Las vegas – R&R – Reachout and Rebuild

Zeldin Kissing the Ring of Sheldon Adelson

David Posnett — Wed, 14 Feb 2018 01:27:54 +0000

Casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, a famously private figure, has given few hints about his plans for the midterms. | Anthony Wallace/AFP/Getty Images

From Perry Gershon:

I saw this over the weekend in Politico:

And then I read the first sentence and felt sick to my stomach:

“Republicans made their annual sojourn to the lavish Venetian hotel here in Las Vegas this weekend to kiss the ring of a benefactor they need more than ever: casino mogul Sheldon Adelson.”

Guess who was right there with them, hoping for a little dirty Vegas money? Congressman Lee Zeldin.

No wonder America and Long Island are so energized to take our country back.

I want to put everyday Americans and the middle class first. Fight for affordable, truly universal health care (Medicare for all). Protect the environment and fight climate change. Create family wage jobs. Ensure equal rights for allAmericans. And end the racism, sexism, and xenophobia coming out of Washington.

Sound better than the current bull being shoveled by Zeldin and Donald Trump?

Response to Rep. Lee Zeldin’s 10-point Plan for Gun-violence-prevention Advocates

David Posnett — Tue, 10 Oct 2017 15:28:56 +0000

Dear Congressman Zeldin,

Every American is saddened and appalled by the massacre in Las Vegas. Yet while the public is overwhelmingly united in wanting Congress to act, you continue to try to divide us by belittling and misrepresenting the positions of gun violence prevention constituents and scaring pro-gun constituents by egregiously mischaracterizing the solutions being suggested.

Rep Zeldin, your overwrought claim to be ready to lay down your life to prevent something like Las Vegas from ever happening again would be a little more credible if you had the courage to support even one of the practical solutions that both gun owners and gun-violence prevention advocates support and that well-respected researchers have deemed effective.

In answer to your recent response to the Las Vegas shooting in the form of a condescending 10-point plan to the gun violence prevention community, our answer is this: We are not idiots. We are tired of being lectured to. We’re tired of platitudes and recycled talking points and no action. We are especially insulted by the tone of your snarky list of criticisms against us, which we feel compelled to answer:

1) Not one of the many respected gun-violence-prevention groups demeans gun owners or is threatening the second amendment or gun ownership. Gun owners and cops and veterans are volunteers and members of our Boards! Stop using the NRA’s caricature of who the advocates of stronger laws are, and what we want. Try actually reading and listening instead. Since Las Vegas, gun violence groups have never had so many gun owners say they’ve had enough and now want to work for stronger laws.

2) I’m sorry if you’re feelings are hurt because some advocates hold you personally responsible for the ongoing slaughter on our streets, or for not backing laws to keep guns away from terrorists or away from the severely mentally ill who are so impaired they can no longer handle their own affairs. But as the body count mounts, year after year, I suggest that it would be much more upsetting if citizens weren’t furious at Congressional inaction when their loved ones are being killed every day. And by the way, if you want to talk about abuse, your pro-gun allies intimidate and threaten us constantly – on social media, at peaceful vigils and educational rallies, and at our places of work. And did I mention that your guys are armed and most of us are not? Your allies have posted photos of the kids and homes of the women I work with, and I can’t imagine how many hours of close-up footage of us your video-toting Oathkeeper friends must have. It’s a nasty form of intimidation.

3) We get it that that Hillary is your favorite whipping post but let’s set her aside (she is not in office, you are) and actually talk about silencers. Let’s talk about all the law enforcement groups that oppose deregulating them because it will make their jobs harder, including the Commission on Accreditation of Law Enforcement Agencies, Inc. (CALEA), the Hispanic American Police Command Officers Association (HAPCOA), the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators (IACLEA), the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP), the Major Cities Chiefs Association (MCCA), the National Association of Women Law Enforcement Executives (NAWLEE), the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives (NOBLE), the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), and the Police Foundation (PF), which together comprise the National Law Enforcement Partnership to Prevent Gun Violence.

4) We all agree that a lack of interest in facts is appalling. But in the heat of the moment after a terrifying massacre, police and government officials (and the media) are trying to communicate using the information available, then correcting it as more is known. What I find disturbing is not a mistake in the heat of the moment but afterwards, when you continue to refuse to consider any research or reports that don’t back up your pro-gun myopia. If you want truth, why don’t you vote to fun gun violence research? What are you afraid of?

5) Playing with semantics about the definition of an “assault weapon” is an effete and cowardly way to avoid the issue that weapons developed for use in war have no place on our streets. Other developed countries have no problem defining – and banning — assault-style weapons and do not have the kind of mass murders that we keep seeing over and over again. I have offered to introduce you to longtime gun shop owner and a blogger for stronger gun laws, Mike Weisser, who would be more than willing to enlighten you on the subject.

6) Accusing people who don’t want terrorists carrying guns of being emotional and frivolous is a characterization that’s beneath contempt. Americans do not lack interest in keeping guns out of the hands of terrorists. The vast majority of Americans support this measure – gun owners and reformers alike — and Congressional obstruction and your purposely unworkable bill, offered as a killer to the real proposal, is the flaw. Why does your concern for the accuracy of the Terror Watch list begin and end only when “no fly no buy” is mentioned. May I once again remind you that Americans make up only 0.5% of the total number in all the US Terror Watch Lists databases?

7) At a guess, people will stop tying you to the NRA when you stop taking their money, spouting their talking points, and offer one position that is at odds with their agenda of selling more and more guns and devices to the American public.

8) Misleading statistics? Yours are the ones out of date. In 2016 the numbers of gun fatalities soared to 36,000. Moreover, gun suicides are a major focus of many in the gun violence prevention community. We do not hide that fact. You maybe don’t care that there’s an epidemic of suicide among white rural males but we do. We think it’s a preventable, national tragedy. You maybe don’t care that there’s an epidemic of suicide among Veterans, especially those suffering from PTSD, but we do, and we – and the mental health community — are working hard to prevent that, even as you’ve voted to overwhelmingly cut back funding for mental health.

9) We work with the victims of gun violence every single day and their pain is often overwhelming to bear. We do not criticize anyone for sending prayers to them. But prayers are not enough, especially from our elected leaders, especially not now. The criticism is directed at you and other electeds who offer prayers, then do nothing.

10) By mentioning the creation of gun-free zones, I guess you’re referring to keeping guns out of schools and off college campuses, where the debate is most fierce right now. You’re right. Administrators, professors, students, campus police and parents have all strongly opposed guns on campuses whenever they’re introduced, but pro-gun politicians in several GOP states think they know better and have passed these measures anyway. Since the proposals are new, we can’t yet measure the result yet, but after the shooting Oct. 9th 2017, of a Texas Tech campus police officer, guns on campus looks like as bad an idea as everyone feared. I would point out that it is exceedingly ironic that the NRA forbids guns inside its convention hall and the US Congress and almost every legislature, including those controlled by the GOP, do not allow guns. Why exactly is that?

Finally, we are not the ones in an echo-chamber, Mr. Zeldin: We suggest you leave yours. Whenever you want to. We’re still waiting for an open town meeting.

Sincerely your constituent,

Sue Hornik

Shame on Zeldin–Again!

David Posnett — Fri, 06 Oct 2017 21:27:46 +0000

Representative Lee Zeldin should be ashamed of himself. That’s what his constituents declared back in May at their “Shame on Zeldin” protest on his AHCA vote.

And now, in the aftermath of the Las Vegas shootings, others have joined that chorus.

A recent editorial in The Forward shames Lee Zeldin—one of two Jewish Republican members of Congress—for accepting money from the NRA and voting so consistently with gun interests to have earned an A rating from the NRA. (In fact, Zeldin has accepted more money from the NRA than any other New York representative).

The massacre in Las Vegas has apparently prompted no soul searching on Zeldin’s part. Instead, he has issued his version of a “thoughts and prayers” statement, and chastised gun control advocates for making arguments he considers ineffective.

The editorial’s author, Jane Eisen, urges us not to let Zeldin off the hook:

“Don’t be distracted. My calls and emails to Zeldin’s and Kustoff’s congressional offices were not returned as of this writing. Contact them yourself. Let them know that they should be ashamed of accepting even a dime of this bloodied money.” (Emphasis added).

http://forward.com/opinion/editorial/384237/for-shame-these-jewish-lawmakers-take-money-from-the-nra/

Stephen Paddock Owned 43 Guns

David Posnett — Tue, 03 Oct 2017 16:01:16 +0000

Gun violence in America, explained in 17 maps and charts.

In the developed world, these levels of gun violence are a uniquely American problem. Here’s why.

America is an exceptional country when it comes to guns. It’s one of the few countries in which the right to bear arms is constitutionally protected. But America’s relationship with guns is unique in another crucial way: Among developed nations, the US is far and away the most violent — in large part due to the easy access many Americans have to firearms. These charts and maps show what that violence looks like compared with the rest of the world, why it happens, and why it’s such a tough problem to fix.

1) America has six times as many firearm homicides as Canada, and nearly 16 times as many as Germany

Javier Zarracina/Vox

This chart, compiled using United Nations data collected by Simon Rogers for the Guardian, shows that America far and away leads other developed countries when it comes to gun-related homicides. Why? Extensive reviews of the research by the Harvard School of Public Health’s Injury Control Research Center suggest the answer is pretty simple: The US is an outlier on gun violence because it has way more guns than other developed nations.

2) America has 4.4 percent of the world’s population, but almost half of the civilian-owned guns around the world

Javier Zarracina/Vox

3) There have been more than 1,500 mass shootings since Sandy Hook

Soo Oh/Vox

In December 2012, a gunman walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and killed 20 children, six adults, and himself. Since then, there have been at least 1,518 mass shootings, with at least 1,715 people killed and 6,089 wounded.

The counts come via the Gun Violence Archive, which has hosted a database that tracks mass shootings since 2013. But since some shootings go unreported, the database is likely missing some, as well as the details of some of the events.

The tracker uses a fairly broad definition of “mass shooting”: It includes not just shootings in which four or more people were murdered, but shootings in which four or more people were shot at all (excluding the shooter).

Even under this broad definition, it’s worth noting that mass shootings make up a tiny portion of America’s firearm deaths, which totaled more than 33,000 in 2014.

4) On average, there is more than one mass shooting for each day in America

Christopher Ingraham/Washington Post

Whenever a mass shooting occurs, supporters of gun rights often argue that it’s inappropriate to bring up political debates about gun control in the aftermath of a tragedy. For example, former Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a strong supporter of gun rights, criticized former President Barack Obama for “trying to score cheap political points” when Obama mentioned gun control after a mass shooting in Charleston, South Carolina.

But if this argument is followed to its logical end, then it will never be the right time to discuss mass shootings, as Christopher Ingraham pointed out at the Washington Post. Under the broader definition of mass shootings, America has nearly one mass shooting a day. So if lawmakers are forced to wait for a time when there isn’t a mass shooting to talk gun control, they could find themselves waiting for a very long time.

5) States with more guns have more gun deaths

Mother Jones

Using data from a study in Pediatrics and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Mother Jones put together the chart above that shows states with more guns tend to have far more gun deaths. And it’s not just one study. “Within the United States, a wide array of empirical evidence indicates that more guns in a community leads to more homicide,” David Hemenway, the Harvard Injury Control Research Center’s director, wrote in Private Guns, Public Health.

Read more in Mother Jones’s “10 Pro-Gun Myths, Shot Down.”

6) It’s not just the US: Developed countries with more guns also have more gun deaths

Josh Tewksbury

7) States with tighter gun control laws have fewer gun-related deaths

Zara Matheson/Martin Prosperity Institute

When economist Richard Florida took a look at gun deaths and other social indicators, he found that higher populations, more stress, more immigrants, and more mental illness didn’t correlate with more gun deaths. But he did find one telling correlation: States with tighter gun control laws have fewer gun-related deaths. (Read more at Florida’s “The Geography of Gun Deaths.”)

This is backed by other research: A 2016 review of 130 studies in 10 countries, published in Epidemiologic Reviews, found that new legal restrictions on owning and purchasing guns tended to be followed by a drop in gun violence — a strong indicator that restricting access to guns can save lives.

8) Still, gun homicides (like all homicides) have declined over the past couple decades

The good news is that all firearm homicides, like all homicides and crime, have declined over the past two decades. (Although that may have changed in 2015 and 2016, with a recent rise in murders nationwide.)

There’s still a lot of debate among criminal justice experts about why this crime drop is occurring — some of the most credible ideas include mass incarceration, more and better policing, and reduced lead exposure from gasoline. But one theory that researchers have widely debunked is the idea that more guns have deterred crime — in fact, the opposite may be true, based on research compiled by the Harvard School of Public Health’s Injury Control Center.

9) Most gun deaths are suicides

https://apps.voxmedia.com/at/vox-firearm-suicides-versus-homicides/?initialWidth=720&childId=vox-firearm-suicides-versus-homicides__graphic&parentUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2Fpolicy-and-politics%2F2017%2F10%2F2%2F16399418%2Fus-gun-violence-statistics-maps-charts

Although America’s political debate about guns tends to focus on grisly mass shootings and murders, a majority of gun-related deaths in the US are suicides. As Dylan Matthews explained for Vox, this is actually one of the most compelling reasons for reducing access to guns — there is a lot of research that shows greater access to guns dramatically increases the risk of suicide.

10) The states with the most guns report the most suicides

https://apps.voxmedia.com/at/vox-more-guns-more-suicides/?initialWidth=720&childId=vox-more-guns-more-suicides__graphic&parentUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2Fpolicy-and-politics%2F2017%2F10%2F2%2F16399418%2Fus-gun-violence-statistics-maps-charts

11) Guns allow people to kill themselves much more easily

Estelle Caswell/Vox

Perhaps the reason access to guns so strongly contributes to suicides is that guns are much deadlier than alternatives like cutting and poison.

Jill Harkavy-Friedman, vice president of research for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, previously explained that this is why reducing access to guns can be so important to preventing suicides: Just stalling an attempt or making it less likely to result in death makes a huge difference.

“Time is really key to preventing suicide in a suicidal person,” Harkavy-Friedman said. “First, the crisis won’t last, so it will seem less dire and less hopeless with time. Second, it opens the opportunity for someone to help or for the suicidal person to reach out to someone to help. That’s why limiting access to lethal means is so powerful.”

She added, “[I]f we keep the method of suicide away from a person when they consider it, in that moment they will not switch to another method. It doesn’t mean they never will. But in that moment, their thinking is very inflexible and rigid. So it’s not like they say, ‘Oh, this isn’t going to work. I’m going to try something else.’ They generally can’t adjust their thinking, and they don’t switch methods.”

12) Programs that limit access to guns have decreased suicides

Estelle Caswell/Vox

When countries reduced access to guns, they saw a drop in the number of firearm suicides. The data above, taken from a study by Australian researchers, shows that suicides dropped dramatically after the Australian government set up a gun buyback program that reduced the number of firearms in the country by about one-fifth.

The Australian study found that buying back 3,500 guns per 100,000 people correlated with up to a 50 percent drop in firearm homicides, and a 74 percent drop in gun suicides. As Dylan Matthews noted for Vox, the drop in homicides wasn’t statistically significant. But the drop in suicides most definitely was — and the results are striking.

Australia is far from alone in these types of results. A study from Israeli researchers found that suicides among Israeli soldiers dropped by 40 percent — particularly on weekends — when the military stopped letting soldiers take their guns home over the weekend.

This data and research have a clear message: States and countries can significantly reduce the number of suicides by restricting access to guns.

13) Since the shooting of Michael Brown, police have killed at least 2,900 people

Soo Oh/Vox

Since police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9, 2014, police have killed at least 2,902 people as of May 2017.

Fatal Encounters, a nonprofit, has tracked these killings by collecting reports from the media, public, and law enforcement and verifying them through news reports. Some of the data is incomplete, with details about a victim’s race, age, and other factors sometimes missing. It also includes killings that were potentially legally justified, and is likely missing some killings entirely.

A huge majority of the 1,112 deaths on the map are from gunshots, which is hardly surprising given that guns are so deadly compared with other tools used by police. There are also noticeable numbers of fatalities from vehicle crashes, stun guns, and asphyxiations. In some cases, people died from stab wounds, medical emergencies, and what’s called “suicide by cop,” when people kill themselves by baiting a police officer into using deadly force.

14) In states with more guns, more police officers are also killed on duty

https://apps.voxmedia.com/at/vox-police-are-more-likely-to-be-killed-in-homicides-in-states-with-more-guns/?initialWidth=720&childId=vox-police-are-more-likely-to-be-killed-in-homicides-in-states-with-more-guns__graphic&parentUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2Fpolicy-and-politics%2F2017%2F10%2F2%2F16399418%2Fus-gun-violence-statistics-maps-charts

Given that states with more guns tend to have more homicides, it isn’t too surprising that, as a study in the American Journal of Public Health found, states with more guns also have more cops die in the line of duty.

Researchers looked at federal data for firearm ownership and homicides of police officers across the US over 15 years. They found that states with more gun ownership had more cops killed in homicides: Every 10 percent increase in firearm ownership correlated with 10 additional officers killed in homicides over the 15-year study period.

The findings could help explain why US police officers appear to kill more people than cops in other developed countries. For US police officers, the higher rates of guns and gun violence — even against them — in America mean they not only will encounter more guns and violence, but they can expect to encounter more guns and deadly violence, making them more likely to anticipate and perceive a threat and use deadly force as a result.

15) Support for gun ownership has sharply increased since the early ’90s

Over the past 20 years, Americans have clearly shifted from supporting gun control measures to greater support of “protecting the right of Americans to own guns,” according to Pew Research Center surveys. This shift has happened even as major mass shootings, such as the attacks on Columbine High School and Sandy Hook Elementary School, have received more press attention.

16) High-profile shootings don’t appear to lead to more support for gun control

Although mass shootings are often viewed as some of the worst acts of gun violence, they seem to have little effect on public opinion about gun rights, based on surveys from the Pew Research Center. That helps explain why Americans’ support for the right to own guns appears to be rising over the past 20 years even as more of these mass shootings make it to the news.

17) But specific gun control policies are fairly popular

Although Americans say they want to protect the right to bear arms, they’re very much supportive of many gun policy proposals — including some fairly contentious ideas, such as more background checks on private and gun show sales and banning semi-automatic and assault-style weapons, according to Pew Research Center surveys.

This type of contradiction isn’t exclusive to gun policy issues. For example, although most Americans in the past said they don’t like Obamacare, most of them also said they like the specific policies in the health-care law. Americans just don’t like some policy ideas until you get specific.

For people who believe the empirical evidence that more guns mean more violence, this contradiction is the source of a lot of frustration. Americans by and large support policies that reduce access to guns. But once these policies are proposed, they’re broadly spun by politicians and pundits into attempts to “take away your guns.” So nothing gets done, and preventable deaths keep occurring.

Fake News Regains Its Megaphone: “Keyword Bombs”!

David Posnett — Tue, 03 Oct 2017 15:14:07 +0000

After Las Vegas Shooting, Fake News Regains Its Megaphone

The Shift By KEVIN ROOSE OCT. 2, 2017

When they woke up and glanced at their phones on Monday morning, Americans may have been shocked to learn that the man behind the mass shooting in Las Vegas late on Sunday was an anti-Trump liberal who liked Rachel Maddow and MoveOn.org, that the F.B.I. had already linked him to the Islamic State, and that mainstream news organizations were suppressing that he had recently converted to Islam.

They were shocking, gruesome revelations. They were also entirely false — and widely spread by Google and Facebook.

In Google’s case, trolls from 4Chan, a notoriously toxic online message board with a vocal far-right contingent, had spent the night scheming about how to pin the shooting on liberals. One of their discussion threads, in which they wrongly identified the gunman, was picked up by Google’s “top stories” module, and spent hours at the top of the site’s search results for that man’s name.

In Facebook’s case, an official “safety check” page for the Las Vegas shooting prominently displayed a post from a site called “Alt-Right News.” The post incorrectly identified the shooter and described him as a Trump-hating liberal. In addition, some users saw a story on a “trending topic” page on Facebook for the shooting that was published by Sputnik, a news agency controlled by the Russian government. The story’s headline claimed, incorrectly, that the F.B.I. had linked the shooter with the “Daesh terror group.”

Google and Facebook blamed algorithm errors for these.

A Google spokesman said, “This should not have appeared for any queries, and we’ll continue to make algorithmic improvements to prevent this from happening in the future.”

A Facebook spokesman said, “We are working to fix the issue that allowed this to happen in the first place and deeply regret the confusion this caused.”

But this was no one-off incident. Over the past few years, extremists, conspiracy theorists and government-backed propagandists have made a habit of swarming major news events, using search-optimized “keyword bombs” and algorithm-friendly headlines. These organizations are skilled at reverse-engineering the ways that tech platforms parse information, and they benefit from a vast real-time amplification network that includes 4Chan and Reddit as well as Facebook, Twitter and Google. Even when these campaigns are thwarted, they often last hours or days — long enough to spread misleading information to millions of people.

The latest fake news flare-up came at an inconvenient time for companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter, which are already defending themselves from accusations that they have let malicious actors run rampant on their platforms.

On Monday, Facebook handed congressional investigators 3,000 ads that had been purchased by Russian government affiliates during the 2016 campaign season, and it vowed to hire 1,000 more human moderators to review ads for improper content. (The company would not say how many moderators currently screen its ads.) Twitter faces tough questions about harassment and violent threats on its platform, and is still struggling to live down a reputation as a safe haven for neo-Nazis and other poisonous groups. And Google also faces questions about its role in the misinformation economy.

Part of the problem is that these companies have largely abrogated the responsibility of moderating the content that appears on their platforms, instead relying on rule-based algorithms to determine who sees what. Facebook, for instance, previously had a team of trained news editors who chose which stories appeared in its trending topics section, a huge driver of traffic to news stories. But it disbanded the group and instituted an automated process last year, after reports surfaced that the editors were suppressing conservative news sites. The change seems to have made the problem worse — earlier this year, Facebook redesigned the trending topics section again, after complaints that hoaxes and fake news stories were showing up in users’ feeds.

There is also a labeling issue. A Facebook user looking for news about the Las Vegas shooting on Monday morning, or a Google user searching for information about the wrongfully accused shooter, would have found posts from 4Chan and Sputnik alongside articles by established news organizations like CNN and NBC News, with no obvious cues to indicate which ones came from reliable sources.

More thoughtful design could help solve this problem, and Facebook has already begun to label some disputed stories with the help of professional fact checkers. But fixes that require identifying “reputable” news organizations are inherently risky because they open companies up to accusations of favoritism. (After Facebook announced its fact-checking effort, which included working with The Associated Press and Snopes, several right-wing activists complained of left-wing censorship.) The automation of editorial judgment, combined with tech companies’ reluctance to appear partisan, has created a lopsided battle between those who want to spread misinformation and those tasked with policing it. Posting a malicious rumor on Facebook, or writing a false news story that is indexed by Google, is a nearly instantaneous process; removing such posts often requires human intervention. This imbalance gives an advantage to

The automation of editorial judgment, combined with tech companies’ reluctance to appear partisan, has created a lopsided battle between those who want to spread misinformation and those tasked with policing it. Posting a malicious rumor on Facebook, or writing a false news story that is indexed by Google, is a nearly instantaneous process; removing such posts often requires human intervention. This imbalance gives an advantage to rule-breakers, and makes it impossible for even an army of well-trained referees to keep up.

But just because the war against misinformation may be unwinnable doesn’t mean it should be avoided. Roughly two-thirds of American adults get news from social media, which makes the methods these platforms use to vet and present information a matter of national importance.

Facebook, Twitter and Google are some of the world’s richest and most ambitious companies, but they still have not shown that they’re willing to bear the costs — or the political risks — of fixing the way misinformation spreads on their platforms. (Some executives appear resolute in avoiding the discussion. In a recent Facebook post, Mark Zuckerberg reasserted the platform’s neutrality, saying that being accused of partisan bias by both sides is “what running a platform for all ideas looks like.”) The investigations into Russia’s exploitation of social media during the 2016 presidential election will almost certainly continue for months. But dozens of less splashy online misinformation campaigns are happening every day, and they deserve attention, too. Tech companies should act decisively to prevent hoaxes and misinformation from spreading on their platforms, even if it means hiring

The investigations into Russia’s exploitation of social media during the 2016 presidential election will almost certainly continue for months. But dozens of less splashy online misinformation campaigns are happening every day, and they deserve attention, too. Tech companies should act decisively to prevent hoaxes and misinformation from spreading on their platforms, even if it means hiring thousands more moderators or angering some partisan organizations.

Facebook and Google have spent billions of dollars developing virtual reality systems. They can spare a billion or two to protect actual reality.