Day: August 25, 2023

Google, Facebook, TikTok and other Big Tech companies operating in Europe must comply with one of the most far-reaching efforts to clean up what people see online.

The European Union’s groundbreaking new digital rules took effect Friday for the biggest platforms. The Digital Services Act is part of a suite of tech-focused regulations crafted by the 27-nation bloc, long a global leader in cracking down on tech giants.

The DSA is designed to keep users safe online and stop the spread of harmful content that’s either illegal or violates a platform’s terms of service, such as promotion of genocide or anorexia. It also looks to protect Europeans’ fundamental rights like privacy and free speech.

Some online platforms, which could face billions in fines if they don’t comply, already have made changes.

Here’s a look at what has changed:

Which platforms are affected? 

So far, 19. They include eight social media platforms: Facebook; TikTok; X, formerly known as Twitter; YouTube; Instagram; LinkedIn; Pinterest; and Snapchat.

There are five online marketplaces: Amazon, Booking.com, China’s Alibaba and AliExpress, and Germany’s Zalando.

Mobile app stores Google Play and Apple’s App Store are subject to the new rules, as are Google’s Search and Microsoft’s Bing search engines.

Google Maps and Wikipedia round out the list. 

What about other online companies?

The EU’s list is based on numbers submitted by the platforms. Those with 45 million or more users — or 10% of the EU’s population — face the DSA’s highest level of regulation. 

Brussels insiders, however, have pointed to some notable omissions, like eBay, Airbnb, Netflix and even PornHub. The list isn’t definitive, and it’s possible other platforms may be added later. 

Any business providing digital services to Europeans will eventually have to comply with the DSA. They will face fewer obligations than the biggest platforms, however, and have another six months before they must fall in line.

What’s changing?

Platforms have rolled out new ways for European users to flag illegal online content and dodgy products, which companies will be obligated to take down quickly. 

The DSA “will have a significant impact on the experiences Europeans have when they open their phones or fire up their laptops,” Nick Clegg, Meta’s president for global affairs, said in a blog post. 

Facebook’s and Instagram’s existing tools to report content will be easier to access. Amazon opened a new channel for reporting suspect goods. 

TikTok gave users an extra option for flagging videos, such as for hate speech and harassment, or frauds and scams, which will be reviewed by an additional team of experts, according to the app from Chinese parent company ByteDance. 

Google is offering more “visibility” into content moderation decisions and different ways for users to contact the company. It didn’t offer specifics. Under the DSA, Google and other platforms have to provide more information behind why posts are taken down. 

Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat also are giving people the option to turn off automated systems that recommend videos and posts based on their profiles. Such systems have been blamed for leading social media users to increasingly extreme posts. 

The DSA also prohibits targeting vulnerable categories of people, including children, with ads. Platforms like Snapchat and TikTok will stop allowing teen users to be targeted by ads based on their online activities. 

Google will provide more information about targeted ads shown to people in the EU and give researchers more access to data on how its products work. 

Is there pushback?

Zalando, a German online fashion retailer, has filed a legal challenge over its inclusion on the DSA’s list of the largest online platforms, arguing it’s being treated unfairly. 

Nevertheless, Zalando is launching content-flagging systems for its website, even though there’s little risk of illegal material showing up among its highly curated collection of clothes, bags and shoes. 

Amazon has filed a similar case with a top EU court.

What if companies don’t follow the rules?

Officials have warned tech companies that violations could bring fines worth up to 6% of their global revenue — which could amount to billions — or even a ban from the EU. 

“The real test begins now,” said European Commissioner Thierry Breton, who oversees digital policy. He vowed to “thoroughly enforce the DSA and fully use our new powers to investigate and sanction platforms where warranted.” 

But don’t expect penalties to come right away for individual breaches, such as failing to take down a specific video promoting hate speech. 

Instead, the DSA is more about whether tech companies have the right processes in place to reduce the harm that their algorithm-based recommendation systems can inflict on users. Essentially, they’ll have to let the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm and top digital enforcer, look under the hood to see how their algorithms work. 

EU officials “are concerned with user behavior on the one hand, like bullying and spreading illegal content, but they’re also concerned about the way that platforms work and how they contribute to the negative effects,” said Sally Broughton Micova, an associate professor at the University of East Anglia. 

That includes looking at how the platforms work with digital advertising systems, which could be used to profile users for harmful material like disinformation, or how their livestreaming systems function, which could be used to instantly spread terrorist content, said Broughton Micova, who’s also academic co-director at the Centre on Regulation in Europe, a Brussels think tank. 

Big platforms have to identify and assess potential systemic risks and whether they’re doing enough to reduce them. These assessments are due by the end of August and then they will be independently audited. 

The audits are expected to be the main tool to verify compliance — though the EU’s plan has faced criticism for lacking details that leave it unclear how the process will work. 

What about the rest of the world? 

Europe’s changes could have global impact. Wikipedia is tweaking some policies and modifying its terms of use to provide more information on “problematic users and content.” Those alterations won’t be limited to Europe and “will be implemented globally,” said the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts the community-powered encyclopedia. 

Snapchat said its new reporting and appeal process for flagging illegal content or accounts that break its rules will be rolled out first in the EU and then globally in the coming months. 

It’s going to be hard for tech companies to limit DSA-related changes, said Broughton Micova, adding that digital ad networks aren’t isolated to Europe and that social media influencers can have global reach.
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The U.S. Justice Department is suing Elon Musk’s SpaceX for refusing to hire refugees and asylum-recipients at the rocket company.

In a lawsuit filed on Thursday, the Justice Department said SpaceX routinely discriminated against these job applicants between 2018 and 2022, in violation of U.S. immigration laws.

The lawsuit says that Musk and other SpaceX officials falsely claimed the company was allowed to hire only U.S. citizens and permanent residents due to export control laws that regulate the transfer of sensitive technology.

“U.S. law requires at least a green card to be hired at SpaceX, as rockets are advanced weapons technology,” Musk wrote in a June 16, 2020, tweet cited in the lawsuit.

In fact, U.S. export control laws impose no such restrictions, according to the Justice Department.

Those laws limit the transfer of sensitive technology to foreign entities, but they do not prevent high-tech companies such as SpaceX from hiring job applicants who have been granted refugee or asylum status in the U.S. (Foreign nationals, however, need a special permit.)

“Under these laws, companies like SpaceX can hire asylees and refugees for the same positions they would hire U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents,” the Department said in a statement. “And once hired, asylees and refugees can access export-controlled information and materials without additional government approval, just like U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents.”

The company did not respond to a VOA request for comment on the lawsuit and whether it had changed its hiring policy.

Recruiters discouraged refugees, say investigators

The Justice Department’s civil rights division launched an investigation into SpaceX in 2020 after learning about the company’s alleged discriminatory hiring practices.

The inquiry discovered that SpaceX “failed to fairly consider or hire asylees and refugees because of their citizenship status and imposed what amounted to a ban on their hire regardless of their qualification, in violation of federal law,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke said in a statement.

“Our investigation also found that SpaceX recruiters and high-level officials took actions that actively discouraged asylees and refugees from seeking work opportunities at the company,” Clarke said.

According to data SpaceX provided to the Justice Department, out of more than 10,000 hires between September 2018 and May 2022, SpaceX hired only one person described as an asylee on his application.

The company hired the applicant about four months after the Justice Department notified it about its investigation, according to the lawsuit.

No refugees were hired during this period.

“Put differently, SpaceX’s own hiring records show that SpaceX repeatedly rejected applicants who identified as asylees or refugees because it believed that they were ineligible to be hired due to” export regulations, the lawsuit says.

On one occasion, a recruiter turned down an asylee “who had more than nine years of relevant engineering experience and had graduated from Georgia Tech University,” the lawsuit says.

Suit seeks penalties, change

SpaceX, based in Hawthorne, California, designs, manufactures and launches advanced rockets and spacecraft.

The Justice Department’s lawsuit asks an administrative judge to order SpaceX to “cease and desist” its alleged hiring practices and seeks civil penalties and policy changes.
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Ukrainian soldier Ilya Mikhalchuk was wounded near Bakhmut and captured by Wagner Group mercenaries in February. He had both arms amputated while in captivity and was released in April. Thanks to volunteers, he is now in the U.S. getting prostheses. Iryna Shynkarenko has the story, narrated by Anna Rice. VOA footage by Kostiantyn Golubchyk.
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When Reed Cammack hears the first meadowlark of spring, he knows his family has made it through another cold, snowy winter on the western South Dakota prairie. Nothing’s better, he says, than getting up at sunrise as the birds light up the area with song.

“It’s part of the flora and fauna of our Great Plains, and it’s beautiful to hear,” says Cammack, 42, a sixth-generation rancher who raises cattle on 4,047 hectares (10,000 acres) of mostly unaltered native grasslands.

But the number of returning birds has dropped steeply, despite seemingly ideal habitat. “There are quite a few I don’t see any more, and I don’t know for sure why,” says Cammack’s 92-year-old grandfather, Floyd, whose family has allowed conservation groups to install a high-tech tracking tower and conduct bird surveys.

North America’s grassland birds are deeply in trouble 50 years after adoption of the Endangered Species Act, with numbers plunging as habitat loss, land degradation and climate change threaten what remains of a once-vast ecosystem.

Over half the grassland bird population has been lost since 1970 — more than any other type of bird. Some species have declined 75% or more, and a quarter are in extreme peril.

And the 38% — 760,000 square kilometers (293,000 square miles) — of historic North American grasslands that remain are threatened by intensive farming and urbanization, and as trees once held at bay by periodic fires spread rapidly, consuming vital rangeland and grassland bird habitat.

Biologists, conservation groups, government agencies and, increasingly, farmers and ranchers are teaming up to stem or reverse losses.

Scientists are sharing survey and monitoring data and using sophisticated computer modeling to determine the biggest threats. They’re intensifying efforts to tag birds and installing radio telemetry towers to track their whereabouts. And they’re working with farmers and ranchers to implement best practices that ensure survival of their livelihoods and native birds — both dependent on a healthy ecosystem.

“Birds are the canary in the coal mine,” says Amanda Rodewald, senior director of the Center for Avian Population Studies at Cornell University’s ornithology lab. “They’re an early warning of environmental changes that also can affect us.”

Monitoring birds

Daniel Horton sets his timer, cocks his head and listens intently while standing in a fog-shrouded expanse of grasses and wildflowers, the morning horizon glowing pink and orange.

Trills, twitters, chirps and coos create a dawn chorus in the native mixed-grass prairie of western Nebraska, while Horton, a field biologist with the Bird Conservancy of the Rockies, records everything he sees and hears on grazing land improved by a local rancher.

Western meadowlarks sing atop flowering yuccas. Grasshopper sparrows flit and disappear. Horned larks hunker in the dense grass. There are rock wrens, nighthawks, mourning doves and lark buntings.

Horton is recording the species and number of birds and assessing their habitat. It’s part of an effort to estimate bird population densities and evaluate whether conservation efforts are making a difference. Once grasslands are gone, he says, “it becomes harder for them to … live in those areas where they evolved and where they have been historically.”

A 2019 study found grassland bird populations had fallen 53% since 1970, compared to overall bird loss of 30%, in the continental United States and Canada. A 2022 report found that, of 24 grassland bird species, two-thirds had experienced significant population declines and eight were at a tipping point — having lost 50% or more of their breeding population and on track to lose another 50% in the next half century — putting them on a path to possible extinction.

The lesser prairie chicken is the only grassland bird federally listed as endangered, but only in part of its range. It has declined by more than 90% with an estimated remaining 2022 population of about 27,000. The Senate and House have voted to delist the bird in an effort led by Republicans who say it hinders oil and gas drilling; environmentalists hope President Joe Biden will veto the measure.

Among birds at a tipping point: Sprague’s pipit, a songbird that’s lost more than 75% of its population since 1970 and breeds only in portions of Montana, North Dakota and small patches of three Canadian provinces. The chestnut-collared longspur, which lives in the northern shortgrass prairie and sings as it flies. The Henslow’s sparrow, which barely sings at all. And the bobolink, known for its robust songs and long-distance travels to South America.

“We’re sort of banging the drum … that we’re having a massive loss of birds,” says Amy Burnett, spokeswoman for the Bird Conservancy of the Rockies. “If we don’t start turning that curve around, we won’t have the western meadowlark. We won’t have the … beautiful song of the Baird’s sparrow. Imagine if we lost that on the prairies.”

Although some grassland birds require large contiguous prairie lands, most adapted to living alongside agriculture, Cornell’s Rodewald says. That was possible because some habitat was nestled within fields or along the margins and farmers often fallowed some fields.

But more-intensive farming practices — including eliminating hedgerows and buffers, planting fewer crop types and pesticide use — have taken a toll. And climate change is bringing hotter, drier conditions that affect soil health and worsen erosion, while watering holes dry up.

So nonprofits and government agencies are working with farmers and offering incentives to improve soil, preserve grasslands and adopt bird-friendly practices, such as delaying mowing until after nesting season.

It’s a delicate balance, “because everybody needs to eat,” says Brandt Ryder, chief conservation scientist for the Bird Conservancy of the Rockies. Conservation groups are working to understand what farmers and ranchers need to be profitable while helping reverse grassland and bird decline.

“Private landowners care and are very, very good stewards of [the land] because it’s their livelihood,” he says.

Turning to technology

To help target conservation efforts, the Bird Conservancy is integrating its population and habitat data with other sources, including the U.S. Geological Survey’s long-running breeding bird survey and Cornell’s eBird sightings database.

Still, much is unknown: If birds must travel great distances to find suitable breeding habitat, does that affect breeding success? Where do they stop during migration and for how long? What’s happening on their wintering grounds, and how many birds return from their winter territory?

“Where along that full life cycle both in time and space are these birds suffering the most?” says Andy Boyce, a research ecologist at the Smithsonian’s Migratory Bird Center who studies the Sprague’s pipit. “We need to figure out a lot of this before we can even start to prioritize where conservation actually needs to take place.”

Researchers aim to find out through a growing network of radio telemetry receivers being installed across the Great Plains to help track birds from Canada to Mexico’s Chihuahuan desert.

When a bird fitted with a tiny transmitter flies within 20 kilometers (12 miles) of a receiver — mounted on towers, poles and other structures — information is stored on a computer connected to a cell network accessible to researchers.

Radio telemetry is more efficient than traditional banding that requires birds to be caught or spotted again to provide data on movements and longevity, researchers say. That’s key because many grassland birds roam the Great Plains for the best nesting habitat instead of returning to the same spot every year — a trait that evolved when wildfires and great bison herds created a constantly shifting grassland mosaic.

The receivers, part of the Motus Wildlife Tracking System managed by Birds Canada, have been installed extensively throughout Eastern and Western North America., but there were few in central grasslands until recent years, Boyce says.

Researchers are about halfway to building a network of 150 or more receivers from Canada into Mexico, says Matthew Webb, an ecologist who leads the Bird Conservancy of the Rockies’ installation efforts.

“It is extremely important to get adequate coverage,” including areas where grassland birds aren’t normally found, such as mountain passes where birdwatchers have reported sightings, he says. “We need to fill in those knowledge gaps.”

Several years ago, Baird’s sparrows, which have lost more than half of their population since 1970 and almost exclusively breed in the northern Great Plains states and Canada, suddenly showed up in Colorado and have bred there successfully since. It’s unclear, Webb says, if their range is expanding or if disturbance in their core breeding area — perhaps oil and gas drilling — forced them to turn back and use less-ideal habitat.

In South Dakota, the Cammacks allowed the bird conservancy to install the tracking tower on their ranch and another group has conducted surveys that found several tipping point species.

“Coming up from my grandfather … we do enjoy the native species, maybe more than the average rancher to a certain extent,” Reed Cammack says. “But a healthy ecosystem is a great place to raise cattle, too.”

Saving grasslands

Green prairie stretches for miles as Brian Sprenger heads out to check on his cows, many with days-old calves by their sides.

He brakes his pickup truck as an antelope bounds away and points to a handful of sharp-tailed grouse on a flat area where males gather during mating season to strut and dance.

“It’s one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen,” says Sprenger, 44, who sometimes sees two dozen or more grouse performing courtship rituals. He never saw them as a kid, when much of the rangeland near Sidney, Nebraska, was overgrazed or farmed.

But things began to change about 20 years ago, when more ranchers put land into a federal conservation program, replanted native grasses and began frequently moving their cattle to prevent overgrazing.

“We’ve noticed that as we have started allowing these rangelands to flourish … that we have seen a lot of different bird species,” says Sprenger.

Almost all of North America’s remaining prairie is on rangelands — and 90% of all grasslands are in private hands — meaning landowner cooperation is critical to stopping bird declines, scientists say. Without cattle, they say, there would be no high-quality grasslands, which require grazing and hooves on the ground to stay healthy.

Despite the progress, many land owners now must contend with fast-spreading eastern red cedar and juniper trees that are contributing to the grassland ecosystem collapse, says Dirac Twidwell, a University of Nebraska professor and rangeland ecologist.

Tree and shrub encroachment and cultivation now account for roughly the same amount of Great Plains loss every year — a combined 16,000 square kilometers (6,250 square miles), says Twidwell, a science advisor to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service. All told, an estimated 756,000 square kilometers (292,000 square miles) have been overtaken by trees and shrubs since settlers arrived.

That leaves less land for ranching and farming — and pushes out grassland birds, which can’t adapt to the wooded environment. Shrinking rangeland now contributes to an estimated $323 million a year in potential losses to ranchers, says Twidwell.

So landowners and environment groups are cutting down trees and stepping up prescribed burns that eliminate their seeds.

“These are some of our last remaining grasslands on the planet that are largescale grasslands; that’s why you’re seeing an increased sense of urgency from bird conservation groups and the livestock industry,” Twidwell says. “All of them are saying the same thing: ‘Wait a minute, this is universally a negative.’ ”

Rancher Reed Cammack says land owners are well aware of their outsized role.

“It’s part of our responsibility … to take good care of what we have,” he says. “If there’s to be anything left for my kids’ kids to see, it’s imperative that we do something now.”
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China’s biggest salt producer urged people against panic buying after Japan began discharging treated radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean from the wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant on Thursday, despite firm opposition from Beijing.

The state-run National Salt Industry Group, the world’s biggest common salt producer, said in a statement issued hours later that it was ramping up supplies as people in some parts of China had rushed to stock up.

Salt shelves were emptied in supermarkets and sold out in online sales platforms in some places, including Beijing and Shanghai.

China has opposed Japan’s action, saying the Japanese government had not proved that the water discharged would be safe and has banned the import of all aquatic products from Japan.

“We are working overtime to produce, distribute and making all efforts to guarantee market supply,” the National Salt Industry Group said in its statement.

“Please purchase rationally and do not panic buy blindly,” it said.

The national salt group said sea salt only accounts for 10% of the salt people consume, the rest are well and late salt, which are safe from contamination.

The group said its salt supply is ample and the stock shortfall would be temporary.

Japan has criticized China for spreading “scientifically unfounded claims” and maintains the water release is safe, noting that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has also concluded that the impact it would have on people and the environment was “negligible.”
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