable discharges. The landmark Fairness for Veterans Act, included in the 2017 military funding bill, aimed to help veterans upgrade their discharges. It requires a review from military officials to consider medical evidence to see whether mental illness or injury led to the discharge. Since the measure went into effect, 1,580 veterans have upgraded their discharges through 2019, according to the most recent Defense Department data. Despite the boost and efforts from Congress, some say a shockingly low number of veterans are applying for upgraded discharges...For decades, thousands of veterans with other-than-honorable discharges were turned away from the VA unlawfully, according to a study by Veterans Legal Clinic at Harvard Law School and the gay veterans group OUTVETS, released in March. The mass denial of benefits since 1980 has left about 400,000 at risk without care, the study found. Discharges that are other-than-honorable, including general discharges, are given for misconduct ranging from alcohol abuse, drug use and insubordination, but those infractions rarely result in courts-martial, meaning the service member never has their day in court and never gets due process. Those discharges are referred to as “bad paper” because of the negative consequences they have and the stigma they can carry.

Facebook announced on Tuesday that it is banning QAnon content across its platforms, an action that it characterizes as part of a larger effort to stop "Militarized Social Movements" from recruiting people through their social media sites. "Starting today, we will remove any Facebook Pages, Groups and Instagram accounts representing QAnon, even if they contain no violent content," Facebook explained in a statement. "This is an update from the initial policy in August that removed Pages, Groups and Instagram accounts associated with QAnon when they discussed potential violence while imposing a series of restrictions to limit the reach of other Pages, Groups and Instagram accounts associated with the movement." ... While many conservatives have taken to social media platforms like Twitter to accuse Facebook of violating QAnon's free speech rights, legal experts agree that the First Amendment only prohibits the government and its leaders from censoring individuals who disagree with them, not private companies. As Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California–Irvine, told Salon in May when Trump threatened to retaliate against Twitter for fact-checking two of his tweets, a private company like Facebook and Twitter is "entitled to include or exclude people as it sees fit." (Ironically, any actions undertaken by Trump to punish social media platforms he regards as hostile, legal experts like Hasen and Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe agreed, would actually violate the First Amendment.)

The world’s use of nitrogen fertilisers for food production could threaten efforts to keep global warming below 2C above pre-industrial levels. That is according to the Global Carbon Project’s first comprehensive assessment of how nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions are contributing to climate change. Published in Nature, the results show that human-caused N2O emissions have increased by 30% over the past four decades – with the use of nitrogen fertilisers in agriculture playing a major role in the uptick. A growing demand for meat and dairy products has also contributed to the surge. This is because livestock manure causes N2O emissions and nitrogen fertilisers are often used in the production of animal feed, the scientists say...The results “further highlight the need to raise agriculture up the climate change agenda”, says Dr. Helen Harwatt, a senior research fellow at Chatham House and food and climate policy fellow at Harvard Law School, who was also not involved in the study. She tells Carbon Brief: “Measures to reduce N2O emissions from the agriculture sector align with the broader requirements of food system transformation to meet key planetary health goals. [Such measures include] a shift to plant-based eating patterns to reduce the disproportionate burden of animal agriculture on all three major greenhouse gases – N2O, CO2 and methane.”

On Wednesday President Donald Trump's chief of staff announced that White House staffers who come into contact with the president, who has COVID-19, will wear masks, gowns, gloves and eye gear to protect themselves from getting infected with coronavirus. Still, that puts White House workers in an odd position, as their boss — the most powerful man in the country — is going to work sick. Meanwhile, workers who may have compromising immune conditions or merely don't wish to put themselves at risk are now expected to feel safe because of a little bit of PPE between them and a coronavirus-ridden boss who eschews mask-wearing...The case of meatpacking employees may end up being comparable to the situation in the White House. Sharon Block, the Executive Director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, explained that workers at meatpacking plants "were told to continue to show up for work even as their coworkers were testing positive in high numbers and even dying." "As different as these workplaces may seem, the dynamic is similar — especially for the non-partisan staff in the White House, many of whom are people of color who are not highly paid. Because of the failures of the Trump Administration and their political objectives, workers' health and lives are needlessly being put at risk." ... "Under the Occupational Safety and Health Act, employees in the United States have a right to refuse to work when they reasonably fear serious injury or death," Benjamin Sachs, a professor of labor and history at Harvard Law School, told Salon by email. "In my view, COVID-19 presents such a threat, especially in a work environment when employees are being asked not to wear protective gear. Unfortunately, the Trump Administration's Occupational Safety and Health Administration has proven time and again that it will not stand up for workers. That's why workers need new leadership at OSHA and across government."

Nearly five years after Richard and Janet Himsel's legal battle over odors and other alleged harm from the nearby confined hog feeding operation began, it appears to be coming to a close. Earlier this year, the Hendricks County couple, with the help of a local environmental group, asked the U.S. Supreme Court to weigh in on their case that claimed Indiana's Right to Farm Act violated the U.S. Constitution. On Monday, the nation's highest court rejected that appeal...The case began in Indiana Trial Court, where they alleged the farm diminished their quality of life — that the odors from the farm made being in their homes unbearable and made their throat and eyes sting, and reduced the value of their homes. In other words, it constitutes a nuisance and a trespass, Ferraro claimed...Right-to-farm laws started to grow in prominence around the nation in the 1970s and 1980s, and Indiana’s was enacted in 1981. These laws were enacted as a way to protect existing farmers from urban sprawl as city-dwellers moved to the countryside unprepared for the smells of agriculture. Such newcomers could not sue for nuisance as they moved to or “came to the nuisance,” said Andy Stawasz ‘22, a Harvard Law student who worked on the petition to the Supreme Court through the school's Animal Law and Policy Clinic. That protection disappeared, however, if there was a significant change on the farm — such as to its size, the hours of operation, technology used, etc. In those situations, a neighbor could file a nuisance claim.

On this episode of Lawfare's Arbiters of Truth series on disinformation, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Yochai Benkler, a professor at Harvard Law School and co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. With only weeks until Election Day in the United States, there’s a lot of mis- and disinformation flying around on the subject of mail-in ballots. Discussions about addressing that disinformation often focus on platforms like Facebook or Twitter. But a new study by the Berkman Klein Center suggests that social media isn’t the most important part of mail-in ballot disinformation campaigns—rather, traditional mass media like news outlets and cable news are the main vector by which the Republican Party and the president have spread these ideas. So what’s the research behind this counterintuitive finding? And what are the implications for how we think about disinformation and the media ecosystem?

We can bring ethics back to Professor Friedman’s call to corporate purpose by returning to the more inclusive purposes that historically bound us together to form corporations. Corporations have the capacity to tap humanity’s greatest potential to accomplish projects spanning, in scope and time, beyond what any individual could provide to the world. Think of the earliest forms of group associations that combined our efforts, from the Roman origin of our word for corporation, corpora (founded “around a common tie such as a common profession or trade, a common worship, or the widespread common desire to receive a decent burial”), through the intergenerational building of cathedrals erected to the glory of powers beyond ourselves...In theory, the 2019 Business Roundtable Statement demoting shareholder primacy, and describing corporate purpose as “a fundamental commitment to all of our stakeholders,” is a good start to rethink the direction in which we are headed. Recent work by Professor Lucian Bebchuk and Mr. Roberto Tallarita asks why, however, if corporations were serious about these changes, they did not bring them more often to their governing boards. Professor Tyler Wry’s work further suggests that Covid-19 is testing the resolve of the companies that signed the Statement. Since the economic impacts of Covid-19 began, its signatories have paid out 20 percent more capital to shareholders than similar companies, and signatory companies have been almost 20 percent more likely to announce layoffs or worker furloughs. Given management incentive systems in place, the Statement’s aspirations do not seem to be penetrating into the behavior of signatory corporations. As another essay by Bebchuk, Tallarita, and Mr. Kobi Kastiel examining the efficacy of stakeholder constituency statutes in this ProMarket series concludes, there should be “substantial doubt [about]… relying on the discretion of corporate leaders, as stakeholderism advocates, to address concerns about the adverse effects of corporations on their stakeholders.”

As the 2020 presidential election approaches, social networks have promised to minimize false rumors about voter fraud or “rigged” mail-in ballots, a mostly imaginary threat that discourages voting and casts doubt on the democratic process. But new research has suggested that these rumors aren’t born in the dark corners of Facebook or Twitter — and that fighting them effectively might involve going after one of social media’s most powerful users. Last week, Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center put forward an illuminating analysis of voting misinformation. A working paper posits that social media isn’t driving most disinformation around mail-in voting. Instead, Twitter and Facebook amplify content from “political and media elites.” That includes traditional news outlets, particularly wire services like the Associated Press, but also Trump’s tweets — which the paper cites as a key disinformation source. The center published the methodology and explanation on its site, and co-author Yochai Benkler also wrote a clear, more succinct breakdown of it at Columbia Journalism Review. The authors measured the volume of tweets, Facebook posts, and “open web” stories mentioning mail-in voting or absentee ballots alongside terms like fraud and election rigging. Then, they looked at the top-performing posts and their sources. The authors overwhelmingly found that spikes in social media activity echoed politicians or news outlets discussing voter fraud. Some spikes involved actual (rare) cases of suspected or attempted fraud. But “the most common by far,” Benkler writes, “was a statement Donald Trump made in one of his three main channels: Twitter, press briefings, and television interviews.”

An article by Yochai Benkler: No group of people has a more important role to play in shaping how Americans think about mail-in voter fraud than editors and journalists who write for local and regional newspapers, local television news, the broadcast networks, and for those who produce the syndicated news these outlets use. My team and I at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society came to this remarkable conclusion in a report about the months-long disinformation campaign that Donald Trump and the Republican Party mounted to sow doubt about mail-in voting. We analyzed tens of thousands of online stories and Facebook posts, and millions of tweets, using network analysis, text analysis, and qualitative research. Contrary to widespread concern with Russia or Facebook as vectors of election disinformation, our findings told a different story. All peaks in attention and coverage of mail-in voter fraud were triggered by statements or actions of political elites, particularly Donald Trump through three channels: his Twitter account, press briefings, and television interviews on Fox. Trump was, in turn, reinforced by his staff, the RNC, and other Republican leaders. Social media played a secondary role, recirculating stories published by major media outlets about the actions or statements of the political actors pushing the false narrative. President Trump perfected the art of harnessing mass media to disseminate and reinforce his disinformation campaign.

Voting fraud, according to study after study, is rare. Mail-in ballots are, with a few exceptions, a safe way to vote. But millions of Americans have come to believe something radically different: They think the Nov. 3 election could very well end up being stolen. That the outcome — especially if it relies on counting the votes that come in later than in a normal election year — might well be illegitimate. Where would they get such an idea? Conventional wisdom might say it comes from false stories and memes spread on social media, originating from foreign troublemakers trying to influence the election results...Not so, says a major new study: It’s the American mainstream press that’s doing most of the dirty work. Eager to look neutral — and worried about being accused of lefty partisanship — mainstream news organizations across the political spectrum have bent over backward to aid and abet Trump’s disinformation campaign about voting by mail by blasting his false claims out in headlines, tweets and news alerts, according to the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University... “If Biden wins clearly by mail-in voting and not in-person voting, you may well have tens of millions of people persuaded that the election was stolen,” Yochai Benkler, the center’s co-director and a Harvard Law School professor, told me. And their outrage could translate into violence. The disinformation campaign “is transmitted primarily through mass media, including outlets on the center-left and in the mainstream,” Benkler said. In particular, it may be those outlets that try hardest to seem unbiased that are doing a lot of the heavy lifting, he said — in part because of their broad reach and their influence on less-partisan voters.

A podcast by Noah Feldman: Adam Przeworski, a politics professor at New York University and one of the world’s foremost scholars on democratic transitions, explains his worries about a peaceful transfer of power.