The business of business is profit, not defending democracy, truth or anything else

Facebook: Clean-up on Aisle 3!

In other words, “Houston, we're got a problem!”

The business model - mining for minds

A whistleblower at Facebook recently released the Facebook Papers.[1] Those internal company documents show that Facebook's algorithms were set to intentionally foment anger and discord before the 1/6 coup attempt because that was the most profitable thing to do. When a social media platform like Facebook has content that makes people angry or otherwise emotionally whipped up, they spend more time on the platform. That makes the people spending more time on the platform better products to sell to advertisers. That increases the platform's profits. 

Users of social media are the product the social media companies sell to advertisers. Specifically, their eyeballs on cell phone and computer screens is what is being sold. The longer and more eyeballs they can trap onto screens, the more money the company makes.[2] That is the business model and it is smashingly successful. So smashing that it arguably is a major factor helping to smash American democracy into some form of corrupt authoritarianism or fascism.

The New York Times writes:

Company documents show that the social network’s employees repeatedly raised red flags about the spread of misinformation and conspiracies before and after the contested November vote.

Sixteen months before last November’s presidential election, a researcher at Facebook described an alarming development. She was getting content about the conspiracy theory QAnon within a week of opening an experimental account, she wrote in an internal report.

On Nov. 5, two days after the election, another Facebook employee posted a message alerting colleagues that comments with “combustible election misinformation” were visible below many posts.

Four days after that, a company data scientist wrote in a note to his co-workers that 10 percent of all U.S. views of political material — a startlingly high figure — were of posts that alleged the vote was fraudulent.

In each case, Facebook’s employees sounded an alarm about misinformation and inflammatory content on the platform and urged action — but the company failed or struggled to address the issues. The internal dispatches were among a set of Facebook documents obtained by The New York Times that give new insight into what happened inside the social network before and after the November election, when the company was caught flat-footed as users weaponized its platform to spread lies about the vote.

Facebook has publicly blamed the proliferation of election falsehoods on former President Donald J. Trump and other social platforms. In mid-January, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, said the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol was “largely organized on platforms that don’t have our abilities to stop hate. “Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, told lawmakers in March that the company “did our part to secure the integrity of our election.”

But the company documents show the degree to which Facebook knew of extremist movements and groups on its site that were trying to polarize American voters before the election. The documents also give new detail on how aware company researchers were after the election of the flow of misinformation that posited votes had been manipulated against Mr. Trump.

The NYT article goes on to point out that Facebook’s employees believed the social network could have done more. Enforcement of Facebook groups arguing that the 2020 election was stolen was not coordinated, but instead piecemeal. Those lies were not stopped. Regarding QAnon, Facebook employees warned for years about its potential to radicalize users, so Facebook cannot honestly argue it was unaware of what the radical right was doing. Facebook's algorithms sent a test account an employee set up to QAnon because the fake account indicated that the fake person, Carol Smith, calling herself a conservative mom who claimed to follow radical right propaganda and lies sources, Fox News and Sinclair Broadcasting. 

That was an internal Facebook research project called “Carol’s Journey to QAnon.” A key QAnon crackpot conspiracy was that the ex-president was valiantly opposing a shadowy cabal of Democratic pedophiles. According to a Facebook researcher, Carol Smith’s account feed devolved in three weeks into “a constant flow of misleading, polarizing and low-quality content.” The same thing happened with fake accounts set to look like liberals. Facebook algorithms were set to emotionally whip people up and polarize them to increase the time their minds stayed trapped in Facebook.  

 

Questions: 

1: Should Facebook sue the whistleblowers that have leaked internal company documents? 

2. From a free speech point of view, is one relatively non-toxic policy, assessing corporate taxes at least in part on higher taxes on revenues or profits that come in from or are associated with objectively false content? 

Footnotes: 

1. According to the AP, “the Facebook Papers represents a unique collaboration between 17 American news organizations, including The Associated Press.” AP writes: 

Facebook the company is losing control of Facebook the product — not to mention the last shreds of its carefully crafted, decade-old image as a benevolent company just wanting to connect the world.

Thousands of pages of internal documents provided to Congress by a former employee depict an internally conflicted company where data on the harms it causes is abundant, but solutions, much less the will to act on them, are halting at best.

The crisis exposed by the documents shows how Facebook, despite its regularly avowed good intentions, appears to have slow-walked or sidelined efforts to address real harms the social network has magnified and sometimes created. They reveal numerous instances where researchers and rank-and-file workers uncovered deep-seated problems that the company then overlooked or ignored.  

“At the heart of these stories is a premise which is false. Yes, we’re a business and we make profit, but the idea that we do so at the expense of people’s safety or wellbeing misunderstands where our own commercial interests lie,” Facebook said in a prepared statement Friday. “The truth is we’ve invested $13 billion and have over 40,000 people to do one job: keep people safe on Facebook.”

Statements like these are the latest sign that Facebook has gotten into what Sophie Zhang, a former Facebook data scientist, described as a “siege mentality” at the company. Zhang last year accused the social network of ignoring fake accounts used to undermine foreign elections. With more whistleblowers — notably Haugen — coming forward, it’s only gotten worse.  

“Facebook has been going through a bit of an authoritarian narrative spiral, where it becomes less responsive to employee criticism, to internal dissent and in some cases cracks down upon it,” said Zhang, who was fired from Facebook in the fall of 2020. “And this leads to more internal dissent.”

No wonder Facebook is changing its name to Meta (what a 😜 stupid name). Companies in serious public relations trouble do that all the time. Cigarette companies, financial firms, and most everyone else in public relations hot water changes their name to hide their sleaze, corruption and/or crimes. It is an effective way of laundering bad corporate behavior, and personal and social damage in the public memory. 

2. That is like eyeballs on televisions screens or ears listening to radio. The more viewers or listeners a TV or radio broadcast has, the more money advertisers are willing to pay for their ads on those platforms. Advertisers want and pay for your valuable mental attention. Mental attention comes via eyeballs and ears. Another analogy is casinos. The longer the average person stays and plays, the more money they will lose. That fact is inherent in markets and it is augmented by casinos rigging their games to increase the odds of people losing. 

The point is simple: the average person's time and attention has commercial value. All advertisers want it and pay to get it -- that is the point of buying advertisements. Few advertisers ask or care about how those consumer minds get trapped or what political or social collateral damage that mining for minds might have done. It's just business. Morals, social conscience, democracy and truth are irrelevant.

Effective oil company disinformation on climate change

The AP and other sources are reporting that the CEO of Exxon-Mobile is disputing allegations that for decades his company has spread disinformation about climate change. AP writes:

WASHINGTON (AP) — ExxonMobil’s chief executive said Thursday that his company “does not spread disinformation regarding climate change″ as he and other oil company chiefs countered congressional allegations the industry concealed evidence about the dangers of it. 

In prepared testimony at a landmark House hearing, CEO Darren Woods said ExxonMobil “has long acknowledged the reality and risks of climate change, and it has devoted significant resources to addressing those risks.″ 

The much-anticipated hearing before the House Oversight Committee comes after months of public efforts by Democrats to obtain documents and other information on the oil industry’s role in stopping climate action over multiple decades. The appearance of the four oil executives — from ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP America and Shell — has drawn comparisons to a high-profile hearing in the 1990s with tobacco executives who famously testified that they didn’t believe nicotine was addictive.

“The fossil fuel industry has had scientific evidence about the dangers of climate change since at least 1977. Yet for decades, the industry spread denial and doubt about the harm of its products — undermining the science and preventing meaningful action on climate change even as the global climate crisis became increasingly dire,″ said Reps. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., and Ro Khanna, D-Calif.  

“Today’s staff memo shows Big Oil’s campaign to ‘greenwash’ their role in the climate crisis in action,” Maloney said. “These oil companies pay lip service to climate reforms, but behind the scenes they spend far more time lobbying to preserve their lucrative tax breaks.″

Maloney and other Democrats have focused particular ire on Exxon, after a senior lobbyist for the company was caught in a secret video bragging that Exxon had fought climate science through “shadow groups” and had targeted influential senators in an effort to weaken President Joe Biden’s climate agenda, including a bipartisan infrastructure bill and a sweeping climate and social policy bill currently moving through Congress.

In 2020, the BBC reported:

To understand what's happening today, we need to go back nearly 40 years.

Marty Hoffert leaned closer to his computer screen. He couldn't quite believe what he was seeing. It was 1981, and he was working in an area of science considered niche.

"We were just a group of geeks with some great computers," he says now, recalling that moment.

But his findings were alarming.

"I created a model that showed the Earth would be warming very significantly. And the warming would introduce climatic changes that would be unprecedented in human history. That blew my mind."

Marty Hoffert was one of the first scientists to create a model which predicted the effects of man-made climate change. And he did so while working for Exxon, one of the world's largest oil companies, which would later merge with another, Mobil.

Hoffert shared his predictions with his managers, showing them what might happen if we continued burning fossil fuels in our cars, trucks and planes.

But he noticed a clash between Exxon's own findings, and public statements made by company bosses, such as the then chief executive Lee Raymond, who said that "currently, the scientific evidence is inconclusive as to whether human activities are having a significant effect on the global climate".

"They were saying things that were contradicting their own world-class research groups," said Hoffert.

Angry, he left Exxon, and went on to become a leading academic in the field.

"What they did was immoral. They spread doubt about the dangers of climate change when their own researchers were confirming how serious a threat it was."

A 14 minute BBC podcast describes the tactics the oil industry used to sabotage efforts to tell the public about climate change and to begin responding to it. The oil industry used the same tactics to deny or downplay climate change science as the tobacco industry used to deny or downplay the addictiveness and dangers of cigarette smoking. Ruthless propaganda tactics and subversion of government by both oil and tobacco interests worked for decades to keep the public disinformed and divided, and government significantly paralyzed. Republicans but not Democrats went from ~50% believing in 2001 that human activity was the main cause of climate change, but by 2011 that had dropped to 30%. 

There were two separate realities, Republican and Democratic. By injecting political ideology and confusion over facts into climate change, inconvenient facts were easier to sweep aside. Tribal loyalty and deceptive propaganda, not facts, dictated perceptions of climate change reality for most Republicans. 

Last July, Politico wrote this:

A recently leaked draft report written by some of the world’s top climate scientists blamed disinformation and lobbying campaigns — including by Exxon Mobil — for undermining government efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increasing the dangers of global warming to society.

On Wednesday, Britain's Channel 4 broadcast a video of Exxon lobbyist Keith McCoy telling Greenpeace UK activists who were posing as headhunters that the oil giant would “aggressively fight against some of the science” including by using third-party “shadow groups.” McCoy also noted his lobbying efforts to strip climate provisions from President Joe Biden’s infrastructure proposal, many of which were dropped in a $1.2 trillion compromise framework.

The IPCC report said disinformation tactics have created “risks to society” because they have prevented governments from responding to the dangers from climate change.

Questions: 

1. Is Exxon's CEO a liar?

2. Has the fossil fuel industry deceived the American people by spreading lies and disinformation about the role of carbon fuels in climate change?

3. Has the fossil fuel industry money and lobbying significantly or mostly impaired government efforts to deal with climate change? 

The terrifying mendacity and fascism of Republican elites

Evidence of Republican Party mendacity and authoritarianism continue to accumulate. A week or so ago, Rachael Maddow reported that pro-ex-president attorney John Eastman disavowed a legal strategy memo he wrote that described how Mike Pence could have subverted the 2020 election and kept the ex-president in office. It would have been easy and effective. Legal experts believe the memo was crackpot nonsense and its implementation would have amounted to an overthrow of the government.

Maddow reported that last Friday Eastman disavowed his own memo to an interview with the National Review.

Then last night Maddow reported that in private on last Saturday, Eastman was clear that he still believes his strategy was sound and it would have been legal and effective at keeping the ex-president in power. He claimed it failed only because Mike Pence was a weak establishment Republican who refused to get on board with a rank and file Republican movement to keep the ex-president in power. An undercover reporter, Lauren Windsor, falsely posing as an ex-president supporter and person present at the 1/6 coup attempt approached Eastman on Saturday. After she dished out some flattery to Eastman about him doing God’s work, saving democracy and whatnot, she got him to speak candidly about the memo and Pence. 

Windsor to Eastman: You're doing the Lord’s work

Windsor to Eastman: Your legal strategy was totally solid

Eastman to Windsor: Yeah

Eastman to Windsor, Pence was just an 

establishment guy

In other reporting last night, Maddow reported that the same reporter, Lauren Windsor, conned Republican candidate for governor, Glenn Youngkin, into admitting that he is much more anti-abortion than he is willing to admit to the people of Virginia. The New York Times reported on Oct. 7:

Glenn Youngkin, the Republican nominee for governor of Virginia, revealed to her that he could not publicly press his anti-abortion agenda for fear of losing independent voters. 

A spokesman for Mr. Youngkin, the Republican candidate for governor in Virginia denied he had said anything privately that he had not uttered publicly, even though he told Ms. Windsor that he had to be discreet about his anti-abortion views. “When I’m governor and I have a majority in the House, we can start going on offense,” he said to her in their encounter. “But as a campaign topic, sadly, that in fact won’t win my independent votes that I have to get.”

At least in some competitive races, at least some Republican candidates feel it is sad that they have to deceive voters to get the votes they need to win elections. So, while in the midst of all-out attacks on democracy and elections, FRP (fascist Republican Party) elites are lying when they tell us they fighting hard to save democracy and elections. Meanwhile, the FRP members of congress either openly support these tactics or are complicit by their silence. FRP mendacity and fascism is nationwide and mainstream, not local or fringe crackpottery in the party.

Advocacy journalism, or immoral or unfair tactics?

The NYT commented on Lauren Windsor’s reporting tactics:

Ms. Windsor, 40, calls herself an “advocacy journalist,” though her methods fall beyond the pale of mainstream journalism, where reporters generally shy away from assuming false identities and secretly recording conversations.

She says her stings are justified by Republicans’ efforts to spread disinformation about the election and to weaken the nation’s democratic underpinnings through restrictive new voting laws and measures taking greater control over how elections are run.

“Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures,” she said in an interview. Assuming a false identity, she argued, can produce a truer record of a politician’s views. “Acting like you’re one of them — you’re going to elicit different answers than if you have a recorder in somebody’s face and they know you’re a journalist.”

While Ms. Windsor’s videos are often picked up by left-leaning news outlets, the political impact of them can be limited. Some of her Republican targets dismiss her videos as nothing they haven’t said before, in so many words.

The bait she dangles to draw out a response can be highly tendentious. “This is a Christian state, and Democrats are not Christian,” she told a cowboy-hatted Texas legislator in the Capitol in Austin.

Claiming to have been at the United States Capitol on Jan. 6, she challenged Mr. Pence about why he didn’t “stop the election from being stolen.” The former vice president didn’t bite: “Read the Constitution,” he said, before offering parting praise of her “heart.”  

Her practices have drawn inevitable comparisons to the right-wing gotcha squad Project Veritas, but she says there are crucial differences.

While Project Veritas has embedded moles in left-leaning groups and Democratic campaigns, Ms. Windsor says she avoids such methods.  

She makes her undercover recordings at public events in brief encounters. She usually uploads the full interaction to her YouTube page, The Undercurrent, or in segments on Twitter (which limits a video’s length).

Questions: 

1. Is what is reported here about Republican elites reasonably called mendacious or fascist?

2. Are Windsor's deceptive tactics to gather candid comments from Republicans who want their real beliefs hidden from voters unfair or immoral, or as some people argue, should fairness and morals[1] be mostly or completely ignored in politics because they are too subjective and/or irrational? 

3. Do candidates for elected office in a democracy, unlike political leaders in a tyranny, have any duty, legal, moral, ethical or otherwise, to be honest with voters, or is that ideal too utopian to be taken seriously, with most or all politicians mostly alike regardless of the form of government and kind of society they operate in?

4. Is the Democratic Party just as bad in terms of mendacity and authoritarianism or fascism as the FRP?

Footnote:

1. Fairness has been cited as an example of an essentially contested concept. Wikipedia writes:

Essentially contested concepts involve widespread agreement on a concept (e.g., “fairness”), but not on the best realization thereof. They are “concepts the proper use of which inevitably involves endless disputes about their proper uses on the part of their users”, and these disputes “cannot be settled by appeal to empirical evidence, linguistic usage, or the canons of logic alone.”

Morals and morality are also essentially contested concepts. From what I can tell, the FRP decided years ago that the sacred ends (single party power, wealth at the top, and Christian God in government) justify essentially all means, including lies, deceit and even illegal means when they can get away with it. 

What is the Opposite of Entropy?

 This stuck in my craw this morning while I was busy coding. As I understand it, as a system no longer maintains the energy necessary to sustain itself, either from external forces, or somehow generating it internally entropy begins to occur, and the system starts losing its form as its order is slowly subverted by chaotic forces.

Maybe I misunderstand that?

If so, then what of a hypothetical system absent any entropy at all? Would it be perfectly ordered? Is that in itself, a sort of perfect death of the system? Can it no longer grow and adapt?

I am not a student of systems theory in the general sense. There's far more that I don't know about it than anything I know about it.

Does anyone here have any insight on this? I'm not sure how to Google it because the title doesn't quite cut to the meat of what I'm wondering about.

I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Disagreement on facts and political discord cause damage

It clear and undeniable that the 2020 election is not over for the most of America's radical right. It may never be over for them. Some want some kind of revenge. Some want the ex-president put back in power right now. Some choose to believe that false crackpot conspiracies are real and true. One bit of crackpottery holds that the ex-president still is in power and is still running the country, with a plan to purge tens of thousands of deep state Democratic socialist pedophiles from government and restore God to his rightful role as a infallible dictator acting through his chosen vessel, the sacred ex-president. 

There's plenty tearing American society apart. To rationalize its main talking points, the radical right sweeps aside inconvenient facts, truths and sound reasoning. This is raw and primal. In the process, it undermines civility and democracy. The Washington Post writes on how a formerly united area in Montana has become bitterly divided. Some people are dying because of that. As usual, toxic social media is part of the mess:

KALISPELL, Mont. — By the time the third teenager had died by suicide since the start of the school year, the Flathead Valley was desperate for unity. The community had been jittery for months.

Supporters of former president Donald Trump, adamant that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election, were driving through town in pickups lined with Trump flags, Confederate flags and “Don’t Tread on Me” flags featuring a rattlesnake coiled and ready to strike at government intrusion.

The coronavirus pandemic had cleaved neighbors into camps for and against masks. A popular Facebook group featuring wildlife photos and local events had degenerated into a forum for politics, bullying and suspicion of the new people moving here.

The October death by suicide of the ninth local teenager in 16 months prompted offers of counseling, training for teachers and visits from national suicide prevention experts. But it also whiplashed into partisan recriminations, as residents lashed out in public forums against the superintendent of schools for failing to impose dress codes and discipline, against parents for not securing their plentiful firearms — used in several suicides — and against the supporters of masks and other pandemic restrictions for stifling teenagers. An issue the valley might have rallied around, in another time, risked dividing it yet again.

“Our community is going through a divorce right now,” Mark Johnson, the mayor of Kalispell, told local officials gathered at city hall to find a path forward from the tragedies, recounting a high school student telling him the hostility around him was a reminder of his parents. “The adults are arguing about what’s right and what’s wrong,” he said in an interview. “The kids are watching it happen. They don’t feel they’re on firm footing.”  

Hostility over the November election, the coronavirus and social movements have left a trail of bad blood among old-school Republicans, backers of the former president, increasingly vocal Democrats and out-of-state transplants, convulsing everything from the school district and the public library to daily interactions.  

Local businesses, politicians and ordinary people now find themselves navigating angry confrontations, and a nuanced political tradition of splitting tickets on Election Day has given way to partisanship that propelled a Republican sweep of races for governor, president and Congress in November for the first time in two decades.  

Even the Independence Day parade shifted this summer from a once-revered slice of Americana to another battle in a culture war. As thousands packed Main Street in Kalispell, the 26,000-population county seat, the Flathead Democrats’ float with a rainbow gay pride flag was heckled the length of the parade. A horse-drawn wagon bearing a “Trump 2024 No More Bulls---” flag rushed toward it, leading the Democrats to fear injury. Someone smashed the plate glass window of a bookstore along the route, then crumpled the gay pride flag displayed inside.  

Ultraconservatives newly in power backed two candidates for state office in 2020 with misdemeanor criminal records. One was Greg Gianforte, who pleaded guilty to a charge of assaulting a reporter during his campaign for the House back in 2017. (He would later be elected governor after an endorsement from Trump, who praised Gianforte’s violence.)  

Politics has animated Tammi Fisher for most of her adult life, and ever since Bill Clinton’s affair turned her away from the Democratic Party, she’s been a conservative Republican.

No one would mistake the outspoken former Kalispell mayor for a big-government liberal. But Fisher, 45, is aghast at what her party has become as Montana’s tradition of political independence gives way, as she sees it, to being just another Trump red state. “The extremists have stolen everything,” she said. “Our community has lost community,” 

Kevin Geer, who leads a local congregation of 4,000 at Canvas Church in Kalispell, said in an interview. He’s angry, too, at extremists he says are polluting religion with ugly politics: “They’ve hijacked the conversation.”

Questions: 

1. Is it reasonable to believe that, in general, the Republican Party and ex-president supporters are more intolerant and aggressive in their rhetoric and other behaviors than the rest of America's political spectrum?

2. Should people opposed to the ex-president refrain from expressing their opinions in public, e.g., displaying a gay pride flag, and instead just keep quiet to avoid provoking bad behavior from the radical right? Or, would keeping quiet make no difference and Montana's traditional independence would still be obliterated and replaced with hard core radical right partisanship? 

3. How much responsibility, if any, does the ex-president, the GOP and their enablers, e.g., Fox News, bear for fomenting the usually disinformed terror, rage and hate that now flows copiously from the radical right and most of the GOP's rank and file? Or, is the terror, rage and hate a falsehood and mostly or completely non-existent, with those bad feelings being grounded in facts, truths and sound reasoning instead of disinformation?  

4. Is it reasonable to label the current Republican Party as a whole as extremist, ultraconservative, radical right or fascist? Or is the GOP just doing conservative politics as usual?

Newsmax, Fox News air outdated, out-of-context photos of empty shelves in segments bashing Biden

• In recent segments, both Newsmax and Fox News displayed old, out-of-context photos in a misleading way that suggested they showed empty shelves in the U.S. today.

• For example, six photos that Newsmax represented as pictures capturing the current situation in the U.S. actually showed London in March 2020; Los Angeles in March 2020; Japan in September 2020; Australia in May; London in July; and Berlin in March 2012.

• Social media users have similarly circulated outdated photos that show grocery stores with depleted shelves due to early-pandemic panic buying or other circumstances.

Newsmax and Fox News have aired old, out-of-context photos of empty grocery store shelves in recent segments bashing President Joe Biden for the jammed-up supply chain that experts say is backlogged due to the coronavirus pandemic’s strain on the global economy.

Shortages of labor and raw materials have certainly created bottlenecks at a time when shoppers are looking to spend. And photos of depleted shelves, like these from the Associated Press in October, have legitimately helped to illustrate that story.

But other photos that appeared on Newsmax and Fox News were taken as early as March 2020, and some were snapped in other countries. The conservative networks represented them as though they were current and taken in the U.S.

"It is unprofessional and unethical to repurpose images from another time and place to illustrate a story that has nothing to do with the original context in which those images were made," said Nina Berman, the director of the photojournalism program at Columbia Journalism School.

"Using a photograph which shows empty shelves because of a coming typhoon in Japan, or old images from the early days of panic pandemic buying, to make a point about the current state of the U.S. economy is a classic case of disinformation," Berman added.

Newsmax and Fox News did not respond to requests for comment about the misleading photos.

Social media users have also circulated several outdated empty-shelf photos out of context. In one instance, conservative commentator Kimberly Klacik shared a photo of a British grocery store from March 2020 and falsely claimed that it offered "a look at" Biden’s economic policies. 

But when TV networks do the same thing, it reflects poorly on all journalists and contributes to distrust of other news organizations, said Lee Wilkins, an author on media ethics and professor emerita at the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism. 

PolitiFact reached out to Getty Images and the Associated Press, the services that supplied the empty-shelves photos that Newsmax and Fox News used out of context. We did not hear back. 

Newsmax poaches photos from London, Japan, Australia and Germany

On Oct. 18, Newsmax host Chris Salcedo interviewed Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., about the supply chain issues. Comer shared a clip from the interview on Twitter, writing that the "high prices and empty store shelves are a direct result of Joe Biden's reckless spending policies."

In the short clip, Comer faulted Biden’s economic policies and COVID-19 vaccine requirement for large employers for labor shortages, high prices and depleted store shelves. 

But as Comer spoke, Newsmax filtered through six old, out-of-context images of empty shelves on screen, leaving the false impression that they depicted the situation Comer described. Here’s what the original photos actually showed, according to their captions on Getty Images:

• The first photo showed empty shelves and long lines at a London supermarket in March 2020.

• The second photo showed an aisle of empty shelves at a Hispanic specialty market in Los Angeles in March 2020, back when former President Donald Trump was in office and the coronavirus pandemic was first breaking out.

• The third photo showed shelves that had been depleted at a convenience store in Japan as the country prepared for a typhoon to make landfall in September 2020.

• The fourth photo showed empty toilet paper shelves at a supermarket in Melbourne, Australia, as the city began a seven-day lockdown in late May.

• The fifth photo showed a sign seen at a London supermarket in July that read, "Please bear with us. We’re experiencing high demand."

• The sixth photo showed a customer walking through a drugstore in Berlin on the last day the store was open before permanently closing in March 2012.

Newsmax did not label any of the six photos on screen, an omission that media ethics experts said was deceptive toward viewers.

"If you’re going to run a story with a photo of empty shelves from Japan, be sure to say that they’re in Japan, and not in the U.S." Wilkins said.

Early pandemic photos on Fox News

A similar scene played out at Fox News Oct. 19, when host Laura Ingraham opened her show by teasing an interview with GOP Reps. Jim Jordan and Mark Green about the supply chain.

"A new piece in the Washington Post reveals what the left wants for America: to have less, and to suffer, of course," Ingraham said, referring to an Oct. 18 column on the supply chain woes.

As Ingraham spoke, two photos from the Associated Press displayed on screen. But neither was current. The two photos showed rows of empty shelves at a Nebraska supermarket and a Pennsylvania grocery store in March 2020.

A day earlier, Fox News host Will Cain also aired a photo from March 2020 as he blamed Biden for the depleted shelves and the chyron read, "Vaccine mandates are hurting America." Fox News had previously used the same image in a March 2020 report on its website.

https://www.politifact.com/article/2021/oct/22/newsmax-fox-news-air-outdated-out-context-photos-e/