#zeynep_tufekci

As AI Use Increases, Journalists’ Responsibility Does, Too. - The Daily Mississippian
▻https://thedmonline.com/as-ai-use-increases-journalists-responsibility-does-too

https://thedmonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Zeynep-Tufekci.jpg

Zeynep Tufekci says AI presents benefits and challenges to news media
Aleesa BookerbyAleesa Booker
April 17, 2025
Reading Time: 4 mins read

As readers turn to Artificial Intelligence rather than mainstream media for their news, journalists need to understand their jobs are more important than ever, according to Zeynep Tufekci, a featured speaker at the “Addressing the Impact of Social Media and AI on Democracy” symposium at the University of Mississippi on April 1.
Zeynep Tufekci, Henry G. Bryant professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University.

Tufekci is a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University. She also is a New York Times opinion columnist and the author of the book “Twitter and Tear Gas.”

In an interview after she spoke to the general assembly at the symposium sponsored by the Jordan Center for Journalism Advocacy and Innovation, Tufekci described the benefits that come from using artificial intelligence and the challenges it presents.

“One of the things that AI brings to the public sphere is the difficulties of figuring out what’s authentic versus what’s not. Journalists by acting as gatekeepers help the audience, the readers and the public differentiate between what is real versus what is just an unsubstantiated claim. Journalists can play a major role in helping us adjust to all the changes that AI may bring to how we consume information,” Tufekci said.

So why is it essential for journalists to understand AI?

“Young journalists will be working in an environment where AI plays a major role, and they need to understand what they bring to these conversations and what and how they can contribute to society by being a journalist. AI is going to both allow them to do certain things perhaps a little easier but also create real challenges in how the public is informed,” Tufekci said.

Tufekci often travels to college campuses to explain why AI is important at the collegiate level.

“If you look at the history of technology and different scientific advancements similar to this one, they make being informed and educated even more important for many reasons. You should be informed generally so you can get jobs in the future, but also you want to understand how you can and should try to use these technologies for the good of society and deal with their downsides,” Tufekci said.

Concerns about the growing use of artificial intelligence include invasion of privacy, with the technology collecting and analyzing massive amounts of personal information; the potential unchecked spread of propaganda and disinformation; the amplification of biases; and the technology’s lack of transparency and accountability.

“I don’t think it will take over the role of journalism. I think it’s going to make the role of a journalist to verify and authenticate the delivery of credible information even more important,” Tufekci said.

Many mainstream media companies, already wrestling with the challenge of making journalism financially viable, see AI’s procurement and dissemination of their copyrighted content as a threat to their very existence.

“The challenge, of course, is (AI) using the labor of journalism without paying for it. So there is going to be a need to find new ways to make sure that journalists can do the job for the benefit of society, but in a way that pushes the goal and people can get paid to do it, because you can’t just pay for things and have them done,” Tufekci said.

Journalists can benefit by using AI.

“It can help process certain kinds of data, but you have to be careful. You have to understand what it’s good for and what it’s not good for. AI can help with minor parts of writing. There is nothing wrong with AI copy editing things just like we use spelling checks,” Tufekci said.

Tufekci herself uses AI.

“I use it to see how it works and how it doesn’t. But for right now, I use it as an addition to my search. However, I found that it can produce fake findings. It does a great job occasionally, but it does produce fake things as well,’ Tufekci said.

Tufekci gave future journalists advice as they enter the newest digital age.

“For young journalists it’s important to not be afraid of technology. … It’s completely understandable that anyone smart enough to be a journalist is smart enough to go and learn the specifics of how this tool works. And that will help them both use it appropriately and understand its strengths and weaknesses and how it’s going to transform the public sphere and the world of journalism.

“There’s no reason to be doom and gloom. The future is not preordained; it’s what people make of it. But to make something of the future in a positive way you have to be informed, so I would say learn a lot, do things, dive into the details, learn how it works and think,” Tufekci concluded.

#Zeynep_Tufekci #Journalisme #IA #Intelligence_artificielle

Opinion | Mark Zuckerberg’s Macho Posturing Looks a Lot Like Cowardice - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/15/opinion/mark-zuckerberg-donald-trump.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2025/01/17/multimedia/00tufekci-qglj/00tufekci-qglj-facebookJumbo.jpg

Jan. 15, 2025
A black-and-white profile photo of Mark Zuckerberg wearing a dark shirt and a necklace with a single, square charm.
Credit...Photo Illustration by The New York Times. Source Photograph: David Zalubowski/Associated Press
Listen to this article · 7:33 min Learn more

By Zeynep Tufekci

Opinion Columnist

I really, really wanted to like Mark Zuckerberg’s gushing appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast last Friday. Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, Facebook’s parent company, made some important points about the inadequacies of fact-checking as well as the troubling ways that governments can manipulate private companies.

Having grown up under an authoritarian regime, I cherish the right to free speech that Zuckerberg kept talking about. But having gone on to study the way that authoritarian regimes work, I know to focus on what people do, not what they say.

On the podcast, Zuckerberg told Rogan about how society had become too “neutered or emasculated” and gushed about “masculine energy” and his newfound devotion to jujitsu.

I’m not their target audience but I feel their vibe. A.C.L. tears, which they spent some time commiserating about, are pretty nasty. And I have a soft spot for martial arts content.

But one of the most recent actions that Zuckerberg’s supposedly emboldened company took was to banish tampons from office men’s rooms. (The products had been provided for transgender or nonbinary employees.) “Masculine energy,” my lady-parts — that is the most snowflake move I’ve heard of in a long time. If the men in your company can’t even handle the sight of a box of tampons, you’ve got bigger problems than an A.C.L. tear.

It wasn’t the only bizarre contradiction of the week.

Zuckerberg says that in the name of free speech, the company he founded “to give people a voice” will no longer attempt to moderate hate speech and misinformation. Facebook will now allow users to allege, among other things, “mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation.” And the rule that prohibited users from claiming that people of certain races were responsible for spreading the coronavirus? It’s gone. Slander whoever you like. Knock yourself out.
Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.

Hate speech in the 21st century is a complicated issue. We can’t just moderate our way out of our very real conflicts over immigration, transgender rights, pandemic response and other issues. Zuckerberg conveniently neglected to mention that Facebook profits off tribalizing, inflammatory, conspiratorial content, which has been shown to keep people scrolling. He is right, however, that fact-checking could never catch more than a tiny portion of those posts. (Though how is that a defense, by the way?) He’s also right that fact-checkers lost a good deal of public trust by overstepping their boundaries. Even if those mistakes were rare, fact-checking is a trust-based mechanism, and that was enough to break it.

So for better or worse, on a range of charged topics, people can now more or less say whatever they want on the platform.

Oh, wait:

This week Meta announced a change to Facebook’s Messenger App. Users who want to customize their wallpaper can still do so, but they will no longer have the option to use themes with colors of the transgender and nonbinary flags.
Editors’ Picks
Overbooked Flight? What You Can Do if an Airline Bumps You.
Outside Nashville, She Rebuilt Her Life With $200,000 and a Dream
Restaurant Wine Lists Are Getting Much Shorter

Whatever one’s position on transgender rights, limiting people’s ability to express themselves — in private conversations with their friends — is not a great way to kick off a free-speech crusade.

It’s a long way from where Zuckerberg was during the Biden or the Obama administration. In those very different political climates, he apologized for Facebook’s role in promoting fake news and hate speech and vowed to take action. The platform even kicked Donald Trump off on Jan. 7, 2021.

But Trump (and his buddy Elon Musk) doesn’t like restrictions on hate speech, and now neither does Zuckerberg. Transgender rights are a flashpoint for Trump’s base, so tampons and theme colors have got to go. Flattery and obeisance are how powerful people keep themselves in favor with strongman regimes. Cash works, too.

Look at the Saudis. When Trump came into the office the first time, they had a problem: He had accused them of having links to the Sept. 11 attacks and of wanting “women as slaves and to kill gays.” So in advance of his visit in 2017, the Saudi capital, Riyadh, was dotted with billboards showing his face and his tweets. The Saudis have spent lavish sums at his properties and funded tournaments at his golf courses. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s wealth fund invested $2 billion in Jared Kushner’s investment fund, even though it reportedly had yet to turn a profit. And just last year, a new Trump Tower in the Saudi city of Jeddah was announced.

Silicon Valley was slow to learn the lesson — too many years under an imperfect but functioning democracy, I guess — but they’re catching up fast. Today, tech moguls are rushing to donate millions to Trump’s second inauguration. They’re clamoring to dine at Mar-a-Lago. Amazon reportedly paid $40 million for exclusive rights to a new documentary about Melania Trump.

It’s mortifying, or should be.

If, however, Zuckerberg is telling us the truth that the Biden administration pressured Facebook employees during the Covid pandemic, trying to get them to take down vaccine-related content — even when it was true and discussed actual side effects, or was humorous or satire — then I share his sense of outrage. During the pandemic, the authorities weren’t always sufficiently transparent about the uncertainties or trade-offs of public health policy. And while anti-vaccine forces did weaponize information in bad faith, the solution was for officials to level with the public, not to strong-arm the platforms.

Since Zuckerberg and Rogan were talking about the illegitimate use of government power to pressure companies, I eagerly waited for them to talk about how Trump had, just last September, threatened to throw Zuckerberg in jail for life because of some nonpartisan donations he and his wife made to strengthen the election infrastructure when it was creaking under the weight of the pandemic. Trump claimed those donations were a plot against his candidacy.

I mean, a strongman presidential candidate threatening a powerful chief executive for exercising his rights as a citizen — that’s bad, right? That’s anti-free speech? That’s lawfare?

But nah. Neither Zuckerberg nor Rogan mentioned it. They just praised Trump.

Facebook is in a strange spot. Many Democrats don’t like the company because they think it’s gotten too powerful. Lina Khan, the current chair of the Federal Trade Commission, brought an antitrust suit against it. But many Republicans don’t like it either. Vice President-elect JD Vance is a fan of Khan. Several red states, including Texas and Florida, have repeatedly sued or passed laws targeting the company. Many in Trump’s base see Zuckerberg as just another unprincipled, Harvard-trained member of the elite.

Zuckerberg told Rogan that “one of the things that I’m optimistic about with President Trump is I think he just wants America to win.” And then he got to the heart of the matter: He suggested that Trump use the power of the U.S. government to defend Meta abroad — for instance, from the huge fines that the European Union has imposed on it for violating data privacy and antitrust rules.

When discussing his love for jujitsu, Zuckerberg told Rogan that the sport let him “just express myself, right?”

“It’s like when you’re running a company, people typically don’t want to see you being this ruthless person who’s just, like, ‘I’m just going to crush the people I’m competing with,’” he said. But in martial arts, “you’re rewarded” for being ruthless.

What is the reward for boasting about your own toughness while charting your umpteenth cowardly zigzag in order to please the people in power? I guess we’re about to find out.

#Meta #Zeynep_Tufekci #Mark_Zuckerberg #Masculinisme #Liberté_expression #Néofascisme_numérique

Opinion | The Rage and Glee That Followed a C.E.O.’s Killing Should Ring All Alarms - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/06/opinion/united-health-care-ceo-shooting.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2024/12/08/multimedia/06tufekci-tcjk/06tufekci-tcjk-facebookJumbo.jpg

Par Zeynep Tufekci

I’ve been studying social media for a long time, and I can’t think of any other incident when a murder in this country has been so openly celebrated.

The conditions that gave rise to this outpouring of anger are in some ways specific to this moment. Today’s business culture enshrines the maximization of executive wealth and shareholder fortunes, and has succeeded in leveraging personal riches into untold political influence. New communication platforms allow millions of strangers around the world to converse in real time.

But the currents we are seeing are expressions of something more fundamental. We’ve been here before. And it wasn’t pretty.

As the historian Jon Grinspan wrote about the years between 1865 and 1915, “the nation experienced one impeachment, two presidential elections ‘won’ by the loser of the popular vote and three presidential assassinations.” And neither political party, he added, seemed “capable of tackling the systemic issues disrupting Americans’ lives.” No, not an identical situation, but the description does resonate with how a great many people feel about the direction of the country today.

It’s not hard to see how, during the Gilded Age, armed political resistance could find many eager recruits and even more numerous sympathetic observers. And it’s not hard to imagine how the United States could enter another such cycle.

Things are much better now than in the 19th century. But there is a similarity to the trajectory and the mood, to the expression of deep powerlessness and alienation.

Now, however, the country is awash in powerful guns. And some of the new technologies that will be deployed to help preserve order can cut both ways. Thompson’s killer apparently knew exactly where to find his target and at exactly what time. No evidence has emerged that he had access to digital tracking data, but that information is out there on the market. How long before easily built artificial-intelligence-powered drones equipped with facial recognition cameras, rather than hooded men with backpacks, seek targets in cities and towns?

The concentration of extreme wealth in the United States has recently surpassed that of the Gilded Age. And the will among politicians to push for broad public solutions appears to have all but vanished. I fear that instead of an era of reform, the response to this act of violence and to the widespread rage it has ushered into view will be limited to another round of retreat by the wealthiest. Corporate executives are already reportedly beefing up their security. I expect more of them to move to gated communities, entrenched beyond even higher walls, protected by people with even bigger guns. Calls for a higher degree of public surveillance or for integrating facial recognition algorithms into policing may well follow. Almost certainly, armed security entourages and private jets will become an even more common element of executive compensation packages, further removing routine contact between the extremely wealthy and the rest of us, except when employed to serve them.

We still don’t know who killed Brian Thompson or what his motive was. Whatever facts eventually emerge, the anger it has laid bare will still be real, and what we glimpsed should ring all the alarm bells.

#Zeynep_Tufekci #Assurance #Violence #Inégalités #Séparatisme

Opinion | The Point: Zeynep Tufekci - Without a Law, the Government Can’t Protect Your Privacy - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/12/04/opinion/thepoint#privacy-ftc-rule

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2024/01/26/opinion/The-Point-Promo-Image/The-Point-Promo-Image-facebookJumbo.png

Zeynep Tufekci
Dec. 3, 2024, 5:00 p.m. ETDec. 3, 2024

Zeynep Tufekci

Opinion Columnist
Without a Law, the Government Can’t Protect Your Privacy

The Federal Trade Commission just took much-needed action against a company and its subsidiaries. You’ve probably never heard of those companies, but they’ve probably heard of you. More accurately, they know where you’ve been. Exactly where you’ve been.

A clinic providing reproductive services? A protest? The new place you just moved, while trying to hide the address from an abusive ex or a stalker? They know.

Earlier investigations revealed that the companies, Gravy Analytics and its subsidiary Venntel, got that data through innocuous-looking apps, including weather and navigation apps. They sold that location data to third parties, including but not just law enforcement agencies. One minute you’re checking whether it’s raining, the next thing you know, immigration police are at the door, asking why you were visiting a migrant shelter. No need for a warrant, just a payment to a corporation will do.

These companies also sold, the F.T.C. says, “health or medical decisions, political activities and religious viewpoints” that they derived from the location data.

The new F.T.C. proposed order would ban these companies from selling “sensitive location data except in limited circumstances involving national security and law enforcement.” This would include places such as medical facilities, religious organizations, correctional facilities, labor unions, schools, shelters and military installations.

Also this week, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau published new rules that would limit how credit data can be distributed — especially addresses, which are currently part of many people’s regular credit files. (If you receive a credit card or statements at home, your address is on there.) At the moment, marketers can easily purchase that data, and those purchases can result in more than just annoying ads.

Investigators from the publication 404 Media found that criminals can then purchase sensitive personal data for about $15 per person in Telegram groups where “members offer services for a price, such as shooting up a house, armed robberies, stabbings, and assault.”

The C.F.P.B. aims to limit distribution of such data to what’s defined as “legitimate purposes” under current financial laws, such as issuing credit or insurance or employer background checks.

To this, I’d say: Don’t get your hopes up. The proposed F.T.C. rule and C.F.P.B. guidance could easily be reversed under a new administration, and it’s not even certain if those agencies will survive the government dismantling Donald Trump has promised.

It’s a pity that Congress never passed proper privacy laws, so whatever the agencies can do will be limited and easily reversible.

Checking whether it will rain or playing a mobile game (another common source for such sensitive data) shouldn’t come at such a high cost, but when lawmakers don’t do what they should, that’s exactly what happens.

#Géolocalisation #Zeynep_Tufekci #Vie_privée #Marché_des_données

Opinion | A Bird Flu Pandemic Would Be One of the Most Foreseeable Catastrophes in History - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/29/opinion/bird-flu-pandemic.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2024/11/28/opinion/28tufekci-image/28tufekci-image-facebookJumbo.jpg

Almost five years after Covid blew into our lives, the main thing standing between us and the next global pandemic is luck. And with the advent of flu season, that luck may well be running out.

The H5N1 avian flu, having mutated its way across species, is raging out of control among the nation’s cattle, infecting roughly a third of the dairy herds in California alone. Farmworkers have so far avoided tragedy, as the virus has not yet acquired the genetic tools to spread among humans. But seasonal flu will vastly increase the chances of that outcome. As the colder weather drives us all indoors to our poorly ventilated houses and workplaces, we will be undertaking an extraordinary gamble that the nation is in no way prepared for.

We might be fine. Viruses don’t always manage to adapt to new species, despite all the opportunities. But if there is a bird flu pandemic soon, it will be among the most foreseeable catastrophes in history.

Devastating influenza pandemics arise throughout the ages because the virus is always looking for a way in, shape shifting to jump among species in ever novel forms. Flu viruses have a special trick: If two different types infect the same host — a farmworker with regular flu who also gets H5N1 from a cow — they can swap whole segments of their RNA, potentially creating an entirely new and deadly virus that has the ability to spread among humans. It’s likely that the 1918 influenza pandemic, for example, started as a flu virus of avian origin that passed through a pig in eastern Kansas. From there it likely infected its first human victim before circling the globe on a deadly journey that killed more people than World War I.

And that’s why it’s such a tragedy that the Biden administration didn’t — or couldn’t — do everything necessary to snuff out the U.S. dairy cattle infection when the outbreak was smaller and easier to address.

For the H5N1 outbreak among dairy cattle, however, the C.D.C. has limited powers. This show is run by the United States Department of Agriculture, led under Biden by Tom Vilsack, an alumnus of the Obama administration who in between those two postings took a turn in a powerful dairy industry position. The agency had already been weakened by attacks on its scientific side during the first Trump term. This time around, at a critical juncture, it has put a higher value on the short-term profits of the powerful dairy farming industry than on the health of billions of people.

Meanwhile, worrying signs keep cropping up.

It’s certainly true that taking on powerful industrial farming interests would have created political headaches for the Biden administration. Perhaps it’s even true that if it had done the right thing and acted aggressively to stomp out the cattle outbreak, it could have cost the Democrats the presidency, the House and the Sen — well, never mind.

I can only hope we continue to get lucky. We don’t have much else going for us.

Well, we do have one thing. Biden is president for another seven weeks or so. It’s not too late for him to give the nation a parting gift. He could start taking these risks as seriously as he should have when the cattle infections were first discovered. We could get serious about mandatory testing of cows, milk and farmworkers and about isolating infected cattle herds — as we already do for birds and pigs. We could speed up development of the vaccine that’s already in the works for cows — and expedite all precautions for humans, too. It’s true that one doesn’t get proper, timely credit for disasters averted. But history will, eventually, deliver its verdict.

#H5N1 #Grippe_aviaire #Etats-Unis #Zeynep_Tufekci

Opinion | Trump, Musk and an American Masculinity Crisis | Zeynep Tufekci

▻https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/10/30/opinion/thepoint#trump-elon-musk-masculinity

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2024/01/26/opinion/The-Point-Promo-Image/The-Point-Promo-Image-facebookJumbo.png

Zeynep Tufekci
Oct. 31, 2024, 3:00 p.m. ETOct. 31, 2024

Opinion Columnist
Trump, Musk and an American Masculinity Crisis

Elon Musk has put full force of his billions, his ownership of the X platform and himself on the line for Donald Trump, especially in Pennsylvania. Some of what he has promised to do, such as a $1 million giveaway, may well be illegal. Other out-out-the ordinary actions — appearing onstage at Trump rallies or blasting false claims about election integrity — have involved aggressively breaking longstanding norms.

By blatantly upending practices (or even laws) and seemingly getting away with it, Musk also appeals to a constituency that both parties are trying to win: young men. Musk’s companies look like the boy-toy aisle in a store organized according to traditional gender roles. And both Musk and Trump frequently float coded ideas about their version of a male-dominated society in their public comments.

All this may help explain why Musk and Trump have aligned their brands. Musk gets a big platform for his version of masculinity and the possibility that Trump will put him in charge of parts of the government and provide favors to his businesses. Trump gets someone who could gin up turnout among the young male voters he needs to balance the widespread revulsion he has engendered among women.

Each man is taking advantage of an emergent crisis of masculinity in American society in order to gain greater power. With the rise of feminism and the fall of one version of a male-dominated society with traditional lines of authority and industrial jobs, many men now lack the classic masculine roles they once might have filled. Historically, authoritarian (and, yes, fascist) movements have projected a sort of über-masculinity that’s unrestrained by rules and promised to usher in a world in which their will would triumph through force and dominance. A modern-day masculinity crisis makes room for this kind of thinking to take root in the United States.

This is why more men should speak up loudly for a positive, empowering vision of masculinity that doesn’t come at the expense of women and doesn’t prize “getting away with” breaking rules. And the rest of us must recognize that a masculinity crisis exists, rather than dismissing it — as many do on social media — as merely the last cry of those who have lost special privileges.

Young men, in particular, have grown up in a world of feminism and deindustrialization, and they certainly face distinct challenges as they find their way in an unsettled world. Around them are a gaggle of podcasters, YouTube video producers, Twitch streamers and organizers of political rallies who assert that men have been shafted and claim that they should wrest back control over society by any means available, including force.

It’s not hard to see why this combination may seem attractive to many young men, especially when Trumpian appeal is matched with Musk’s money, boy toys and an implied promise that if you’re a man like them, you too can dominate and get away with it.

But there are other ways to be strong and decent young men, and it’s essential to build and model that alternative, positive vision. The stakes are high in this election, and they will only continue to grow after Tuesday.

#Zeynep_Tufekci #Masculinisme

Opinion | How the Powerful Outmaneuvered the American Protest Movement - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/21/opinion/campus-protests-internet-america.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2024/09/22/multimedia/21tufekci-vjhq/21tufekci-vjhq-facebookJumbo.jpg

Un essai de Zeynep Tufekci qui constitue un réel rebond sur son livre Twitter & les gaz lacrymogènes, en reprenant ses travaux à la lueur des manifestations actuelles aux Etats-Unis (mais on croirait y reconnaître également ce qui se passe en Europe, dans tous les pays que l’on considère pourtout comme « démocratiques »).

Zeynep Tufekci

By Zeynep Tufekci

Opinion Columnist

Sept. 21, 2024

The year 2024 started out looking as if it would be a momentous one for political protests. All winter and spring, college campuses were aflame in anger and conflict and as summer approached, the Democratic National Convention threatened to be engulfed by street demonstrations in a potential repeat of the tumultuous 1968 party convention.

The year was momentous, all right, but not for the reasons it seemed. Mass protests had already been showing diminishing returns, sometimes drawing big crowds but rarely getting proportionally big results. Now, 2024 looks like the end of the road, at least for the kind of power that such mass protests once had, a power that has defined political action in America and in democracies around the world for decades.

Look at the campuses that seized so much attention last winter and spring. Over the summer, while protesters scattered to pursue internships or wait tables or help out at home, many institutions quietly changed the rules regarding political action. Mother Jones reported that dozens of institutions of higher education, in charge of nearly 100 campuses, were “effectively banning many forms of protest” with new regulations going far beyond the “time, space and manner” restrictions that were already in place.

Students will still raise their voices, of course, but don’t count on seeing many big encampments, nor administrators paralyzed for months on end, unsure how to deal. The balance of power has tilted sharply back in their favor, where it is likely to stay for a while.

The Democratic convention, meanwhile, saw sizable, energetic marches most days opposing Israel’s actions in Gaza — a stance that Democrats overwhelmingly support. But when the dust settled, there was no sign of any shift in policy from the Kamala Harris camp. It wouldn’t even let a single Palestinian American, a Georgia state legislator, give a brief speech mentioning the plight of Palestinians while wholeheartedly endorsing Harris.

If anything, the antiwar movement departed Chicago in a weaker position, with less leverage than it had when it arrived.

Thousands of people surging into the street or taking over college campuses, cheering on fiery speeches, presenting demands, chanting slogans — that familiar model won’t go away entirely. Especially not if a certain former president wins re-election, an event that could prompt millions to march. But as much as it pains me to say it, protesting just doesn’t get results anymore. Not the way it used to. Not in that form. It can’t.

Those in power have figured out how to outmaneuver protesters: by keeping peaceful demonstrators far out of sight, organizing an overwhelming police response that brings the threat of long prison sentences, and circulating images of the most disruptive outliers that makes the whole movement look bad.

It works. And the organizers have failed to keep up.

The digital platforms they rely on make it difficult to impose any discipline on the message being communicated. Crackpot agitators and off-the-wall causes attach themselves more easily than ever. Conflict erupts. Fueled by the drama-loving algorithms of social media platforms, the movements descend into ugly public bickering.
Editors’ Picks
I Wanted to Crave Him, Not Have Him
19 More of Our Best Recipes Ever, According to You
An Art Installation She Called Home on the Upper East Side

Hell, no, we won’t go! The whole world is watching! No justice, no peace! R.I.P. the era when big protest marches, civil disobedience and campus encampments so often changed the course of history. It was a good run, wasn’t it?
Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.

The irony is that the very tool that has undermined the power of the protests — the internet — initially contributed to some of the most spectacular protests in history, starting with the convention of the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999.

I had gotten word about the Seattle demonstrations the same way most of the protesters did: through email lists, a major novelty at the time.

It was magical. Tens of thousands of demonstrators assembled from seemingly out of nowhere. They took everyone — elected officials, the news media, the delegates in the convention center — by surprise, in a way that would previously have been impossible. The police were bewildered by the protesters’ ability to communicate among themselves at scale, in real time, to take over intersections and deftly circumvent obstacles and keep everyone else several steps behind. The whole thing brought the W.T.O. proceedings practically to a halt and gave the world a new way to think about globalization: Whom does it actually benefit?

In 2011, that model expanded to include occupations. Protesters camped out in Zuccotti Park, near Wall Street in Lower Manhattan, inspired similar occupations around the world, with the same spirit of anarchic fun also playing out online. That movement gave the world a new way to think about inequality: the 1 percent versus the 99 percent.

But considering the popularity and energy of these movements, they didn’t change the world that much. Two decades later, globalization still favors corporations. Wealth is as inequitably distributed as ever. Other large protest movements — the Iraq antiwar movement, which I participated in, and the Arab Spring, which I studied and observed — were ground down or ignored.

By 2024, the authorities had the response down pat. In Chicago last month, protesters were assigned a circular marching route at least half a mile away from the convention site. The area was secured by two concentric fences and several more barriers. Protesters could be as loud as they wanted to be and they still wouldn’t even be heard anywhere near the arena.

It was quite a decent crowd — not as many as some had expected, but I counted thousands of people energetically marching on multiple days.

But big numbers alone can’t have the impact they once did because they no longer signal the same threat. The 1963 March on Washington took several months of extensive effort and planning, a show of immense strength and organizational ability that could keep the pressure on long after the protest ended. By comparison the Occupy movement came together much more easily, in just a few weeks. It produced one of the largest ever days of global protest, but what does that even mean when the internet juices so much of the prep work? “Biggest ever” protests keep occurring to little avail. The Women’s March in 2017 was considered the largest single-day protest in U.S. history, but Donald Trump is once again back as the Republican nominee in a toss-up race.

The factors that have defanged big marches have made direct action and confrontational tactics lose their bite, too. With police officers responding in overwhelming numbers and courts doling out lengthy sentences, today’s disrupters often lack the discipline and preparation required to pull off effective civil disobedience.

In Chicago, the few protesters who tried to defy the barricades were arrested immediately. Police officers vastly outnumbered them.

With the news media swarming them, those protesters got some publicity but it was a double-edged sword: In addition to news outlets, right-wing media personalities and streamers flocked to the scene to try to use it to portray Chicago as a city in chaos.

As a scholar of social movements and an alumna of more protests than I can count, I know that to distance itself from discordant voices, a movement needs designated spokespeople who make clear what it stands for and what it denounces. That kind of message discipline is always hard, but it’s an even bigger challenge when participants all have their own social media accounts and people are quick to say they are being silenced. In 2024 it became almost impossible.

In the few weeks before the convention, a lot of drama erupted — especially on TikTok — between some Black activists and those with Palestinian or Arab heritage. These groups had previously worked in tandem, but now recriminations and ugly accusations spread virally as pro-Palestinian voices decried Harris as a warmonger and Black voices accused them of undermining a candidate of color — all fueled by ever more strident comments.

Who were these commenters inflaming the conflict? Why did so many appear not even to live in the United States? Did TikTok’s Chinese corporate overlords pick the winners? Whatever the answers, the venom was online but the results were felt on the streets: Black Lives Matter protests, so visible in Chicago in 2020, seemed almost completely absent during the Democratic convention.

The internal tensions that social movements have always faced become especially paralyzing when they play out in public, amplified by the algorithms that favor conflict. Without a counterbalancing organizational structure, there’s no way to bridge those differences and build consensus.

All of this might help explain why, during the Republican convention in Milwaukee, there were no big protests at all, despite the provocations of Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, and the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Maybe the odds were stacked so high against protesters that they didn’t even bother.

That’s not necessarily how it will play out on college campuses. Students have already begun making their voices heard. But many campus administrations (no doubt at the fervent behest of trustees) have spent the summer carefully preparing. They intend to return student protests to the status they occupied before this last extraordinary year: a common occurrence with little impact beyond the campus gates.

History, of course, is full of innovation and counter-innovation. Protests will reinvent themselves eventually. So what form does the future of political protest take? If the past is any indication, the answers will surprise us all.

After a tumultuous century of uprisings and conflict, in the mid-19th century, Paris imposed a new street plan that turned narrow roads into majestic boulevards — not merely for the aesthetics but also to make them harder for protesters to barricade. A century later, however, those boulevards were where the 1968 movement exploded with flair, creativity and impact.

For activists, finding a way forward will mean figuring out new ways to leverage the power of social media without surrendering to its destructive effects. It will mean a new understanding of impact that goes beyond virality and self-expression. It will mea — ah, what do I know?

I don’t have an easy answer, and I know that the protesters probably wouldn’t listen to me even if I did, just as I wouldn’t have listened to some scholar of protest movements when I was in their shoes. Each generation needs to creatively, purposefully find its own way.

All I know is that protests and mass demonstrations of dissent are a necessary part of a healthy democracy. I can’t wait to see what this generation comes up with.

#Zeynep_Tufekci #Mouvements_sociaux

Opinion | The Point: Conversations and insights about the moment. - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/08/27/opinion/thepoint

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2024/01/26/opinion/The-Point-Promo-Image/The-Point-Promo-Image-facebookJumbo.png

Zeynep Tufekci
Aug. 27, 2024, 12:05 p.m. ETAug. 27, 2024

‘Free Speech’ Should Not Shroud Criminal Activity

The detention in France of Pavel Durov, the founder and chief executive of the messaging app Telegram, has sparked a loud outcry about free speech. Elon Musk has portrayed the arrest on his X account as an ominous threat to free speech, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. referred to the app as an “encrypted, uncensored” platform and said “the need to protect free speech has never been more urgent.”

It’s a curious case, and the French government hasn’t helped matters by releasing information in dribs and drabs. While it is possible that there are free speech issues entangled here, some early details suggest the issue may be one of criminal activity.

On Monday, the French prosecutor said in a statement that Durov — who is a citizen of France, Russia, St. Kitts and Nevis and the United Arab Emirates — was being held for questioning in connection with an investigation into criminal activities on the app, including the trading of child sexual abuse material as well as drug trafficking, fraud and money laundering. Notably, Telegram explicitly boasts that it has never disclosed user data to any government, ever.

Questions have long swirled around Telegram. Contrary to widespread belief, Telegram is not encrypted in any meaningful sense. That would be “end to end” encryption, so that even the company couldn’t read users’ messages. Telegram — and anyone it chooses — can read all group chats, and there is no way to fully encrypt them. Those very large groups are the main attraction of the platform.

Private chats on Telegram also lack end-to-end encryption by default. Here, though, users can undergo an onerous process to turn on end-to-end encryption, which then applies only to that conversation. Even the protection provided to private chats is murky: Cryptography experts have long questioned whether Telegram’s limited encryption actually meets security standards.

Durov was born in Russia, where Telegram is used widely. The Kremlin has Durov’s back: It issued a statement that unless more evidence is provided, Durov’s detention may be “a direct attempt to limit freedom of communication.” Russian antiwar activists have long wondered how the Kremlin seems to know so much about their activities on Telegram. (Good question.)

Free speech is an important value, but protecting it does not mean absolving anyone of responsibility for all criminal activity. Ironically, Telegram’s shortage of end-to-end encryption means the company is likely to be more liable simply because it can see the criminal activity happening on its platform. If, for example, Telegram did not cooperate with authorities at all after receiving legal warrants for information about criminal activities, that would mean trouble even in the United States, with its sweeping free speech protections.

#Telegram #Pavel_Durov #Zeynep_Tufekci #Chiffrement

Opinion | Zeynep Tufekci - Wealthy Nations Must Prioritize the Global Fight Against Mpox - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/08/13/opinion/thepoint

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2024/01/26/opinion/The-Point-Promo-Image/The-Point-Promo-Image-facebookJumbo.png

Zeynep Tufekci
Aug. 14, 2024, 2:48 p.m. ETAug. 14, 2024
Wealthy Nations Must Prioritize the Global Fight Against Mpox

The W.H.O. has declared a new global public health emergency for an outbreak of deadly mpox, primarily in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In response, wealthy nations must do everything possible to stop the disease’s spread.

Mpox, formerly known as the monkeypox virus, made the news in 2022 when a global outbreak, including in the United States, prompted a public health emergency. But by May 2023, cases in wealthy nations had receded, largely because of vaccination drives and behavior change among those most at risk of contracting the virus. The W.H.O. ended that mpox emergency.

But the virus hadn’t disappeared, and it’s now back on the rise, potentially with a vengeance.

The mpox virus has two types: a much deadlier Clade I and a less severe Clade II. In 2022, the United States experienced an outbreak of Clade II. But lacking support for eradication efforts, including vaccination drives, Clade II simmered in African countries. Worse, Clade I — estimated to have a 3 percent to 6 percent fatality rate — also spread, though it was confined to the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo. Despite all the global attention heaped on this disease at the time, African countries never received enough vaccines or sufficient support to eradicate the virus.

Now, Clade I cases are sharply on the rise in Congo, where the disease has claimed the lives of more than a thousand people, most of them children. It has reached more urban areas. Cases have begun to pop up in other African countries, including Burundi, Kenya and Uganda.

So far, wealthy nations have failed to send enough vaccines to counter the disease’s quick spread. The African Union’s health agency Africa C.D.C. has said it has only about 200,000 mpox vaccine doses available out of the 10 million needed. The global vaccine alliance GAVI told Reuters it needs $84 million to respond in areas at most risk, but it has raised only $8 million.

But providing vaccines alone is not enough. In Congo, stigma, regulatory obstacles and other crises — including measles and cholera outbreaks — have made a coordinated response difficult. The country finally approved two mpox vaccines just a few weeks ago, Reuters reported, but it has only about 65,000 vaccines available in the short term (for a population of about 100 million people) and vaccination campaigns appear unlikely to begin before October. Comprehensive international support may be the only thing that could beat back the disease.

Will we get it right this time around? If not, the United States and the rest of the world may get an unfortunate shot at a Round 2 of the virus too, perhaps in its much deadlier form.

#Zeynep_Tufekci #Mpox #Epidémiologie #Vaccination

Opinion | Political Violence and Division Aren’t Worse Than Ever - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/07/31/opinion/political-violence-history-division.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2024/07/31/opinion/31columnists-package-tufecki/31columnists-package-tufecki-facebookJumbo-v3.jpg

Le regard sur le passé est utile. Pour aider à résoudre les problèmes du présent.

By Zeynep Tufekci

Don’t Tell My Friends, But… is a series in which we asked Times columnists what everyone else is wrong about.

A president refusing to accept the results of the election he lost, inspiring a mob to overtake the Capitol and call for the hanging of the vice president, and then, four years later, emerging as his party’s frontrunner again and surviving a terrifyingly near-miss assassination attempt. A pandemic that devolved into polarized argument over most everything, even life-saving vaccines. And research showing big partisan divides over a wide range of issues, with political violence on the rise.

It’s fashionable to say we are more divided than ever, and superficially, it sounds like hard-edged realism. However, there have been many periods in U.S. history when things were worse — and we could end up there again.

To see how bad it could get, there’s no need to go all the way back to the Civil War. Just look at the 1960s and 1970s.

Though the civil rights movement is celebrated now, at the time, it was deeply unpopular. In May 1964, the year after the march on Washington and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, 74 percent of Americans thought that mass demonstrations were “more likely to hurt” the cause for racial inequality than to help. In 1966, in the last Gallup poll that asked about King before his assassination, his unfavorable rating was 63 percent.

The country was also deeply divided over the Vietnam War, which would claim the lives of millions of Vietnamese and more than 50,000 Americans. In the pivotal year of 1968, the country was rocked with antiwar and civil rights protests that make today’s campus conflicts look like mild disagreements.

Political violence of all forms was on the rise, too. When King was assassinated, riots erupted across the country. Just two months later, Robert Kennedy was assassinated, which upended the trajectory of the impending presidential election. The Democratic National Convention that August was thrown into turmoil as protesters and the police clashed for days in Chicago.

Elected with a majority of less than 1 percent of the popular vote — but a landslide in the Electoral College — Richard Nixon, after years of secret bombing of Cambodia, announced a full-scale ground invasion of the country. Just days later, on May 4, 1970, the National Guard opened fire on an anti-war protest at Kent State in Ohio, killing four students and sparking the largest nationwide student strike in the country’s history. But a poll taken the day after the shootings showed that only 11 percent of the public blamed the National Guard for the deaths of the students.

Later, Nixon tried to cover up his involvement in a scheme to wiretap the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate Hotel, an outcome that was averted when a security guard noticed signs of an intruder. The rest, as the saying goes, is dismal history, ending with Nixon resigning in disgrace.

Meanwhile, radicalized groups adopted violent tactics. Bombs started going off seemingly everywhere — the Pentagon, corporate offices, the U.S. Capitol, the State Department, Wall Street, the California Attorney General’s Office. The retired F.B.I. agent Max Noel put the total at 1,900 domestic bombings in 1972 alone — an average of five a day. In the book “Days of Rage,” by Bryan Burrough, Noel scoffs at how “one bombing now gets everyone excited. In 1972? It was every day.”

One lesson from this history is that divisive, polarized issues of yesteryear can look very different in the light of history and progress. The civil rights movement is now justly celebrated, and Martin Luther King Jr. has been honored with a federal holiday. The Vietnam War is widely recognized as a historic error and a great moral failure. Congress was so disgusted by Nixon’s actions in Cambodia that it passed a law barring presidents from doing that ever again without congressional approval — overriding his veto.

However, troubling signs for the future are already here. In 2023, 33 percent of Republicans agreed that “American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save the country,” an uptick from previous years. (Thirteen percent of Democrats agree — much lower, but that, too, is an uptick.) Most worryingly as we head into another major election, Americans who wrongly believe that the 2020 election was stolen are more than three times as likely — 46 percent to 13 percent — to believe that “true American patriots” may have to resort to violence to save the country.

So when I hear my friends say “we’re more divided than ever,” I object with these historical facts. They are important reminders that things could get worse, and whatever people think can’t or won’t happen in the United States probably could indeed happen. Some of it already has. But all this isn’t meant as a downer either: It’s what we do with the information that matters.

Historical awareness can even be empowering, inspiring “pessimism of the intellect but optimism of the will” — an ethos attributed to the long-imprisoned Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci.

As I like to remind my friends, a true, harsh critic is actually an optimist — inspired by the hope that things can be made better — but one that knows that we have to make ourselves face reality, no matter how grim, in order to fix the problems we face. Studying the history of violent political division is the opposite of resignation or nihilism: It’s a hopeful call to action!

And that sentiment sometimes cheers up my friends, which is when I remind them about what came after the 1970s: the 1980s, when the world came too close to nuclear annihilation a few times, a true threat to humanity that hasn’t gone away.

But that’s a topic for another time, perhaps after I finish a column on my strategies for becoming a popular partygoer with a reputation for lighthearted small talk.

Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) is a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University, the author of “Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest” and a New York Times Opinion columnist. @zeynep • Facebook

#Zeynep_Tufekci #Politique #Ettas-Unis #Violence

Comment le NYT a camouflé les preuves sur les masques - UnHerd
▻https://unherd.com/fr/2024/08/comment-le-nyt-a-sape-les-preuves-sur-les-masques

https://unherd.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/GettyImages-1210942365-e1722509493541.jpg

Un article anti-Zeynep, qui se répète beaucoup, mais fait une synthèse des débats autour de la question des masques.
Je ne sais pas pourquoi, mais j’aime bien que mon chirurgien porte un masque en salle d’op.

Paul D. Thacker
août 2, 2024 12 mins

En pleine tempête des gros titres de l’élection américaine ces dernières semaines, une nouvelle a commencé à faire surface sur les réseaux sociaux, ce qui, il y a seulement quelques années, aurait déclenché une tempête médiatique frénétique. Le président Biden avait été testé positif au Covid et des vidéos postées sur X le montraient embarquant et sortant de l’Air Force One, mais sans masque.

« Écoutez les scientifiques, soutenez les masques », a déclaré Biden lors d’un rassemblement de campagne, il y a quatre ans, critiquant Trump pour ne pas avoir porté de masque après qu’il ait attrapé le Covid. « Soutenez l’obligation de porter le masque à l’échelle nationale », a tonné Biden sous les acclamations et l’adoration. Son message de campagne a capturé un sentiment de « suivre la science » parmi les électeurs américains de gauche qui ridiculisaient quiconque remettait en question l’efficacité des masques avec l’étiquette « anti-mask ». Ceci, malgré quelques articles dans Scientific American, Wired, New York Magazine et The Atlantic rapportant que des études scientifiques ont trouvé que les masques ne semblaient pas arrêter les virus.

Le débat sur l’efficacité des masques a pris une tournure étrange l’année dernière lorsque Zeynep Tufekci, fervente défenseure des masques, a écrit un essai dans le New York Times affirmant que « la science est claire, les masques fonctionnent ». L’article de Zeynep Tufekci a dénigré et ridiculisé une revue scientifique de l’éminente organisation médicale à but non lucratif, Cochrane, pour avoir conclu que les preuves sont « incertaines ».

Peu de temps après la publication de son essai, la rédactrice en chef de Cochrane, Karla Soares-Weiser, a publié une déclaration pour assurer les défenseurs des masques que Cochrane mettrait à jour le langage du rapport. Les revues Cochrane sont largement considérées comme la « référence » en matière d’informations de haute qualité pour éclairer la médecine, et leur processus est laborieux, avec de multiples cycles de vérifications internes et d’évaluations par des pairs experts. Le fait que la responsable de Cochrane fasse une déclaration personnelle dans une revue publiée est sans précédent, comparable à ce que ferait le rédacteur en chef exécutif du The New York Times en écrivant un essai exprimant des opinions personnelles sur l’une des enquêtes approfondies du journal.

L’incident a également marqué un moment étrange dans l’histoire de l’utilisation des masques. Avant la pandémie, peu, voire aucune, organisation de premier plan ne promouvait les masques pour arrêter la grippe ou autres virus respiratoires. Comme l’OMS l’a conclu dans son plan de préparation à la pandémie de 2019 : « Il y a eu un certain nombre d’essais contrôlés randomisés de haute qualité démontrant que les mesures de protection individuelle telles que l’hygiène des mains et les masques faciaux ont, au mieux, un effet limité sur la transmission de la grippe. » Il n’était donc pas surprenant que les affirmations de Zeynep Tufekci telles que « les masques fonctionnent » et les allégations de Karla Soares-Weiser selon lesquelles quelque chose n’allait pas avec le rapport des masques de Cochrane se soient révélées plus tard sans preuves réelles.

Au début de l’année, Karla Soares-Weiser a publié une autre déclaration, expliquant cette fois que le rapport sur les masques était correct et qu’aucun changement ne serait apporté. Malgré ce revirement, le préjudice causé au rapport sur les masques de Cochrane était déjà fait. Google vous redirige directement vers l’essai de Zeynep Tufekci dans le New York Times, qui allègue des problèmes dans la revue de Cochrane.

Mais pourquoi Karla Soares-Weiser a-t-elle changé d’avis ?

J’ai découvert, à travers des centaines d’e-mails qui m’ont été fournis par des demandes de liberté d’information et un lanceur d’alerte de Cochrane, que Zeynep Tufekci a poussé Karla Soares-Weiser à faire la déclaration contre le rapport même sur les masques de Cochrane – un geste qui a explosé comme une grenade à l’intérieur de l’organisation.
Lecture suggérée
Did virus hunters cover up a lab leak ?

By Matt Ridley

Bien que Karla Soares-Weiser dirige Cochrane, des scientifiques experts dans chaque domaine spécifique rédigent et éditent les revues. Lorsqu’elle a publié précipitamment sa déclaration se plaignant du rapport sur les masques, les auteurs de la rapport ont accusé Cochrane d’avoir sacrifié la science en travaillant avec l’écrivaine « controversée » Zeynep Tufekci ; pendant ce temps, l’éditeur du rapport sur les masques a rappelé à la direction de Cochrane que les changements étaient seulement envisagés en raison d’une « couverture médiatique intense, et de critiques », et non parce qu’il y avait des problèmes dans le procédé scientifique du rapport. « J’ai eu une réunion très difficile avec le [conseil d’administration] hier », a écrit Karla Soares-Weiser quelques jours plus tard. « Je tiens bon, stressée, mais ça va. »

Mais l’histoire ne s’arrête pas là. Parce que l’attaque de Karla Soares-Weiser et de la direction de Cochrane contre leur propre rapport sur les masques illustre comment la pression médiatique et politique a sapé et supprimé des conclusions scientifiques gênantes pendant la pandémie – et continue de le faire. L’incident soulève également des questions sur l’éthique des médias et sur la pertinence actuelle de la direction de Cochrane.

Lorsque Cochrane a publié son rapport sur les masques de 2023, c’était la septième fois dans un processus qui avait commencé 18 ans auparavant. En 2006, les chercheurs de Cochrane ont examiné la littérature scientifique pour déterminer quelles interventions pourraient arrêter la propagation des virus. Ils n’ont trouvé aucune preuve tangible que les masques fonctionnent. Les scientifiques ont ensuite mis à jour leur rapport en 2007, 2009, 2010, 2011, et 2020.

Avec les six mises à jour, en examinant à chaque fois de nouvelles études évaluées par des pairs, les chercheurs de Cochrane ont conclu la même chose : il n’existe aucune preuve scientifique solide que les masques fonctionnent pour contrôler les virus. Et à chaque fois, la communauté scientifique a baillé d’ennui. Parce que jusqu’à la pandémie de Covid, personne n’avait envisagé un mouvement politique en faveur des masques. Pas même Zeynep Tufekci.

« Ne vous inquiétez pas si vous ne trouvez pas de masques », a écrit Zeynep Tufekci dans un article de février 2020 pour Scientific American. « Pour les non-professionnels de la santé, se laver souvent les mains, utiliser généreusement un désinfectant pour les mains à base d’alcool et apprendre à ne pas se toucher le visage sont les interventions cliniquement prouvées les plus importantes qui existent. » En promouvant l’article sur X, Zeynep Tufekci a réitéré ce point : « Les études cliniques montrent que se laver les mains est l’étape cruciale, pas les masques. »

Mais le mois suivant, un journaliste des médias du New York Times a félicité Zeynep Tufekci pour avoir changé d’avis dans une série de tweets du 1er mars. Cela a été suivi par un essai du 17 mars pour The New York Times qui a convaincu le CDC de modifier ses directives fédérales et de conseiller aux Américains de porter des masques.
Lecture suggérée
Why did Peter Daszak change his mind ?

By Ian Birrell

Ce qui rend tout cela alarmant, c’est que Zeynep Tufekci est une sociologue universitaire, sans formation en médecine ou en santé publique. Et pourtant, elle a réussi à modifier la politique de santé publique avec une série de tweets et un essai suivi, deux mois plus tard, par une prépublication scientifique co-écrite qui promouvait l’obligation de porter le masque. « Nous recommandons que les responsables publics et les gouvernements encouragent vivement l’utilisation généralisée de masques faciaux en public, y compris l’utilisation d’une réglementation appropriée », a-t-il déclaré.

L’auteur principal de l’étude est Jeremy Howard, un défenseur du masque et entrepreneur australien en logiciels, qui, comme Zeynep Tufekci, n’a aucune formation en santé publique ou en médecine. Le rapport a été plus tard publiée dans un journal médical et reste le seul article que j’ai pu trouver que Zeynep Tufekci a publié dans la littérature scientifique sur les masques.

Malgré un si mince bilan de publication dans la littérature scientifique, le Raleigh News & Observer (un journal influent parmi les universitaires) a sacré Zeynep Tufekci une héroïne médiatique de la Covid, qui aurait défié le milieu médical et de la santé publique et aurait les faits exacts – mais avec des essais, pas de la science. « Au lieu de mener des expériences en laboratoire liées au Covid-19, elle a utilisé sa plateforme sur Twitter et dans les sections d’opinion de Scientific American, The Atlantic et The New York Times pour informer le public avec des conseils pratiques sur ce qu’il faut faire et pourquoi. »

Avec le recul, il est difficile de lire cet article – qui célèbre un universitaire pour avoir fait de la science en écrivant des essais – et de ne pas se demander s’il s’agit d’un article satirique pour The Onion : « Un singe résout la théorie unifiée de la physique en un seul tweet. » Néanmoins, Zeynep Tufekci a joué le jeu, étonnée de sa capacité magique à résoudre des problèmes scientifiques complexes sans faire de science réelle – juste écrire des essais.

« Je n’aurais jamais pensé en un million d’années écrire quelque chose qui disait essentiellement que l’Organisation mondiale de la santé et les CDC et l’établissement médical aux États-Unis et en Europe ont tort », a-t-elle déclaré au journal. Mais un petit obstacle se dressait entre Zeynep Tufekci et l’acceptation totale de l’obligation de porter le masque : Cochrane.

Lorsque Cochrane a publié sa mise à jour sur les masques en janvier 2023, dans laquelle il a été de nouveau déclaré que l’efficacité des masques était incertaine, les critiques des politiques pandémiques ont naturellement utilisé ces conclusions scientifiques pour mettre en doute les défenseurs des masques. « Les obligations de porter le masque étaient un échec », a écrit le chroniqueur du New York Times Brett Stephens, citant une interview de Tom Jefferson, l’auteur principal du rapport des masques de Cochrane. « Ces sceptiques, qui étaient furieusement moqués comme des hurluberlus et parfois censurés en tant que ‘désinformateurs’ pour s’être opposés aux obligations, avaient raison. »

L’ascension de Zeynep Tufekci à la notoriété publique est étroitement liée à sa défense des masques. Lire cette chronique dans The New York Times, le journal le plus important du pays, et où elle a également travaillé, a dû être irritant pour elle. Trois jours après la chronique de Stephens, Zeynep Tufekci a envoyé un e-mail à Cochrane pour une interview. Mais au lieu de contacter Jefferson ou l’un des scientifiques qui ont rédigé la rapport, Zeynep Tufekci s’est adressée directement à Michael Brown, l’un des éditeurs de Cochrane. Elle a également demandé s’il pourrait la présenter à Karla Soares-Weiser, rédactrice en chef de Cochrane, ce que Brown a accepté.
‘L’ascension de Zeynep Tufekci à la notoriété publique est étroitement liée à sa défense des masques.’

Quelques jours plus tard, Karla Soares-Weiser a écrit dans un e-mail à un responsable de Cochrane qu’elle avait été « en contact avec le NYT au sujet du rapport sur les masques », demandant de l’aide pour répondre aux questions. « Je navigue dans une situation difficile », a écrit Karla Soares-Weiser par e-mail. Pendant ce temps, Zeynep Tufekci a contacté Jefferson pour un commentaire, mais il l’a ignorée.

Le lendemain même, le Times a publié l’essai intitule « les masques fonctionnent » de Zeynep Tufekci. Étant donné la manière dont fonctionne le journalisme américain, l’article avait très probablement été rédigé et édité avant qu’elle n’ait contacté Jefferson la veille au soir pour obtenir un commentaire. Bien que 12 scientifiques différents aient été impliqués dans l’écriture et la recherche du rapport sur les masques Cochrane, Zeynep a mis en avant Jefferson. Elle l’a nommé plusieurs fois dans son essai pour avoir fait des déclarations présumées fausses sur la pandémie. Quelques heures plus tard, Cochrane a précipité la déclaration de Karla Soares-Weiser, puis s’est excusé auprès des auteurs du rapport. « Nous espérions vous informer tous avant la publication mais avons été pris de court par le NYT et avons dû nous précipiter pour publier notre déclaration, » a écrit Cochrane par e-mail aux auteurs du rapport.

Cela n’a pas été bien reçu par les auteurs. « Je ne parlerai pas pour les autres mais je suis profondément bouleversé par le déroulement de ces événements, qui se sont produits sans notre connaissance, » a répondu Jon Conly, professeur et ancien chef du département de médecine de l’Université de Calgary. Il a insisté sur le fait que Cochrane avait sacrifié les auteurs du rapport. « Très naïf de penser que vous et le [rédacteur en chef Karla Soares-Weiser] avez parlé aux médias du NYT (sans nous en informer) et que vous leur avez fait confiance et qu’ils n’ont pas immédiatement publié ce que vous avez dit, surtout avec cette femme qui est bien connue comme une écrivaine controversée. »

« Il n’y avait aucune intention de vous sacrifier ou de sacrifier qui que ce soit, » a répondu Brown, « puisque je me sacrifierais moi-même en tant qu’éditeur responsable de la publication. » Il a ajouté qu’il avait dit à Zeynep Tufekci qu’il soutenait le rapport et lui avait demandé de contacter les auteurs du rapport pour obtenir leurs déclarations.

Conly m’a confirmé plus tard que Zeynep Tufekci — qui n’a pas répondu à de nombreuses demandes de commentaire — ne l’avait jamais contacté, même s’il est nommé comme auteur correspondant du rapport, que Zeynep Tufekci aurait dû contacter pour un commentaire. « Je ne sais pas avec qui Zeynep Tufekci aurait dû correspondre pour trouver l’un des auteurs qui aurait été d’accord avec elle, » a déclaré Conly.

Comme je l’ai vu dans la correspondance interne, les éditeurs de Cochrane ont ensuite commencé à discuter de la manière de gérer les répercussions de la déclaration de Karla Soares Weiser. Brown leur a rappelé que la mise à jour utilisait le même langage qu’en 2020 et que des révisions étaient maintenant suggérées parce que Cochrane reculait devant les critiques des médias, et pas parce que la science a fait une erreur. « Bien que je sois d’accord que les changements proposés au [résumé] ajoutent de la clarté, ce n’est que sous une couverture médiatique intense et des critiques que ces révisions ont été suggérées, » a écrit Brown.
Lecture suggérée
The real Covid conspiracy

By Ian Birrell

Cherchant un autre point de vue pour calmer les critiques de la déclaration de Karla Soares-Weiser, Lisa Bero, professeur de médecine à l’Université du Colorado et conseillère éthique de Cochrane, a suggéré que Cochrane publie les commentaires soumis par des tiers qui critiquaient également le rapport sur les masques. « Cela devrait être publié dès que possible (après avoir été vérifié pour diffamation ou obscénité), » a écrit Lisa Bero. « Il est important que les lecteurs sachent que les critiques ne sont pas seulement venues par les médias, mais aussi par les canaux formels que nous avons. »

Mais selon Conly, le rapport avait déjà fait l’objet d’un examen par des pairs approfondi et détaillé. « Si le rédacteur en chef et l’officier éthique conspiraient pour trouver des critiques par la suite, » m’a-t-il dit, « cela semblerait être contraire à l’éthique. »

Pendant ce temps, la déclaration de Karla Soares-Weiser et l’article de Zeynep Tufekci avaient un effet significatif en dehors de l’organisation, suscitant plusieurs articles de presse ainsi que des moqueries envers les auteurs du rapport sur le masque sur les réseaux sociaux. Laurie Garret, reporter lauréat du prix Pulitzer et auteur de plusieurs livres sur les pandémies, a accusé les auteurs du rapport sur le masque de fraude. « [C]es rigolos ont sapé la confiance du public dans [les masques] & la volonté des entreprises/gouvernements de promouvoir leur utilisation, » a-t-elle posté sur X. (Il est à noter qu’avant la pandémie, Garrett a posté sur X en 2018 que les masques ne fonctionnent pas contre la grippe et les autres virus respiratoires. « Nous savons aussi depuis plus de 100 ans que les masques ne servent à rien. »)

L’argument a même trouve un écho en politique. Témoignant lors de sa dernière apparition devant le Congrès, la directrice du CDC, Rochelle Walensky, a cité la déclaration de Karla Soares-Weiser, affirmant à tort que Cochrane avait « rétracté » l’examen des masques. Le personnel du Congrès a dû corriger son témoignage : « Le manque de confiance dans les responsables de la santé publique devient un énorme problème, » a écrit plus tard un membre du Congrès.

La nouvelle des actions de Karla Soares-Weiser a même atteint les plus hauts niveaux du gouvernement britannique. Cet été-là, alors qu’elle était à Londres pour un événement organisé par Cochrane, un député l’a invitée à la Portcullis House du Parlement pour expliquer sa déclaration. Cependant, selon un membre du personnel du Parlement, Karla Soares-Weiser a esquivé l’invitation et n’est jamais apparue.
‘La nouvelle des actions de Karla Soares-Weiser a même atteint les plus hauts niveaux du gouvernement britannique.’

Bien qu’il se soit fait remarquer de manière proéminente dans l’essai « les masques fonctionnent », Michael Brown, de Cochrane, m’a dit que le Times avait beaucoup « manipulé » ses commentaires et qu’il n’était pas au courant que Zeynep Tufekci avait fait campagne pour des obligations de port de masque, ni qu’elle avait publié un rapport dont les conclusions contredisaient celles de Cochrane. Dans son premier e-mail à Brown, Zeynep Tufekci avait mis en avant son parcours scientifique, se présentant à la fois comme une chroniqueuse du New York Times et une universitaire avec une formation en statistiques et inférence causale, et un intérêt pour les rapports scientifiques. « J’utilise et je participe moi-même à des rapports (j’en écris bientôt un dans mon propre domaine) et je suis donc familière avec bon nombre des défis et problèmes. »

C’est pour le moins un embellissement des références de Zeynep Tufekci. Selon Google Scholar, elle n’a publié aucun article académique cette année et le seul qu’elle a publié en 2023 était une tribune dans Nature. Quant à l’article de revue auquel Zeynep Tufekci avait fait référence, il n’a jamais été publié.

« Je suis une personne de confiance, » m’a dit Brown, expliquant qu’il n’avait jamais vérifié l’historique de Zeynep Tufekci avant de lui parler. « Elle est définitivement plus journaliste que scientifique. Je n’étais pas d’accord avec elle, la façon dont elle l’a ensuite interprété : les masques fonctionnent. »

« En fin de compte, notre rapport était bien fait, » a déclaré Brown. En ce qui concerne les modifications proposées au langage du rapport, Brown a expliqué que le résumé avait été rédigé par le personnel de Cochrane sous la responsabilité de Karla Soares-Weiser, et non de Tom Jefferson et des autres auteurs du rapport.

« Elle s’est retrouvée prise dans la tourmente, » a déclaré Brown à propos de Karla Soares-Weiser, ajoutant que ses collègues l’avaient pressée car ils n’aimaient pas les conclusions selon lesquelles il n’y a pas de preuve que les masques fonctionnent. « Ce qui est vraiment difficile pour elle, en tant que rédactrice en chef. »
Lecture suggérée
Were masks a waste of time ?

By Geoff Shullenberger

En septembre dernier, Brown a clairement exprimé son point de vue sur le procédé scientifique lorsqu’il a envoyé un e-mail à l’organisateur d’une conférence qu’il donnait, indiquant que les masques « n’ont pas d’impact majeur au niveau communautaire lorsqu’ils sont promus comme une intervention en santé publique ». Il m’a également dit qu’un rapport scientifique récent paru dans les Annals of Internal Medicine complétait les conclusions de Cochrane. « Au final, les conclusions étaient les mêmes. »

Mais alors que Cochrane a cessé d’attaquer son propre rapport sur les masques, The New York Times continue de promouvoir la déclaration selon laquelle « les masques fonctionnent » — malgré des preuves contraires. En mai dernier, le journal a publié un essai de John M. Barry de l’Université Tulane. Dans son article, Barry a écrit : « Les masques posent une question beaucoup plus simple. Ils fonctionnent. Nous savons qu’ils fonctionnent depuis 1917, lorsqu’ils ont aidé à protéger les soldats d’une épidémie de rougeole. »

Pourtant, nous savons que ce n’est pas vrai. Même Barry le sait. Comme il l’a écrit dans son best-seller, The Great Influenza : « Les masques portés par des millions de personnes étaient inutiles tels qu’ils étaient conçus et ne pouvaient pas empêcher la grippe. Seule la prévention de l’exposition au virus pouvait le faire. »

Mais comme cela est devenu évident, et comme Brown l’a confirmé lors de notre conversation, les masques ne relèvent plus de la science : « Au lieu de simplement rester du domaine de la science, c’est devenu une question politique. Et les gens se sont rangés d’un côté ou de l’autre, » a-t-il dit. « Et ils ont dit certaines choses, puis ils doivent soutenir ce qu’ils ont dit précédemment. Et ils s’enlisent de plus en plus. »

Ce que The New York Times a fait a été d’adopter un avis scientifique — les masques fonctionnent ! — et de défendre cette notion comme un décret divin — en ignorant les preuves contraires et en attaquant des chercheurs comme Tom Jefferson qui ont passé des décennies à travailler sur un sujet autrefois obscur. « C’est ce que l’avenir nous réserve, » m’a dit Jefferson. « C’est un monde à l’envers. C’est la mort de la science. »

Paul D. Thacker is a former congressional investigator who runs The Disinformation Chronicle newsletter, and was awarded a British Journalism Award for a series that investigated COVID-19 pandemic policies.

#Zeynep_Tufekci #Masques #Cochrane #Polémique

Opinion | Scarlett Johansson’s Voice Isn’t the Only Thing A.I. Companies Want - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/05/21/opinion/thepoint#openai-scarlett-johansson

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2024/01/26/opinion/The-Point-Promo-Image/The-Point-Promo-Image-facebookJumbo.png

Par Zeynep Tufekci

When OpenAI introduced its virtual assistant, Sky, last week, many gasped. It sounded just like Scarlett Johansson, who had famously played an artificial intelligence voice assistant in the movie “Her.”

On the surface, the choice made sense: Last year, Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, had named it his favorite science fiction movie, even posting the single word “her” around the assistant’s debut.

OpenAI approached Johansson to be the voice for its virtual assistant, and she turned it down. The company approached her again two days before the debut of Sky, but this time, she said in a blistering statement, it didn’t even wait for her official “no” before releasing a voice that sounds so similar to hers that it even fooled her friends and family.

In response to Johansson’s scathing letter, OpenAI claimed that the voice was someone else and “was never intended to resemble hers,” but it took Sky down anyway.

The A.I. industry is built on grabbing our data — the output that humanity has collectively produced: books, art, music, blog posts, social media, videos — and using it to train their models, from which they then make money or use as they wish. For the most part, A.I. companies haven’t asked or paid the people who created the data they grab and whose actual employment and future are threatened by the models trained on it.

Politicians haven’t stepped in to ask why humanity’s collective output should be usurped and monopolized by a handful of companies. They’ve practically let the industry do what it wants for decades.

I am someone who believes in the true upside of technology, including A.I. But amid all the lofty talk about its transformational power, these companies are perpetuating an information grab, a money grab and a “break the rules and see what we can get away with” mentality that’s worked very well for them for the past few decades.

Altman, it seems, liked Johansson’s voice, so the company made a simulacrum of it. Why not?

When you’re a tech industry star, they let you do anything.

#Zeynep_Tufekci #Intelligence_artificielle #OpenAI #Voice

Opinion | The Point: Conversations and insights about the moment. - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/04/02/opinion/thepoint#avian-flu-cows-outbreak

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2024/01/26/opinion/The-Point-Promo-Image/The-Point-Promo-Image-facebookJumbo.png

The discovery of the country’s second human case of H5N1 avian flu, found in a Texas dairy farm worker following an outbreak among cows, is worrying and requires prompt and vigorous action.

While officials have so far said the possibility of cow-to-cow transmission “cannot be ruled out,” I think we can go further than that.

The geography of the outbreak — sick cows in Texas, Idaho, Michigan, Ohio and New Mexico — strongly suggests cows are infecting each other as they move around various farms. The most likely scenario seems to be that a new strain of H5N1 is spreading among cows, rather than the cows being individually infected by sick birds.

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2024/04/02/multimedia/02opinion-thepoint-tufekci-birdflu-vmtb/02opinion-thepoint-tufekci-birdflu-vmtb-jumbo.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp

Avian flu is not known to transmit well among mammals, including humans, and until now, almost all known cases of H5N1 in humans were people in extended close contact with sick birds. But a cow outbreak — something unexpected, as cows aren’t highly prone to get this — along with likely transmission between cows, means we need to quickly require testing of all dairy workers on affected farms as well as their close contacts, and sample cows in all the dairy farms around the country.

It is possible — and much easier — to contain an early outbreak when an emergent virus isn’t yet adapted to a new host and perhaps not as transmissible. If it gets out and establishes a foothold, then all bets are off. With fatality rates estimated up to 50 percent among humans, H5N1 is not something to gamble with.

Additionally, H5N1 was found in the unpasteurized milk of sick cows. Unpasteurized milk, already a bad idea, would be additionally dangerous to consume right now.

Public officials need to get on top of this quickly, and transparently, telling us the uncertainties as well as their actions.

The government needs to gear up to potentially mass-produce vaccines quickly (which we have against H5N1, though they take time to produce) and ensure early supplies for frontline and health care workers.

It’s possible that worst-case scenarios aren’t going to come true — yet. But evolution is exactly how viruses get to do things they couldn’t do before, and letting this deadly one have time to explore the landscape in a potential new host is a disastrously bad idea.

#H5N1 #Zeynep_Tufekci #contagion #Santé_publique

Opinion | Who’s to Blame for Those Kate Middleton Conspiracies? |Conversations and insights about the moment. - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/03/26/opinion/thepoint#kate-middleton-russia-interference

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2024/01/26/opinion/The-Point-Promo-Image/The-Point-Promo-Image-facebookJumbo.png

Par Zeyneo Tufekci

Who’s to Blame for Those Kate Middleton Conspiracies?

A British government source, reportedly, told the British newspaper The Telegraph that “hostile state actors” — China, Russia and Iran — are “fueling disinformation about the Princess of Wales to destabilize the nation.” British morning shows promptly picked up the story, comparing it to election interference.

It’s certainly possible that countries with a history of online conspiracy mongering played some role in amplifying the most salacious rumors about Catherine, the Princess of Wales. But it’s also undeniable that large numbers of people — and celebrities and newspapers and everything else — were intensely interested in the princess’s whereabouts.

The claim about foreign bots and the Princess of Wales is just the latest of similar claims of foreign interference or social media manipulation made without convincing public evidence. Young people are dissatisfied with President Biden’s policies over the Israel-Hamas war? Blame TikTok. Consumer sentiment soured amid high inflation and housing prices? Must be social media!

If our institutions turn foreign meddling on social media into the new “the dog ate my homework,” it will become an easy excuse to ignore public dissatisfaction with divisive policies. And how will such claims be believable when they actually involve consequential foreign meddling in elections?

There is nothing mysterious about the Kate Middleton rumors and conspiracies. She completely disappeared from view amid conflicting claims about her whereabouts. Then photo agencies conceded that the one photo the palace released of her and her children was doctored. Because the royals cultivate a headline-grabbing parasocial relationship with the public, the topic merged with the global water cooler chat online and rumors ran wild.

But there is a lesson. Kensington Palace is the latest institution to discover that lying to the public will make people suspicious. Mistrust will swirl on social media, as valid questions and bonkers conspiracies percolate.

It was true for the pandemic and for the war in Gaza. It’s true in the royals’ case, too. Western institutions should first worry about shoring up their own behavior. Then they can talk about meddling — with evidence, please.

#Zeynep_Tufekci #C_est_la_faute_aux_rezosociaux

Opinion | The Increase in Measles Cases Is Utterly Avoidable | Zeynep Tufekci. - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/02/13/opinion/thepoint#measles-outbreak-vaccine

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2024/01/26/opinion/The-Point-Promo-Image/The-Point-Promo-Image-facebookJumbo.png

The Increase in Measles Cases Is Utterly Avoidable

The World Health Organization has reported a “staggering” increase in the number of measles cases and deaths around the world. Millions of these victims are in poor countries and war zones, where vaccination programs have faltered because of the pandemic, violence or a lack of resources. In 2022, there were an estimated nine million measles cases globally, with 136,000 deaths.

Increasingly, measles outbreaks have been taking place in wealthier countries, largely because of vaccine refusal. This is a dangerous situation — and not just for the willfully unvaccinated.

Measles is airborne, wildly contagious and deadly. While the measles vaccine is greatly protective, losing herd immunity against the disease would result in many victims, and not just those who are willfully unvaccinated.

A small percentage of fully vaccinated people will develop breakthrough measles infections if exposed to the disease. While their cases may be mild, they can transmit the disease to others. That’s how measles will spread to infants too young to be vaccinated, older people and the immunocompromised. (In the United States, babies get vaccinated against measles between 12 and 15 months of age.) Because the vaccinated can have few to no symptoms, vaccinated breakthrough cases are easy to miss — until that potentially deadly transmission.

Some Republican politicians and state legislatures have toyed with removing or weakening vaccine mandates against measles, mumps and rubella in children. The number of Republicans who believe parents should be able to forgo vaccines for their children — even if that choice increases the risk of disease to others — is now up to 42 percent. That’s more than double the number before the pandemic, when the percentages were similar between the parties.

Make no mistake: If efforts to remove these mandates succeed, there will be more outbreaks. Many unvaccinated children will die horrible deaths, while the vaccinated will be largely spared. But many babies, grandparents and immunocompromised patients will get sick and die, too.

In a sane world, our country would allocate the resources to get vaccines to those in poorer countries and conflict zones and would refuse to budge on compulsory childhood vaccines. The alternative should be unthinkable.

#Zeynep_Tufekci #Vaccination

Opinion | Boeing Is Missing Much More Than Four Door Bolts - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/02/06/opinion/thepoint#boeing-door-bolts

https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/images/icons/defaultPromoCrop.png

Cette affaire Boeing est un révbélateur de la manière dont le capitalisme néolibéral est devenu une manière de singer dans tous les domaines les pratiques du capitalisme numérique. Go fast and break things, soyez agiles, on apprend des erreurs... Une bascule radicale de la culture des ingénieurs vers les pratiques des auditeurs et des commerciaux.

There it is, the probable answer to why the exit door plug on the Boeing 737 Max Alaska Airlines flight blew out in the air. A National Transportation Safety Board preliminary report on the incident, released today, says that four bolts on the door plug were missing.

Those four bolts, which prevent the door from sliding up, are removed on purpose when mechanics have to take the door off for maintenance or inspection, as was done last September, according to the report. But somehow, when the installation was over, they weren’t there. No bolts — nothing to stop the door from sliding up and then off.

Preliminary N.T.S.B. reports like this one focus on establishing facts rather than spelling out who was at fault, which will wait for the final report. But this plane was practically new, and the Boeing chief executive, David Calhoun, has already acknowledged that it was a “quality escape” that caused the blowout.

Everything so far indicates that Boeing is a company plagued by shoddy quality control. Just yesterday, it disclosed that a supplier had found “two holes may not have been drilled exactly to our requirements” on about 50 unfinished Boeing 737 Max planes, requiring more work on the planes and delaying their delivery.

How could all this happen?

This morning, before heading to Capitol Hill to testify before the House Transportation Committee, the F.A.A. administrator Mike Whitaker stopped by CNBC to discuss everything the agency has done to try to get ahead of this: slowing Boeing production lines, revoking certain exemptions, getting more inspectors on the ground, etc.

But he also said something that really goes to the heart of the matter. Pressed by the host about the root causes, Whitaker said, “The system is designed really as an audit system, and I think that hasn’t worked well enough.”

Our airline safety system assumes that airplane manufacturers are also deeply invested in upholding safety standards, so the F.A.A. oversight focuses on identifying new problems, improving existing systems and auditing to make sure existing standards are properly upheld.

What happens if a company instead focuses more on what it could get away with in terms of cost-cutting?

That’s how we get to a world where audits alone will not have “worked well enough.” The missing bolts may have caused the door to blow out, but it’s the missing corporate ethos that we should examine to understand the root cause.

#Boeing #Zeynep_Tufekci

Conversations and insights about the moment. - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/01/30/opinion/thepoint#tech-hearings-transparency

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2024/01/26/opinion/The-Point-Promo-Image/The-Point-Promo-Image-facebookJumbo.png

Zeynep Tufekci
Feb. 1, 2024, 1:02 p.m. ETFeb. 1, 2024
Feb. 1, 2024

Zeynep Tufekci

Opinion Columnist
We Need Information, Not Apologies, From Tech Companies

At the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Wednesday on online child sexual exploitation, perhaps the most dramatic moment came when Mark Zuckerberg, the C.E.O. of the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, turned around and stood up to face parents holding up photos of their children who had died by suicide after sexual abuse or extortion via a social media platform.

“I’m sorry for everything you have all been through,” Zuckerberg said to them.

Here, reasonable voices might intervene. An unbearable tragedy, certainly, they might say, but such tragedies have occurred before social media came along. Let’s not lose proper historical and individual context when talking about the mental health and well-being of children, they might point out.

All of that is technically correct, but fundamentally wrong. And one senator got to the heart of it.

“Platforms need to hand over more content about how the algorithms work, what the content does and what the consequences are, not at the aggregate, not at the population level, but the actual numbers of cases so we can understand the content,” said Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware. He said he was sponsoring a bill with that requirement, setting new standards for disclosure and transparency, and posed the question forthrightly for Zuckerberg and the C.E.O.s of TikTok, Snap, X and Discord:

“Is there any one of you willing to say now that you support this bill?”

The answer was … silence. Crickets. Not one C.E.O. would commit. “Mr. Chairman, let the record reflect a yawning silence from the leaders of the social media platforms,” Coons noted, with resignation.

The platforms have nearly absolute immunity as an industry. Thanks to Section 230, they generally cannot be sued and held liable for tragic events even if they were facilitated by their product; they get to keep all the profits made from these products. And yet when the public asks for meaningful transparency and data — so that it’s not just an appeal to emotion that results in legislation — the public is told, basically, to pound sand.

We wouldn’t accept this from any other industry, and we should not accept it from technology companies. And that’s the most important point anyone should make until legislators start passing bipartisan bills that force meaningful transparency on these companies, which could finally allow proper accountability and reasonable oversight.

#Zeynep_Tufekci #Facebook #Enfants

One big thing missing from the AI conversation | Zeynep Tufekci - GZERO Media
▻https://www.gzeromedia.com/gzero-world-clips/one-big-thing-missing-from-the-ai-conversation-zeynep-tufekci

https://www.gzeromedia.com/media-library/one-big-thing-missing-from-the-ai-conversation-zeynep-tufekci-gzero-world.jpg?id=50916468&width=1200&height=600&coordinates=0%2C0%2C0%2C80

When deployed cheaply and at scale, artificial intelligence will be able to infer things about people, places, and entire nations, which humans alone never could. This is both good and potentially very, very bad.

If you were to think of some of the most overlooked stories of 2023, artificial intelligence would probably not make your list. OpenAI’s ChatGPT has changed how we think about AI, and you’ve undoubtedly read plenty of quick takes about how AI will save or destroy the planet. But according to Princeton sociologist Zeynep Tufekci, there is a super important implication of AI that not enough people are talking about.

“Rather than looking at what happens between you and me if we use AI,” Tufekci said to Ian on the sidelines of the Paris Peace Forum, “What I would like to see discussed is what happens if it’s used by a billion people?” In a short but substantive interview for GZERO World, Tufekci breaks down just how important it is to think about the applications of AI “at scale” when its capabilities can be deployed cheaply. Tufekci cites the example of how AI could change hiring practices in ways we might not intend, like weeding out candidates with clinical depression or with a history of unionizing. AI at scale will demonstrate a remarkable ability to infer things that humans cannot, Tufekci explains.

#Intelligence_artificielle #Zeynep_Tufekci

Opinion | The Memories That Feed Distrust in the Middle East - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/31/opinion/columnists/israel-gaza-hamas-misinformation.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2023/10/31/multimedia/31tufekci-qjkf/31tufekci-qjkf-facebookJumbo.jpg

By Zeynep Tufekci

Opinion Columnist

Moshe Lavi, whose relatives have been taken hostage by Hamas, recently talked to a group of New York Times journalists about his family’s agony.

His pained voice turned to anger when he recounted encountering disbelief that Hamas committed terrible atrocities when it attacked Israel. Lavi seemed especially bewildered by people “arguing over the semantics” of whether people were beheaded or their heads fell off, or even whether there were hostages in Gaza.

In one particularly gruesome twist, there’s been an uproar over whether Hamas had beheaded babies — an unverified claim that President Biden repeated before the White House walked it back, and has been subject to much discussion since.

Indeed, since Hamas did murder children and take others as hostages, should it get credit if it didn’t also behead them? It’s an appalling thought.

Some of this skepticism is surely the result of antisemitism. But that’s not all that’s going on.

One key reason for some of the incidents of doubt is the suspicion that horrendous but false or exaggerated claims are being used as a rationale for war — and there are many such historical examples, most notably the Iraq war.

Recently, a former permanent representative of Israel to the United Nations told Britain’s Sky News that he was “very puzzled by the constant concern which the world,” he said, “is showing for the Palestinian people.” He cited U.S. actions after Sept. 11 as a model for what Israel should do in response to Hamas’s shocking massacre of civilians on Oct. 7, which many have called Israel’s Sept. 11.

But if the U.S. response after Sept. 11 is a model, it is as a model of what not to do.

After the attacks, the United States received deep global sympathy. Many Muslims around the world were furious about this blemish upon Islam, even if they opposed U.S. policies: Citizens held vigils, politicians condemned the attacks and clerics repudiated them in mosque sermons. (The idea that Muslims widely celebrated the attacks has been repeatedly shown to be false or traces back to a few instances of dubious clarity.)

But, instead of mobilizing that widespread global sympathy to try to isolate the extremists, the United States chose to wage a reckless and destructive war in Iraq, driven by an impulsive desire for vengeance and justified by falsehoods about weapons of mass destruction.

The Bush administration’s lies in the lead-up to the war, the fiasco of its occupation, and the chaos, violence and death that the invasion set off have deeply and indelibly damaged the standing and credibility of the United States and its allies.

People in the region were seared by images of Iraqi institutions — hospitals, ministries, museums — being looted while the U.S. military did little, of families shot as they returned home from a hospital or at checkpoints as they missed a hand signal or instructions shouted in English, of the torture and sadism at Abu Ghraib.

People also saw how occupation policies, like the quick and thoughtless disbanding of the Iraqi Army, contributed to the creation of ISIS a decade later.

In the Middle East, the devastating aftermath of that war — justified by false claims — has never ended.

To make matters worse, the Israel government has a long history of making false claims and denying responsibility for atrocities that later proved to be its doing.

In one example of many, in 2014, four boys younger than 13 were killed by Israeli airstrikes while playing by themselves at a beach — three of them hit by a second blast while desperately fleeing the initial blast.

There was first a concerted effort among some pro-Israel social media activists to claim the explosions were due to a Hamas rocket misfiring. The Israeli military initially claimed that “the target of this strike was Hamas terrorist operatives.” However, the beach was near a hotel housing journalists for Western outlets, including at least one from The New York Times, who witnessed the killings. The Guardian reported that journalists who visited the area in the aftermath saw no weapons or equipment and that kids regularly played there.

Israel then investigated and exonerated itself. Peter Lerner, then a spokesman for the Israeli Defense Forces, said that it had targeted a “compound belonging to Hamas’s Naval Police and Naval Force (including naval commandos), and which was utilized exclusively by militants.”

But The Telegraph, whose correspondent also witnessed the incident, reported that some of the journalists who had seen the bombing said there had been “no attempt to interview them.”

One can see how this history plays out in the global upheaval over the Hamas claim two weeks ago that an Israeli missile struck a hospital courtyard in Gaza. Israeli and American officials denied this, and asserted that the missile came from within Gaza. There were also initial claims that 500 people were killed in the hospital blast, leading to headlines and global condemnations. Then the number was challenged, leading to another round of uproar and back-and-forth.

It is certainly possible that the hospital may have been accidentally hit by a missile fired in Gaza — such misfires have happened. But Israel bombardment has also caused large civilian casualties. The evidence isn’t conclusive either way, and the truth remains unknown.

Yet to a family that lost members in the hospital blast — which U.S. officials estimate killed hundreds — that squabble over exact numbers might seem as cruel as the skepticism about the atrocities committed by Hamas do to an Israeli family that suffered during the Oct. 7 attack.

But there’s still the fact that fabricating or exaggerating atrocities is done to influence the calculus of what the public will accept — including what costs are justified to impose on civilians.

In 1990, after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, there was widespread resistance in the United States to the idea of a new war — the country had not shaken “Vietnam syndrome,” that it was best for the United States to avoid large foreign military entanglements, both for practical and moral reasons.

It was in this context that a teenager testified before Congress in 1990 that she had seen Iraqi soldiers take premature babies out of incubators and left them to die on the cold floor, a shocking assertion repeated by many high-level officials. The claim was widely repeated by officials and the media, and even by Amnesty International.

Kept secret was the fact that the witness was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States, and her false testimony had likely been organized by a public relations firm working for the Kuwaiti government.

The shocking fabrication played a key role in the effort to sell the war to the reluctant American public. Needing to make sure oil fields stayed in the hands of the rulers of a tiny country created by colonial powers in the early 20th century went only so far. Opposing an army so savage that it commits the most unthinkable crimes is a more convincing appeal for war.

The terrible outcome of all this history is widespread distrust and dehumanization, as ordinary people’s loss and pain are viewed suspiciously as a potential cudgel that will cause further loss and pain for others.

Even people who I know have no sympathies toward Hamas or any kind of terrorism roll their eyes at some of the recent accounts of atrocities. “We always hear of something terrible when they want to go to war — how convenient,” one acquaintance told me recently.

There are plenty of echoes of this on social media. “Hamas beheaded babies, Saddam had WMD and I’m the last unicorn,” one person posted on X. Another one said, “The ‘40 babies beheaded by Hamas’ lie is equivalent to the WMD’s lie.”

Such sentiments are widespread.

All this highlights the importance of voices capable of retaining trust and consistent concern for all victims.

I was heartened to see that Human Rights Watch independently verified some of the videos of the horror on Oct. 7, and called the attacks deliberate killings. Similarly, Amnesty International’s independent investigation led the group to condemn the attacks as “cruel and brutal crimes including mass summary killings, hostage-taking.” Both organizations have called for the attacks to be investigated as war crimes.

Both organizations also have a history of documenting Israeli wrongdoings, including its treatment of civilians in Gaza and the West Bank, and both organizations have been vilified for doing so, especially by the government of Israel and some NGOs and lawmakers.

Yet these are the kind of independent voices that need to be heard. In a context where many in the region and world already see the United States as reflexively supporting Israel, no matter its conduct, President Biden might consider elevating such independent human rights voices rather than embracing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

As Amnesty International states, kidnapping civilians is a war crime and the hostages should be released, unharmed. And their families shouldn’t have to endure this suspicion on top of their pain.

But to credibly demand that war crimes be stopped and lives respected requires equal concern extended to all victims, including the two million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

The victims are real — all of them — and that’s where all efforts to rebuild credibility or to seek a solution must begin.

#Zeynep_Tufekci #Gaza #Mensonges #Preparation_guerre #Guerre_information

The power of protest
▻https://www.thenews.com.pk/print/1123788-the-power-of-protest

https://www.thenews.com.pk/assets/uploads/akhbar/2023-10-29/1123788_061946_updates.jpg

In July last year, eight columnists of The New York Times made confessions about what they had been wrong about. This was apparently an editorial assignment. Anyhow, I found one ‘mea culpa’ very meaningful and had a lot to think about.

This was Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist of Turkish descent, who professed that she was wrong about the power of protest. Her reference seemed perfect. She talked about the Global Day of Protest that was observed on February 15, 2003 against the impending invasion of Iraq by the United States.

She was herself there in the protest held in New York, one of scores of venues across the world. It was impossible to not be overwhelmed by the magnitude of that protest. They rightly projected it as the largest protest in human history and I need not go into how many millions had gathered in which major cities.

But President George W. Bush still went ahead with the invasion and military operations began on March 20 of that year. An unprecedented tsunami of public opinion could not stop the destruction of a country on the basis of poor evidence and bad advice.

It is obvious why I have invoked Zeynep Tufekci’s column she had titled: ‘I was wrong about why protests work’ at this time when the entire world is watching with horror the humanitarian tragedy that is unfolding in Gaza after that Hamas attack inside Israel on October 7. Is it really true that public protests do not work? Or have things changed during the past two decades in terms of how people can influence the decisions of those who have the power to wage wars?

I realize that the Iraq war of 20 years ago may not be very relevant when we try to make sense of what is happening on the ground in Gaza and in the lobbies of the United Nations and also on the streets of the cities where protests have been held, including in favour of Israel.

We have also to acknowledge that, while the passions that have been kindled by the present conflict are immensely more powerful, there is a distinct division in the opinions at both the popular and the governmental levels. It is evident that while confronting their moral dilemmas, progressive and sensitive individuals everywhere are expressing their distress in many ways. There is perhaps also a shift in the sympathies of many who may previously have been neutral in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

#Gaza #Manifestations #Zeynep_Tufekci

Opinion | One Thing Not to Fear at Burning Man - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/03/opinion/columnists/one-thing-not-to-fear-at-burning-man.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2023/09/04/multimedia/04tufekci1-ktwf/04tufekci1-ktwf-facebookJumbo.jpg

Sept. 3, 2023
Two people walk through gray mud at a flooded campground with recreational vehicles.
Credit...Trevor Hughes/USA Today Network, via Reuters
Two people walk through gray mud at a flooded campground with recreational vehicles.

By Zeynep Tufekci

Opinion Columnist

The news that thousands of Burning Man festival goers were told to conserve food and water after torrential rains left them trapped by impassable mud in the Nevada desert led some to chortle about a “Lord of the Flies” scenario for the annual gathering popular with tech lords and moguls.

Alas, I have to spoil the hate-the-tech-rich revelries. No matter how this mess is resolved — and many there seem to be coping — the common belief that civilization is but a thin veneer that will fall apart when authority disappears is not only false, the false belief itself is harmful.

Rutger Bregman, who wrote a book called “Humankind: A Hopeful History,” had read “Lord of the Flies” as a teenager like many, and didn’t doubt its terrible implication about human nature. However, Bregman got curious about whether there were any real-life cases of boys of that age getting stranded on an island.

Bregman learned of one that played out very differently,

In 1965, six boys from 13 to 16, bored in their school in Tonga, in Polynesia, impulsively stole a boat and sailed out, but became helplessly adrift after their sail and rudder broke. They were stranded on an island for more than a year. Instead of descending into cruel anarchy, though, they stayed alive through cooperation. When one of them broke his leg, they took care of him.

Some of the most memorable weeks of my life were spent helping out with rescues and aid in the aftermath of the 1999 earthquake in Turkey that killed thousands of people. The epicenter was my childhood hometown, so I was very familiar with the place, and I rushed to help, unsure of what I would find. Instead of the chaos and looting that was rumored, the people had been mostly sharing everything with one another. Intrigued, I dived into the sociology of disasters and found that this was the common trajectory after similar misfortune.

Rebecca Solnit’s book “A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster” documents many such experiences — people altruistically cooperating in the aftermath of earthquakes, hurricanes and other catastrophes — and how the authorities often assume the opposite, and go in to restore law-and-order, but end up doing real harm.

One of the most egregious recent examples of this involved rumors of conditions after Hurricane Katrina in the Superdome in New Orleans — where tens of thousands of people unable to evacuate earlier had gathered. The police chief told Oprah Winfrey that babies were being raped. The mayor said, “They have people standing out there, have been in that frickin’ Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people.” There were reports that rescue helicopters were being shot at.

The reality was that even as the situation deteriorated in the Superdome, as Rebecca Solnit’s book documents, many people kept each other alive, especially taking care of the elderly and the frail under very stressful conditions.

But the demonization of the overwhelmingly Black population of New Orleans fueled true ugliness: Some aid was delayed and resources diverted to prevent “looting,” and refugees from the city trying to escape on foot were shot at by residents in the mostly white suburbs.

What about the terrible side of humanity: the wars, the genocides? And what about survival of the fittest?

In his book “Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society,” Nicholas Christakis, a sociologist as well as a physician, explains that people are cooperative and social animals, not lone wolves. Humans have survived not because they were the animals with the sharpest claws and strongest muscles, but because they had smarts and they had one another.

Christakis looked at shipwrecks from 1500 to 1900 and found that survivors often managed by cooperation and that violence and ugliness was far from the norm.

This is not a rosy-eyed view that ignores the terrible aspects of human behavior. Groups can also be organized politically and socially against each other. That’s the basis of wars and genocides. But far from being elements of true human nature that are revealed once the thin veneer of civilization is worn off, such atrocities are organized through the institutions of civilization: through politics and culture and militaries and sustained political campaigns of dehumanization.

The institutions of civilization can also be enlisted to resist this dehumanization. The European Union may not be perfect, but it has helped to largely suppress the sorts of conflicts that wracked the continent for centuries.

I would venture that many of the thousands trapped in the Nevada mud are mostly banding together, sharing shelter, food and water.

If tech luminaries and rich folks are among those suffering in the mire, instead of gloating about their travail, let’s hope this experience reinforces for them the importance of pulling together as a society.

We can help them along by passing laws that make tax havens illegal, create a more equitable tax structure and a strong international framework for stopping the laundering of gains of corruption, force technology and other companies to deal with the harms of their inventions and overcome the current situation where profits are private but the fallout can be societal.

Human nature isn’t an obstacle to a good society, but it needs help from laws and institutions, not thick mud, to let the better angels have a chance.

#Burning_Man #Zeynep_Tufekci #Communs #Solidarité

Révoltes urbaines : couper les réseaux sociaux pour ignorer l’incendie ? - POLITIS
▻https://www.politis.fr/articles/2023/07/nahel-revoltes-urbaines-couper-les-reseaux-sociaux-pour-ignorer-lincendie

https://www.politis.fr/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/SIRVINS_NANTERRE_NAHEL_60.jpg

« L’attention est l’oxygène des mouvements. Sans elle, ils ne peuvent pas s’embraser », écrit Zeynep Tufekci, sociologue américano-turque dans son remarquable essai Twitter et les gaz lacrymogènes, forces et fragilités de la contestation connectée (C&F éditions). Elle ajoute : « Des acteurs puissants tentent d’étouffer les mouvements en leur refusant toute attention. » Couper les réseaux sociaux ou carrément le réseau des réseaux, Internet, est devenu en quelques années l’outil indispensable des régimes autoritaires. Turquie, Inde, Chine, Russie… 72 pays (1), non démocratiques pour l’essentiel, utilisent de telles techniques pour s’assurer de la docilité de leur population.

Couper les réseaux, ce n’est pas seulement empêcher l’incendie de se propager, mais empêcher de le voir. Comme le soulignait très justement Zeynep Tufekci dans Twitter et les gaz lacrymogènes, la profusion d’images lors d’événements de contestation permet aux journalistes et militants des droits humains, sans être dans la confusion du moment, d’appréhender un événement sous une multitude d’angles. Empêcher ce travail de documentation revient à entraver la presse et masquer de potentielles violences de la police. L’article 24 de la loi sécurité globale – depuis censuré par le Conseil constitutionnel –, qui projetait de pénaliser la diffusion « malveillante » d’images de policiers, procédait du même esprit. Circulez, il n’y a rien à voir. Les militants des quartiers n’ont pas fini de le répéter : ici c’est le laboratoire, ici se joue l’avenir. Tout le monde devrait se sentir concerné, les techniques imaginées pour « pacifier » les banlieues finissent toujours par en sortir.

#Zeynep_Tufekci #Emeutes

Opinion | The Government Must Say What It Knows About Covid’s Origins - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/21/opinion/covid-lab-leak-origins.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2023/06/21/multimedia/21Tufekci-glkz/21Tufekci-glkz-facebookJumbo.jpg

Finira-t-on par savoir l’origine du Covid ?
par Zeynep Tufekci

Three researchers at a laboratory in Wuhan, China, who had fallen ill in November 2019 had been experimenting with SARS-like coronaviruses under inadequate biosafety conditions, The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday, citing current and former U.S. officials.

The Journal had reported in 2021 that some researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had sought hospital care that November, around the time that evidence suggests Covid first began to spread among people. It was not publicly known, though, that those scientists had been experimenting with SARS-like coronaviruses — that is, pathogens related to the ones that cause SARS and Covid.

Their role in that work is not proof that the virus initially leaked out of a lab rather than spreading from animals at a market in the city, the other theory into how the pandemic started. There is no proof of that path, either, since the known cases from the market outbreak were too late to have been the origin, and no infected animal has been found there.

But this is yet another demonstration that almost all of the most significant information we’ve had about Covid’s possible relationship to scientific research in Wuhan has come out in dribs and drabs from the hard work of independent researchers, journalists, open records advocates and others, not directly from our government choosing to act with transparency.

The names of the researchers who reportedly fell ill, which have not been publicly confirmed by the U.S. government and therefore remain unverified, and the nature of their work, were disclosed last week by the news site Public. One of those named researchers, Ben Hu, is a leading scientist who has worked on bat coronaviruses related to SARS. Some of Hu’s work was funded by the U.S. government, a fact that was unearthed through Freedom of Information Act requests by the nonprofit group White Coat Waste Project, which opposes taxpayer-funded research on animals, as well as by The Intercept, which uncovered broader U.S. funding for potentially dangerous lab work in Wuhan.

Another researcher who reportedly fell sick, Yu Ping, had written a thesis in 2019 about work at the virology institute on bat coronaviruses related to SARS — a thesis that was unearthed by a group of independent researchers who call themselves DRASTIC. The thesis further confirmed that work on these dangerous viruses was being done in labs with the second-lowest level of biosafety, BSL-2.

In September 2021, DRASTIC also obtained a funding proposal that the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s U.S. collaborator, EcoHealth Alliance, submitted to the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The proposal called for using genetic engineering to perform experiments with bat SARS-like coronaviruses and modify them by inserting features that can increase their ability to infect humans. The U.S. government rejected the proposal. One of the things that the scientists were proposing to do was to insert into these SARS-like viruses what is called a “furin cleavage site” — a feature of the Covid virus, but of no other known member of its subgenus.

The feature could also have evolved naturally, and many scientists dismissed its significance as evidence that research set off the pandemic origins. In a September 2021 journal article, published just before the grant application was made public, 21 scientists wrote that there was no evidence of research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology “involving the artificial insertion of complete furin cleavage sites into coronaviruses.” So the grant application, which calls that claim into question, is significant.

Thanks to extensive public records requests by the nonprofit group U.S. Right to Know, we are also aware that, as early as February 2020, many scientists who were publicly ruling out any role that research could have played in the pandemic, were privately expressing concern that there was a such connection, and in fact were specifically worried about the unusual furin cleavage site. (Some of the scientists have said they later changed their minds.)
Editors’ Picks
A 20-Minute Boxing Workout to Build Strength and Endurance
Can You Still Be a Femme Fatale if You’re Butch?
How to Exercise When It’s Humid

What’s notable about all this is not that it necessarily indicates that researchers in Wuhan were doing something nefarious that their counterparts in the West weren’t doing. It’s that they were doing the type of research that occurs around the world, including the United States. By all accounts, some of the most vilified people — including Shi Zhengli, the lead bat researcher in Wuhan — were dedicated scientists. Their work raised safety concerns, but they were not alone in that regard.

A recently published book by the investigative journalist Alison Young demonstrates multiple instances in the United States, including very recent ones, in which labs and universities have downplayed or covered up significant biosafety lapses, including ones that involved deadly engineered viruses that could potentially set off pandemics. If Chinese scientists were endangering the world, American scientists have too.

By keeping evidence that seemed to provide ammunition to proponents of a lab leak theory under wraps and resisting disclosure, U.S. officials have contributed to making the topic of the pandemic’s origins more poisoned and open to manipulation by bad-faith actors.

Treating crucial information like a dark secret empowers those who viciously and unfairly accuse public health officials and scientists of profiting off the pandemic. As Megan K. Stack wrote in Times Opinion this spring, “Those who seek to suppress disinformation may be destined, themselves, to sow it.”

The American public, however, only rarely heard refreshing honesty from their officials or even their scientists — and this tight-lipped, denialist approach appears to have only strengthened belief that the pandemic arose from carelessness during research or even, in less reality-based accounts, something deliberate. According to an Economist/YouGov poll published in March, 66 percent of Americans — including majorities of Democrats and independents — believe the pandemic was caused by research activities, a number that has gone up since 2020. Only 16 percent of Americans believed that it was likely or definitely false that the emergence of the Covid virus was tied to research in a Chinese lab, while 17 percent were unsure.

Worse, biosafety, globally, remains insufficiently regulated. Making biosafety into a controversial topic makes it harder to move forward with necessary regulation and international effort.

For years, scientists and government officials did not publicly talk much about the fact that a 1977 “Russian” influenza pandemic that killed hundreds of thousands of people most likely began when a vaccine trial went awry. In a 2014 report from the Center for Arms Control Nonproliferation, Martin Furmanski explained that one reason for the relative silence was the fear of upsetting the burgeoning cooperation over flu surveillance and treatment by the United States, China and Russia.

The world doesn’t work that way anymore. A few people can’t control the public conversation, especially after tens of millions of people have died, and attempts to do so will only backfire.

The public deserves to know this information. So far, some of the details about the Wuhan scientists who were sickened, including their names, have come from news reports citing unnamed sources, so some skepticism is required. But why hasn’t the Biden administration confirmed or denied these details?

Even though President Biden signed a law in March requiring the declassification of information about Covid-19’s origins by this past Sunday, his administration has yet to release that information. It needs to quickly declassify as much as possible of what it knows about the pandemic’s origins. In addition, the National Institutes of Health, which reportedly funded some of the research in China under scrutiny, needs to be forthcoming too, rather than waiting for more leaks or laws forcing its hand.

When people lose trust in institutions, misinformation appears more credible. The antidote is more transparency and accountability.

Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) is a professor at Columbia University, the author of “Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest” and a New York Times Opinion columnist. @zeynep • Facebook

#Zeynep_Tufekci #Covid #Biosécurité #Origine_covid

Les réseaux sociaux, leviers des luttes sociales – nvo
▻https://nvo.fr/les-reseaux-sociaux-leviers-des-luttes-sociales

https://nvo.fr/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/abacanewsroy-brupi20211005_0688-copie.jpg

De la révolte des Gilets jaunes à la vague féministe post-#MeToo, les outils numériques sont devenus des leviers incontournables des luttes sociales et syndicales. Sur les réseaux sociaux, les photos et vidéos d’Extinction Rebellion ou de ReAct font le buzz et relaient les mobilisations. Un article publié dans le numéro #05 de la Vie Ouvrière.

Ces dernières années, les exemples de mouvements sociaux ou de soulèvements populaires déployés grâce aux possibilités de connexions qu’offre Internet se sont multipliés. Dans son remarquable ouvrage Twitter & les gaz lacrymogènes, la chercheuse et activiste turque Zeynep Tufekci montre que l’usage des outils numériques et leur démocratisation (applications, réseaux sociaux…) permettent non seulement d’atteindre rapidement une masse critique de citoyens agissants mais en a fait des alliés incontournables des luttes actuelles.

En l’espace de quelques semaines, le mouvement des Soulèvements de la Terre, menacé de dissolution sur décision du ministère de l’Intérieur, a rassemblé plus de 90.000 soutiens, notamment grâce aux milliers de partages sur les réseaux sociaux. Des relais qui ont permis de faire converger le 25 mars sur le terrain à Sainte-Soline, dans les Deux-Sèvres, près de 30.000 personnes venues pas seulement de France mais de toute l’Europe pour s’opposer au projet de méga-bassine.

Les médias numériques améliorent la visibilité d’une cause, mais ils créent aussi une communauté, un sens de la camaraderie, explique Zeynep Tufekci dans son essai. Ils permettent à un mouvement de dépasser l’espace du site d’occupation en créant un sentiment d’appartenance : on peut se sentir zadiste sans terres à défendre, se revendiquer d’Occupy Wall Street sans être américain…

https://cfeditions.com/lacrymo/ressources/couv_lacrymo_grand.jpg

En 2021, les activistes ont fait irruption au milieu des mannequins d’un défilé Louis Vuitton afin de dénoncer l’impact climatique de la mode. Un happening militant qui a fait un énorme buzz sur les réseaux sociaux. La même stratégie digitale a été employée, en octobre 2022, quand d’autres militants ont collé leurs mains sur des voitures haut de gamme sous les yeux du public du Mondial de l’auto.

« Quatre cents personnes nous ont filmés et ont mis en ligne la scène sur Instagram et TikTok. Ça a fait des millions de vues. Là, le public était lui aussi vecteur de diffusion, même si tu ne contrôles plus le message », commente le militant d’XR dont l’organisation ne communique que sur réseaux cryptés (Signal, Mattermost), afin de préserver le secret de ses actions et l’anonymat de ses membres.

#Militantisme #Zeynep_Tufekci #Mouvements_sociaux #La_Vie_Ouvirère

Y voir clair sur les choses importantes Zeynep Tufekci, une sociologue dans l’action - Enjeux numériques - N° 21 - Mars 2023 - Données et modèles : Technopolitique de la crise sanitaire
▻https://www.annales.org/enjeux-numeriques/2023/resumes/mars/17-en-resum-FR-AN-mars-2023.html#17FR

N° 21 - Mars 2023 - Données et modèles : Technopolitique de la crise sanitaire

Y voir clair sur les choses importantes Zeynep Tufekci, une sociologue dans l’action

Par Hervé LE CROSNIER
Éditeur multimédias chez C&F éditions

Durant la première phase de la pandémie, les paroles scientifiques ont principalement été occupées par les médecins et les épidémiologistes. Or, dès janvier 2020, ce fut une sociologue qui, aux États-Unis, a devancé la plupart des inflexions concernant les comportements nécessaires face à la maladie et acceptables par la société. Zeynep Tufekci a su, grâce à son approche multidisciplinaire, et à sa grande capacité d’écriture fluide, accessible et néanmoins pointue et pertinente, proposer des solutions adaptées dans de nombreuses tribunes et sur Twitter. Au point qu’elle a eu droit à un long article dans le New York Times la caractérisant comme la sociologue qui savait y voir clair sur les choses importantes.

#Zeynep_Tufekci #Covid