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Facebook’s former elections boss now questions social media’s impact on politics – Fox Business

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Katie Harbath joined Facebook more than a decade ago as the first Republican employee in the company’s Washington, D.C., office, pushing skeptical members of Congress on the virtues of the young social network for healthy elections.

Now she is pitching a different message. After rising to become Facebook’s public-policy director for global elections, Ms. Harbath left the company last year and teamed with a group now advising lawmakers in Washington and Europe on legislation advocating more guardrails around social media.

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In her role at Facebook, now Meta Platforms Inc., Ms. Harbath had been the face of the company on many political issues and a liaison with governments and parties around the world. She says that when she resigned in March, she had come to believe that unless there is urgent intervention from governments and tech platforms, social media will likely incubate future political violence like that of the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.

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“I still believe social media has done more good than harm in politics, but it’s close,” she says. “Maybe it’s 52-48—and trending south.”

In this photo illustration, the Facebook logo is displayed on the screen of an iPhone Oct. 06, 2021 in Paris, France.  (Photo illustration by Chesnot/Getty Images / Getty Images)

Ms. Harbath, 41 years old, is the highest-ranking former Facebook executive now working with the Integrity Institute, a startup nonprofit founded by former employees who had worked on identifying and mitigating potential societal harms caused by the company’s products. The institute is now advising lawmakers and think tanks around the world on these issues.

Ms. Harbath, now also a fellow at several Washington think tanks focused on election issues, joins a growing number of former Facebook executives who have gone public with their criticisms of the company. She says she no longer thinks her former company, including Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, has the will to address its core problems in the way she believes is necessary.

“I’m disappointed in leadership, and I hate the fact that I’m disappointed in leadership,” she said of the company.

Meta spokesman Andy Stone said Ms. Harbath “helped represent the company around the globe. We thank her and wish her the best.”

Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg

Ms. Harbath says that Meta is so consumed with daily crises that it neglects more proactive planning, and that her efforts to build a plan for 2024 electoral threats were dismissed. Among other things, she says, if tech platforms including Facebook don’t draw better lines between news and paid political propaganda, operatives will systematically erode the distinction.

Regarding the events of Jan. 6, 2021, for example, Facebook and other social-media platforms were used extensively by those contesting the election results and organizing the rallies that culminated in violence. She said the company should be doing more to scrutinize both whether it could have done more to head off violence of the sort that erupted on Jan. 6 and what role its platforms have played in making politics more vitriolic.

“While they’re right that they don’t deserve sole blame, there should be more soul-searching,” she says.

FACEBOOK’S PUSHBACK: STEM THE LEAKS, SPIN THE POLITICS, DON’T SAY SORRY

Mr. Stone said Meta invested heavily in its 2020 election preparations and continues to work on the issues that she described as causes of concern.

Facebook’s policy team, led by Ms. Harbath’s former boss Joel Kaplan, often didn’t accept changes pushed by internal researchers and staffers on the company’s integrity team charged with assessing potential harm to users.

Documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show that integrity staffers felt the policy team often placed business and political concerns above the risks to users. Facebook has said it invested billions of dollars and hired tens of thousands of employees dedicated to preventing such harms.

Mark Zuckerberg

A protester holds an anti-vaccination sign as supporters of President Donald Trump rally to reopen California as the coronavirus pandemic continues to worsen, on May 16, 2020 in Woodland Hills, Calif. (David McNew/Getty Images)

“Inside of Facebook, Katie was the face of the people who told us ‘no,’ ” said Sahar Massachi, one of the Integrity Institute’s founders. Ms. Harbath had been “the honorable opposition,” he said; he credits her with bringing political savvy and connections to the new organization.

Ms. Harbath praises Meta’s work on voter registration and political-ad transparency as groundbreaking, and says as a consultant she hopes to help outside groups find other ways to make social media a healthier part of politics.

“People know where to put a whistleblower and they know where to put a loyal company spokesperson,” says Nu Wexler, who worked on the policy communications team with Ms. Harbath and is now a partner in a Washington, D.C., communications firm. “I don’t know they know where to put someone like Katie.”

Ms. Harbath grew up in a conservative Wisconsin family in a paper-mill town, and attended the University of Wisconsin with plans to be a journalist.

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After graduation, she landed a job at the Republican National Committee, where her limited experience blogging earned the 23-year-old a role overseeing its digital-campaign efforts.

Several years later, she joined Facebook, where she eventually oversaw a staff of as many as 60 employees that trained political parties in how to best use the platform and helped design the company’s election policy. She says there was a working assumption throughout the company that more Facebook usage would make governments more transparent and expand people’s ability to engage in public discourse.

FACEBOOK EMPLOYEES TRIED TO SUPPRESS CONSERVATIVE NEWS OUTLETS, REPORT SHOWS

Ms. Harbath says her doubts about the premise originated in 2016, when elections in the Philippines and the U.S. and the Brexit campaign in the U.K. were awash in misinformation spread on Facebook.

After that, Ms. Harbath says, her role shifted from primarily trying to promote Facebook as a positive force to more often trying to prevent foreign governments, criminals, troll farms and other bad actors from abusing it.

As public criticism of Facebook mounted, she says, executives put a heavy focus on what internally was called defensibility—forming policies based in part on whether the company would face external attacks or criticism. She says her job became consumed by “escalations”—an internal term for potential public-relations crises and high-profile complaints.

“Eighty percent of my time was spent doing escalations,” she says.

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A restructuring in her department stripped her of much of her authority over election policy heading into 2020, she said, and the company rejected her proposal to refocus her work on heading off electoral threats before 2024, when a number of major global elections are scheduled. On Jan. 6, she watched the riot at the Capitol unfold on television.

“That was a key day in terms of deciding to leave,” she said. “If I wasn’t going to be able to have impact internally, I needed to go somewhere where I could actually do something.”

This article originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal

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Larry David shares how he feels about Trump – CNN

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Larry David shares how he feels about Trump

“Curb Your Enthusiasm” star Larry David shares how he feels about former President Donald Trump and the 2020 election. Watch the full episode of “Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace,” streaming March 29 on Max.


03:21

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Trump's claims on crime rates clash with police data – NBC News

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Surging crime levels, out-of-control Democratic cities and “migrant crime.”

Former President Donald Trump regularly cites all three at his campaign rallies, in news releases and on Truth Social, often saying President Joe Biden and Democrats are to blame.

But the crime picture Trump paints contrasts sharply with years of police and government data at both the local and national levels.

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FBI statistics released this year suggested a steep drop in crime across the country last year. It’s a similar story across major cities, with violent crime down year over year in Chicago, New York and Washington, D.C.

NBC News analyzed crime data to evaluate Trump’s assertions about the topic.

U.S. and big city crime rates

Trump’s campaign often refers to crime levels, regularly pointing the finger at Biden.

“On Joe Biden’s watch, violent crime has skyrocketed in virtually every American city,” the campaign said in a news release published this month on its site.

Trump himself has made similar remarks.

“Four years ago, I told you that if crooked Joe Biden got to the White House, our borders would be abolished, our middle class would be decimated and our communities would be plagued by bloodshed, chaos and violent crime,” Trump said in a speech last month at the Conservative Political Action Conference. “We were right about everything.”

Government figures don’t support that characterization.

Reported violent crime dropped 6% across the board when comparing the last three months of 2022 to the same period in 2023, the FBI reported.

The reported drops were especially pronounced in the big cities that Trump often assails, many of which have Democratic mayors. Violent crime dropped by 11% in cities with populations of 1 million or more, according to FBI data, while murders dropped by 20%, rape was down 16%, and aggravated assault fell by 11%.

Reached for comment, the Trump campaign pointed to other reports indicating that certain types of crimes increased in specific cities.

At the national level, the reported rate of violent crime in 2022, the most recent full year with comprehensive FBI data, was 380.7 offenses per 100,000 people. That’s lower than the overall reported violent crime rate from 2020 — the last full year Trump was in office — when the figure was at 398.5.

The lowest reported violent crime rate of Trump’s presidency was in 2019, when the metric was at 380.8 — in line with the 2022 rate.

The FBI said it will release more comprehensive 2023 crime data in October, just before the election.

The Trump campaign, reached for comment, cited certain categories of violent crime, such as motor vehicle theft, as having increased during the Biden administration, according to FBI figures.

“Joe Biden is trying to convince Americans not to believe their own eyes,” campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement, adding that “Democrats have turned great American cities into cesspools of bloodshed and crime.”

New York City crime

Trump, who was born and raised in New York but now lives in Florida, often rails against what he portrays as an increasing crime rate in his former hometown.

Those references to soaring violence have only increased as he faces criminal charges in New York accusing him of falsifying business records related to hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels. Trump, who has pleaded not guilty in that case, must also post a $175 million bond to prevent state Attorney General Letitia James from collecting the judgment from a New York civil fraud case.

“I did nothing wrong, and New York should never be put in a position like this again,” Trump posted on Truth Social about the civil judgment in all capital letters. “Businesses are fleeing, violent crime is flourishing, and it is very important that this be resolved in its totality as soon as possible.”

In a separate post, he claimed that “murders & violent crime hit unimaginable records” in the city.

However, major crimes in New York City are down this year by 2.3%, according to police department data comparing year-to-date figures to the same period in 2023.

Those figures for last year were also far below the highs from recent decades. In 1990, more than 527,000 major crimes were reported, compared to more than 126,000 last year, according to New York police data — a drop of more than 75%.

In 2001, more than 162,000 major crimes were reported in New York. The figure dropped by more than 20% over the next two decades.

At the same time, New York City data indicates that the number of major crimes increased in the past few years, though reported violent crimes like murder and rape were down last year from previous years.

‘Migrant crime’

Trump’s dehumanizing language about migrants has become a mainstay of his political speeches since he first sought office in 2015.

In a news release this month, his campaign said the “border Crisis has created a tragic surge in violent crime against innocent American citizens at the hands of some of the world’s most violent criminals.”

Trump has also focused his energy on high-profile cases such as the death of Laken Riley, who was killed in Georgia while jogging. The suspect is a Venezuelan citizen who entered the U.S. illegally in 2022.

“Every day, innocent citizens are being killed, stabbed, shot, raped and murdered because of Biden migrant crime,” Trump said in a video posted to his campaign’s X account last week.

However, there is no evidence of a migrant-driven crime wave in the U.S., according to local police department data.

Crime reports have decreased in several major cities targeted by Texas’ Operation Lone Star, a program backed by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott that flies or buses migrants from the state to Democratic-run cities across the U.S.

Several of those cities — New York, Chicago, Washington and Philadelphia — have had decreases in year-to-date reported crime totals compared to the same period last year.


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Federal government promising a 'renters' bill of rights' in upcoming budget – CBC.ca

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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that his government will introduce new measures — including a new “bill of rights” — that he says will help protect those who rent their homes as part of the upcoming budget.

Trudeau said the new measures are specifically geared toward younger people, who are renting more than previous generations.

“It’s about changing the rules of the game in a way that meets young people where they are,” he said on Wednesday.

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Ottawa will work with provinces and territories to develop a “renters’ bill of rights” that would introduce a national standard lease agreement and implement requirements for landlords to disclose an apartment’s pricing history to allow tenants to negotiate their rent.

The new measures will also include a $15-million fund for provincial legal aid organizations that help tenants fight against “renovictions” and landlord abuse.

The Liberals are also proposing to change federal rules so that making rental payments on time will count toward someone’s credit scores, something Trudeau said is meant to help renters looking to one day buy a house.

“If you look at someone who pays a $2,000 [per month] mortgage, they’re getting recognition and credit for that from their bank as part of their credit score,” the prime minister said.

“But if you’re paying $2,000 a month on rent, you get no kudos.”

Typically the government doesn’t discuss what is in an annual budget until it is introduced in the House of Commons. But the announcement was made weeks prior to the release of the Liberals’ next budget, which is slated to drop on April 16.

Releasing tidbits from the budget ahead of time is part of a new communications strategy for the Liberals, sources told CBC News. Trudeau and his ministers are expected to make a number of similar announcements in the run-up to the budget, the sources said.

WATCH | Trudeau says new measures aim to help tenants: 

Liberals promise ‘renters’ bill of rights’ to fight housing crisis

5 hours ago

Duration 2:07

The Liberals are looking to create a ‘renters’ bill of rights’ to help deal with Canada’s housing crisis. Justin Trudeau says the plan is geared toward younger people suffering from a rising cost of living. The Conservatives call the measures meaningless.

Before revealing the planned rental measures on Wednesday, Trudeau took a moment to plug the April 16 fiscal plan, saying that the budget will be about “fairness.”

“For Canada to succeed, we need everyone to succeed,” he said.

Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland joined Trudeau for his announcement and hinted about further announcements ahead of budget day.

“Over the coming days and in the April budget, we are going to launch a no-holds-barred plan to wrestle down the cost of owning and renting a home,” she said.

Wednesday’s announcements came on the same day that the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation released a report that found a surge in new apartment construction drove housing start increases in several major Canadian cities last year.

But the report also cautions that demand continues to outweigh supply.

The opposition Conservatives, who have enjoyed a healthy lead in recent polls, have made housing — and other cost-of-living issues — a key point of attack against the governing Liberals.

Following his announcement, Trudeau was asked whether he thinks he bears any responsibility for people feeling left behind in the current economy and whether the new measures would be enough to convince younger people to support him in the next election.

In response, Trudeau suggested that a recent rise in the cost of living is not unique to Canada.

“Young people who are key to our present, and obviously key to our future, are seeing a system that is stacked against them. That’s true in Canada but also true elsewhere around the world,” he said. “What we’re focused on now is making sure that young people can see their success in the economy.”

Opposition parties criticize Liberal announcement

Scott Aitchison, the Conservative housing critic, said Wednesday’s announcement was Liberal posturing that won’t get results.

“Today’s photo op is just another set of meaningless measures that won’t result in building the homes Canadians need,” he said in a statement.

NDP housing critic Jenny Kwan criticized the announcement for not going far enough.

“The Liberals are so out of touch with what Canadian renters are experiencing that they keep offering half-measures instead of a real action,” Kwan said in a statement.

The NDP is calling on the government to invest more in affordable housing while temporarily preventing for-profit firms from buying designated affordable-housing spaces.

WATCH | Liberal government promises better protections for renters in upcoming budget: 

Liberal government promises better protections for renters in upcoming budget

9 hours ago

Duration 11:39

The Liberal government unveiled three new proposals Wednesday to better protect renters in Canada. Power & Politics speaks to Marci Ien, minister of women, gender equality and youth, about the proposed protections.

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