What Happened Today: April 20, 2022

Russia’s online statecraft; guns now highest cause of child mortality; MacKenzie Scott’s social experiment

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The Big Story

While Russia continues to escalate its offensive with aggressive artillery strikes along the eastern front of Ukraine, the war intensifies in the digital realm, where Russia is pushing its narrative onto its own people through its nascent roster of social media platforms. Billed as Russia’s alternatives to YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok respectively, Rutube, Fiesta, VKontakte, and Yappy are being touted by Russian officials as superior hubs for information and entertainment. The move to bulk up its domestic social media apparatus has had some success and comes after Russia recently banned its residents from accessing Facebook and Instagram: Last month, 1.1 million Russian users downloaded the Rutube app, where the news is exclusively provided by pro-government broadcasters. 

Still, some Russians find the government platforms lacking. “I tried to use it, but I had an extremely negative impression from the quality of the video and content that was posted,” one young internet user told The Wall Street Journal, saying he prefers to get his news from YouTube. Indeed, as Russia has blocked at least 900 websites that might have war-related content, Russians are clamoring for the open web, warts and all, with average daily demand for virtual private networks, which can bypass government censorship, growing 2,700% in Russia as they prepared to invade Ukraine. Outside of Russia, the state-backed narratives pushed by bots and operatives on Western social platforms are running up against Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation, which claims 300,000 volunteers creating videos and posts that undercut the Russian narrative, advocate for Western consumers and companies to boycott Russia, and call for more military aid to Ukraine. 

Read more: https://www.wsj.com/articles/from-youtube-to-rutube-inside-russias-influence-campaign-11650447002

In The Back Pages: MacKenzie Scott’s Social Experiment 

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The Rest

→ More children and teenagers are dying from guns than from any other cause, a new study in The New England Journal of Medicine reports. Last week The Scroll noted the worrying rise in child and adolescent suicides in the United States, which has become the second most common cause of death for children. Today, more than 10,000 children die each year because of guns, which marks a roughly 42% increase in the past two decades. The increase in gun-related death stands in contrast to the continual decrease in automotive accidents, which had long been the leading cause of death for children. Indeed, carmakers have made vehicles increasingly safe, with improved blindspot detection and better airbags to reduce accidents and injury. Guns, meanwhile, have trended in the other direction, with safety-lock features becoming less popular as gunmakers gravitate toward more powerful and easy-to-use military-style weapons.

Read More: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2200169

→ As Congress considers a raft of new legislation aimed at curbing Big Tech, the United States security establishment is pushing back. On Monday, several prominent former defense and intelligence officials published an open letter seeking to kneecap pending legislation. Citing Russian misinformation and cybersecurity risks, the former officials, including James Clapper, who served as President Obama’s director of national intelligence, and Leon Panetta, Obama’s CIA director and secretary of defense, argued that to fight Russia’s efforts, Big Tech should maintain its ability to collect the personal data of U.S. citizens, and that social media companies must be able to mitigate the power of misinformation campaigns on their platforms. Nevermind that Clapper and Panetta themselves were practitioners of the same statecraft they accuse the Russians of perpetrating. Recall that Clapper oversaw (and lied to Congress about) the National Security Agency’s massive operation to sweep up the metadata of hundreds of millions of Americans. And in the lead-up to the 2020 election, Clapper and Panetta were signatories on a letter that argued without evidence that Hunter Biden’s laptop full of emails related to his Burisma bribes “ha[d] all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

→ At its Shanghai factory, where production halted because of China’s zero-COVID lockdown mandate, Tesla is set to resume making its vehicles with a clever work-around: force workers to live inside the factory, where they will eat and sleep on the floor. Though some Chinese manufacturing facilities house workers in dormitories with a kitchen and at least sparse amenities, Tesla’s Shanghai operation lacks such accommodations, which, according to a company memo obtained by Bloomberg, has led the company to this new arrangement, providing workers with sleeping bags and meal budgets that are determined by the seniority of the worker’s title. 

→ Louisiana is drastically reshaping its high school curriculum in the hopes of overhauling a public school system that currently sends approximately 47% of its graduating seniors to join the working poor and ranks 42nd in the nation. The state’s new program, Fast Forward Initiative, will offer high schoolers apprenticeships and associate’s degrees in growing fields with better prospects, like aerospace manufacturing, so participants could use their training and debt-free associate’s education to begin $50,000 entry-level positions.

→ Forty-five years after R. Murray Schafer, a Canadian composer and environmentalist, coined the term noise pollution, a new study from Rutgers New Jersey Medical School has found a strong link between living near noisy things—trains, airports, highways—and having a heart attack. The study analyzed 16,000 heart attacks that occurred in New Jersey in 2018, dividing the sample into those who were exposed to higher decibels of noise pollution and those exposed to lower decibels of noise pollution. The study’s lead author, Dr. Abel Moreyra, a cardiology professor at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, concluded that the heart attack rate was 72% higher in areas with more noise pollution and that 5% of New Jersey’s heart attacks were ultimately caused by noise pollution.

→ Despite the draconian “zero-COVID” lockdowns, China is still struggling to control its current surge of COVID-19 cases, leading to calls from scientists around the world for China to begin importing vaccinations from the West. China developed and has been using its own vaccine, Sinopharm, which has been found to be considerably less effective than the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. A study published in March by researchers at the University of Hong Kong concluded that those age 60 and older who received two jabs of the Chinese Sinopharm vaccine were three times more likely to die of COVID-19 than those 60 and older who received two jabs of the BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine. Compounding the vaccine’s low level of protection, China has had difficulty vaccinating its older citizens: 43% of those 60 and older have not received a booster, or third dose of the vaccine, leaving them vulnerable to the latest Omicron surge as the case count in China nears its high.

→ A severe outbreak of avian flu has infected some 27 million U.S. birds—including chickens as well as penguins—and dramatically hurt poultry farmers, many of whom have had to destroy the infected animals to tamp down on the spread of the disease. The price of eggs has skyrocketed as a result, with the average price for a dozen eggs at $2.95, up from $1 in November. Agriculture analysts are concerned about this round of the flu because it appears to be significantly worse than the last major outbreak in 2015. Today, 1.3% of U.S. chickens have been affected by the outbreak, compared to just .02% after the same number of days into the prior outbreak. “What chicken egg prices did last time affected the market for years,” one agriculture industry analyst told The Washington Post, adding that a longer outbreak will push up the cost not only of eggs and chicken but also of baked goods and processed foods reliant on eggs for production.

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MacKenzie Scott’s Social Experiment 

MacKenzie Scott—the ex-wife of Jeff Bezos, whose divorce settlement in 2019 netted her a fortune that’s grown to $52 billion—has spent the past two years testing out a hypothesis: Will dropping billions of dollars into the bank accounts of more than a thousand nonprofit organizations help or hinder those groups in realizing their ambitions? 

So far, Scott’s documented the experiment in several short blog posts that, like much about the overall process, is short on detail. As to how Scott and her small team decide upon recipients, she’s said that not everyone they consider is selected, with some groups passed over because of “unproven management teams,” while the ones deemed capable to “absorb and make effective use of funding” have been “selected through a rigorous process of research and analysis.” The nonprofits themselves run the gamut of causes, from youth sports to arts and culture to YMCAs, though many seem to also rise to the top in conjunction with the news cycle. When the media began intensely focusing on hate crimes against Asian Americans, Scott significantly increased her giving to Asian American nonprofits. As the COVID-19 pandemic worsened food security for vulnerable populations, Scott poured money into food banks. 

Scott’s general approach to philanthropy is a departure from the typical giving of billionaires who’ve made their riches in business or finance and wish to lend their wisdom and expertise to the social problems that are the domain of their grantees. Compared to someone like Bill Gates, who writes books and speaks frequently about the water sanitation programming he’s spearheaded in sub-Saharan Africa, Scott’s eschewed technocratic charity. Rather than help people on their behalf, Scott simply disperses money with no strings attached, and a lot of it. The grand sum of funds and how fast Scott has spent it is itself noteworthy, with $12.4 billion dispersed in two years across 1,257 nonprofits. In the course of one 12-month period, Scott spent more than two of the largest U.S. charities, the Ford Foundation and the Gates Foundation, combined.

For the grantees on the receiving end, this is also an unusual process. The phone calls from Scott’s team come out of the blue, alerting each group that it is about to receive one of the largest single donations it’s ever taken. One Bloomberg survey of Scott’s recipients found that 90% of them had never been given so much money at one time.

As atypical as the process has been, the money for many of these organizations is much needed and will go to noble causes. If there’s been one dominant critique thus far of Scott’s method, it’s the lack of transparency of exactly how much recipients have received and why they’ve been chosen. Scott doesn’t run her fund through a foundation that must publicly disclose its finances in tax filings but rather gives her money through donor-advised funds, which allow her to make unlimited gifts and receive a tax deduction without any need to disclose when or where that money is spent. 

Scott has vowed to release a database of her gifts to make the process more open. (This pledge came in a blog post, not in an interview: She and her team have thus far refused every media request for comment.) The database will likely assuage many critics, and as fair as these calls for more transparency have been, the more significant issue at hand is the lack of any public input or accountability on the impact of the gifts. It would seem counterintuitive that giving a charity organization tens or hundreds of millions of dollars could somehow have a detrimental effect, but the scale of the money elevates these donations into a different category of social engineering. 

In Connecticut, for example, four nonprofits all took in major multimillion donations during Scott’s latest giving round—the smallest gift of $5 million went to Shatterproof, an addiction crisis center founded in Norwalk by a parent of a child lost to an overdose. The unprecedented size of the gift will allow Shatterproof to build up its office and programs, attract the best employees with better pay, market themselves to a larger pool of volunteers, and solicit more grants from other donors. It will also make potential employees and future donors less inclined toward Courage to Speak, another addiction prevention nonprofit in Norwalk founded by a parent who lost a child to an overdose. 

For those nonprofits who don’t get the money, their board of directors might wonder, Is there something wrong with how this organization is being run? Why is it less attractive to the more generous donors? And why can’t it bring in the same kind of talented staff and volunteers that gravitate to the better-funded organization across the street? Maybe the best thing to do, then, is to replicate the program and design of the organization that is getting money. And in the cities where a handful of nonprofits took in hundreds of millions in grants from Scott and dozens more didn’t get any money, the process repeats: Those who missed out on the transformational gift are now incentivized to mimic the winners to become more appealing.

“In Iowa, it’s difficult for us to find large donors,” Scot Orban, a director of a nonprofit in Iowa, recently told one reporter. Orban’s group did not get funding from Scott, but others nearby did. On one of Scott’s blog posts, Orban made a plea in the comments for Scott to give his group money too, but the request went unanswered. “It’s literally an act of utter desperation on our behalf,” he said. By most accounts, it seems as though Scott’s gifts will allow the recipients to improve their chances at success. But it’s unclear yet if the ungoverned scale of the donations and lack of transparency will push other organization’s into desperate circumstances.