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A new poll from Pew Research finds that 72% of American adults think social media companies wield too much power and influence over politics.

According to a survey conducted last week, just 22% of Americans believe Silicon Valley technocrats hold the ‘right amount’ of political power, while just 6% believe it’s ‘not enough.’

Nearly 9 out of 10 ‘conservative Republicans’ (89%) feel social media platforms have too much power vs. 74% of ‘moderate or liberal Republicans,’ while liberal Democrats are slightly more likely than moderate or conservative Democrats to agree (68% vs. 60%).

Majorities of both Republicans and Democrats believe social media companies wield too much power, but Republicans are particularly likely to express this view. Roughly eight-in-ten Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (82%) think these companies have too much power and influence in politics, compared with 63% of Democrats and Democratic leaners. Democrats, on the other hand, are more likely than Republicans to say these companies have about the right amount of power and influence in politics (28% vs. 13%). Small shares in both parties believe these companies do not have enough power. –Pew Research

The results echoed a similar 2018 Center survey which found that Republicans were more likely than Democrats to believe social media platforms censor political content, and are biased towards liberal views.

On July 27, CEOs of Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Google will appear together in front of Congress for the first time to testify before the House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee, which has spent the last year investigating competition within the tech industry.

Beyond debates about fair business practices, the tech industry has also come under fire in recent months from a host of critics – from President Donald Trump to civil rights advocates and even tech companies’ own employees.  

Amid these concerns, Americans favor more, not less, regulation of major technology companies, according to the Center’s recent survey. Some 47% of the public thinks the government should be regulating major technology companies more than they are now, while just 11% think they should be regulated less. About four-in-ten (39%) believe regulation should stay at its current level. –Pew Research

Will lawmakers push for oversight so that Silicon Valley tech platforms stop discriminating along party lines?

Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

It is unlikely that pundits, politicians, and the general public have ever been so obsessed with numbers as they are right now. I speak, of course, of the numbers surrounding deaths and illnesses attributed to COVID-19.

For months now, every new day has brought new headlines about total COVID-19 infections, total deaths, and estimates put out by models claiming to predict how many deaths will soon occur.

These numbers have become the focal points of many politicians’ careers. This is especially true for state governors and other politicians in executive positions who now in this time of “emergency” essentially rule by decree. New edicts are regularly issued by policymakers, allegedly based on an assessment of the all-important numbers. These decrees may unilaterally close businesses, cut people off from important medical procedures, ban religious gatherings, or even attempt to confine people to their homes. Those who refuse to comply may have their livelihoods destroyed.

“The Number” becomes the standard by which all behavior is judged. Will Activity X increase The Number or decrease it? For those who wish to engage in Activity Z, they must first prove that it will not increase The Number. Nothing shall be allowed that doesn’t have a good effect on The Number.

But there’s a problem with this way of doing things: the number in question only tells us about the one thing being measured. If we only have a number for that one thing, then we tend to ignore all the other things that aren’t being assigned a number.

Focusing on One Number, Ignoring Others

Things get even more lopsided if one number is being continually updated in real time, while other numbers are updated only occasionally.

We can certainly see all of this this at work in the COVID-19 debate. During March 2020 much of the population suddenly became very interested in the latest COVID-19 totals. Johns Hopkins University created a web site to show the spread of the disease, and Worldometer — a site normally only useful for checking the population of, say, Bolivia — began publishing continually updated numbers on total COVID-19 cases and deaths. Models predicting the future course of the disease began to spring up. The ever-rising total deaths number then was compared against the predictions of the models — such as the Imperial College London model predicting more than 2 million deaths in the United States.

This immediately changed the terms of the debate over what measures to take in response to COVID-19. Faced with rising COVID-19 numbers at Worldometer and related sites, and accompanied by news stories asserting hospitals everywhere will soon run out of room, panicky voters began to demand action from politicians.

“Look at that terrible number!” was essentially the “argument.” This was followed by the phrase “do something!” Seeing that their opportunity to seize vast new powers had arrived, health bureaucrats were quick to pounce: “quarantine everyone!” they demanded. “there’s no time to consider the downside.”

Ignoring the Costs of COVID-19 Shutdowns

Nearly overnight, the only numbers that mattered anymore were the COVID-19 numbers.

When the advocates for coerced “lockdowns” business closures and stay-at-home orders finally prevailed, a minority nonetheless asked: what are the negative effects of these measures?

These people were thoroughly ignored. They didn’t have any continually-updating, media-friendly, easy-to-access numbers on their side.

In fact, the numbers that illustrated the dark side of lockdowns and stay-at-home orders only began to trickle out, any without any online ticker to announce every new case.

For instance, in April, doctors began to report they were seeing more cases of severe child abuse (both sexual and non-sexual) than before the lockdowns. The lockdowns cut children off from relatives and settings that offered an escape from abuse. Moreover, the likelihood for abuse increased as the lockdown put more financial and emotional stress on families. But did child abuse receive much media attention? Certainly not. Child abuse victims have no dedicated website with a number that’s posted daily at CNN or The Drudge Report.

We encounter a similar problem with suicides and drug overdoses . Although there is much evidence that suicides, drug overdoses, and other “deaths of despair ” have increased as a result of lockdowns, these threats to life and limb have received little attention by politicians and media outlets looking to maximize fears of COVID-19. Once again, suicides and drug overdoses have no “daily death toll” relentlessly featured in media stories. These deaths aren’t counted in real time.

Even worse, perhaps, are the measures adopted by state governors that reduce access to essential medical care. As a result of this widespread effort to deny basic medical care to non-COVID patients, hundreds of doctors in May, organized by Dr. Simone Gold, published an open letter to Donald Trump calling for action to end the medical lockdowns. The letter states that the Americans denied treatment under COVID lockdowns includes

150,000 Americans per month who would have had a new cancer detected through routine screening that hasn’t happened, millions who have missed routine dental care to fix problems strongly linked to heart disease/death, and preventable cases of stroke, heart attack, and child abuse. Suicide hotline phone calls have increased 600%.

Further complicating matters is the fact many of the negative repercussions of lockdowns and business closures lead to long-term costs. We know that unemployment brings higher mortality due to a wide variety of ailments, long after the initial period of unemployment began.

It’s Easy to Ignore What You Don’t Measure

Yet the impact of unemployment on mortality and mental health was almost entirely ignored. This was partly due to the fact that unemployment numbers are not updated daily, as COVID-19 numbers are. The fact 40 million Americans lost their jobs during the lockdowns — and more than 20 million remain unemployed today — continues to be treated as a minor affair. Any increased mortality that results will be labeled simply as a “heart attack.” No connection will be made to the COVID-19 lockdowns.

Thus, the Gold letter continues:

The millions of casualties of a continued shutdown will be hiding in plain sight, but they will be called alcoholism, homelessness, suicide, heart attack, stroke, or kidney failure. In youths it will be called financial instability, unemployment, despair, drug addiction, unplanned pregnancies, poverty, and abuse.

In other words, there will be no media-friendly web site listing the long and lingering effects of the lockdowns. There will be no list of abused children, the destitute, the suicides, and the victims of drug abuse who couldn’t get the help they needed. There will be no list of cancer patients denied care because their states’ governors decided cancer diagnostics were “elective” medical procedures.

Indeed, so unimportant are the deaths and illnesses uncounted in any any government tally, that politicians are now talking about another round of stay-at-home orders and lockdowns. Los Angeles city officials are threatening to impose new lockdown measures, and at least one county in Texas has implemented a stay-at-home order.

Those who support these measures need only point to the official statistics: “see, we must do something to keep this COVID-19 number from getting bigger!” The number will be there for all to see.

But the child abuse, the suicides, and the cancer deaths? There’s no Worldometer number to point to.

There’s an important lesson here. Since the nineteenth century, government bureaucrats, politicians, and other advocates for more government action have long sought greater use of government statistics as a means of justifying government interventions in the marketplace. In this way of thinking, that which is measured is that which merits government planning.

It’s simply another illustration of Frederic Bastiat’s lesson of “the seen” versus “the unseen.” As with most government interventions, the public is only interested in the easily seen “benefits” of government intervention. All the unseen costs of that intervention are simply ignored. Paying government workers to provide a “service” that almost nobody wants? That “creates jobs.” That can easily be seen and measured.  The lost wealth that results from such a pointless endeavor? That’s hard to measure, and can be ignored.

But we’re now learning that, in order to be counted among the “seen,” it’s not enough to just have an occasionally updated statistic. If we want our statistic to receive a lot of attention, it must be easily-found by the public, and be easy for journalists—most of whom lack the skills to engage in serious research—to use. A daily-updated COVID-19 death number, will beat an an annual estimate of drug overdoses any day.

This is partly why the pandemics of 1958 and 1969 received so much less attention – even though the 1958 pandemic remains deadlier than the current pandemic. Those pandemics had no web site, and no concerted media effort to maximize attention paid to a daily-mounting death toll.

The Hamptons housing market is booming. But how? Isn’t the economy in shambles and the recovery stalling? 

Well, yes, but as we’ve discussed over the last several weeks, those who still have the economic mobility are fleeing cities for rural communities and towns, such as the one on eastern Long Island’s South Fork. 

For the same price as a multi-million dollar 5 bedroom Manhattan condo, one can easily afford a mansion, with a few acres, garden, tennis court, and maybe even a pool in the Hamptons. If lockdowns come again, instead of being cooped up in a building with no yard, one can have a relaxing cocktail on the back patio while remote working and enjoying the sounds of nature.

A new report via Miller Samuel and Douglas Elliman (seen by CNBC), outlines how Hampton home prices have hit a new record high due to the influx of New Yorkers permanently leaving the city for the beach town. 

The median price of a single-family home in the luxurious beach town hit $1.1 million in 2Q20, a 25% increase YoY. The average sale price of a home in the Hamptons during the quarter was up 21% to about $2.1 million, which is relatively cheap, considering how much Manhattan condos cost.

After a couple of years of weakness, Hamptons real estate appears to be bouncing back. The weekenders who have shown up to the beach town for holidays are now becoming permanent residents as city life, considering today’s unprecedented challenges, just doesn’t make sense anymore.   

“These aren’t weekenders, or people just here from Memorial Day to Labor Day,” said Gary DePersia, a top broker in the Hamptons with Corcoran. “They plan to be here full time for the duration.”

DePersia said one of his buyers now works remotely and doesn’t need to be in the city anymore.

Jonathan Miller, CEO of Miller Samuel, said 2Q sales in the Hamptons slumped 15% over last year because of the virus pandemic, but it was nothing like the 54% crash in Manhattan. He said once lockdowns in the city ended in June, sales in the Hamptons “exploded.” 

Miller said wealthy families would on longer spend their days in the city, even after a vaccine is developed. Folks are quickly renovating or buying more year-round homes in the Hamptons.

“I call it ‘co-primary’ residences,” he said. “It’s not just using the Hamptons for summers and occasional weekends. It’s equal to their Manhattan residence.”

Miller said the virus pandemic has given Hamptons real estate a bump, adding that, “the pandemic may have started the trend, but it’s the technology, and the acceptance of working from home now, that will make it more lasting.”

And it’s not just wealthy folks abandoning the city, Wall Street firms are leaving as well… 

Authored by James Ferguson via Campus Reform,

The Harvard University Board of Overseers is under pressure to alter its name due to the term having ties to slavery. 

The Coalition for a Diverse Harvard is calling for the board to drop the title “overseer,” as the term was also used to refer to individuals who managed plantations. The alumni organization Harvard Forward brought attention to the“Board of Overseers” name in a series of tweets.

“Today, on the 237th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts, we join the @harvarddiverse Coalition in calling to #RenameTheOverseers,” Harvard Forward tweeted July 8.

Sources:https://t.co/LgjxefnQNghttps://t.co/Io4pMRPI0mhttps://t.co/6tcgSu0PRzhttps://t.co/tpzghrazm0https://t.co/ZKW40JdXq4

— Harvard Forward (@HarvardForward) July 9, 2020

“‘Overseer’ also refers to men hired by plantation owners during that same time period to violently control and abuse enslaved people. Plantation overseers were paid to elicit the most work out of enslaved people, and they often resorted to violent disciplinary tactics and brutal torture. Narratives from enslaved people are filled with accounts of mutilations, burnings, & whippings at the hands of overseers,” the group stated, claiming that “the term ‘overseer’ cannot be separated from its historical context and connotations.” 

“The continued use of a word characterized by such deep-rooted racism is a testament to Harvard’s failure to confront our country’s history.”

The group began its campaign to change the name of Harvard’s “second-highest governing body” in 2017, as the Harvard Crimson reported.

The board itself consists of 30 alumni and has the power to appoint the university president.

In June, the University of Louisville scrapped the title “overseer” from its student government bodies, saying the term “hearkens back to American slavery and reminds us of the brutality of the conditions and treatment of black people during this time,” University of Louisville President Neeli Bendapudi. 

Harvard’s Board of Overseers is not the first organization to come under scrutiny at the Ivy League institution. A petition in June to rename the Mather House, named for Increase Mather, a Harvard president and slave owner who attended the university in 1656.  

The university’s board elections began July 1.  The Coalition for a Diverse Harvard has backed five candidates who have endorsed altering the name “overseer” as part of their election platform, the Crimson reported.  One of the candidates, John E. Betty said it was difficult for the noun “overseer” to be “divorced” from connections with slavery, saying “we need to change” and further stated that the Board of Overseers “is a bit of a relic around Harvard history and linguistics.” 

The Coalition for a Diverse Harvard did not respond to Campus Reform’s request for comment. 

A federal grand jury has indicted former Pennsylvania Senator Michael J. “Ozzie” Myers on charges that the Philadelphia Democrat committed election fraud for his alleged role in a ballot box-stuffing scheme in 2014, 2015 and 2016, according to CBS Philly.

Myers, 77, is charged with conspiring with and bribing another Democrat – former Judge Domenick J. DeMuro, who pleaded guilty in May to accepting the money in the ballot box scheme while he served as a judge of elections. DeMuro’s responsibilities included overseeing a polling place during voting.

DeMuro, 73, charged between $300 and $5,000 per election to rig the votes for Myers, who in turn charged his clients “consulting fees” which were used to pay off multiple Election Board Officials. The disgraced judge would illegally add votes for certain candidates – many of whom paid for the votes, and others who Myers favored for other reasons. According to this week’s indictment.

“Free and fair elections are the hallmark of our system of government,” said Acting Assistant Attorney General Brian C. Rabbitt of the DOJ’s Criminal Division. “The Department of Justice has zero tolerance for corruption of the electoral process, and we will spare no effort in investigating and prosecuting those who would seek an unfair advantage at the polls by bribing state and local officials responsible for ensuring the fairness of our elections.”

In a Thursday statement, US Attorney William M. McSwain said “If only one vote has been illegally rung up or fraudulently stuffed into a ballot box, the integrity of that entire election is undermined,” adding “Votes are not things to be purchased and democracy is not for sale.”

Myers had previously been convicted of bribery and conspiracy for taking money from FBI agents who posed as Arab sheiks in the 1970s “Abscam” scandal, according to CBS Philly.

A former ward leader and former cargo checker on the Philly waterfront, he was captured on tape saying a $15,000 bribe was not sufficient.

Myers was expelled from Congress in 1980 and served more than a year in federal prison before his release in 1985. –CBS Philly

DeMuro faces up to 15 years at his September sentencing.

Authored by J.D.Tuccille via Reason.com,

Americans are increasingly monitored, and COVID-19 health concerns aren’t improving the situation…

Pandemic maps are all the rage, these days, but the latest one from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is a little different; instead of viral hotspots, it displays a plague of official snoopiness, arranged by location and sortable by technology. While it documents intrusions that predate the current crisis, the Atlas of Surveillance is all too relevant to the age of coronavirus. Concerns about curtailing contagion help to normalize detailed scrutiny of people’s lives and drive us toward a pervasive surveillance state.

“The Atlas of Surveillance database, containing several thousand data points on over 3,000 city and local police departments and sheriffs’ offices nationwide, allows citizens, journalists, and academics to review details about the technologies police are deploying, and provides a resource to check what devices and systems have been purchased locally,” EFF announced on July 13.

Users can click on the map to see what surveillance technologies are used in specified localities. If you want to see what’s going on in your area, the map is searchable by the name of a city, county, or state. The map can also be filtered according to technologies such as body-worn cameras, drones, and automated license plate readers.

The nearest entry to me is in Prescott Valley, Arizona, where the police department is among the hundreds that have partnered with Ring, the Amazon-owned doorbell-camera company.

The Ring partnerships don’t give police live feeds, but they can request video recordings regarding a specific time and area. While participation by Ring customers is voluntary, the partnerships are “a clever workaround for the development of a wholly new surveillance network, without the kind of scrutiny that would happen if it was coming from the police or government,” warns Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, a professor at the University of the District of Columbia’s David A. Clarke School of Law and author of The Rise of Big Data Policing.

Researchers find few crimes solved by the voluntary surveillance partnerships, but the home-security marketing of the Ring arrangement nudges the culture toward an easier acceptance of a panopticon that operates outside of the full range of civil liberties protections.

Also easing America’s slide toward a full surveillance state is fear of the COVID-19 pandemic. Public health officials who, just months ago, fretted about overcoming privacy concerns with regard to contact-tracing schemes have turned to governments’ usual solution: threatening harsh penalties for noncompliance.

“Travelers from certain states landing at New York airports starting Tuesday could face a $2,000 fine for failing to fill out a form that state officials will use to track travelers and ensure they’re following quarantine restrictions,” AP reported this week.

Mandatory tracking forms for travelers to New York follow on Rockland County’s earlier efforts to compel cooperation with contact tracers.

“Commissioner of Health Dr. Patricia Schnabel Ruppert urged residents to comply with the Department of Health’s contact tracing efforts and threatened those who do not comply with subpoenas and $2,000 per day fines,” the county announced on July 1.

We can hope that health-related snooping into people’s movements and activities will come to an end when the pandemic passes, but these things have a way of getting embedded in the culture as people become accustomed to them. In the name of controlling infection, many private companies are now closely monitoring employees, including their proximity to one another in the workplace.

“Privacy advocates warn the tracing apps are a slippery slope toward ‘normalizing’ an unprecedented new level of employer surveillance,” notes Politico.

“Aggressive expansion of surveillance programs without adequate checks could normalize privacy intrusions and create systems that may later be used for various forms of political and social repression,” frets Freedom House.

That novel invasions of privacy which might once have set off alarms can become the new normal is clear from public-private surveillance partnerships of the sort that Ring developed with police departments. After the Supreme Court ruled that police need a warrant to access cellphone location data in Carpenter v. United States (2018), law enforcement quickly started purchasing data from private marketing firms.

“The Trump administration has bought access to a commercial database that maps the movements of millions of cellphones in America and is using it for immigration and border enforcement,” the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year.

“Experts say the information amounts to one of the largest known troves of bulk data being deployed by law enforcement in the U.S.—and that the use appears to be on firm legal footing because the government buys access to it from a commercial vendor.”

In a growing trend, other agencies, including the FBI and the IRS, have also turned to private sources to monitor social media posts and track cellphone movements. The new surveillance technique is quickly becoming widely established.

Likewise, even after COVID-19 fades to an unpleasant memory, we may find that it has left a legacy of intrusive monitoring of our whereabouts and social connections—all for our own good, we’ll be told.

For now, the growing incidence of public health surveillance is too new and low-tech to be included in the Atlas of Surveillance, which is plenty full as it is.

Selecting “automated license plate readers” reveals dense clusters in California, and in urban areas and along major highways elsewhere.

Clicking on “drones” reveals that they monitor much of the country—especially east of the Mississippi River and along the West Coast—from the sky.

A look at “face recognition technology” shows that it is especially popular in Florida and around Washington, D.C.

As thoroughly monitored as the atlas reveals the country to be, it’s far from complete and EFF invites volunteers to assist in collecting data. As new information trickles in, that map will undoubtedly fill in with new jurisdictions and surveillance efforts as time goes on.

The Atlas of Surveillance will probably fill in with new monitoring technologies, too, including some driven by public health concerns. For officials looking for reasons to poke their noses into other people’s business, the pandemic is as good an excuse as any.