Repetitive and arid, but with points of interest for policymakers.
A scholarly analysis of the ways that social media platforms can—and cannot—moderate extremism and misinformation.
Writing in often labored academic prose, Mitts observes, repeatedly, that because social media lack any consistent cross-platform moderation policies, extremist groups such as QAnon and the Islamic State set up shop on one, such as Facebook, and then when charged with policy violations simply migrate to more lenient platforms such as Telegram. By the time they do, the harm is often done: As Mitts calculates, by the time Facebook began to take down Proud Boys pages in 2018, the group had attracted some 50,000 followers. Censorship can be a double-edged sword, Mitts notes: Setting firm policies against, say, hate speech and threats of violence can sometimes steer users away from extremist outlets, but just as often “being subject to content moderation motivates individuals to further seek out the banned information, either on the moderating platform or in less-regulated spaces.” Moreover, any suggestion of censorship can radicalize users, as a case study of a Twitter user who “experienced moderation” and later turned up at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, indicates, if in a roundabout way. Mitts suggests that heightened diligence is called for: The shooter in Christchurch, New Zealand, who targeted Muslims there managed to post video that, though deplatformed by Facebook, was up long enough to be replicated on many other sites, so that moderators on sites such as YouTube now have to play whack-a-mole to keep up with taking it down. Allowing that the landscape has changed now that Elon Musk’s X, one of the largest of the platforms, has welcomed previously banned hate groups, Mitts closes with the hopeful if unlikely thought that getting social media users to accept that moderation is a socially good thing will make them “less vulnerable to extremism.”
Repetitive and arid, but with points of interest for policymakers.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780691258522
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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