AI is “undermining confidence in our information ecosystem, how the use of biased AI can harm constituents of democracies, and how elected officials with authoritarian tendencies can use it to consolidate power.”
Eric Mastrota is a Contributing Editor at The National Digest based in New York. A graduate of SUNY New Paltz, he reports on world news, culture, and lifestyle. You can reach him at eric.mastrota@thenationaldigest.com.
In a world brimming with information, the ability to think critically is a necessity. Critical thinking is the meticulous, thoughtful process of evaluating the facts, contemplating potential impacts, and making educated decisions. Nuclear physicist Dr. Thomas Bowles believes this crucial skill encourages us to consider what we hear and see about an issue in order to find a viable solution. This practice not only enriches our personal lives but also fortifies the foundations of our democratic society.
Moumita Basuroychowdhury is a Contributing Reporter at The National Digest. After earning an economics degree at Cornell University, she moved to NYC to pursue her MFA in creative writing. She enjoys reporting on science, business and culture news. You can reach her at moumita.b@thenationaldigest.com.
Last week, the Indian government approved the prosecution of Booker prize-winning author Arundhati Roy under the country’s anti-terrorism law. In response, more than 200 Indian academics, activists, and journalists have published an open letter urging the government to withdraw the decision.
“We … deplore this action and appeal to the government and the democratic forces in the country to ensure that no infringement of the fundamental right to freely and fearlessly express views on any subject takes place in our nation,” the group said in the letter, according to the Guardian.
Vinai Kumar Saxena, the lieutenant governor of Delhi, gave the approval for police to prosecute Roy last week for remarks she made at a seminar in 2010, claiming she violated an anti-terrorism law known as the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA). Academic figure Sheikh Showkat Hussain was also called on to be prosecuted.
Roy allegedly said that the disputed region of Kashmir was “never an integral part of India.”
“The Indian constitution upholds Roy’s right to the freedom of her opinions and we are a constitutional democracy,” said history professor Ajay Dandekar, further stating that the decision was unjustified.
Protests from civil rights groups, activists, and students in both Delhi and Bengaluru have also taken place, calling for a reversal of this prosecution’s approval.
Roy has been a critic of Narendra Modi’s government, as well as previous governments, since reaching literary success in 1997. Her main perspective criticizes capitalism, how minorities are treated, globalization, and supports human rights cases. The recent decision to call for her prosecution has caused Indians to question the validity of the democracy they live in.
“Are we a democratic country or not? We signed the letter because we have to uphold our constitutional right to disagree with the government. We can’t let the government take revenge against critics like Roy out of some personal whim,” stated Mukta Manohar, the general secretary of the Pune municipality Safai union, according to the Guardian.
“The police will have to explain the 14-year delay and also explain why she should be charged when her words have not resulted in any violence or criminal acts in all this time,” supreme court lawyer Sanjay Hegde said.
The human rights lawyer Colin Gonsalves agreed that “the case, if the government goes ahead, could collapse at the first hurdle. It’s a crazy decision and they won’t be able to prove that Roy was linked to any violence or any efforts to overthrow the state. The prosecution is unlikely to succeed,” he said.
Eric Mastrota is a Contributing Editor at The National Digest based in New York. A graduate of SUNY New Paltz, he reports on world news, culture, and lifestyle. You can reach him at eric.mastrota@thenationaldigest.com.
Israeli lawmakers are gearing up to vote on the government’s overall plan to weaken the nation’s court system, despite nearly six months of protests from citizens, and waves of urgent warnings from the White House.
Eric Mastrota is a Contributing Editor at The National Digest based in New York. A graduate of SUNY New Paltz, he reports on world news, culture, and lifestyle. You can reach him at eric.mastrota@thenationaldigest.com.
This Tuesday Hong Kong police arrested nine people due to suspicion that they were engaging in terrorist activity. The officers made the arrest after it was uncovered that the group was attempting to make explosives to allegedly plant around the city.
Hong Kong is currently rather politically divided, and the past two years have been especially futile. Massive pro-democracy protests have erupted all throughout the city, as well as China in general, and these arrests come just one year after Beijing imposed strict security laws.
Of the nine individuals arrested six of them are secondary school students. The group was attempting to make the explosive chemical triacetone triperoxide (TATP) in a homemade laboratory hostel, according to police reports.
Police claimed “the group planned to use the TATP to bomb court buildings, cross-harbor tunnels, railways, and even planned to put some of these explosives in trash bins on the street to maximize damage caused by society.”
The authorities said they seized an apparatus and raw materials that would typically be used to make the TATP, as well as trace amounts of the explosive as well. Operating manuals and about 80,000 Hong Kong dollars in cash was also taken in at the scene.
Police froze around 600,000 Hong Kong dollars worth of assets that may also be linked to the bombing plot. The group was allegedly planning on setting off all the explosives as they left the city of Hong Kong for good.
TATP is unfortunately a very common chemical among terrorist organizations and groups. Since 2019, Hong Kong police have made multiple arrests over alleged bomb plots and for making TATP illegally.
Hong Kong chief executive Carrie Lam spoke at a news briefing this week to discuss the threats of violence that Hong Kong is facing.
“I hope members of the public will openly condemn threats of violence. They should not be wrongly influenced by the idea that there is only government tyranny. They should not be influenced into thinking that they can find excuses to inflict violence.”
Lam claimed that an envelope of white powder had been sent to her office but police concluded this Tuesday that the substance didn’t initially seem to be dangerous, but further tests would still be performed to make sure.
Eric Mastrota is a Contributing Editor at The National Digest based in New York. A graduate of SUNY New Paltz, he reports on world news, culture, and lifestyle. You can reach him at eric.mastrota@thenationaldigest.com.
The Electoral College is all set to vote this Monday and make President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election against Donald Trump official. Electors from all 50 states and the District of Columbia will meet to cast their ballots and confirm Joe Biden as the 46th President of the United States and California Senator Kamala Harris as the Vice President.
Early attempts from Trump, his administration, and Republican lawmakers attempted to produce allegations and evidence in key swing states that a majority of the votes were fraudulent and Trump had actually won his reelection. The Supreme Court has since delivered several rebukes which found no evidence to any of these claims, and multiple state courts also refused to even see the cases because of how baseless the allegations were.
After the ballots are counted and cast by the end of the day Biden will likely have well over the 270 votes needed to officially win the presidency. Once the ballots are counted they’re transported to Washington D.C. where they will then be tallied by Congress on January 6th.
Once the votes are officially cast, Biden plans to deliver a speech on prime time television about the resilience of US democracy in an effort to unite a nation that has been so ideologically divided within the past four years. Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana recently spoke on CNN’s State of the Union and claimed that “obviously, Biden is the President-elect. He has the 270 Electoral College Votes.”
Since the election, Trump and his team have made a multitude of false claims that he won landslides in states that Biden won by thousands of votes, as well as tweets that simply claimed he won the presidency. Almost every tweet from Trump has a large warning on the bottom that states the information given in his tweets are false and don’t reflect the actual results of the 2020 election.
Meanwhile, while the current president and his administration have spent the last month trying to reverse the results of the election, thousands of Americans have continued to die from Covid-19, and hundreds of thousands of new cases are appearing every day thanks to the complete lack of federal policy. The first Covid-19 vaccine has been officially approved for distribution in America, however, if strict lockdown measures, along with all other health and safety procedures, aren’t strictly implemented, case numbers and deaths will continue to rise exponentially.
Beyond the pandemic, Trump’s consistent claims that the current President-elect won by illegal ballots and procedure is only further dividing the country. Never in the history of US elections has there ever been such a blatant and public effort from the current standing president to try to reverse the results of an election without any actual evidence whatsoever. His supporters see these constant claims that the American political system is “corrupt” and thus take to the streets in violent outrage.
Members of the far-right Proud Boys group recently made headlines after violently clashing with an anti-Trump demonstration that up until that point had remained peaceful. Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander spoke with the media recently about how he hopes after Monday’s Electoral results that Trump will put the country first and really begin the peaceful transition of power: “We need to not lose one day in the transition in getting the vaccine out.”
Eric Mastrota is a Contributing Editor at The National Digest based in New York. A graduate of SUNY New Paltz, he reports on world news, culture, and lifestyle. You can reach him at eric.mastrota@thenationaldigest.com.
Between the constant talks of building a multi-billion dollar border wall and families being separated from their kids who are then kept in cages, the last four years have been a major nightmare for immigrants all throughout the US.
Eric Mastrota is a Contributing Editor at The National Digest based in New York. A graduate of SUNY New Paltz, he reports on world news, culture, and lifestyle. You can reach him at eric.mastrota@thenationaldigest.com.
In an era of widespread political disinformation deployed by bad actors to influence democracies, Facebook has faced criticism for its policy of allowing advertisers to use its platform to spread false messages, particularly about politics. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has argued that such a policy is necessary to protect free speech, and that he doesn’t see Facebook’s role as one of censoring political messages. Certainly, the question of how to handle the spread of disinformation on social media networks is a tricky one, particularly during a time when the president’s reelection campaign overtly makes false claims in social media ads, most notably on Facebook, to influence the voting public.
Rival social network Twitter has decided to address the problem by banning political ads on Twitter altogether, neatly sidestepping the issue by refusing to participate in it in any capacity. But even in the face of ongoing, intense criticism and action taken on other platforms, Zuckerberg has remained steadfast in his opinion, positioning Facebook as a platform that promotes free speech instead of one that polices the political views of its users. However, amid the intensity of the criticism directed at the social networking giant, Facebook has recently announced it would ban “deepfakes” on the site, an apparent concession to those who are worried about social media’s role in facilitating the spread of false information.
So-called “deepfakes” are the result of new technology, made possible by advances in machine learning using neural networks, that can appear to show evidence of a person saying or doing something that they did not in fact say or do by manipulating video to superimpose an image of one person’s face onto another person’s head with near-perfect accuracy. Such videos can be difficult or impossible to detect, even by experts, and as the technology advances deepfakes become even more convincing and easy to make.
While these moves are certainly steps in the right direction, they are likely not enough to stop the spread of fake news
Researchers and political observers around the world have understandably voiced concerns about the potential impact of deepfakes on the spread of information, as the very existence of deepfakes causes one to call into question the legitimacy of videos depicting well-known political figures, which were once considered ironclad evidence of a person’s speech and conduct. To illustrate this point, director Jordan Peele created a deepfake that appears to depict President Obama delivering a warning about the spread of disinformation. Even more disturbingly, deepfakes have also been used to create pornographic videos appearing to depict various well-known celebrities, in violation of these celebrities’ rights to control how their images are used in public forums.
As the dangers that deepfakes pose to individuals and to society as a whole are clear, it’s no surprise that Facebook has taken the step of banning this type of video on its site. However, given the extent of the spread of misinformation online, this action alone is not nearly enough to ensure that bad actors cannot subvert democracies by spreading fake news. For one, deepfakes are difficult to detect, even using computer analysis; as such, Facebook launched the Deep Fake Detection Challenge in an attempt to improve the technology that can determine whether a video has been digitally manipulated. And while Facebook continues to allow the spread of falsehoods in the form of political advertisements, the company has also partnered with independent fact-checkers with the aim of informing users when they are encountering false information.
While these moves are certainly steps in the right direction, they are likely not enough to stop the spread of fake news, especially given the level of sophistication exhibited by disinformation campaigns around the world, most notably Russia’s interference in the 2016 American presidential election and its likely interference in the upcoming election. While Facebook and other social media giants have learned some lessons from the election interference of the last several years, the rapid pace of technological advancement ensures that the fight against disinformation will not end anytime soon.
Tyler Olhorst is a Contributing Editor at The National Digest based in New York. You can reach him at inquiries@thenationaldigest.com.
Despite the president’s claim that “it doesn’t feel like” he was being impeached, the House of Representatives’ passage of articles of impeachment is having a clear emotional effect on him. Throughout the process, Trump has been especially active on Twitter, a platform he uses to air his many grievances and seek sympathy for what he perceives as unfair attacks on his character and presidency. As the votes that would cement his legacy as only the third American president in history to be impeached and as the first to be impeached during his first term were counted, Trump held a campaign rally in Michigan, basking in his audience’s approval as he angrily castigated Democrats even if he downplayed the significance of the historic night.
Rallies function as a kind of security blanket for the president, as he perhaps loves nothing more than hearing the cheers and applause of his supporters, who are particularly vocal when he belittles and demeans his opponents. As in prior Trump rallies, the president casually encouraged law enforcement officers to use violence against anti-Trump protestors, reiterated improbable or false claims like that he led people to start saying “Merry Christmas” again, and attacked his former political opponent Hillary Clinton and her husband as well as his current rival, Joe Biden.
The president apparently acts in this way as a self-soothing behavior, but given the immense level of stress he must be undergoing, this practice may fail to satisfy his ongoing need for admiration and approval. Indeed, Wednesday night’s display was egregious even for a Trump rally, as the president suggested that the recently-deceased husband of a sitting US Representative was looking up at her from Hell as she cast her vote to impeach. This comment offended even some of the president’s most loyal defenders, as a number of audience members audibly groaned and Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the president’s closest allies, criticized him for his slur against a dead man and his grieving widow.
If the president wins re-election next year and Republicans regain full control over Congress, it’s difficult to imagine what obstacles to the expansion of his power would remain.
While Trump’s psychological state has long been a subject of interest and concern to mental health professionals and political experts, it is of particular note in the aftermath of impeachment, as the unprecedented nature of Wednesday’s proceedings combined with his volatile disposition makes it even harder than usual to predict his behavior, which may grow even more chaotic and dangerous as the reality of impeachment’s impact on his legacy sinks in. The president seems to live in a state of perpetual denial, constantly projecting by accusing others of engaging in the same misconduct he is in fact guilty of; however, he does seem to recognize the reality of his circumstances, though his pathological lying makes it difficult to discern his true beliefs.
By analyzing official accounts of his behavior, psychologists have found with a high degree of confidence that Trump does not generally take in critical information and advice, has profound impairments relating to information processing and decision making, and tends to endanger himself and the people around him. These characteristics will likely only intensify as the president processes this new stain on his legacy, and reports have indicated that Trump is incensed by the situation and has privately vowed to exact revenge on his political enemies. As such, the president may not only continue to abuse the awesome powers of the executive branch in his quest for vengeance, but expand his misconduct in further unprecedented and as-of-yet unknown ways.
Given the Republican party’s near-absolute loyalty to Trump, the limits of executive power are unclear, as congressional Republicans have not yet generally shown any interest in curbing his abnormal and illegal acts as the Constitution requires. Most political analysts agree that Trump is virtually certain to be acquitted in the upcoming Senate trial; if he is, he is likely to feel vindicated and emboldened to expand the scope of his wrongdoing, just as he did on the day after Robert Mueller testified when he tried to cheat in the next election. And if the president wins re-election next year and Republicans regain full control over Congress, it’s difficult to imagine what obstacles to the expansion of his power would remain.
Tyler Olhorst is a Contributing Editor at The National Digest based in New York. You can reach him at inquiries@thenationaldigest.com.
A historic election in the U.K. has given the country’s Conservative Party a powerful majority in the British Parliament, allowing controversial Prime Minister Boris Johnson to essentially reshape British politics for years to come. Though the Labour Party had hoped that the recent election would remove Johnson from the position of Prime Minister, paving the way for a second referendum to potentially prevent the country’s departure from the European Union, voters decided overwhelmingly that Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party was more fit to lead Britain.
Johnson, whose primary political message has been a promise to “get Brexit done” as quickly as possible, now faces little to no opposition as his power has just been augmented considerably. That being said, much of Britain’s future is now uncertain, as the negotiations involving the country’s departure from the European Union continue to be complicated and controversial. Experts are uncertain about the long-term ramifications of leaving the EU, though most economists project that the economic downturn already caused by the 2016 referendum, in which a slim majority of the country voted to leave the EU, will only worsen.
Now, the country will almost certainly leave the European Union early next year, a polarizing move which is sure to delight half the country and frustrate the other half. For many living in the U.K., Brexit represents a rejection of liberal ideas in favor of conservative ones, as the decision to leave the E.U. is connected with anti-immigrant sentiment as well as nationalistic pride. Indeed, yesterday’s victory indicates how thoroughly this conservative sentiment has enraptured the British electorate, as the Conservative Party’s victory is the largest the country has seen since the victory that led to the election of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1987. The election represents a tremendous victory for Boris Johnson particularly because his tenure as Prime Minister has gotten off to a rocky start, characterized by several defeats in Parliament, as he was legally blocked from pursuing a no-deal Brexit and a deal he negotiated with the European Union was voted down in Parliament.
Now, however, Boris Johnson will be in power for five years, a period of time during which he has the power to make tremendous political changes to the country, with the historically consequential Brexit being the first order of business. The value of the pound skyrocketed after news of the election spread, reflecting a belief that the chaos that has for years defined British politics will soon subside and the country’s departure from the EU will be orderly and largely uncontested in Parliament, as Johnson’s power to negotiate terms of a Brexit deal in accordance with his wishes has expanded tremendously.
That being said, Johnson still faces some opposition in Parliament. Specifically, the Scottish National Party, which gained more than a dozen seats in the election, stridently opposes Mr. Johnson’s desire to get Brexit done as quickly as possible, and the party may push for calls for a referendum on Scottish independence, which would allow Scotland to remain in the EU by breaking ties with England. Additionally, Mr. Johnson’s negotiations to leave the EU are likely to be influenced by the country’s working class, who are likely to focus on invigorating Britain’s manufacturing economy and protecting the economy from imports, a vision that contradicts the Prime Minister’s desires.
International observers have had a wide range of perspectives on the issue, with many analysts judging the country’s historic election, which will have ramifications around the world, as a sign of exhaustion and frustration with democracy in an information age that is saturated with political news of all ideologies and biases. With the vote to impeach President Trump being held today in the United States House of Representatives, one thing is for certain: the moment we are currently living in is a consequential and pivotal one in the history of global democracy, which faces unprecedented threats from multiple fronts.
Tyler Olhorst is a Contributing Editor at The National Digest based in New York. You can reach him at inquiries@thenationaldigest.com.