“This may be the first time kids were administered experimental drugs instead of candy on October 31.”
A new report details details how two Texas children under the age of 10 young children were administered full 30-microgram doses of the experimental COVID-19 injection “instead of candy” while trick-or-treating on October 31, with one immediately experiencing adverse reactions.
Two children, six and 7 years old, were illegally administered full, adult-sized doses of the COVID-19 injection “instead of candy” while trick-or-treating on Halloween, with one immediately experiencing adverse reactions, according to a report from the The Epoch Times.
The incident occured during a Halloween gathering at a local church in Garland, Texas, where the city set up a vaccination center. Nurses at the event were unauthorized to inject children younger than 12 years old.
The young children were illegally injected with full 30-microgram doses of the COVID-19 vaccines, which are 3-times the dose recommended by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for children ages five through 11. According to the report, at least “one of the children experienced adverse reactions immediately after” being injected.
The father of the 6-year-old, Julian Gonzalez, was told by the nurses that his child could get the Pfizer injection. “Going off of their confidence and what we had read, we were all for it,” he told local media.
On October 31, the injections were not cleared by federal health authorities for use in any children under the age of 12. Today, despite approval from the federal government, children ages 5-11 are not to be given more than 10-microgram doses.
The reason for this is because of the high risk of post-vaccination heart inflammation in children. Upon being informed that his child illegally received the full dose injection, Gonzales asked “Where did that decision come from? Who was it that told them [the nurses] that they could go ahead and offer it?”
The City of Garland Health Department confirmed in a statement to local media that the injections should not have been administered, adding that the incident occurred “in error.” They claim that they are in communication with the parents of the children, who are monitoring them for side effects.
The condition of the 7-year-old child is unknown. Meanwhile, the Gonzales boy’s side effects have been reported to have eased.
This would not be the first time children who were improperly injected with the Pfizer shot had undergone adverse events. As National File previously reported, two young children were “accidentally” given the COVID-19 vaccine instead of flu shots at a Walgreens in Indiana according to local media in October. Now, both are experiencing “heart issues,” according to their pediatrician.
A family in Evansville, Indiana went to a local Walgreens to have each member, including two young children, receive a flu shot. During the appointment, all members of the party including the two children were “accidentally” given full adult does of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, according to the family’s lawyer. The children, four and five years old, were born in 2016 and 2017, as revealed by the vaccination cards provided to the family by Walgreens.
Added: After the alleged vaccine mix up, both children are now experiencing signs of “heart issues,” according to their pediatrician. The younger child is sick with a cough and fever, according to the reportby KWTX.
The FDA knew of numerous adverse reactions in children “related” to the Pfizer shot prior to authorizing it for children ages 5-11, but signed off on it anyways.
Further, perhaps coincidentally, the FDA approved the “first oral blood thinning medication for children” just a few months ahead of their COVID-19 vaccine rollout for children ages 5-11. The approved drug, Pradaxa, are oral pellets that treat children 3 months to less than 12 years of age with venous thromboembolism, a condition that involves blood clots forming in the veins. Pradaxa is the “first FDA-approved blood thinning medication that children can take by mouth,” according the FDA News Release.
The app hurts sleep, work, relationships or parenting for about 12.5% of users, who reported they felt Facebook was more of a problem than other social media.
Facebook researchers have found that 1 in 8 of its users report engaging in compulsive use of social media that impacts their sleep, work, parenting or relationships, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
These patterns of what the company calls problematic use mirror what is popularly known as internet addiction. They were perceived by users to be worse on Facebook than any other major social-media platform, which all seek to keep users coming back, the documents show.
A Facebook team focused on user well-being suggested a range of fixes, and the company implemented some, building in optional features to encourage breaks from social media and to dial back the notifications that can serve as a lure to bring people back to the platform.
Facebook shut down the team in late 2019.
A company spokeswoman said Facebook in recent months has begun formulating a new effort to address what it calls problematic use alongside other well-being concerns, such as body image and mental health.
The company has been public about its desire to address these problems, said Dani Lever, the spokeswoman, in a statement. Some people have struggles with other technologies, including television and smartphones, she said.
“We have a role to play, which is why we’ve built tools and controls to help people manage when and how they use our services,” she said in the statement. “Furthermore, we have a dedicated team working across our platforms to better understand these issues and ensure people are using our apps in ways that are meaningful to them.”
The Wall Street Journal’s Facebook Files series has documented how Facebook knows the products and systems central to its business success routinely fail and cause harm. For some people, such as teen girls or human-trafficking victims, the risks can be significant. These documents highlight the company’s research into possible negative impacts on a broader swath of users.
Facebook is owned by Meta Platforms Inc. A restructuring announced in late October highlights the company’s focus on the so-called metaverse—an online world featuring extensive use of virtual reality—that goes beyond traditional social media.
The research into social-media use that may negatively affect people’s day-to-day lives was launched several years ago with the goal of mitigating harmful behavior that the company was increasingly identifying on its platforms.
The researchers on the well-being team said some users lack control over the time they spend on Facebook and have problems in their lives as a result. They wrote that they don’t consider the behavior to be a clinical addiction because it doesn’t affect the brain in the same way as gambling or substance abuse. In one document, they noted that “activities like shopping, sex and Facebook use, when repetitive and excessive, may cause problems for some people.”
Note: Third-party images have been pixelated. Source: March 2020 internal Facebook report titled, ‘Problematic Use of Facebook: User Journey, Personas & Opportunity Mapping’
Those problems, according to the documents, include a loss of productivity when people stop completing tasks in their lives to check Facebook frequently, a loss of sleep when they stay up late scrolling through the app and the degradation of in-person relationships when people replace time together with time online. In some cases, “parents focused more on FB than caring for or bonding with their children,” the researchers wrote.
“I’m on Facebook every day, every moment. Literally, every moment; just not when I’m in the shower,” a 22-year-old woman told the researchers. “I lose the notion of time.”
In March 2020, several months after the well-being team was dissolved, researchers who had been on the team shared a slide deck internally with some of the findings and encouraged other teams to pick up the work.
The researchers estimated these issues affect about 12.5% of the flagship app’s more than 2.9 billion users, or more than 360 million people. About 10% of users in the U.S., one of Facebook’s most lucrative markets, exhibit this behavior. In the Philippines and in India, which is the company’s largest market, the employees put the figure higher, at around 25%.
‘Lower well-being’
The researchers said in the documents that most of the people who use Facebook compulsively said they used multiple social-media apps, including Instagram and WhatsApp, which are also owned by Meta, Facebook’s new corporate parent, along with Twitter and Snapchat. Some of the troublesome aspects for users on Facebook, such as feeling pressure to respond to messages and frequently checking for new content, are also widespread in smartphone use, the researchers noted.
“Why should we care?” the researchers wrote in the slide deck. “People perceive the impact. In a comparative study with competitors, people perceived lower well-being and higher problematic use on Facebook compared to any other service.” The other services in the comparison also included YouTube, Reddit and the videogame World of Warcraft.
Note: Some names have been redacted. Source: March 2020 internal Facebook report titled, ‘Problematic Use of Facebook: User Journey, Personas & Opportunity Mapping’
The researchers noted the results couldn’t determine causality. They said they would need to conduct more studies to determine whether, for example, Facebook causes people to have problems sleeping, or if people who have trouble sleeping experience higher stress and turn to Facebook as a distraction.
“We welcome other teams to take on these opportunities,” one of the researchers posted on Facebook’s internal communications system. “Please get in touch if we can help.
”Facebook’s findings are consistent with what many external researchers have observed for years, said Brian Primack, a professor of public health and medicine and dean of the College of Education and Health Professions at the University of Arkansas. He said there isn’t a consensus on causality but that most of the evidence “should be concerning to people.” His research group followed about a thousand people over six months in a nationally representative survey and found that the amount of social media that a person used was the No. 1 predictor of the variables they measured for who became depressed.
“Everything is pointing in a certain direction,” he said. “There’s only going to be a certain amount of time Facebook can say there is nothing causal out there.”
In late 2017, a Facebook executive and a researcher wrote a public blog post that outlined some of the issues with social-media addiction. According to the post, the company had found that while passive consumption of social media could make you feel worse, the opposite was true of more active social-media use.
“Actively interacting with people—especially sharing messages, posts and comments with close friends and reminiscing about past interactions—is linked to improvements in well-being,” the company said.
Facebook then made a switch to more heavily weigh “meaningful social interactions” in its news feed as a way to combat passive consumption. One side effect of that change, as outlined in a previous Journal article in The Facebook Files, was that the company’s algorithms rewarded content that was angry or sensational, because those posts increased engagement from users.
Facebook said any algorithm can promote objectionable or harmful content and that the company is doing its best to mitigate the problem.
Feeling addicted
Laurin Manning Gandy, 40 years old, signed up for Facebook in late 2004, and the media strategist said the platform enabled her to reach people beyond her own immediate network.
Ms. Gandy said she would check her posts again and again, counting how many comments and likes had rolled in, often spending eight hours or more a day on the app.
“Every second that I wasn’t occupied by something I had to do I was fooling around on my phone scrolling through Facebook,” Ms. Gandy said. “Facebook took over my brain.”
Ms. Gandy says she realized she had abandoned her creative pursuits, including drawing and painting, in exchange for a purely online existence. She increasingly came to see it as an addiction.
In April, she deleted Facebook from her phone, but she recently reinstalled it to order takeout from a barbecue restaurant. She said she is now making an effort not to post on Facebook.
‘Facebook took over my brain,’ Ms. Gandy said. PHOTO: TRAVIS DOVE FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Part of Facebook’s interest in addressing use of its app that causes problems in people’s day-to-day lives is a business calculation related to users like Ms. Gandy. In 2017, an intern found that users who exhibited “twitchy” behavior of logging on frequently for short sessions were more likely than regular users to deactivate their accounts for the stated reason that “I spend too much time on Facebook.”In a 2018 study, researchers on Facebook’s core data science team wrote that they were starting to read frequent articles about addiction to Facebook.
“We take these issues seriously, and though Facebook use may not meet clinical standards for addiction, we want to fix the underlying design issues that lead to this concern,” they wrote.
Apple and Google had started to roll out features to address device addiction, and the researchers predicted more companies would soon follow.
In 2018, Facebook added a time-management tool to the app. It includes a dashboard where users can see their total time on the app each day and set a daily reminder to give themselves an alert when they have reached the amount of time they want to spend on it.
Focus on number of sessions
Inside Facebook, the researchers registered concern about the direction of Facebook’s focus on certain metrics, including the number of times a person logs into the app, which the company calls a session. “One of the worries with using sessions as a north star is we want to be extra careful not to game them by creating bad experiences for vulnerable populations,” a researcher wrote, referring to elements designed to draw people back to Facebook frequently, such as push notifications.
In 2018, then Facebook board member Reed Hastings, who co-founded Netflix Inc., told top Facebook executives he wasn’t sure why the company needed to apologize for being heavily used, according to three people familiar with the matter. Mr. Hastings added that he wouldn’t apologize for allowing people to binge-watch shows on Netflix, the people said.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Hastings declined to comment.
The well-being team, according to people familiar with the matter, was reshuffled at least twice since late 2017 before it was disbanded, and could only get about half of the resources the team requested to do its work.
Note: Third-party images have been pixelated. Source: March 2020 internal Facebook report titled, ‘Problematic Use of Facebook: User Journey, Personas & Opportunity Mapping’
Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg has said the company continues to prioritize the issue. “We certainly do not want our products to be addictive,” he said in a November 2020 Senate hearing in response to a question from Sen. Lindsey Graham. “I don’t think the research has been conclusive, but it is an area that we care about and study,” Mr. Zuckerberg said.
Ms. Lever, the spokeswoman, said the company also funds external research, such as with the Digital Wellness Lab run jointly by Harvard University and Boston Children’s Hospital.
In 2018, Facebook’s researchers surveyed 20,000 U.S. users and paired their answers with data about their behavior on Facebook. The researchers found about 3% of these users said they experienced “serious problems” in their sleep, work or relationships related to their time on Facebook that they found difficult to change. Some of the researchers’ work was published in a 2019 paper.
According to that study, the researchers also said that a liberal interpretation of the results would be that 14% of respondents spent “a lot more time on Facebook than they want to,” although they didn’t label this group problematic users.People who felt like they have a problem with the app were more likely to be men; either teens or in their 20s; have about 15 more sessions a day than the average user; and spend a greater portion of their time on the app at night. They also spent more time on Facebook overall—about 1 hour and 36 minutes a day, compared with 1 hour and 18 minutes a day for regular users.
Some of the people, although they reported problems, also said the time they spend on Facebook is more valuable than people who don’t report problems.
Tom Meitner said Facebook took too much of his energy and left him feeling crabby. PHOTO: FÁBIO ERDOS FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
In 2019, the researchers had come to a new figure: What they called problematic use affects 12.5% of people on Facebook, they said. This survey used a broader definition for the issue, including users who reported negative results on key aspects of their life as well as feelings of guilt or a loss of control, according to the documents.
The researchers also wrote that they had a more detailed understanding of the aspects of Facebook that triggered the issues, which they said include getting too many notifications, videos that play automatically, uncertainty over whether they will see posts from the people they want to follow and ephemeral content that users felt compelled to watch before it disappeared, among others.
Facebook provided a related research document to the Journal that described the rationale for the broader metric. “There is no established or consistently used definition of internet addiction or problematic use in academic research or clinical practice,” the researchers wrote, calling the work an effort to rethink industry approaches to problem behaviors.
Ideas for fixes
In mid-2019, the researchers held a workshop to come up with ideas for ways to change aspects of Facebook to address the concerns of people who said their use of the app caused problems in their lives. Then they showed the designs to a couple dozen users in New York, São Paulo and Mumbai to gather feedback.
The most-liked fixes included alerts to remind users to take a break from Facebook, a way to dial back the notifications people receive and a wind-down mode to tell Facebook to not show certain types of content before bed, such as politics.
Note: Concepts, top row, left to right: Q. Quiet Mode; Q1. Post Quiet Mode Digest; Q2. Facebook-free Events; Q3. Family Quiet Mode; Q4. Accountability Buddies; R. Encouraging Breaks (Time Alert); S. Choose Your Circle. Bottom row, left to right: T. You’re all caught up; U. Grouped Notifications; V. Public Status Indicator (OOO); W. Wind-down mode; X. Dark mode; Y. Time to complete. Source: March 2020 internal Facebook report titled, ‘Problematic Use of Facebook: User Journey, Personas & Opportunity Mapping’
The researchers also asked Facebook users what aspects of Facebook triggered them most. The users said the app’s many notifications sucked them in. “Red dots are toxic on the home screen,” a male young adult in the U.S. told the researchers, referring to the symbol that alerts a user to new content.
Autoplay videos also made it hard for users to put the app down, especially before bedtime, the researchers said.
Ms. Lever, the company spokeswoman, said Facebook’s settings offer users tools to limit notifications and allow users to turn off the autoplay of videos.
In March 2020, Facebook introduced quiet mode to allow users to mute most push notifications. But the researchers said the way Facebook buried the feature in the app’s settings made it hard for users to find. They recommended Facebook add easy-to-find shortcuts to quiet mode.
One entrepreneur came up with his own solution to some of these issues. In 2016, software developer Louis Barclay manually unfollowed all the people, pages and groups he saw on Facebook in an attempt to be more deliberate about how he used technology. The process, which isn’t the same as unfriending, took him days, but he was happy with the result: an empty newsfeed that no longer sucked him in for hours. He could still visit the profile pages of everyone he wanted to connect with on Facebook, but their content would no longer appear in the never-ending scroll of posts.
Thinking other people might benefit from a similar experience on Facebook, he built a tool that would enable anyone to automate the process. He created it as a piece of add-on software called a browser extension that anyone could download. He called it Unfollow Everything and made it available on Chrome’s web store for free.
‘Unfollowing everything allowed me to take stock of who is taking my energy, where does my brain power belong, and if I’m going to engage with certain people,’ Mr. Meitner said. PHOTO: FÁBIO ERDOS FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Tom Meitner, a 36-year-old self-published crime novelist in Milwaukee, said before he used Unfollow Everything, Facebook took too much of his energy and left him feeling crabby. He has a wife and three young children, and said he aims to bring positive energy to his family life at the end of each day. But the more time he spent arguing with people on Facebook, the harder that became.
“I’d log on and it was just loaded with these ideas and opinions,” he said. “It became a situation where I might post something in response to someone, and suddenly I’m having an argument with someone’s uncle whom I’d never met.”
Mr. Meitner said he considered quitting Facebook but was conflicted because he appreciated how the app connected him with friends and family who no longer lived in his area. And he sometimes used Facebook to advertise his novels. “Unfollowing everything allowed me to take stock of who is taking my energy, where does my brain power belong, and if I’m going to engage with certain people,” Mr. Meitner said.
In July, Facebook sent Mr. Barclay a cease-and-desist letter, which the inventor earlier wrote about for Slate, saying his tool was a breach of its terms of service for automating user interactions. It also permanently disabled Mr. Barclay’s personal Facebook and Instagram accounts.
Ms. Lever, the company spokeswoman, said Mr. Barclay’s extension could pose risks if abused, and said Facebook offers its own unfollow tool that allows users to manually unfollow accounts.
The left does everything to scrub their connection, CRC’s Wikipedia entry leading the way.
I think the real ominous thing is that critical race theory, which isn’t real, turned the suburbs 15 points to the Trump insurrection-endorsed Republican. What do Democrats do about that?”
So said MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace in bemoaning her Democrats’ drubbing in Virginia. She’s merely one exhibit among many liberals. And what do Democrats do about it?
Some traditional Democrats, like wild man James Carville, acknowledge it and howl from the rooftop at Democrats to stop it. Others, however, cover their eyes and instead blast those concerned about the teaching of CRT to their children. Those of the Wallace school attack the victims. Their assessment of critical race theory in schools usually goes something like this:
Step 1: “No way, CRT isn’t being taught in public schools! Republicans are liars.” Once it is shown that CRT is being taught, they retreat to step 2: “Okay, it is being taught, but that isn’t a bad thing. Republicans are liars. In fact, they’re racists. Their opposition to CRT shows they’re racists.”
When those objections fail, some creative liberals retreat to the Wallace-esque absurdity that CRT itself is a “myth.”
That’s an amusing position to retreat to. As noted by Daniel Greenfield, if CRT isn’t being taught, then where’s the harm in banning it? If it’s a “myth,” what’s the harm in banning something that doesn’t exist? This would be little different than, say, agreeing to a Republican ban on unicorns.
This whole sloppy mess of illogic sometimes sends liberals dashing to a third step: “CRT has nothing to do with Marxism.”
Here, ladies and gentlemen, I step forward to offer my humble services. CRT most definitely has much to do with Marxism. I could offer an exhaustive analysis for you, dear reader. But for now, I thought I’d give an instructive tutorial on what the modern world sees when it searches “critical race theory” on the dreaded Google.
Some 80-90% of the planet’s web searches go through Google. It’s an enormous influence and problem. Google really does rule the world. In fact, who or what truly teaches Americans? Not the public schools. It’s Google — the behemoth of Big Tech.
When typing “critical race theory” into Google, the first thing pops up is the Wikipedia definition. This is where inquirers “learn” about critical race theory. Like many terms, such as “cultural Marxism,” Google and Wikipedia in the past were far more accurate about these terms and their Marxist roots — back before the terms became hyper-politicized and intrepid progressives started redefining them in a way to vilify conservatives and protect their own ideologues. I’ve written here at length about the term “cultural Marxism” (click here and here), including how Big Tech’s sudden redefinition of the term was used against me.
For those of us unfortunates who study this junk for a living, we know better. We watch how ideologues manipulate the meanings. In the past, I’ve printed these web pages and filed them in manila folders; now, I get screenshots. Screenshots are a must, given how quickly leftists remold reality to suit their revolutionary purposes.
Precisely that is going on with the Google-to-Wikipedia search of “critical race theory.” What’s there is barely enough to discern the Marxist roots, albeit only to the discerning few who know the history. Here’s how the definition starts:
Critical race theory (CRT) is a body of legal scholarship and an academic movement of U.S. civil-rights scholars and activists who seek to examine the intersection of race and U.S. law and to challenge mainstream American liberal approaches to racial justice.[1][2][3][4] CRT examines social, cultural, and legal issues primarily as they relate to race and racism in the U.S..[5][6] A tenet of CRT is that racism and disparate racial outcomes are the result of complex, changing, and often subtle social and institutional dynamics, rather than explicit and intentional prejudices of individuals.[7][8]
Note that there’s no explicit mention of Marxism, though for those who know, the mention of “grounded in critical theory” and listing of Antonio Gramsci first among its proponents tells you just that. Gramsci, the pioneering Italian Marxist (whose leading American scholar was Pete Buttigieg’s father), was a founder of the application of Marxism to culture — that is, cultural Marxism.
And yet, if you search the words “Marx” or “Marxism” in the text of the Wikipedia entry for critical race theory, they do not appear even once. They’ve been scrubbed. You will find, however, a crucial reference at the very bottom of the page in the box on “Origins.” There, it states succinctly: “Critical Theory: Origins: Frankfurt School, Freudo-Marxism.”
That’s it, precisely. Those are the foundational roots of critical race theory. Critical race theory, as one must cobble together from the Wikipedia page, “is grounded in critical theory,” and critical theory’s origins are the Frankfurt School and its infamous Freudian-Marxism.
Case closed. That’s what you need to know. It should be in the lead paragraph, but the scrubbers scrubbed it, though they evidently missed the box at the end.
Get a screenshot of the box, before some hyperventilating liberal deletes it. As I write, that Wikipedia page was last edited on November 4, 2021 at 13:29 (UTC). The box on origins has not changed since I saved a screenshot last Friday. Expect it to change. Expect there to soon be no mention of Marxism whatsoever anywhere on that page. In fact, my flagging it here may prompt the immediate removal.
Spring into action, comrade!
Truthfully, the Wikipedia page ought to say much more. As I laid out in my review of Mark Levin’s smash bestseller, American Marxism, the Marxist basis of critical race theory is extremely important to understand because of how dehumanizing and destructive it is, particularly to children. Karl Marx saw people not as individuals made in the imago Dei — the Judeo-Christian conception of human beings made in the image of God — but as groups to be shoved into opposing categories pitted against one another as foes. Marx did this according to class and economics, i.e., the Proletariat vs. the bourgeoisie, whereas Marxist critical race theorists do this according to race, i.e., white vs. black or some other ethnic-based construct. One group is the oppressor and the other the oppressed; your category defines you. Rather than aspiring to the color-blind world that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. envisioned, where individuals are judged by the content of their character, people are foremost viewed by the color of their skin.
It is a terribly dehumanizing way to view people.
Levin quotes Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker, who was very close to the Rev. King: “Today, too many ‘remedies’ — such as Critical Race Theory, the increasingly fashionable post-Marxist/post-modernist approach that analyzes society as institutional group power structures rather than on spiritual or one-to-one human level — are taking us in the wrong direction: separating even school children into explicit racial groups, and emphasizing differences instead of similarities.” Walker stressed: “The roots of CRT are planted in entirely different intellectual soil. It begins with ‘blocs’ (with each person assigned to an identity or economic bloc, as in Marxism).”
The Wikipedia entry for CRT says nothing like this. It makes no mention of Marxism, other than the “Freudo-Marxism” reference thus far surviving in the box at the bottom.
And so, for the typical 21st century Googler landing at Wikipedia to learn of Marxist elements in CRT, they’ll find effectively none. For the left, that’s perfect for demonizing conservatives — and parents — who object to CRT’s Marxist influences. Those people can be derided as followers and fabricators of “myths,” and as “white supremacists.”
This is what we’re up against. Big Tech has become the left’s new Ministry of Truth. As it does, the left controls not only the media narrative but the very meanings of terms.
Civil, criminal case records create portrait of how Igor Danchenko allegedly misled America as primary source for Christopher Steele dossier.
The indictment of Igor Danchenko, the primary source for the discredited Steele dossier, provides damning evidence alleging the Russian analyst repeatedly lied to the FBI. But it’s only part of a larger portrait emerging in federal court records chronicling how the U.S. government was bamboozled into investigating Donald Trump for Russia collusion by a circle of players connected to Hillary Clinton.
Just a few weeks before his arrest Thursday, Danchenko was served in late September with a federal subpoena in a separate civil case brought by executives connected to the Russia-based Alfa Bank. That case, like the indictment, has produced evidence Danchenko contrived the intelligence he provided to former MI6 agent Christopher Steele in 2016.
Danchenko is not a defendant in the civil case, but rather a witness that the Alfa executives want testimony and documents from. The executives are seeking possible damages against Fusion GPS, the Clinton-connected research firm that hired Steele to write the dossier.
The dossier, funded by Clinton’s campaign law firm during the height of the 2016 campaign, became prime evidence used by the FBI to justify FISA surveillance warrants targeting the Trump campaign and former adviser Carter Page, even though agents were never able to verify most of the allegations and in some cases debunked them as false or Russian disinformation.
A federal judge ordered that Danchenko be properly served with papers in the civil case after the Alfa executives’ legal team submitted sworn statements from several Russian citizens alleging that Danchenko concocted stories of Trump-Russia collusion and falsely claimed they had provided the information as willing sub-sources for the dossier. He was served the subpoena in late September through his lawyer Mark Schamel, according to court records.
Schamel did not return a call to his office Thursday seeking comment. Danchenko appeared briefly in court and tried to plead innocent to the Durham charges Thursday, but a judge said it was premature to accept a plea.
In the civil case, the plaintiffs have produced several statements from Russian citizens challenging Danchenko and his dossier work.
“In contrast to what Mr. Danchenko told U.S. authorities, I was not a ‘source’ for the Dossier,” Russian journalist Lyudmila Nikolayevna Podobedova said in a sworn declaration submitted to U.S. District Judge Richard Leon on June 21 in the Alfa case. “I never provided Mr. Danchenko (or anyone else) with any information related to the contents of the Dossier …”
Podobedova said she believe she is the woman identified in the dossier as Sub-Source 5 but that she did not provide the information attributed to her in the dossier though she talked on the phone in 2016 with Danchenko.
“My view is that once Mr. Danchenko realized that the Dossier was coming under scrutiny, he decided to point at me to make it look as if I were involved in the Dossier and thus add credibility to his work,” her declaration said.
Likewise, Russian academic Alexey Sergeyevich Dundich said he believes he is the person identified in the dossier as Danchenko’s “Sub-Source 4” and declared the information attributed to him was contrived and did not come from him as alleged.
“I believe that Mr. Danchenko framed me as Sub-Source 4 to add credibility to his low-quality work, which is not based on real information or in-depth analysis,” Dundich’s declaration states. “My impression is that Mr. Danchenko fabricated the information published in the Dossier to make quick money. It is apparent to me that the Dossier is a deliberate fraud and a collection of idle rumors.”
A third Russian, banking industry journalist and currency collector Ivan Mikhailovich Vorontsov, alleged in his court declaration that he not only was falsely portrayed as “Sub-Source 2” in the Steele dossier, but that Danchenko later apologized for doing so.
“Although it is apparent that Mr. Danchenko claimed that I was a source of information for the Dossier, in fact I was not a ‘source’ for the Dossier,” Vorontsov said. “I never provided Mr. Danchenko (or anyone else) with any information associated with the contents of the Dossier generally … Mr. Danchenko later confirmed this to me as well when he expressed guilt for dragging me into this whole controversy concerning the Dossier.
He added: “I believe that the Dossier was fabricated to fit whatever the client who requested the information wanted to receive.”
The portrait of a dossier infused with deception and lies was furthered Thursday when Durham unsealed a grand jury indictment accusing Danchenko of lying at least five times to the FBI during the Russia case, lies the prosecutor said hindered agents from getting the truth about the dossier and its underlying allegations.
“All of DANCHENKO’s lies were material to the FBI because, among other reasons, (1) the FBI’s investigation of the Trump Campaign relied in large part on the Company Reports to obtain FISA warrants on Advisor-1, (2) the FBI ultimately devoted substantial resources attempting to investigate and corroborate the allegations contained in the Company Reports, including the reliability of DANCHENKO’s sub-sources; and (3) the Company Reports, as well as information collected for the Reports by DANCHENKO, played a role in the FBI’s investigative decisions and in sworn representations that the FBI made to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court throughout the relevant time period,” the indictment charged.
The indictment says Danchenko’s lies included telling the FBI he got an anonymous tip on Trump-Russia collusion that he believed came from a former Russia-American Chamber of Commerce official and he tried to follow up on it.
“In truth and fact, and as DANCHENKO well knew, DANCHENKO never received such a phone call or such information from any person he believed to be Chamber President-1, and DANCEHNKO never made any arrangements to meet Chamber President-1 in New York,” the indictment said. “Rather, DANCHENKO fabricated these facts regarding Chamber President-1.”
Another lie, alleged in the indictment, was that Danchenko falsely denied to agents that he got any information for the Steele dossier from an American public relations executive who was deeply tied to Hillary Clinton as well as the Russian ambassador in Washington and other senior Russian government officials.
“DANCHENKO stated falsely that he had never communicated with a particular U.S.-based individual — who was a long-time participant in Democratic Party politics and was then an executive at a U.S. public relations firm — about any allegations contained in the Company Reports,” the charge documents said. “In truth and in fact, and as DANCHENKO well knew, DANCHENKO sourced one or more specific allegations in the Company Reports anonymously to PR Executive-l.”
The indictment didn’t name the PR executive, but Ralph D. Martin, the lawyer for longtime Washington PR executive Charles Dolan Jr. confirmed to CNBC and the New York Times that Dolan was in fact the executive named in the indictment. Martin declined further comment, citing the ongoing criminal case.
Dolan served in Bill Clinton’s campaigns for president as a state chairman, was appointed to an advisory board in the Clinton State Department and later “actively campaigned and participated in calls and events as a volunteer on behalf of Hillary Clinton” in 2016, the indictment noted. He is treated as a witness in the indictment, not accused of wrongdoing. And the indictment noted Dolan claimed the Clinton campaign did not know about his dealings with Danchenko.
Danchenko’s alleged lie about the PR executive was particularly harmful to the FBI, the indictment charged, because it “bore upon PR Executive-l’s reliability, motivations, and potential bias as a source of information.”
The indictment also touches on one of the most salacious allegations in the dossier — one that was never corroborated — that Trump had engaged with prostitutes at a Moscow hotel. The indictment suggested that the PR executive, Dolan, could have been connected to part of the allegation because he had visited with hotel staff on 2016 and learned that Trump stayed in the presidential suite at the hotel. But it noted there was no basis for the sexual allegation.
“During the aforementioned tour of the Presidential Suite, a Moscow Hotel staff member told the participants, including PR Executive-1, that Trump had stayed in the Presidential Suite. According to both Organizer-1 and PR Executive-1, the staff member did not mention any sexual or salacious activity,” the indictment noted.
The indictment offered one last tantalizing piece of information: An American think tank official introduced Danchenko to both Steele and Dolan years before the dossier.
The indictment did not name the think tank official. But FBI documents obtained by Just the News show Steele told agents in fall 2017, a year after he was terminated as a confidential source in the Russia case, that the think tank official was Fiona Hill, a National Security Council official who later would emerge as a key witness against Trump in the Ukraine impeachment proceedings. Trump was acquitted in that trial.
“The primary subsource was introduced to STEELE and ORBIS by FIONA HILL in or around 2011,” the FBI document quoted Steele as saying. Hill at the time worked with Danchenko at the Brookings Institution, a liberal think tank then run by former Clinton administration official Strobe Talbott.
“Emphasizing the sensitivity, STEELE explained that HILL now worked for the White House on the National Security Council,” the 2017 FBI document added. “HILL has a very high opinion of the primary sub-source, and she told STEELE that he and ORBIS should take a look at him. HILL is one of STEELE’s close friends.”
In congressional testimony during impeachment, Hill was not as adoring of Steele, suggesting it was likely Steele and his dosser had been duped by some Russian disinformation.
“It’s very likely that the Russians planted disinformation in and among other information that may have been truthful, because that’s exactly, again, the way that they operate,” she told lawmakers in 2019.
On Wednesday, Patriots rallied in Phoenix, Arizona for election integrity and Arizona’s audit.
AZ Gubernatorial Candidate Kari Lake hosted a spectacular Election Integrity rally featuring the heroic Arizona State Legislators, Congressman Paul Gosar, Mike Lindell, OANN’s Christina Bobb, and President Trump.
It was exactly one year after our corrupt dictatorship scammed us out of our votes.
Arizona State Senator Wendy Rogers gave a fiery speech where she lambasted the RNC for their recent New Jersey election disaster and called on Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich to proceed with indictments, perp walks, and “arrests for those who shamed us”.
The Gateway Pundit correspondent Jordan Conradson spoke to Senator Rogers after the event.
Conradson: Itis November 3 2021. It’s been one year since this fraudulent election and Americans are tired of waiting. What is the next step with Arizona audit?
Rogers: Well, first of all, great to be with you, Jordan here down in Phoenix at the Kari Lake event for election integrity. One year later, elections have consequences. Stolen elections have far worse consequences. We barely won Virginia last night. We won it because we won Chesterfield, we won rural Virginia, and we won Virginia Beach. They turned out in massive amounts, more than typical, which overcame the fraud and corruption that was attempted in Fairfax County. We’re losing New Jersey. I don’t know if we lost it now as of tonight, because of this fraud and corruption. I am doing everything I can here in Arizona to prevent this from happening, to get to the bottom of the truth, which means Brnovich needs to do his job. And I want to see perp walks. I want to see arrests and I’m going to bear down on the issue until we do.
Conradson: so I just saw Adrian Fontes, former Maricopa County Recorder he was brought in for some questions by Attorney General Brnovich. What do you think will come out of that? Who do you think needs to be in question next?
Rogers: Well, something needs to come out of it and just because fontes has was an attorney with the Attorney General’s Office at one time, he thinks he can skate he thinks he can skirt what is gonna come down on him. And I believe that the justice will be served. And I’ll tell you my constituents in northern Arizona are absolutely adamant, emphatic, HOT that arrests are being made.
Conradson: And not just constituents in your district, constituents around the country, not even your constituents. Constituents of other Legislators. They’re signing your letter to audit 50 states. Yes. How many signatures from how many states have you received?
Rogers: Well, we’re almost to 200 My phone is blowing up every day. I just got two from North Carolina this morning. I’ve got folks on Telegram, on Gab, Gettr, Twitter, Facebook, reaching out to their state representatives and state senators imploring them to get on board on my audit 50 states letter. It’s the only vehicle by which we state legislators from around the country are coming together to demand that we do audits in our states. And if corruption is found, that electors can be recalled.
Conradson: We know laws were violated here in Arizona, we know this election was stolen. We know they’re covering it up. What do we do If they get away with it?
Rogers: They’re not going to get away with it. And here’s the other thing to answer your question. If you know about monkey business that occurred in your county, in Arizona, I represent Gila, Yavapai, Navajo and Coconino counties. I have told my constituents if you know about fraud in one of our counties, you need to do affidavits, and then you need to present them to the sheriff, the sheriff which has broad authority, so that the sheriff can conduct an investigation.
This is on us. We are the plan. God Bless America.
State Senator Wendy Rogers has drafted a letter to our corrupt federal government demanding States’ rights over elections, full forensic audits in all 50 states, and decertification where necessary. nearly 200 legislators from almost every state have signed onto the new declaration.
Contact your legislators and demand that they add their names to this historic document.
Racine County sheriffs recently cracked down on a voter fraud operation by the Wisconsin Elections Commission, utilizing retirement homes to abuse the elderly and steal their vote.
These crimes will be prosecuted after the extensive investigation by Racine County Sheriff Christopher Schmaling.
Gather affidavits, contact your Sheriff and Legislators, canvass the vote, and audit all 50 states.
They will only get away with this disgusting crime against our nation if we the people let them.
We will never let them get away with it.
Contact Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich now to demand perp walks.
James O’Keefe breaks down the FBI and Southern District of New York raiding the houses of Project Veritas journalists and what it means for the future of the First Amendment.
The DOJ even asked O’Keefe to keep the raids secret in order to “preserve the confidentiality of the investigation.”
While the feds asked Project Veritas not to disclose the subpoena to the public, a New York Times reporter was apparently aware of the investigation as they requested a comment from a Veritas journalist who just had their home raided.
Virginia Attorney General-elect Jason Miyares (R) announced Thursday he plans to investigate sexual assault incidents in the Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS).
Asked by a reporter at a press conference if he intends to investigate the sexual assault incidents reported in LCPS, Miyares responded immediately, “Yes.”
“We’re going to be seeking a legislative change,” he added, noting Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin (R) has already indicated he would sign into law a bill that “would essentially say if the chief law enforcement officer in a jurisdiction, either the chief of police or the sheriff, makes a request because the commonwealth’s attorney is not doing their job, then I’m going to do their job for them.”
“And I’m thinking specifically of some of the so-called social justice commonwealth’s attorneys that have been elected, particularly in northern Virginia,” he asserted.
Miyares, joined by Loudoun County Sheriff Mike Chapman, said his office would have a “shift of focus” from that of outgoing Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring (D).
“Attorney General Herring was very vocal about the fact that he turned the office into a “progressive powerhouse” – those are his words, not mine – and I campaigned and went to the voters of Virginia asking them to hire me,” he said.
“I wanted to get it shifted back into more public safety and a law enforcement focus, precisely at a time when the murder rate’s the highest it’s been in over two decades in Virginia, and so that’s going to be a big focus for me,” Miyares added.
An investigation has been underway in Loudoun County since last week by the sheriff’s office after multiple reported incidents of a male student touching other students inappropriately at a district middle school.
LCSO is investigating multiple incidents that occurred at Harmony Middle School this week involving a male student touching other students inappropriately over their clothing. https://t.co/SI2rdaPEjmpic.twitter.com/WHBhUkxrIJ
News of the investigation came only two days after high school students in the scandal-ridden school district held a walkout in support of other sexual assault victims. The students left the school building chanting, “Loudoun County protects rapists.”
The walkout occurred one day after a Loudoun County judge found a boy guilty of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old girl in May. The boy was wearing a skirt and entered the girls’ bathroom at Stone Bridge High School.
Juvenile Court Judge Pamela Brooks found the boy, who is also a minor, guilty of forcible sodomy and forcible fellatio. The boy has also been charged with another, more recent, sexual assault in October of another girl at Broad Run High School.
Scott Smith, whose daughter was assaulted during the first incident, had been dragged out of a school board meeting and arrested on June 22 after hearing school officials supportive of transgender bathrooms deny there had been reports of sexual assaults in these spaces.
LCPS Superintendent Scott Ziegler also stated he was unaware of any assaults happening in the bathrooms.
However, as Breitbart News reported, Ziegler later acknowledged, following parents’ outrage, the school district has “failed” to provide safety for its students.
The Democratic Governors Association appears to have designated the 2022 gubernatorial race in Florida as a lost cause and will not give any Democratic candidates looking to defeat Gov. Ron DeSantis any significant financial support.
Politico reported that the DGA will instead prioritize defending incumbent Democratic governors in other states amid a “growing sense that Democrats can’t win statewide elections in Florida”:
The decision to withhold resources in Florida deals a blow to Democrats eager to knock off DeSantis, a nationally ascendant Republican with future White House aspirations. It also indicates that Florida is losing its position as the largest swing state, with some national groups deciding that, at least for now, it’s center-right terrain.
The perception that DeSantis is unbeatable has left national Democratic groups like the DGA to weigh whether they should spend resources in Florida, a hugely expensive state with 10 media markets, or use that cash to help incumbents in cheaper states.
“I do think, and I can’t stress this enough, the DGA is playing mostly defense this year, and that’s a monumental change,” said Jonathan Ducote, a veteran Democratic consultant who has worked with the group. “When I think about Florida statewide elections, the number one thing you have to ask yourself is do you have the money to communicate in a really expensive state?”
In a statement to Politico, a DGA official asserted that DeSantis is vulnerable and criticized his record on the COVID-19 pandemic. But Democratic consultants who are aware of the DGA’s plans and spoke with the outlet about them said there are races in Massachusetts, Maryland, and Arizona with better opportunities to unseat Republican governors.
“They might do some money, but they are not going the way they have been in the past. There are not going to be multi-million-dollar checks” for whichever Florida Democrat challenges DeSantis, one consultant said.
Ahead of his 2022 re-election campaign, DeSantis appears to be in a far stronger position than three years ago when he narrowly defeated Democrat Andrew Gillum in a race so close it triggered a machine recount.
A recent poll from the Saint Leo University Polling Institute found DeSantis holding double-digit leads over potential Democratic challengers, including former Gov. Charlie Crist and state Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried.
DeSantis held a combined job approval rating of 56.4% in the poll, with 40.6% disapproving of his performance as governor.
The governor has also raised a formidable $50 million war chest for his campaign from enthusiastic supporters nationwide, some of whom believe he could be a strong candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
DeSantis’ strengths, combined with a national environment that’s unfavorable to Democrats given President Joe Biden’s flailing approval rating (42.9%), make clear that barring an unforeseen change of fortune, the Republican governor seems well on his way to re-election, and then who knows where next?
Fashion statement at Mar-a-Lago gala embraces popular conservative meme
Rep. Lauren Boebert, Colorado Republican, is mocking President Biden, taking a page from a Democratic “Squad” House member’s book to promote a popular conservative meme on Twitter.
Ms. Boebert on Thursday night wore a red dress emblazoned with the phrase “Let’s Go Brandon” during an event with former President Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort.
Playing off New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s September appearance at the Met Gala where she famously wore a “Tax The Rich” dress, Ms. Boebert posted a photo of herself in her own dress posing with Mr. Trump on Twitter, and saying, “It’s not a phrase, it’s a movement! #LGB.”
Republicans around the country latched on to the now-viral phrase among conservatives. The seemingly innocuous phrase came about after an NBC reporter mistakenly told NASCAR driver Brandon Brown that a crowd chanting “F—- Joe Biden” was actually saying “Let’s go Brandon” to mark the driver’s first-time win at the Talladega Speedway.
Other guests at the Mar-a-Lago event posted photos of the Colorado Republican posing in her dress with them, including American Conservative Union Chair Matt Schlapp and Oklahoma Transportation Commissioner T.W. Shannon.
Ms. Boebert is not the only Republican lawmaker who has run with the protest meme against the president.
Rep. Jeff Duncan, a South Carolina Republican, wore a “Let’s go Brandon” face mask on the House floor last week, and two days later, Rep. Bill Posey, Florida Republican, ended his floor remarks by evoking the phrase.
“Let’s go Brandon” has also trended in pop culture as songs referring to the phrase are hot on the music charts.
Will the party recognize its mistake in embracing extremism? Will the GOP prove worthy of its wins?
‘Took my first DC trip yesterday since pre-COVID. Union Station mostly deserted, hardly any stores/restaurants open. 2 homeless guys hanging out & begging in the seating area at Sbarro’s. Real ‘decline of the republic’ vibe in the building. The election results didn’t surprise me.”—the Week columnist Damon Linker on Twitter Wednesday
“What a weird thing it will be if Donald Trump has done less harm to the Republican brand than Robin DiAngelo has done to the Democratic brand.”—the Atlantic’s David Frum on Twitter Tuesday
“Nobody elected him to be FDR, they elected him to be normal and stop the chaos.”— Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D., Va.) on Joe Biden, quoted in Thursday’s New York Times
(WSJ) These quotes leapt out in a week of listening and reading. A widespread sense of national deterioration, increasing resistance to the woke cultural regime, and Democratic leadership’s misreading of the nation’s mood and needs yielded Tuesday’s remarkable returns.
Some big pushback is going on. It’s not over and might only have begun. In the broadest sense it was propelled by a desire to reclaim the nation’s footing, to push away from disorder and things worse than disorder, and to regain our poise as a nation. Sometimes elections begin things; less frequently do they end them, but I think Tuesday marked a kind of psychic endpoint to the past terrible two years—an end to pandemic dominance, to pandemic thinking and all that came with it, from lockdowns to social and cultural unrest.
To some degree it was a pushback against smugness, too, which has become a primary behavioral tic of many, not all, on the progressive left. I am thinking of unions and school boards that act as if they own the schools and you little mommies had better pipe down, and those in the professional classes who say, “I believe in science” to dismiss critics and alternative arguments. There is the smugness of the woke regime itself. On PBS James Carville, after the election, blamed “stupid wokeness” for the party’s losses. It went beyond Virginia and New Jersey: “I mean, this ‘defund the police’ lunacy, this ‘take Abraham Lincoln’s name off of schools,’ . . . People see that.” It had a “suppressive effect all across the country on Democrats. Some of these people need to go to a woke detox center or something.”
A consideration of Tuesday’s context must include the shock of Afghanistan. There was already plenty of political and cultural uneasiness, the administration was new, and this sudden and dramatic failure seemed to reveal three terrible words: no baseline competence. It shook certitudes: Maybe it wasn’t good enough not to be Donald Trump. And when President Biden didn’t follow the example of JFK after the Bay of Pigs, taking the fault on himself, but instead was consistently defiant and defensive, his numbers went down and never came up. It was too telling. It was damaging.
“The Blob” is what they call the foreign-policy establishment, but it might also be used as a name for the Democratic domestic-policy establishment. The Blob rarely does anything helpful culturally because it’s blithely unaware of the country’s cultural problems. It tends to turn a blind eye when its constituent groups become extreme.
It likes to spend and doesn’t worry about raising taxes. I take the current American feeling on spending to be an Italian mother’s response when I was a child when her husband informed her she was spending too much on the family. “It takes money to live,” she said, silencing him. It does. A lot of people need a lot of help; a nation needs public works. But when the spending reaches multitrillions and almost nobody seems to bother keeping an eye on it, seeing it isn’t wasted or abused or wrongly funneled, applying limits to moderate it, or admitting any potential downside, such as inflation, then people get anxious. And when they get anxious they get mad, and push back.
Terry McAuliffe had one kind of race in Virginia, Phil Murphy had another in Jersey, but neither seemed to have a program beyond: The Blob continues.
When Republican Glenn Youngkin mentioned trouble in the public schools, Mr. McAuliffe called it a “racist dog whistle.” But the trouble in the schools is real. Two months ago an education activist told a small group in Virginia that people don’t yet understand that Americans’ relationship with public schools changed during the pandemic. For the first time ever, on Zoom, parents overheard what is being taught, how, and what’s not taught, and they didn’t like what they heard. The schools had been affected by, maybe captured by, woke cultural assumptions that had filtered down from higher-ed institutions and the education establishment. The parents were home in the pandemic and not distracted. They didn’t want their children taught harmful nonsense, especially at the expense of the basics. The education activist said: None of this is fully appreciated, but it will have profound implications.
On Tuesday it did. The pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson, in the Washington Examiner, backed up the argument. Her polling had Mr. Youngkin ahead by 15 points among parents of K-12 children. “Those saying ‘education’ is simply a proxy for racism, and that this result is proof that white or conservative parents really don’t want schools to teach about topics like slavery or give a complete picture of American history, have misread the full picture of parents’ anxieties.” She found 77% of Republicans and 96% of Democrats alike agreed “we should acknowledge the terrible things that have happened in our nation’s history regarding race so students can learn from them and make the future better.” But parents were “alarmed” by “anything that seems to be deterministic about race, such as telling children their skin color will shape their future.” They are uncomfortable “with anything that feels like it is separating children by race.” They’re “also alarmed” by the learning loss that happened during the pandemic, and “upset” over efforts to gut gifted-and-talented education in the name of equity.
Democrats have allowed themselves to be associated with—to become the political home of—progressive thinking. They thought they had to—progressives would beat them to a pulp if they didn’t get with the program. They thought it would play itself out. This was a mistake. You can’t associate a great party with cultural extremism and not eventually pay a price.
Were voters, Tuesday, saying, “Gee, we’re all Republicans now!” No, and it would be foolish for Republicans to think so. It means more voters than usual saw Republicans as an alternative, and took it. It means what a crusty political operative told me decades ago. He had no patience for high-class analyses featuring trends and contexts. When voters moved sharply against a party he’d say, “The dogs don’t like the dog food.” Tuesday they vomited it up.
For Democrats everything depends on how they understand the reasons Tuesday happened, and whether they are agile, supple and humble enough to admit and readjust.
For Republicans the challenge is to prove that they are worthy of the bounty that came and may be coming their way—that they can do something with it.
Is Facebook Bad for You? 360 Million Users Say Yes, Company Documents Show
The app hurts sleep, work, relationships or parenting for about 12.5% of users, who reported they felt Facebook was more of a problem than other social media.
Facebook researchers have found that 1 in 8 of its users report engaging in compulsive use of social media that impacts their sleep, work, parenting or relationships, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
These patterns of what the company calls problematic use mirror what is popularly known as internet addiction. They were perceived by users to be worse on Facebook than any other major social-media platform, which all seek to keep users coming back, the documents show.
A Facebook team focused on user well-being suggested a range of fixes, and the company implemented some, building in optional features to encourage breaks from social media and to dial back the notifications that can serve as a lure to bring people back to the platform.
Facebook shut down the team in late 2019.
A company spokeswoman said Facebook in recent months has begun formulating a new effort to address what it calls problematic use alongside other well-being concerns, such as body image and mental health.
The company has been public about its desire to address these problems, said Dani Lever, the spokeswoman, in a statement. Some people have struggles with other technologies, including television and smartphones, she said.
“We have a role to play, which is why we’ve built tools and controls to help people manage when and how they use our services,” she said in the statement. “Furthermore, we have a dedicated team working across our platforms to better understand these issues and ensure people are using our apps in ways that are meaningful to them.”
The Wall Street Journal’s Facebook Files series has documented how Facebook knows the products and systems central to its business success routinely fail and cause harm. For some people, such as teen girls or human-trafficking victims, the risks can be significant. These documents highlight the company’s research into possible negative impacts on a broader swath of users.
Facebook is owned by Meta Platforms Inc. A restructuring announced in late October highlights the company’s focus on the so-called metaverse—an online world featuring extensive use of virtual reality—that goes beyond traditional social media.
The research into social-media use that may negatively affect people’s day-to-day lives was launched several years ago with the goal of mitigating harmful behavior that the company was increasingly identifying on its platforms.
The researchers on the well-being team said some users lack control over the time they spend on Facebook and have problems in their lives as a result. They wrote that they don’t consider the behavior to be a clinical addiction because it doesn’t affect the brain in the same way as gambling or substance abuse. In one document, they noted that “activities like shopping, sex and Facebook use, when repetitive and excessive, may cause problems for some people.”
Source: March 2020 internal Facebook report titled, ‘Problematic Use of Facebook: User Journey, Personas & Opportunity Mapping’
Those problems, according to the documents, include a loss of productivity when people stop completing tasks in their lives to check Facebook frequently, a loss of sleep when they stay up late scrolling through the app and the degradation of in-person relationships when people replace time together with time online. In some cases, “parents focused more on FB than caring for or bonding with their children,” the researchers wrote.
“I’m on Facebook every day, every moment. Literally, every moment; just not when I’m in the shower,” a 22-year-old woman told the researchers. “I lose the notion of time.”
In March 2020, several months after the well-being team was dissolved, researchers who had been on the team shared a slide deck internally with some of the findings and encouraged other teams to pick up the work.
The researchers estimated these issues affect about 12.5% of the flagship app’s more than 2.9 billion users, or more than 360 million people. About 10% of users in the U.S., one of Facebook’s most lucrative markets, exhibit this behavior. In the Philippines and in India, which is the company’s largest market, the employees put the figure higher, at around 25%.
‘Lower well-being’
The researchers said in the documents that most of the people who use Facebook compulsively said they used multiple social-media apps, including Instagram and WhatsApp, which are also owned by Meta, Facebook’s new corporate parent, along with Twitter and Snapchat. Some of the troublesome aspects for users on Facebook, such as feeling pressure to respond to messages and frequently checking for new content, are also widespread in smartphone use, the researchers noted.
“Why should we care?” the researchers wrote in the slide deck. “People perceive the impact. In a comparative study with competitors, people perceived lower well-being and higher problematic use on Facebook compared to any other service.” The other services in the comparison also included YouTube, Reddit and the videogame World of Warcraft.
Source: March 2020 internal Facebook report titled, ‘Problematic Use of Facebook: User Journey, Personas & Opportunity Mapping’
The researchers noted the results couldn’t determine causality. They said they would need to conduct more studies to determine whether, for example, Facebook causes people to have problems sleeping, or if people who have trouble sleeping experience higher stress and turn to Facebook as a distraction.
“We welcome other teams to take on these opportunities,” one of the researchers posted on Facebook’s internal communications system. “Please get in touch if we can help.
”Facebook’s findings are consistent with what many external researchers have observed for years, said Brian Primack, a professor of public health and medicine and dean of the College of Education and Health Professions at the University of Arkansas. He said there isn’t a consensus on causality but that most of the evidence “should be concerning to people.” His research group followed about a thousand people over six months in a nationally representative survey and found that the amount of social media that a person used was the No. 1 predictor of the variables they measured for who became depressed.
“Everything is pointing in a certain direction,” he said. “There’s only going to be a certain amount of time Facebook can say there is nothing causal out there.”
In late 2017, a Facebook executive and a researcher wrote a public blog post that outlined some of the issues with social-media addiction. According to the post, the company had found that while passive consumption of social media could make you feel worse, the opposite was true of more active social-media use.
“Actively interacting with people—especially sharing messages, posts and comments with close friends and reminiscing about past interactions—is linked to improvements in well-being,” the company said.
Facebook then made a switch to more heavily weigh “meaningful social interactions” in its news feed as a way to combat passive consumption. One side effect of that change, as outlined in a previous Journal article in The Facebook Files, was that the company’s algorithms rewarded content that was angry or sensational, because those posts increased engagement from users.
Facebook said any algorithm can promote objectionable or harmful content and that the company is doing its best to mitigate the problem.
Feeling addicted
Laurin Manning Gandy, 40 years old, signed up for Facebook in late 2004, and the media strategist said the platform enabled her to reach people beyond her own immediate network.
Ms. Gandy said she would check her posts again and again, counting how many comments and likes had rolled in, often spending eight hours or more a day on the app.
“Every second that I wasn’t occupied by something I had to do I was fooling around on my phone scrolling through Facebook,” Ms. Gandy said. “Facebook took over my brain.”
Ms. Gandy says she realized she had abandoned her creative pursuits, including drawing and painting, in exchange for a purely online existence. She increasingly came to see it as an addiction.
In April, she deleted Facebook from her phone, but she recently reinstalled it to order takeout from a barbecue restaurant. She said she is now making an effort not to post on Facebook.
PHOTO: TRAVIS DOVE FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Part of Facebook’s interest in addressing use of its app that causes problems in people’s day-to-day lives is a business calculation related to users like Ms. Gandy. In 2017, an intern found that users who exhibited “twitchy” behavior of logging on frequently for short sessions were more likely than regular users to deactivate their accounts for the stated reason that “I spend too much time on Facebook.”In a 2018 study, researchers on Facebook’s core data science team wrote that they were starting to read frequent articles about addiction to Facebook.
“We take these issues seriously, and though Facebook use may not meet clinical standards for addiction, we want to fix the underlying design issues that lead to this concern,” they wrote.
Apple and Google had started to roll out features to address device addiction, and the researchers predicted more companies would soon follow.
In 2018, Facebook added a time-management tool to the app. It includes a dashboard where users can see their total time on the app each day and set a daily reminder to give themselves an alert when they have reached the amount of time they want to spend on it.
Focus on number of sessions
Inside Facebook, the researchers registered concern about the direction of Facebook’s focus on certain metrics, including the number of times a person logs into the app, which the company calls a session. “One of the worries with using sessions as a north star is we want to be extra careful not to game them by creating bad experiences for vulnerable populations,” a researcher wrote, referring to elements designed to draw people back to Facebook frequently, such as push notifications.
In 2018, then Facebook board member Reed Hastings, who co-founded Netflix Inc., told top Facebook executives he wasn’t sure why the company needed to apologize for being heavily used, according to three people familiar with the matter. Mr. Hastings added that he wouldn’t apologize for allowing people to binge-watch shows on Netflix, the people said.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Hastings declined to comment.
The well-being team, according to people familiar with the matter, was reshuffled at least twice since late 2017 before it was disbanded, and could only get about half of the resources the team requested to do its work.
Source: March 2020 internal Facebook report titled, ‘Problematic Use of Facebook: User Journey, Personas & Opportunity Mapping’
Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg has said the company continues to prioritize the issue. “We certainly do not want our products to be addictive,” he said in a November 2020 Senate hearing in response to a question from Sen. Lindsey Graham. “I don’t think the research has been conclusive, but it is an area that we care about and study,” Mr. Zuckerberg said.
Ms. Lever, the spokeswoman, said the company also funds external research, such as with the Digital Wellness Lab run jointly by Harvard University and Boston Children’s Hospital.
In 2018, Facebook’s researchers surveyed 20,000 U.S. users and paired their answers with data about their behavior on Facebook. The researchers found about 3% of these users said they experienced “serious problems” in their sleep, work or relationships related to their time on Facebook that they found difficult to change. Some of the researchers’ work was published in a 2019 paper.
According to that study, the researchers also said that a liberal interpretation of the results would be that 14% of respondents spent “a lot more time on Facebook than they want to,” although they didn’t label this group problematic users.People who felt like they have a problem with the app were more likely to be men; either teens or in their 20s; have about 15 more sessions a day than the average user; and spend a greater portion of their time on the app at night. They also spent more time on Facebook overall—about 1 hour and 36 minutes a day, compared with 1 hour and 18 minutes a day for regular users.
Some of the people, although they reported problems, also said the time they spend on Facebook is more valuable than people who don’t report problems.
PHOTO: FÁBIO ERDOS FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
In 2019, the researchers had come to a new figure: What they called problematic use affects 12.5% of people on Facebook, they said. This survey used a broader definition for the issue, including users who reported negative results on key aspects of their life as well as feelings of guilt or a loss of control, according to the documents.
The researchers also wrote that they had a more detailed understanding of the aspects of Facebook that triggered the issues, which they said include getting too many notifications, videos that play automatically, uncertainty over whether they will see posts from the people they want to follow and ephemeral content that users felt compelled to watch before it disappeared, among others.
Facebook provided a related research document to the Journal that described the rationale for the broader metric. “There is no established or consistently used definition of internet addiction or problematic use in academic research or clinical practice,” the researchers wrote, calling the work an effort to rethink industry approaches to problem behaviors.
Ideas for fixes
In mid-2019, the researchers held a workshop to come up with ideas for ways to change aspects of Facebook to address the concerns of people who said their use of the app caused problems in their lives. Then they showed the designs to a couple dozen users in New York, São Paulo and Mumbai to gather feedback.
The most-liked fixes included alerts to remind users to take a break from Facebook, a way to dial back the notifications people receive and a wind-down mode to tell Facebook to not show certain types of content before bed, such as politics.
Source: March 2020 internal Facebook report titled, ‘Problematic Use of Facebook: User Journey, Personas & Opportunity Mapping’
The researchers also asked Facebook users what aspects of Facebook triggered them most. The users said the app’s many notifications sucked them in. “Red dots are toxic on the home screen,” a male young adult in the U.S. told the researchers, referring to the symbol that alerts a user to new content.
Autoplay videos also made it hard for users to put the app down, especially before bedtime, the researchers said.
Ms. Lever, the company spokeswoman, said Facebook’s settings offer users tools to limit notifications and allow users to turn off the autoplay of videos.
In March 2020, Facebook introduced quiet mode to allow users to mute most push notifications. But the researchers said the way Facebook buried the feature in the app’s settings made it hard for users to find. They recommended Facebook add easy-to-find shortcuts to quiet mode.
One entrepreneur came up with his own solution to some of these issues. In 2016, software developer Louis Barclay manually unfollowed all the people, pages and groups he saw on Facebook in an attempt to be more deliberate about how he used technology. The process, which isn’t the same as unfriending, took him days, but he was happy with the result: an empty newsfeed that no longer sucked him in for hours. He could still visit the profile pages of everyone he wanted to connect with on Facebook, but their content would no longer appear in the never-ending scroll of posts.
Thinking other people might benefit from a similar experience on Facebook, he built a tool that would enable anyone to automate the process. He created it as a piece of add-on software called a browser extension that anyone could download. He called it Unfollow Everything and made it available on Chrome’s web store for free.
PHOTO: FÁBIO ERDOS FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Tom Meitner, a 36-year-old self-published crime novelist in Milwaukee, said before he used Unfollow Everything, Facebook took too much of his energy and left him feeling crabby. He has a wife and three young children, and said he aims to bring positive energy to his family life at the end of each day. But the more time he spent arguing with people on Facebook, the harder that became.
“I’d log on and it was just loaded with these ideas and opinions,” he said. “It became a situation where I might post something in response to someone, and suddenly I’m having an argument with someone’s uncle whom I’d never met.”
Mr. Meitner said he considered quitting Facebook but was conflicted because he appreciated how the app connected him with friends and family who no longer lived in his area. And he sometimes used Facebook to advertise his novels. “Unfollowing everything allowed me to take stock of who is taking my energy, where does my brain power belong, and if I’m going to engage with certain people,” Mr. Meitner said.
In July, Facebook sent Mr. Barclay a cease-and-desist letter, which the inventor earlier wrote about for Slate, saying his tool was a breach of its terms of service for automating user interactions. It also permanently disabled Mr. Barclay’s personal Facebook and Instagram accounts.
Ms. Lever, the company spokeswoman, said Mr. Barclay’s extension could pose risks if abused, and said Facebook offers its own unfollow tool that allows users to manually unfollow accounts.