In 2017, soon after then Ukrainian member of parliament Svitlana Zalishchuk gave a speech to the United Nations on the impact of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict on women, a fake tweet began to circulate on social media claiming that she had promised to run naked through the streets of Kiev if Russia-backed separatists won a critical battle. Zalishchuk said, “The story kept circulating on the Internet for a year,” casting a shadow over her political accomplishments.
Zalishchuk is not alone in her experience. Around the world, women in politics receive an overwhelming amount of online abuse, harassment, and gendered defamation via social media platforms. For example, a recent analysis of the 2020 U.S. congressional races found that female candidates were significantly more likely to receive online abuse than their male counterparts. On Facebook, female Democrats running for office received ten times more abusive comments than male Democratic candidates. Similar trends have been documented in India, the UK, Ukraine, and Zimbabwe.
Social media companies have come under increasing pressure to take a tougher stance against all forms of hate speech and harassment on their platforms, including against women, racial minorities, and other marginalized groups. Yet their patchwork approach to date has proven insufficient. Governments and international institutions need to press for more action and develop new standards for platform transparency and accountability that can help address the widespread toxicity that is currently undermining online political debate. If effectively designed and implemented, the EU’s Digital Services Act and U.S. President-elect Joe Biden’s proposed National Task Force on Online Harassment and Abuse will represent steps in the right direction.
The Global Challenge
Online abuse against politicians is often misunderstood as inevitable: after all, most public figures occasionally find themselves on the receiving end of vitriolic attacks. Yet over the past several years, the gendered and racialized nature of the phenomenon has received increasing policy attention, as women appear to be disproportionately targeted by online abuse and disinformation attacks.
This pattern tends to be even more pronounced for female political leaders from racial, ethnic, religious, or other minoritygroups; for those who are highly visible in the media; and for those who speak out on feminist issues. In India, for example, an Amnesty International investigation found that one in every seven tweets that mentioned women politicians was problematic or abusive—and that both Muslim women politicians and women politicians belonging to marginalized castes received substantially more abuse than those from other social groups.
Lucina Di Meco
Lucina Di Meco is a women’s rights and gender equality expert, advocate, and author. She currently serves as senior director of the Girls’ Education & Gender Equality program at Room to Read and as a member of the Advisory Board at Fund Her.
Female politicians are not only targeted disproportionately but also subjected to different forms of harassment and abuse. Attacks targeting male politicians mostly relate to their professional duties, whereas online harassment directed at female politicians is more likely to focus on their physical appearance and sexuality and include threats of sexual violence and humiliating or sexualized imagery. Women in politics are also frequent targets of gendered disinformation campaigns, defined as the spreading of deceptive or inaccurate information and images. Such campaigns often create story lines that draw on misogyny and gender stereotypes. For example, a recent analysis shows that immediately following Kamala Harris’s nomination as the 2020 U.S. vice presidential candidate, false claims about Harris were being shared at least 3,000 times per hour on Twitter, in what appeared to be a coordinated effort. Similar tactics have been used throughout Europe and in Brazil.
The disproportionate and often strategic targeting of women politicians and activists has direct implications for the democratic process: it can discourage women from running for office, push women out of politics, or lead them to disengage from online political discourse in ways that harms their political effectiveness. For those women who persevere, the abuse can cause psychological harm and waste significant energy and time, particularly if politicians struggle to verify whether or when online threats pose real-life dangers to their safety.
What’s Driving Gendered Online Abuse
Some political scientists and social psychologists point to gender role theory to explain harassment and threats targeting female politicians. In many societies, the characteristics traditionally associated with politicians—such as ambition and assertiveness—tend to be coded “male,” which means that women who display these traits may be perceived as transgressing traditional social norms. Online harassment of women seeking political power could thus be understood as a form of gender role enforcement, facilitated by anonymity.
However, online abuse and sexist narratives targeting politically active women are not just the product of everyday misogyny: they are reinforced by political actors and deployed as a political strategy. Illiberal political actors often encourage online abuse against female political leaders and activists as a deliberate tactic to silence oppositional voices and push feminist politicians out of the political arena.
Fellow Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program
Saskia Brechenmacher is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge and a fellow in Carnegie’s Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program, where her research focuses on gender, civil society, and democratic governance.
Laura Boldrini, an Italian politician and former UN official who served as president of the country’s Chamber of Deputies, experienced this situation firsthand: following sexist attacks by Matteo Salvini, leader of the far-right Northern League party, and other male politicians, she was targeted by a wave of threatening and misogynistic abuse both online and offline. “Today, in my country, threats of rape are used to intimidate women politicians and push them out of the publish sphere—even by public figures,” notes Boldrini. “Political leaders themselves unleash this type of reaction.”1
What Can Be Done
In recent years, women politicians and activists have launched campaigns to raise awareness of the problem and its impact on democratic processes. Last August, the U.S. Democratic Women’s Caucus sent a letter to Facebook urging the company to protect women from rampant online attacks on the platform and to revise algorithms that reward extremist content. Similar advocacy initiatives have proliferated in different parts of the world, from the global #NotTheCost campaign to Reclaim the Internet in the UK, #WebWithoutViolence in Germany, and the #BetterThanThis campaign in Kenya.
Civil society organizations that support women running for office are also spearheading new strategies to respond to gendered online abuse. Some are offering specialized training and toolkits to help women political leaders protect themselves and counter sexualized and racialized disinformation. In Canada, a social enterprise created ParityBOT, a bot that detects problematic tweets about women candidates and responds with positive messages, thus serving both as a monitoring mechanism and a counterbalancing tool.
Yet despite rising external pressure from politicians and civil society, social media companies’ responses have so far been inadequate to tackle a problem as vast and complex as gendered disinformation and online abuse—whether it targets female politicians, activists, or ordinary citizens. For example, Facebook recently created an Oversight Board tasked with improving the platform’s decisionmaking around content moderation—yet many experts are highly skeptical of the board’s ability to drive change given its limited scope and goals. Twitter reportedly increased enforcement of its hate speech and abuse policies in the second half of 2019, as well as expanded its definition of dehumanizing speech. However, its policies to date lack a clear focus on the safety of women and other marginalized groups. Broader reforms are urgently needed.
Increase Platform Transparency and Accountability
Major social media platforms should do more to ensure transparency, accountability, and gender sensitivity in their mechanisms for content moderation, complaints, and redress. They should also take steps to proactively prevent the spread of hateful speech online, including through changes in risk assessment practices and product design.
To date, most tech companies still have inadequate and unclear content moderation systems. For example, social media companies currently do not disclose their exact guidelines on what constitutes hate speech and harassment or how they implement those guidelines. To address this problem, nonprofits such as Glitch and ISD have suggested that social media platforms allow civil society organizations and independent researchers to access and analyze their data on the number and nature of complaints received, disaggregated by gender, country, and the redress actions taken. According to Amnesty International, tech companies should also be more transparent about their language detection mechanisms, the number of content moderators employed by region and language, the volume of reports handled, and how moderators are trained to recognize culturally specific and gendered forms of abuse. To this day, most tech companies focus on tackling online abuse primarily in Europe and the United States, resulting in an enforcement gap in the Global South. Greater transparency about companies’ current content moderation capacity would enable governments and civil society to better identify shortcomings and push for targeted resource investments.
The move to more automated content moderation is unlikely to solve the problem of widespread and culturally specific gendered and racialized online abuse. Until now, social media companies have used automated tools primarily for content that is easier to identify computationally. Yet these tools are blunt and often biased. So far during the coronavirus pandemic, Facebook, Twitter, and Google have all relied more heavily on automation to remove harmful content. As a result, significantly more accounts have been suspended and more content has been flagged and removed than in the months leading up to the pandemic. But some of this content was posted by human rights activists who had no mechanism for appealing those decisions, and some clearly hateful content—such as racist and anti-Semitic hate speech in France—remained online. “Machine learning will always be a limited tool, given that context plays an enormous part of how harassment and gendered disinformation work online,” notes Chloe Colliver, the head of digital policy and strategy at ISD. “We need some combination of greater human resources and expertise along with a focus on developing AI systems that are more accurate in detecting gendered disinformation.”2
The proliferation of online harassment, hate speech, and disinformation is not only driven by gaps in content moderation but also by a business model that monetizes user engagement with little regard for risk. At the moment, Twitter and other platforms rely on deep learning algorithms that prioritize disseminating content with greater engagement. Inflammatory posts often quickly generate comments and retweets, which means that newsfeed algorithms will show them to more users. Online abuse that relies on sensational language and images targeting female politicians thus tends to spread rapidly. Higher levels of engagement generate more user behavior data that brings in advertising revenue, which means social media companies currently have few financial incentives to change the status quo.
Advocates and experts have put forward different proposals to tackle this problem. For example, social media companies could proactively tweak their recommendation systems to prevent users from being nudged toward hateful content. They also could improve their mechanism for detecting and suspending algorithms that amplify gendered and racialized hate speech—a step that some organizations have suggested to help address pandemic-related mis/disinformation. As part of this process, companies could disclose and explain their content-shaping algorithms and ad-targeting systems, which currently operate almost entirely beyond public scrutiny.
In addition, they could improve their risk assessment practices prior to launching new products or tools or before expanding into a new political and cultural context. At the moment, content moderation is often siloed from product design and engineering, which means that social media companies are permanently focused on investigating and redressing complaints instead of building mechanisms that “increase friction” for users and make it harder for gendered hate speech and disinformation to spread in the first place. Moreover, decisions around risk are often taken by predominantly male, white senior staffers: this type of homogeneity frequently leads to gender and race blindness in product development and rollout. Across all of these domains, experts call for greater transparency and collaboration with outside expertise, including researchers working on humane technology and ethical design.
Step Up Government Action
Given tech companies’ limited action to date, democratic governments also have a responsibility to do more. Rather than asking social media companies to become the final arbiters of online speech, they should advance broader regulatory frameworks that require platforms to become more transparent about their moderation practices and algorithmic decisionmaking, as well as ensure compliance through independent monitoring and accountability mechanisms. Governments also have an important role to play in supporting civil society advocacy, research, and public education on gendered and racialized patterns of online abuse, including against political figures.
The first wave of legislation aimed at mitigating abuse, harassment, and hate speech on social media platforms focused primarily on criminalizing and removing different types of harmful online content. Some efforts have targeted individual perpetrators. For example, in the UK, legal guidelines issued in 2016 and in 2018 enable the Crown Prosecution Service to prosecute internet trolls who create derogatory hashtags, engage in virtual mobbing (inciting people to harass others), or circulate doctored images. In 2019, Mexico passed a new law that specifically targets gendered online abuse: it punishes, with up to nine years in prison, those who create or disseminate intimate images or videos of women or attack women on social networks. The law also includes the concept of “digital violence” in the Mexican penal code.
Such legal reforms are important steps, particularly if they are paired with targeted resources and training for law enforcement. Female politicians often report that law enforcement officials do not take their experiences with online threats and abuse seriously enough; legal reforms and prosecution guidelines can help change this pattern. However, efforts to go after individual perpetrators are insufficient to tackle the current scale of misogynistic online harassment and abuse targeting women politicians and women and girls more generally: even if applicable legal frameworks exist, thresholds for prosecution are often set very high and not all victims want to press charges. Moreover, anonymous perpetrators can be difficult to trace, and the caseload easily exceeds current policing capacity. In the UK, for example, fewer than 1 percent of cases taken up by the police unit charged with tackling online hate crimes have resulted in charges.
Other countries have passed laws that make social media companies responsible for the removal of illegal material. For example, in 2017, Germany introduced a new law that requires platforms to remove hate speech or illegal content within twenty-four hours or risk millions of dollars in fines. However, this approach has raised strong concerns among human rights activists, who argue that this measure shifts the responsibility to social media companies to determine what constitutes legal speech without providing adequate mechanisms for judicial oversight or judicial remedy. In June 2020, the French constitutional court struck down a similar law due to concerns about overreach and censorship. French feminist and antiracist organizations had previously criticized the measure, noting that it could restrict the speech of those advocating against hate and extremism online and that victims would benefit more from sustained investments in existing legal remedies.
In light of these challenges, many researchers and advocates have started . One example of this approach is the UK’s 2019 Online Harms White Paper, which “proposes establishing in law a new duty of care towards users” to deal proactively with possible risks that platform users might encounter, under the oversight of an independent regulator. The proposed regulatory framework—which is set to result in a new UK law in early 2021—would “outline the systems, procedures, technologies and investment, including in staffing, training and support of human moderators, that companies need to adopt to help demonstrate that they have fulfilled their duty of care to their users.” It would also set strict standards for transparency and require companies to ensure that their algorithms do not amplify extreme and unreliable material for the sake of user engagement. The EU’s Digital Services Act, currently in development, is another opportunity to advance a regulatory approach focused on harm prevention. The act should demand greater transparency from social media platforms about content moderation practices and algorithmic systems, as well as require better risk assessment practices. It also should incentivize companies to move away from a business model that values user engagement above everything else.
Of course, governments can take action beyond passing and enforcing platform regulations. They can promote digital citizenship education in school curricula to ensure that teenagers and young adults develop the skills to recognize and report inappropriate online conduct and to communicate respectfully online. In Europe, as part of negotiations around the Digital Services Act, activists are demanding that governments dedicate part of the Digital Services Tax to fund broader efforts to tackle online abuse, including additional research on patterns of gendered and racialized online harassment. In the United States, Biden’s proposal to set up a national task force—bringing together federal and state agencies, advocates, law enforcement, and tech companies—to tackle online harassment and abuse and understand its connection to violence against women and extremism represents a welcome and important step toward developing longer-term solutions. Equally welcome are his proposals to allocate new funding for law enforcement trainings on online harassments and threats and to support legislation that establishes a civil and criminal cause of action for unauthorized disclosure of intimate images.
Who Is Responsible
The problem of gendered and racialized harassment and abuse targeting women political leaders extends far beyond the online realm: traditional media outlets, political parties, and civil society all have crucial roles to play in committing to and modeling a more respectful and humane political discourse.
However, social media companies have the primary responsibility to prevent the amplification of online abuse and disinformation—a responsibility that they are currently failing to meet. As the coronavirus pandemic has further accelerated the global shift to online campaigning and mobilization, there is now an even greater need for governments to hold these companies accountable for addressing all forms of hate speech, harassment, and disinformation on their platforms. Both Biden’s proposed national task force and the EU’s Digital Services Act represent key opportunities for developing new regulatory approaches mandating greater transparency and accountability in content moderation, algorithmic decisionmaking, and risk assessment.
These reform efforts need to include a gender lens. As Boldrini emphasizes, “It is extremely important to speak out against sexism and misogyny in our societies, particularly in light of the global movement against women’s rights inspired by the far right. The time has come to start a new feminist revolution to defend the rights we already have—as well as to acquire new rights.” Ensuring that all women political leaders and activists can engage in democratic processes online without fear of harassment, threats, and abuse will be a central piece of this struggle.3
Notes
1 Authors’ interview with Laura Boldrini, written communication, November 1, 2020.
2 Authors’ interview with Chloe Colliver, video call, October 28, 2020.
3 Authors’ interview with Laura Boldrini, written communication, November 1, 2020.
NEW YORK (AP) — In a new video posted early Election Day, Beyoncé channels Pamela Anderson in the television program “Baywatch” – red one-piece swimsuit and all – and asks viewers to vote.
In the two-and-a-half-minute clip, set to most of “Bodyguard,” a four-minute cut from her 2024 country album “Cowboy Carter,” Beyoncé cosplays as Anderson’s character before concluding with a simple message, written in white text: “Happy Beylloween,” followed by “Vote.”
At a rally for Donald Trump in Pittsburgh on Monday night, the former president spoke dismissively about Beyoncé’s appearance at a Kamala Harris rally in Houston in October, drawing boos for the megastar from his supporters.
“Beyoncé would come in. Everyone’s expecting a couple of songs. There were no songs. There was no happiness,” Trump said.
She did not perform — unlike in 2016, when she performed at a presidential campaign rally for Hillary Clinton in Cleveland – but she endorsed Harris and gave a moving speech, initially joined onstage by her Destiny’s Child bandmate Kelly Rowland.
“I’m not here as a celebrity, I’m not here as a politician. I’m here as a mother,” Beyoncé said.
“A mother who cares deeply about the world my children and all of our children live in, a world where we have the freedom to control our bodies, a world where we’re not divided,” she said at the rally in Houston, her hometown.
“Imagine our daughters growing up seeing what’s possible with no ceilings, no limitations,” she continued. “We must vote, and we need you.”
Harris used the song in July during her first official public appearance as a presidential candidate at her campaign headquarters in Delaware. That same month, Beyoncé’s mother, Tina Knowles, publicly endorsed Harris for president.
Beyoncé gave permission to Harris to use the song, a campaign official who was granted anonymity to discuss private campaign operations confirmed to The Associated Press.
Outside of sports and a “Cold front coming down from Canada,” American news media only report on Canadian events that they believe are, or will be, influential to the US. Therefore, when Justin Trudeau’s announcement, having finally read the room, that Canada will be reducing the number of permanent residents admitted by more than 20 percent and temporary residents like skilled workers and college students will be cut by more than half made news south of the border, I knew the American media felt Trudeau’s about-face on immigration was newsworthy because many Americans would relate to Trudeau realizing Canada was accepting more immigrants than it could manage and are hoping their next POTUS will follow Trudeau’s playbook.
Canada, with lots of space and lacking convenient geographical ways for illegal immigrants to enter the country, though still many do, has a global reputation for being incredibly accepting of immigrants. On the surface, Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver appear to be multicultural havens. However, as the saying goes, “Too much of a good thing is never good,” resulting in a sharp rise in anti-immigrant sentiment, which you can almost taste in the air. A growing number of Canadians, regardless of their political affiliation, are blaming recent immigrants for causing the housing affordability crises, inflation, rise in crime and unemployment/stagnant wages.
Throughout history, populations have engulfed themselves in a tribal frenzy, a psychological state where people identify strongly with their own group, often leading to a ‘us versus them’ mentality. This has led to quick shifts from complacency to panic and finger-pointing at groups outside their tribe, a phenomenon that is not unique to any particular culture or time period.
My take on why the American news media found Trudeau’s blatantly obvious attempt to save his political career, balancing appeasement between the pitchfork crowd, who want a halt to immigration until Canada gets its house in order, and immigrant voters, who traditionally vote Liberal, newsworthy; the American news media, as do I, believe immigration fatigue is why Kamala Harris is going to lose on November 5th.
Because they frequently get the outcome wrong, I don’t take polls seriously. According to polls in 2014, Tim Hudak’s Progressive Conservatives and Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals were in a dead heat in Ontario, yet Wynne won with more than twice as many seats. In the 2018 Quebec election, most polls had the Coalition Avenir Québec with a 1-to-5-point lead over the governing Liberals. The result: The Coalition Avenir Québec enjoyed a landslide victory, winning 74 of 125 seats. Then there’s how the 2016 US election polls showing Donald Trump didn’t have a chance of winning against Hillary Clinton were ridiculously way off, highlighting the importance of the election day poll and, applicable in this election as it was in 2016, not to discount ‘shy Trump supporters;’ voters who support Trump but are hesitant to express their views publicly due to social or political pressure.
My distrust in polls aside, polls indicate Harris is leading by a few points. One would think that Trump’s many over-the-top shenanigans, which would be entertaining were he not the POTUS or again seeking the Oval Office, would have him far down in the polls. Trump is toe-to-toe with Harris in the polls because his approach to the economy—middle-class Americans are nostalgic for the relatively strong economic performance during Trump’s first three years in office—and immigration, which Americans are hyper-focused on right now, appeals to many Americans. In his quest to win votes, Trump is doing what anyone seeking political office needs to do: telling the people what they want to hear, strategically using populism—populism that serves your best interests is good populism—to evoke emotional responses. Harris isn’t doing herself any favours, nor moving voters, by going the “But, but… the orange man is bad!” route, while Trump cultivates support from “weird” marginal voting groups.
To Harris’s credit, things could have fallen apart when Biden abruptly stepped aside. Instead, Harris quickly clinched the nomination and had a strong first few weeks, erasing the deficit Biden had given her. The Democratic convention was a success, as was her acceptance speech. Her performance at the September 10th debate with Donald Trump was first-rate.
Harris’ Achilles heel is she’s now making promises she could have made and implemented while VP, making immigration and the economy Harris’ liabilities, especially since she’s been sitting next to Biden, watching the US turn into the circus it has become. These liabilities, basically her only liabilities, negate her stance on abortion, democracy, healthcare, a long-winning issue for Democrats, and Trump’s character. All Harris has offered voters is “feel-good vibes” over substance. In contrast, Trump offers the tangible political tornado (read: steamroll the problems Americans are facing) many Americans seek. With Trump, there’s no doubt that change, admittedly in a messy fashion, will happen. If enough Americans believe the changes he’ll implement will benefit them and their country…
The case against Harris on immigration, at a time when there’s a huge global backlash to immigration, even as the American news media are pointing out, in famously immigrant-friendly Canada, is relatively straightforward: During the first three years of the Biden-Harris administration, illegal Southern border crossings increased significantly.
The words illegal immigration, to put it mildly, irks most Americans. On the legal immigration front, according to Forbes, most billion-dollar startups were founded by immigrants. Google, Microsoft, and Oracle, to name three, have immigrants as CEOs. Immigrants, with tech skills and an entrepreneurial thirst, have kept America leading the world. I like to think that Americans and Canadians understand the best immigration policy is to strategically let enough of these immigrants in who’ll increase GDP and tax base and not rely on social programs. In other words, Americans and Canadians, and arguably citizens of European countries, expect their governments to be more strategic about immigration.
The days of the words on a bronze plaque mounted inside the Statue of Liberty pedestal’s lower level, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…” are no longer tolerated. Americans only want immigrants who’ll benefit America.
Does Trump demagogue the immigration issue with xenophobic and racist tropes, many of which are outright lies, such as claiming Haitian immigrants in Ohio are abducting and eating pets? Absolutely. However, such unhinged talk signals to Americans who are worried about the steady influx of illegal immigrants into their country that Trump can handle immigration so that it’s beneficial to the country as opposed to being an issue of economic stress.
In many ways, if polls are to be believed, Harris is paying the price for Biden and her lax policies early in their term. Yes, stimulus spending quickly rebuilt the job market, but at the cost of higher inflation. Loosen border policies at a time when anti-immigrant sentiment was increasing was a gross miscalculation, much like Trudeau’s immigration quota increase, and Biden indulging himself in running for re-election should never have happened.
If Trump wins, Democrats will proclaim that everyone is sexist, racist and misogynous, not to mention a likely White Supremacist, and for good measure, they’ll beat the “voter suppression” button. If Harris wins, Trump supporters will repeat voter fraud—since July, Elon Musk has tweeted on Twitter at least 22 times about voters being “imported” from abroad—being widespread.
Regardless of who wins tomorrow, Americans need to cool down; and give the divisive rhetoric a long overdue break. The right to an opinion belongs to everyone. Someone whose opinion differs from yours is not by default sexist, racist, a fascist or anything else; they simply disagree with you. Americans adopting the respectful mindset to agree to disagree would be the best thing they could do for the United States of America.
PHOENIX (AP) — Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent proponent of debunked public health claims whom Donald Trump has promised to put in charge of health initiatives, said Saturday that Trump would push to remove fluoride from drinking water on his first day in office if elected president.
Fluoride strengthens teeth and reduces cavities by replacing minerals lost during normal wear and tear, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The addition of low levels of fluoride to drinking water has long been considered one of the greatest public health achievements of the last century.
Kennedy made the declaration Saturday on the social media platform X alongside a variety of claims about the heath effects of fluoride.
“On January 20, the Trump White House will advise all U.S. water systems to remove fluoride from public water,” Kennedy wrote. Trump and his wife, Melania Trump, “want to Make America Healthy Again,” he added, repeating a phrase Trump often uses and links to Kennedy.
Trump told NBC News on Sunday that he had not spoken to Kennedy about fluoride yet, “but it sounds OK to me. You know it’s possible.”
The former president declined to say whether he would seek a Cabinet role for Kennedy, a job that would require Senate confirmation, but added, “He’s going to have a big role in the administration.”
Asked whether banning certain vaccines would be on the table, Trump said he would talk to Kennedy and others about that. Trump described Kennedy as “a very talented guy and has strong views.”
The sudden and unexpected weekend social media post evoked the chaotic policymaking that defined Trump’s White House tenure, when he would issue policy declarations on Twitter at virtually all hours. It also underscored the concerns many experts have about Kennedy, who has long promoted debunked theories about vaccine safety, having influence over U.S. public health.
In 1950, federal officials endorsed water fluoridation to prevent tooth decay, and continued to promote it even after fluoride toothpaste brands hit the market several years later. Though fluoride can come from a number of sources, drinking water is the main source for Americans, researchers say.
Officials lowered their recommendation for drinking water fluoride levels in 2015 to address a tooth condition called fluorosis, that can cause splotches on teeth and was becoming more common in U.S. kids.
In August, a federal agency determined “with moderate confidence” that there is a link between higher levels of fluoride exposure and lower IQ in kids. The National Toxicology Program based its conclusion on studies involving fluoride levels at about twice the recommended limit for drinking water.
A federal judge later cited that study in ordering the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to further regulate fluoride in drinking water. U.S. District Judge Edward Chen cautioned that it’s not certain that the amount of fluoride typically added to water is causing lower IQ in kids, but he concluded that mounting research points to an unreasonable risk that it could be. He ordered the EPA to take steps to lower that risk, but didn’t say what those measures should be.
In his X post Saturday, Kennedy tagged Michael Connett, the lead attorney representing the plaintiff in that lawsuit, the environmental advocacy group Food & Water Watch.
Kennedy’s anti-vaccine organization has a lawsuit pending against news organizations including The Associated Press, accusing them of violating antitrust laws by taking action to identify misinformation, including about COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccines. Kennedy is on leave from the group but is listed as one of its attorneys in the lawsuit.
What role Kennedy might hold if Trump wins on Tuesday remains unclear. Kennedy recently told NewsNation that Trump asked him to “reorganize” agencies including the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration and some agencies under the Department of Agriculture.
But for now, the former independent presidential candidate has become one of Trump’s top surrogates. Trump frequently mentions having the support of Kennedy, a scion of a Democratic dynasty and the son of former Attorney General Robert Kennedy and nephew of President John F. Kennedy.
Kennedy traveled with Trump Friday and spoke at his rallies in Michigan and Wisconsin.
Trump said Saturday that he told Kennedy: “You can work on food, you can work on anything you want” except oil policy.
“He wants health, he wants women’s health, he wants men’s health, he wants kids, he wants everything,” Trump added.
