US Supreme Court hears case challenging Section 230 online liability shield

Kevin Reed

On February 21, the US Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Gonzalez v. Google. The lawsuit seeks to hold Google’s YouTube responsible for the death of Nohemi Gonzalez, a 23-year-old college student who was killed during a terrorist attack in Paris in November 2015.

The suit—which was dismissed by the Northern District Court of California and the dismissal then upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals—was brought by the Gonzalez family in 2016. The family asserted that videos produced by ISIS and posted on YouTube were promoted by the platform’s algorithms and, therefore, violated US laws against aiding and abetting terrorists.

The lawsuit asserts that YouTube helped to spread the ISIS video content, contributed to the radicalization of users and their recruitment as terrorists and, therefore, assisted the deadly attack in Paris that killed Nohemi Gonzalez.

For its part, Google has argued that the Gonzalez family’s claims that YouTube gave support to terrorists are based on “threadbare assertions” and “speculative” arguments. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union have filed amicus briefs supporting Google on the grounds that the lawsuit represents a threat to First Amendment rights and freedom of speech online.

The legal issue at the heart of the case is the federal law known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act—part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996—which protects online services from liability for the content posted by users of their platforms. The 1996 law was an update to the Communications Act of 1934 that created the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and regulated telephone, telegraph and radio communications in that era.

The core language of Section 230 is as follows: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” To the extent that the courts have adhered to this aspect of the law, Section 230 has functioned as a shield that protects internet companies from being liable for establishing the legal or illegal character of speech on their platforms.

While the law has significant First Amendment implications, its original intent was to ensure that the opportunity of online and internet technical innovation did not become stifled by costly litigation. The law was passed at a time when the World Wide Web was in its infancy, and proprietary messaging boards and online services such as CompuServe, Prodigy and America Online (AOL) dominated the internet. In 1996, there were 36 million users of online services or 0.9 percent of the world’s population.

The 1996 law was influenced by an environment when information and news distribution were still dominated by print media. In that era, a liability line had been drawn between “publishers” and “distributors” of content such that a publisher was legally responsible for the material being printed while a distributor would be unaware of it and immune from any liability.

During the ensuing 27 years, new forms of online communications have revealed significant contradictions within Section 230. For example, the categories of “interactive computer service,” “publisher or speaker” and “information content provider” have undergone a profound transformation brought on by the wireless and mobile technologies used by more than 5.5 billion people or 69 percent of the world’s population.

In this environment where nearly every individual on earth is an online consumer as well as a “publisher” or “content provider”—with added facilities for “sharing” and/or “liking” the content of others—the rules established by Section 230 have become obsolete. Meanwhile, the demarcation between an “internet computer service” and a “publisher” has been blurred by algorithms that recommend content to users and accelerate circulation, or throttle it, based on what brings in the most advertising revenue.

What the transformation of global online activity and technology since 1996 has demonstrated—and this can never be addressed by the US Supreme Court or Congress—is the need for platforms such as Google, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter to be made public utilities. The continued ownership of these advanced technologies by a handful of billionaires for the purpose of increasing their personal wealth threatens both free speech and the transformation of the platforms into tools of authoritarianism.

The provisions of Section 230 that are the subject of conflict within the political establishment and being argued by the Supreme Court are what are known as “Good Samaritan” protections. Contradicting the shield portion of the law, this requirement demands that online services “remove” or “moderate” content that is deemed “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.”

In other words, according to this broad definition of what is “objectionable” material, online services are expected to violate the First Amendment and censor content on their platforms—with the proviso that they act “in good faith”—without fear of being prosecuted for acts against free speech.

Along these lines, an aspect of the Gonzalez v. Google case before the Supreme Court is the assertion that YouTube failed to find and remove the objectionable ISIS content. The case says that the platform recommended the terrorist videos through its “user-persuasion” algorithm. These attention-getting-and-holding techniques are not based on an evaluation of the content itself but preoccupied with the advertising revenue they generate.

While the lower courts have upheld the immunity shield of Section 230 in Gonzalez v Google, the decision of the right-wing dominated Supreme Court to hear the case comes at a time when political censorship and control of online content is being sought by all factions of the political establishment.

On this question, one faction of the ruling establishment considers the content moderation rules part of the old, buccaneering, freewheeling and early “Wild West” internet that have become insufficient and need to be abolished in favor of a more effective regime of censorship.

Another faction of the political establishment that is more closely aligned with the tech giants—especially the massive profits they generate for billionaires on Wall Street—is saying that Section 230 can and should be utilized more effectively for censorship. They are arguing that the law does not need to be abolished because the tech platforms are more than capable of doing the job of imposing the regulation and control being demanded by the entire ruling class. These objectives are also behind the various congressional and regulatory initiatives aimed at “taking down big tech.”

The political offensive against both Section 230 and the technology monopolies is directed, above all, against the growth of anti-war, anti-imperialist, left-wing and socialist politics online. It is additionally focused on blocking the working class from using the social media platforms to organize their struggles against the capitalist system.

The major reasons for the ongoing public campaigns against “big tech” are that sections of the intelligence and political establishment are dissatisfied with the progress of self-imposed censorship and fear that large numbers of their employees are sympathetic to left and socialist politics.

Significant in this regard is the censorship by Google, beginning in the spring of 2017, that suppressed socialist, left-wing and alternative news sources. After a campaign was mounted by the WSWS against it, the CEO of Google Sundar Pichai admitted during congressional testimony that the number one search engine was indeed censoring socialists online.

Meanwhile, in the atmosphere of the “fake news” hysteria whipped up during the first year of the coronavirus pandemic and the 2020 presidential elections, far-right Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said it “behooves” the court to find a case to review Section 230.

Thomas said the courts have broadly interpreted the law to “confer sweeping immunity on some of the largest companies in the world.” In a 2021 opinion, Justice Thomas suggested that Donald Trump’s Twitter account, shut down by the platform after he used it to attempt the overthrow of the US Constitution on January 6, 2021, resembles “a constitutionally protected public forum.”

The news coverage of the arguments before the Supreme Court on February 21 emphasize that it is difficult to determine how the majority will decide on the crucial case or if it will rule at all. As with the original intent of Section 230, several of the justices expressed concerns about the financial impact on the corporations of lifting the liability shield.

A report on CNBC entitled, “Supreme Court justices in Google case express hesitation about upending Section 230,” said, “Justices across the ideological spectrum expressed concern with breaking the delicate balance set by Section 230,” and some justices suggested, “a narrower reading of the liability shield could sometimes make sense.”

Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law, told CNBC he felt more optimistic that the high court would uphold Section 230 while he was concerned for the future of the law. “I remain petrified that the opinion is going to put all of us in an unexpected circumstance,” Goldman said.

Leaked UK government messages confirm pandemic crimes

Thomas Scripps

Britain’s Daily Telegraph has begun publishing The Lockdown Files, a series of articles based on over 100,000 WhatsApp messages between former Health Secretary Matt Hancock and other leading figures in the government during the first two years of the pandemic.

The messages were given by Hancock to journalist Isabel Oakeshott in an act of supreme political idiocy. He wanted her help writing his autobiography, The Pandemic Diaries, presenting himself as an advocate for public health measures to control the spread of COVID-19—rather than the criminal responsible for tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths.

Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Matt Hancock gives a live press conference from number 9 Downing Street. 19/05/2021. London, United Kingdom. [Photo by Tim Hammond/No 10 Downing Street/Flickr / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

But Oakeshott was one of the most vocal anti-lockdown campaigners in the UK and is the partner of Richard Tice, leader of Reform UK—the former Brexit Party “relaunched”, in the words of Nigel Farage in November 2020, “to fight this cruel and unnecessary lockdown.” In an interview with the right-wing GB News platform last March, she described protective masks as “completely unnecessary symbols of fear and repression.”

Oakeshott writes in the Telegraph that she released the messages to “short-circuit” the UK’s “never ending inquiry” into the pandemic response and “avoid a whitewash”—by which she means anything which does not condemn such restrictions as were implemented as a “disaster”. Her primary target is the closure of schools—“Those responsible for school closures should now admit their mistake – and vow never to inflict such harm in the future.”

Allister Health, editor of the Sunday Telegraph, sums up the purpose of The Lockdown Files, insisting that governments should never again “panic, dig out their catastrophically flawed Covid playbooks, and seek to terrorise us into another lockdown, guaranteeing our final moral and financial degradation.”

But the conclusions Oakeshott and the Telegraph want to be drawn are far removed from those the working class will draw from these messages. They so far provide more detail of the decisions which turned care homes into killing fields and reveal the constant efforts of sections of the Tory party to pursue an even more socially murderous course than that which has produced a death toll of over 200,000 people. All that stood in their way was fear of popular opposition.

Nearly 46,000 care home residents were killed by COVID during the first two years of the pandemic, close to a quarter of the total. On March 17, 2020, the government ordered the discharge of thousands of patients from hospitals into care settings. There was no requirement to test for COVID before doing so until April 15. But no policy of blanket testing of care home residents and staff was implemented, despite Hancock being advised to do so.

One of his messages dated April 14 reads, “Chris Whitty [the UK’s Chief Medical Officer] has done an evidence review and now recommends testing of all going into care homes, and segregation whilst awaiting result.” Later the same day, he set out a policy which limited testing only to those coming into a care setting from hospital, not the community: “I do not think the community commitment adds anything and it muddies the waters.”

Testing for those entering from the community was only recommended on August 14. There was no recommendation to care homes to segregate incomers from the community until given the all-clear. Testing of asymptomatic staff and residents only began at the end of April, with regular testing of staff only getting underway in early July.

The brutal ideology underlying this and other failures is made clearest by the leaked messages from Prime Minister Boris Johnson. His words fill in the details of the anti-public health policy he championed, and which were summed up by his angry declaration in October 2020, “No more f**ing lockdowns! Let the bodies pile high in their thousands!”

In one chat with Whitty and the Chief Scientific Officer Sir Patrick Vallance on August 26, 2020, Johnson misreads an article from the Financial Times as saying the overall fatality rate of COVID was 0.04 percent (in fact this was a probability figure, equating to 4 percent). He writes sneeringly that this is about “one in two thousand. And I seem to remember that when the plague began we thought the fatality rate was one in a hundred.”

He goes on stupidly, “So if all 66 m[illion] people in the UK were to be infected we could expect 33,000 deaths. And we have already had 41k. Is that why the death rate is going down? Is it possible that covid is starting to run out of potential victims?”

Informed that the overall mortality rate was between 0.4 and 1 percent, rising to 6 percent for older age groups, Johnson is unmoved. “If I were an 80 year old and I was told that the choice was between destroying the economy and risking my exposure to a disease that I had a 94 percent chance of surviving, I know what I would prefer.”

The callous disregard for the lives of thousands of elderly people was a running theme. Earlier in the month, Johnson had written exasperatedly, “If you are over 65 your risk of dying from covid is probably as big as your risk of falling down stairs. And we don’t stop older people from using stairs.”

He made this point to argue for an article published in the Spectator, “Herd immunity is still key in the fight against Covid-19,” written by the anti-lockdown advocate and Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) signatory Martin Kulldorf, who later that year defended President Trump’s “let it rip” COVID adviser Scott Atlas.

Johnson had met with other signatories to the pseudo-scientific, anti-public health GBD in September 2020—Professor Sunetra Gupta and Sweden’s state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell. The messages show he stayed in close contact with these circles. In November that year, he sent a note that he was “on a call” with Carl Heneghan, who sits with GBD authors Gupta, Kulldorf and Professor Jay Bhattacharya on the scientific advisory board of the anti-lockdown Collateral Global.

Johnson used their authority in an ultimately failed attempt to stop the November lockdown—though it was limited to the point it allowed a massive winter wave of infections to develop immediately afterwards. Over 56,000 people died in the two months from December 2020 to the end of January 2021.

It might have been even worse. With cases skyrocketing at the end of December, Education Secretary Gavin Williamson was, in Hancock’s words, fighting “tooth and nail” and “going absolutely gangbusters” to have schools open for the new term. The health secretary worried about “a policy car crash when the kids spread the disease in January.”

In the end, schools were closed after just one partially attended day when it became clear educators would overwhelmingly refuse to go in, and many parents refuse to send their children. Williamson and Hancock had complained to each other a few months before, “What a bunch of absolute arses the teaching unions are”-“I know they really really do just hate work” after battles over school reopenings and delaying A-Level tests.

Messages refer to polling showing more than “50 percent of the public want the same *or stronger* lockdown” in April 2020, and that “80 percent of the public support the lockdown—there is no public clamour to start lifting measures,” in January 2021. When Johnson pushed to relax the first lockdown in the summer of 2020, he was warned “the whole package will be too far ahead of public opinion.”

The Telegraph cynically reports on concerns raised in government about the hardships caused by lockdowns—particularly to the elderly left isolated and children who education and social development was impeded—using these to decry the measure.  

But the leaked messages show that these costs of implementing restrictions were exacerbated precisely because the government was so determined to avoid any public health measures at all, meaning those that were forced to be enacted by catastrophic rates of infection were poorly implemented and under-resourced. Schools had to be repeatedly closed because the government never took the necessary action to fully suppress and control the virus.

Inequality in Sweden reaches highest level in decades

Bran Karlsson

New data from the Swedish government’s statistics agency—Statistics Sweden—shows that income inequality in the country is now higher than at any other point in time since the agency began collecting this information in 1975.

Election posters of the Sweden Democrats are put up by a party member in Stockholm, Sweden, in 2018. The poster for the Sept. 9, 2018 election read 'Welfare must work' and 'law and order'. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)

Sweden’s Gini-coefficient in 2020 was 0.31. Then in 2021—the most recent year the agency has released data for—it rose to 0.34. The Gini-coefficient is a measure used to calculate inequality. Its scale ranges from 0, complete equality, to 1, complete inequality. For comparison, Sweden’s Gini-coefficient was just 0.2 in the late 1970s.

The significant year-on-year increase in 2021 was the result of a surge of profits for the Swedish ruling class and upper-middle class, which was directly tied to the Swedish ruling elite’s spearheading of the criminal “herd immunity” response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In 2021, as the pandemic raged around Europe and the United States, major central banks pursued a combination of ultra-low interest rates and cash injections into financial markets. This policy of easy money inflated stock portfolios, greatly benefiting the wealthy and super-rich.

While this was a global trend, in Sweden it was particularly pronounced. The top ten percent of Swedish society increased their income by more than 16 percent in 2021, largely due to selling stock market shares and other equity.

While the Swedish Social Democratic government promoted the uncontrolled spread of COVID-19, the Swedish central bank—the Riksbank—funneled 700 billion kronor (about €63 billion) into the financial markets by means of asset purchases. The Social Democratic government, ruling with the support of the Greens and Left Party, defended both measures—the cash injections and the policy of “herd immunity”—as necessary to protect the economy.

The gains of those at the top of Swedish society during the pandemic stand in stark contrast to the devastating impact of COVID on poorer sections of the population.

Sweden had—relative to its Nordic neighbors—one of the highest death rates due to COVID-19. The government has effectively stopped tracking the pandemic in any meaningful way, as part of global efforts to pretend it is over.

Meanwhile, the increasing cost of living weighs heavily on the population. In December of last year, the inflation rate in Sweden stood at 12.3 percent, year on year. Food and energy price increases have hit workers particularly hard. For example, in 2022, the cost of butter increased by about 25 percent, and that of meat by 24 percent.

The pandemic accelerated a steady growth in social inequality that has been under way in Sweden over the past four decades. As early as 2011, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development noted that Sweden had experienced the fastest growth in income inequality in the OECD since the mid 1980s.

The working class in Sweden, as in many other relatively wealthy, small northern European countries, achieved significant concessions from the ruling class in the post-war period. Sweden’s comprehensive social welfare programmes, referred to as the “folkhemet” or “people’s home,” were bound up with the restabilisation of capitalism under the auspices of US imperialism, which created temporary conditions for the implementation of reforms within the framework of the nation state.

However, for decades Sweden’s public services and social programmes have been under relentless attack by successive social democratic and conservative governments. Following the Nordic banking crisis of the early 1990s, a right-wing Moderate Party-led coalition under Karl Bildt and a Social Democrat-Green coalition between 1994 and 2006 enforced major attacks on pension rights and the privatisation of public services.

The right-wing parties returned to power in 2006, unleashing the largest wave of privatisations in the country’s history and undermining unemployment insurance. When the Social Democrats returned to power in 2014, they entered an agreement with the right-wing parties to implement their budgetary framework for public spending austerity in exchange for a commitment from the right not to bring down the Social Democrat-Green minority coalition government.

In 2022, the Guardian estimated that about 14 percent of the country’s 10.5 million inhabitants live below the official poverty line—measured as 40 percent of the median income. A 2018 estimate from the European Anti-Poverty Network placed the real poverty rate, what they call the “social exclusion” level, at 18.3 percent. However, when looking just at those who live in Sweden but were born in another country, this rose to nearly 40 percent—reflecting the large number of immigrants and refugees who live in poverty, especially in Sweden’s larger cities.

Last year, the head of Oxfam in Sweden, Suzanne Standfast, said, “Sweden is one of the OECD countries whose economic inequalities have increased the most in recent decades.”

She explained that while Sweden had a high tax burden, “assets are taxed considerably lower in Sweden than in most other countries. This means that people with a low income sometimes pay a higher percentage of tax than people with greater assets.”

Standfast also noted that in 2019, the Social Democratic government, under the so-called January Agreement, abolished the värnskatt—a tax on high income earners.

The growth of income inequality in Sweden, and the declining conditions of its working class, will only be exacerbated as the Swedish government, with the full support of the Social Democratic opposition, takes measures to dramatically increase military spending. Sweden plans to increase its military budget by 64 percent between 2022 and 2028 as part of plans to join NATO and support the US-NATO war on Russia in Ukraine. 

The country’s new right-wing government, which relies on the far-right Sweden Democrats for a parliamentary majority, has significantly increased military aid to Ukraine. In January, Sweden announced it would send its high-tech Archer artillery system to Ukraine—one of the most advanced mobile artillery weapon systems. This was part of a larger package, valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars, of anti-tank missiles and armored vehicles.

The Swedish government has so far passed 10 military support packages for Ukraine. On the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which was provoked by the Western powers, Swedish Defence Minister Pål Jonson announced that Stockholm will send up to 10 Leopard II tanks as part of its 11th military aid package. Sweden is also cooperating closely with Germany to supply components for the IRIS-T anti-aircraft system.

Thousands join climate change protests in New Zealand

Tom Peters

Thousands of people joined protests across New Zealand yesterday for this year’s first Global Climate Strike, demanding action to cut greenhouse gas emissions and stop catastrophic global warming.

Protesters march through downtown Wellington on March 3, 2023. [Photo: WSWS]

The event follows New Zealand’s worst flooding in recent memory in January and February across much of Auckland, the biggest city, Hawke’s Bay, Gisborne, Northland and Coromandel. Fifteen people were killed in the floods and about 10,500 were displaced, with many unable to return to their destroyed homes.

Auckland received 280 percent of its usual January rainfall in less than six hours during the January 27 flooding. Cyclone Gabrielle, which hit the North Island on February 13, inundated huge areas of farmland, villages and suburbs, and destroyed roads, bridges and vital infrastructure. Napier, one of the worst-hit areas, received over 600 percent of its normal February rainfall.

Such extreme weather events are becoming more frequent due to more water vapour in the atmosphere, caused by warmer temperatures. Severe storms are causing similar destruction throughout the world, including recently in California and Australia.

Despite the ever-increasing urgency of the climate crisis, turnout at this week’s events was lower than previous years. In 2019, more than 170,000 people participated. Unlike in the past, the organisers School Strike 4 Climate (SS4C) did not call on young people to walk out of school for the entire day; most rallies were held at 2 p.m. or 3 p.m. The group appealed for university students and workers to take part as well.

About 1,000 people protested in Auckland, with similar numbers taking part in Wellington and Christchurch. Rallies were also held in at least 10 other centres including Dunedin, Napier, New Plymouth, Palmerston North and Tauranga.

Members of the Socialist Equality Group (SEG) attended the Wellington protest, which marched through the city centre to parliament, spoke with some of those in attendance and distributed the statement, “New Zealand’s flooding disaster and the case for socialism.”

Miriam, a student at Victoria University of Wellington, said it was not possible to deny the effects of climate change any more. “You just have to look at what’s just happened in Auckland and Gisborne and Hawke’s Bay. There’s been evidence to say that this is going to happen for years and years, and it is happening, and it’s having an effect on everyone. So someone has to do something about it.”

Miriam [Photo: WSWS]

Governments around the world, including in New Zealand, had not acted on the scientific evidence because “that’s just not where the money is, that’s not where the incentive is,” she said, adding, “I don’t really know how you change that.”

A 14-year-old student, Will McKenzie, said he was attending out of solidarity with people affected by the flooding in Auckland, Hawke’s Bay, and other parts of the country. “It’s horrible because thousands of people have lost their homes and on the news you’ve seen that people have lost their businesses, kumara [sweet potato] farms, all because some major world powers and countries decide not to do anything about [climate change].”

Asked what needed to be done, he said governments should “stop funding oil companies. I feel like they should break the contracts and start funding more wind farms.”

A group of school students from Samoa and the Cook Islands agreed with the SEG’s demand for people in Pacific island countries whose homes are threatened by climate change to be offered help to relocate and to get residence in New Zealand.

“Our people deserve better, and I think people have to start taking initiatives,” said Leana. “The water’s rising and it’s getting hotter, and it’s costing them a lot of money [to adapt] that they don’t really have.”

Susana added: “I think the events happening here in New Zealand should make us more aware about the things that are happening everywhere. It’s a worldwide issue.” Across the Pacific, “people are dying, our people are really hurting, families are struggling, and things need to change now.”

Aimee [Photo: WSWS]

Aimee, a recent tertiary student, said “the world’s going in the wrong direction and we either fight or we die.” She said the corporations polluting the atmosphere were “not moral entities; they are machines with one purpose, which is to make as much profit as possible.” She called for more regulations on big business, and for fossil fuel companies to be taxed to pay for environmental disasters like the recent flooding.

A number of people spoken to said they hoped the Labour government could be pressured by the protests, and by the Greens, to take stronger action on the climate.

This reflects the politics of the organizers. SS4C presented five modest demands to the government: No new fossil fuel mining or exploration; lower the voting age to 16; support farmers to shift to regenerative farming; expand marine reserves; and introduce rebates for people to buy e-bikes.

In an article published by Stuff ahead of the protests, Christchurch SS4C spokesperson Aurora Garner-Randolph wrote that after five years, the government had not taken the necessary steps to address the climate crisis. “It’s clear that for politicians, the best interests of the people come second to short-term petty election politics and big corporate donors,” she said. But she offered no way forward except more “protest and direct action.”

Speaking at the Auckland rally, Joe Carolan, from the Unite union and the pseudo-left group Socialist Aotearoa, called on protesters to “vote Labour, vote Greens, vote for the parties that have the best policy.” He suggested that this, combined with more strikes and protests, would lead to a “revolution.”

At the Wellington rally, Green Party co-leader James Shaw gave a speech saying the floods were “a wake-up call” and that “the government should be acting faster on climate change.”

He declared that the problem was the Greens were “outnumbered” in parliament, “and we need more Green MPs and we need more Green ministers sitting around the Cabinet table after this election, because that is how political change happens.”

This is a lie. Shaw has been the minister for climate change in the Labour-Greens government for the past five years, during which time carbon emissions have continued to increase. The Greens, like Labour, oppose any action that would harm the profits of New Zealand’s corporate elite.

News Corp Media Fellowship 2023

Application Deadline: 26th March 2023

Eligible Countries: All

To Be Taken At (Country): Washington, USA

About the Award: In collaboration with The Wall Street Journal, ICFJ is offering international journalists an opportunity to participate in an innovative program that includes training on creative storytelling and offers grants to support data-driven projects.  The prize for the best project is a three-month News Corp Fellowship in New York, where the fellow will receive hands-on training and mentorship at the WSJ media science lab.

This program builds on the News Corp Media Fellowship, which has offered international journalists an immersive, hands-on experience in some of the world’s most digitally advanced newsrooms since 2014.

During the fellowship, the journalist will be embedded for three months in the WSJ’s media science lab to work on a data-driven project relevant to the fellow and tailor-made for the WSJ. The selected News Corp Media Fellow will have the opportunity to work on projects related to:

• Workflow and collaboration in a global newsroom;
• Data science, artificial intelligence and computational journalism;
• New forms of training and internal leadership development;
• Audience surveying and emerging forms of social media analysis.

Prior to the three-month fellowship, ICFJ will host a three-day orientation in Washington D.C., where the fellow will receive training and be prepared to develop his or her own digital projects at the Journal.

Type: Fellowship

Eligibility: To be considered for the fellowship, journalists must:

1. Participate in two half-day webinars conducted by editors and reporters with expertise in digital tools, data journalism and visualization, artificial intelligence, mobile journalism and audience engagement. Webinars will be open to a select group of up to 50 journalists. Both webinars will occur in April.

2. Receive one of five news innovation grants to support a data or digitally-driven project. Only journalists who participate in both webinars are eligible to apply for these grants. Projects should promote new forms of storytelling, data journalism and visualization, or citizen engagement. Each grant recipient will also receive online editorial coaching and mentorship from experienced editors, reporters and experts.

Only journalists who complete both stages successfully will be considered for the News Corp Media Fellowship. The ideal fellow will be one who:

• Has a strong news sense and curiosity
• Demonstrates strong collaborative skills
• Has an interest in audience engagement and building community
• Is willing to try new things, experiment and innovate
• Comes with ideas for several projects to work on during the fellowship

Number of Awards: Not specified

Value of Award: All travel and fellowship expenses are covered by the program.

Duration/Timeline of Programme: 3 months

How to Apply: Please apply here.

Visit the Programme Webpage for Details

Israel’s fascist minister Smotrich calls for town of Huwara to be wiped out, anti-Netanyahu opposition grows

Jean Shaoul

Israel’s fascist cabinet ministers have escalated their incendiary attacks on the Palestinians in the wake of the pogrom-style attack Sunday on Huwara and other Palestinian villages near the northern West Bank city of Nablus.

Hundreds of settlers, some masked and armed, went on a rampage, setting fire to the homes, shops, cars, property and agricultural land of the Palestinians, killing one person and injuring 120 more. At least 35 homes were destroyed, with another 40 damaged. More than 400 cars as well as agricultural property were set aflame, leaving the town smouldering for hours.

Israeli soldiers patrol an area damaged bay fires from torched vehicles during a rampage by settlers in Hawara, near the West Bank city of Nablus, Wednesday, March 1, 2023. [AP Photo/Majdi Mohammed]

Israeli soldiers stood by and did nothing to protect the Palestinians, as required under international humanitarian law. The next day, the army ordered Palestinians to stay indoors and stores to close, leaving the settlers to roam the streets of what the Jerusalem Post described as a “ghost town.”

Neither Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nor any of his cabinet ministers denounced the assault, simply saying that it was “not our way to take the law into our own hands.”

Following a public outcry, the Israeli authorities arrested a handful of people, all of whom were released. Just one was sentenced to four days of house arrest.

Far-right party leaders have called for the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) to drive out the Palestinians from their homes in an explicit call for the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, or a second “Naqba,” as the Palestinians call the expulsion of at least 700,000 Palestinians before and during the 1948-49 war between Israel and its Arab neighbours.

Netanyahu’s far-right and religious coalition parties absented themselves from a Knesset session called by the opposition bloc to discuss the rampage.

On Monday, Zvika Fogel of Jewish Power declared, “Yesterday, a terrorist came from Huwara—Huwara is closed and burned. That is what I want to see. Only thus can we obtain deterrence.” He was referring to the shooting earlier on Sunday of two brothers from a neighbouring settlement, killed as they drove through the town.

On Wednesday, Bezalel Smotrich, the Religious Zionist leader and Finance Minister who has been given responsibility for the civil administration of the West Bank illegally occupied by Israel since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war—said Israel should “wipe out” Huwara. Home to 7,000 Palestinians, Huwara is almost completely surrounded by Israeli settlements and bisected by a settler road.

“The Palestinian village of Huwara should be wiped out. The state needs to do it and not private citizens,” Smotrich said.

Before the assault, Smotrich had tweeted his support for a statement by David Ben-Zion, deputy leader of the Samaria Regional Council, calling for Huwara to be destroyed. He later complained that his remarks had been taken out of context and deleted his tweet, insisting that this was the government’s responsibility.

This prompted a group of Israeli human rights lawyers to call for the attorney general to investigate Smotrich and two of his allies for “inducing war crimes”. There have been online collections for the Palestinians in Huwara, as well as demonstrations earlier in the week protesting the pogrom.

On Wednesday, there was a mass walkout by Israeli workers along with huge demonstrations in Tel-Aviv, Jerusalem and other towns and cities in a day of action—dubbed “National Disruption Day”—in protest at the government’s plans to assume dictatorial powers by neutering the judiciary. It follows eight weeks of Saturday-night mass rallies in towns and cities across the country that have been growing in strength.

The proposed legislation, set to become law before parliament goes into recess on April 2, would allow the government to appoint Supreme Court justices and grant the Knesset the power to override court rulings. This would smooth the path for the government to ride roughshod over democratic rights and for the ultraorthodox and religious Zionist groups to strengthen the role of religion within the country. It would remove all remaining restrictions on the ultra-nationalist settler movement in their bid to expand their presence across the West Bank.

If these measures become law, the Supreme Court is likely to rule them unconstitutional, precipitating a major political crisis ahead of the celebrations planned to mark the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Zionist State.  

The government has also introduced legislation enabling thrice-convicted Shas party leader Aryeh Deri to serve as government minister, overruling a High Court decision, and is set to introduce a bill preventing the scandal-ridden Netanyahu, currently in court on corruption charges, from being removed from office. This is in anticipation of the auditor general declaring him “unfit for office” due to the “conflict of interest” between his corruption trial and his involvement in the plans to emasculate the judiciary. Such a ruling could precipitate a constitutional crisis, with the army and intelligence services unable to take orders from the prime minister.

Parliamentary committees have nodded through extra funds for Netanyahu’s homes and personal expenditure, while approving on an almost daily basis the far-right parties’ pet projects and allies, stoking public anger

Tensions boiled over on Wednesday when hundreds of police sought to disperse the demonstration in Tel Aviv, using stun grenades and water cannon against protesters, dragging them off the road. Arab News, a Saudi publication, reported that the police were met with chants of “democracy,” “police state” and “Where were you?”, a reference to the refusal of either soldiers or border police to act against settlers in Huwara.

Times of Israel reported, “In the Jerusalem neighborhood of Rehavia, hundreds of protesters marching toward the Prime Minister’s Residence were blocked by police as they sought to block the road…. Dozens are heard shouting, ‘Where were you in Huwara,’ at officers…”

One policeman was seen kneeling on a protester’s neck. At least 71 demonstrators were arrested across the country, including 42 in Tel Aviv, and 11 people needed emergency medical emergency treatment. It followed Jewish Power leader and minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir’s order for the police to “use all available means” to disperse the protesters whom he accused of anarchy.

Ben-Gvir accused opposition leader Yair Lapid of encouraging anarchy and called on him and other leaders to stop inciting against the police.

For their part, Lapid and the Zionist leaders of the opposition advance themselves as a safer set of hands to protect the Israeli state, speaking for the most part in language identical to the far right. “Two months after the establishment of a full-on right-wing government,” Lapid said, “the scope of [Palestinian] attacks is increasing, terrorists are raising their heads, and the army is confused and does not understand its chain of command.”

Netanyahu has supported Ben-Gvir’s orders to the police and refused to disavow Smotrich’s comments. Speaking on Wednesday as protesters were rallying across the country, he also accused them of anarchy and claimed the demonstrations were being funded by “foreign elements.”

Netanyahu’s far-right government is beginning to fragment amid unprecedented uproar and opposition. This includes criticism from senior lawyers, legal experts, former generals, heads of Israel’s intelligence services and business leaders, and demonstrations from army reservists who have said they will refuse to serve if the legislation passes—as well as regular mass protests well in excess of 100,000 people in a country of just 9.3 million on successive Saturdays.

Noam party leader, Avi Moaz, part of the Religious Zionism electoral alliance, has resigned from the government, complaining that Netanyahu was not allowing him to carry out his mandate to strengthen religious education in public schools. Shortly after, a minister from one of the religious parties resigned from one of his posts after a fall-out with Netanyahu over the funding for ultraorthodox Jews.

57 confirmed dead in Greek train crash, as protests and strikes erupt

Robert Stevens

At least 57 people are dead following Tuesday night’s train crash in Greece. They were killed when a passenger train, on route from Athens to Thessaloniki with more than 350 people on board—many of them young students returning to university after a holiday for Greek Orthodox Lent—crashed head-on into a freight train shortly before midnight Tuesday, outside the town of Tempe in central Greece.

According to a report on Thursday by public broadcaster ERT, 52 people remain in hospital in the city of Larissa as a result of the crash. Six people are in critical condition due to head wounds and serious burns. Residents in Larissa, near to where to crash occurred, lined up to give blood—many waiting more than an hour in heavy rain.

Cranes remove debris after a trains' collision in Tempe, about 376 kilometres (235 miles) north of Athens, near Larissa city, Greece, Thursday, March 2, 2023. Rescuers using cranes and heavy machinery on Thursday searched the wreckage of trains involved in a deadly collision that sent Greece into national mourning and prompted strikes and protests over rail safety. [AP Photo/Vaggelis Kousioras]

Late Thursday, almost 48 hours after the crash, authorities announced that another 56 people on the passenger list were still missing,

The rescue and recovery operation is ongoing amid the completely destroyed and crushed rail carriages. Rescuer Konstantinos Imanimidis told Reuters on Thursday, “It will be very difficult to find survivors, due to the temperatures [caused by fires] that developed in the carriages… This is the hardest thing, instead of saving lives we have to dig out bodies.”

On Wednesday, the government announced three days of national mourning, while asserting that the disaster was, according to Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, “mainly due to a tragic human error.”

The station master in Larissa, a worker with over 40 years’ experience on the railways, has been arrested. But the attempt to pin the blame on a single individual has been widely rejected, fueling protests and a rail strike against the New Democracy (ND) conservative government.

Workers know that the rail network has suffered years of austerity cuts, including mass job losses. Much of the network, especially in northern Greece, is not automated, relying on manual signaling.

The station master was charged Thursday with dangerous disruptions of transportation, and may face charges of manslaughter through negligence, bodily harm through negligence and dangerous interventions in means of transportation. But evidence is already emerging throwing doubt over claims that human error is to blame.

Kathimerini reported that when the station master appeared before an investigative magistrate in the town of Larissa Thursday, “He allegedly claimed that during his shift he gave an order to change the tracks on the railway network so that the two trains would not move on the same line but that the system apparently did not respond.”

The newspaper added, “This version of events is supported by a photograph from the stationmaster’s logbook that shows he instructed the fatal Inter City 62 train to continue its journey to Neos Poros, apparently not knowing that the freight train was moving on the same piece of track right toward it.”

More evidence points to the catastrophic implications of having large sections of the rail system that rely totally on manual intervention, with no implementation of automated rail systems widely used internationally. Kathimerini noted, “A colleague reportedly said in an interview with the media that before the fatal accident another train had come to a standstill at Tempe. And that in order to move the stalled train to the nearest station there were changes to the tracks, but the network was not later restored to its previous state.”

The deaths prompted angry protests in Athens, in Thessaloniki where many of the people who died lived, and in Larissa.

In Athens, hundreds of mainly young protesters demonstrated on Wednesday outside the headquarters of Hellenic Train, the privatised company responsible for maintaining Greek railways. They were attacked by riot police, who fired tear gas and stun grenades. Protesters then marched to the Greek parliament in Syntagma Square where police attacked again.

In Larissa, a silent vigil to commemorate the victims of the crash was held. Speaking to the AFP news agency, Nikos Savva, a medical student from Cyprus, said, “The rail network looked problematic, with worn down, badly paid staff.” The arrested station master should not pay the price “for a whole ailing system”. Larissa-based doctor Costas Bargiotas said, “This is an inadmissible accident. We've known this situation for 30 years”.

People hold candles, in memory of the trains collision victims, outside the train station of Larissa city, about 355 kilometres (222 miles) north of Athens, Greece, Thursday, March 2, 2023. Emergency crews inched through the mangled remains of passenger carriages in their search for the dead from Tuesday night's head-on collision, which has left dozens of passengers dead in Greece's worst recorded rail accident. [Photo: Vaggelis Kousioras/WSWS]

The BBC reported, “Families have given DNA samples to help identification efforts, with the results expected on Thursday. One of those, a woman called Katerina searching for her missing brother, a passenger on the train, shouted ‘Murderers!’ outside the hospital in Larissa, directing her anger towards the government and the rail company”.

On Thursday, rail workers in the Federation of Railway Employees began a nationwide 24-hour strike to protest the deaths and the unsafe conditions on Greece’s rail network. A statement by the union said, “Pain has turned into anger for the dozens of dead and wounded colleagues and fellow citizens.” Successive governments, it added, had ignored repeated demands to improve safety standards. The rail network required “hiring permanent personnel, better training and, above all, modern safety technology.” These proposals had always ended up “in the trash can.”

Lines 2 and 3 of the Athens Metro were also suspended for the duration of the rail workers’ action due to a solidarity strike by members of the Athens Metro Workers Union.

That evening, striking workers protested outside Hellenic Railway headquarters in Athens, with thousands then marching to Syntagma Square, with young people joining them—to protest in front of the parliament.

The train deaths are the result of social crimes for which every political party of the ruling elite shares responsibility. It is their leaders who should be in the dock facing charges.

Under-resourcing and destaffing of an already below standard rail network was accelerated over the last decade with the privatisation of the state-owned railway, TrainOSE, by the pseudo-left SYRIZA government in 2017-18.

SYRIZA was brought to power in 2015 on a wave of protests and strikes after five years of savage austerity. They then trampled on this mandate, imposing, as ND and the social democratic PASOK did before them, a devastating austerity programme. The privatisation of key national economic assets and infrastructure was the price demanded in return for any further loans by the European Union (EU) and International Monetary Fund. SYRIZA carried their instructions out to the letter.

TrainOSE was sold off as part of the third austerity package imposed after 2010, with the rail privatisation and sale of other state assets expected to raise €6 billion euros by 2018. It was bought by Ferrovie Dello Stato Italian, the Italian state-owned railway holding company, for just €45 million.

SYRIZA’s Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, at a lavish ceremony in Corfu, presented this as a glorious success. Naftemporiki, the daily financial newspaper, reported, “Tsipras explained that the importance of the investment lies in the fact that the country has been spared a great financial burden... in the price itself, but even more so in the size of the investment it will make in the Greek economy, in the Greek railway, amounting to 500 million euros.”

Tsipras’s lies were soon exposed, with the newly privatised firm, renamed Hellenic Railways, making no investments to upgrade the rail network. The reality, as SYRIZA knew well, was that Ferrovie Dello Stato Italian was planning only vast profits. Ferrovie’s CEO Renato Mazzoncini described buying TrainOSE as a “strategic move for the group. It is not so much about buying a piece of Greece at reduced price, but rather about a strategic expansion operation in view of the major investment in the Athens-Thessaloniki line, which is part of the European corridor project.” The European corridor project would be worth about €3 billion, said Mazzoncini.

The horrific human cost was confirmed in an EU report last year on “Railway Safety and Interoperability in the EU”. Greece was the only member state entirely without “train protection systems” that are “widely considered one of the most effective railway safety measures for reducing the risk of collisions between trains.”

Post-privatization, Greece’s rail network is one of the most dangerous in Europe. From 2018 to 2020, according to the European Union Agency for Railways, Greece recorded the highest railway fatality rate per million train kilometres among 28 European nations.

On Thursday, the Financial Times reported, “Fifteen days before the worst railway crash Greece has seen in decades, the European Commission had referred the country to the European Court of Justice for ‘failing to fulfil its obligations’ [from 2015 to the present day] under the Single European Railway Area Directive” regarding “infrastructure investments and emergency procedures”.