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Twitter and Facebook said they have removed thousands of accounts connected to Chinese information campaigns, in the latest sign of Beijing’s ambitions to shape the global narrative around the country.
In a notice posted early Thursday, Twitter said that it took action against two networks comprising more than 2,000 accounts that worked to undermine accusations of human rights abuses in the western Chinese region of Xinjiang, where Chinese officials have interned Muslim minorities and subjected them to harsh surveillance.
Both networks promoted videos shot within Xinjiang that sought to portray the region as one of prosperity and freedom. One of the networks, which Twitter attributed to the Chinese Communist Party, also coordinated verbal attacks against activists and articles critical of China, while bolstering Chinese state media with positive comments and likes, according to a report on the takedown released by the Stanford Internet Observatory, a research group focused on the misuse of technology and social media.
The New York Times and ProPublica first identified a large number of accounts in the network in a June report about the campaign to project normalcy in Xinjiang.
Although many of the more than 30,000 tweets attributed to the network received little engagement, the use of harassment and hashtags indicated “an effort to reframe global debate or to crowd out critical/adversarial narratives,” the Stanford report said.
In a separate statement released late Wednesday, Facebook said it had taken down more than 500 accounts after they had helped to amplify posts from a fake Swiss biologist named “Wilson Edwards” who alleged the United States was interfering in World Health Organization efforts to track the origins of Covid-19. The fake scientist’s accusations were quoted by Chinese state media.
When the Swiss embassy in Beijing said “Wilson Edwards” did not exist, Facebook found that his account on the platform had been created less than 12 hours before it began posting.
The takedowns are the latest in a series of efforts by American social media companies to push back against Chinese information campaigns. Although blocked within China, Twitter and Facebook have become important avenues for shaping global opinions about China. In recent years, Chinese diplomats and state media have focused new efforts on building followings on the platforms.
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U.S. stocks rose in early trading Thursday, with the S&P 500 poised to recover some of its losses from the week. The benchmark index was 0.5 percent higher at the start of trading, while the tech heavy Nasdaq composite was up 0.2 percent.
The emergence of the new variant of the coronavirus, Omicron, has triggered a tumultuous stretch for major indexes. The S&P 500 on Friday marked its biggest drop since February, and has whipsawed between gains and losses since.
News that the Federal Reserve could reduce its support for the economy more quickly, as well as the first confirmed case of the Omicron variant in the U.S. prompted stocks to fall again. It has added up to a drop of about 3 percent since last Wednesday.
Oil prices, which have been similarly volatile, fell again on Thursday as officials from
OPEC, Russia and other oil-producing countries met to discuss their production targets. The group, called OPEC Plus, made no changes to its production schedule. West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. crude benchmark, dropped about 1 percent to $64.81 a barrel.
Since the Omicron variant was first reported, oil prices are down about 18 percent.
“The Omicron variant has sobered up markets during the last few days, halting the oil demand recovery enthusiasm and sending traders scrambling to limit risk in their portfolios,” Louise Dickson, senior oil markets analyst at Rystad Energy, wrote in a note.
The Labor Department reported a rise in initial jobless claims on Thursday, saying that claims rose last week by 28,000 to 222,000, but still remaining at their lowest level since March 2020. The jump follows sharp drop in claims in the prior week.
The Labor Department is set to publish its jobs report for November on Friday, with economists surveyed by Bloomberg expecting more than 500,000 jobs added last month.
Apple fell more than 3 percent in early trading after Bloomberg News reported that the company has warned suppliers that demand for iPhones is slowing as the holiday season approaches.
Read moreCredit…Alexey Malgavko/Reuters
Officials from OPEC, Russia and other oil-producing countries will meet by teleconference on Thursday to decide how much oil to produce in January and try to stop a drop in oil prices set off by reports of a threatening new Covid-19 variant.
“They will want to put some sort of floor under prices,” said Richard Bronze, head of geopolitics at Energy Aspects, a research firm.
But the producers group, known as OPEC Plus, also must worry about the implications of the announcement last week that the United States and several other nations, including China, will release tens of millions of barrels of oil from their stockpiles, with the goal of bringing down what the White House called “elevated gas prices at the pump.”
Analysts said this move, which could put a surge of oil on the market early next year, amounts to a kind of rebellion against OPEC Plus by its customers.
Because it’s too early to know what impact the Omicron variant may have on the world economy, the easiest move may be to stick with the agreed-upon plan and wait until the group’s next meeting, in January.
Maintaining the planned increase would probably ease friction with the Biden administration, which orchestrated the release of oil stocks from the United States Strategic Petroleum Reserve in conjunction with smaller moves by other large oil consumers.
It would “keep the White House content and stave off” an additional release of reserves, Helima Croft, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets, said in a note to clients. The Biden administration has signaled that another reserve release is possible if this one does not accomplish its goals.
Coupled with the impact of the new variant, prices are now down about 15 percent since late October, probably accomplishing much of what the White House wanted.
Over time, the strategic reserve releases could be a more worrying development than Omicron for OPEC Plus. Previous coordinated releases have been rare events, in response to disruptions in supply.
This release, though, is, in effect, a protest over what oil-consuming nations perceive as excessively rapid price increases, at least partly because of artificial constraints on supplies by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies.
What OPEC can do about this development remains to be seen.
Analysts say the oil officials will be mindful of the severe price crashes that occurred in the early months of the pandemic in 2020. READ THE FULL ARTICLE →
Read moreCredit…Kenny Holston for The New York Times
One of the arguments that Mississippi has made as a law banning abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy makes its way through the Supreme Court is that women have progressed enough economically to make abortion unnecessary.
Before Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court case that established a constitutional right to abortion up to 23 weeks, “there was little support for women who wanted a full family life and a successful career,” Mississippi’s attorney general, Lynn Fitch, said in a statement in July summing up the argument and announcing that she had filed a brief with the court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. “Maternity leave was rare. Paternity leave was unheard-of. The gold standard for professional success was a 9-to-5 with a corner office. The flexibility of the gig economy was a fairy tale.
“In these last 50 years,” she continued, “women have carved their own way to achieving a better balance for success in their professional and personal lives.”
While some progress has been made, the idea that the benefits that Ms. Fitch described are available to a majority of women is still a stretch.
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Parental leave is still rare. The United States is the only rich country without national paid maternity leave. Family leave is available to only 20 percent of private-sector workers and 8 percent of low-wage workers, according to figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
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The option to work from home is not widely available. Even with the pandemic closing down offices, fewer than half of U.S. workers had the flexibility to work from home in 2020.
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Research has found that women face more barriers to fully participating in the work force without access to abortion. One study last year compared the outcomes of women who were able to obtain an abortion and those who were denied the procedure. It found “a large and persistent increase in financial distress” for those denied abortions, including larger debt and higher eviction rates. Studies also have directly linked a woman’s ability to control her fertility with increased labor force participation.
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Becoming a mother also can have a significant economic impact. Mothers lose out on tens of thousands of dollars in lifetime earnings in what is known as the “motherhood penalty.” Fathers don’t face decreased wages.
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While pregnancy discrimination has been outlawed, it is still rampant. In two-thirds of the dozens of pregnancy discrimination cases filed between 2015 and 2019, courts sided with employers, stating that they didn’t need to provide pregnant women with accommodations like additional bathroom breaks or a stool to sit on, according to an analysis by A Better Balance, a national advocacy organization that provides free legal advice for pregnant women facing discrimination.
Should the court overturn Roe v. Wade, at least 20 states have laws or constitutional amendments already in place to ban abortion as quickly as possible, according to an analysis by the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights, and five others are likely to follow suit.
That could affect abortion access for 41 percent of women of childbearing age, adding to women’s economic difficulties that have been exacerbated by the pandemic.
Read moreCredit…Mark Blinch/Reuters
Workers at three plants owned by the luxury apparel-maker Canada Goose in Winnipeg, Manitoba, have voted overwhelmingly to unionize, according to results announced by the union on Wednesday.
Workers United, an affiliate of the giant Service Employees International Union, said it would represent about 1,200 additional workers as a result of the election.
Canada Goose, which makes parkas that can cost more than $1,000 and have been worn by celebrities like Daniel Craig and Kate Upton, has union workers at other facilities, including some in Toronto, and has frequently cited its commitment to high environmental and labor standards. But it had long appeared to resist efforts to unionize workers in Winnipeg, part of what the union called an “adversarial relationship.”
The company denied that it sought to block unionization, and both sides agree that it was neutral in recent weeks, in the run-up to the election. The union said 86 percent of those voting backed unionization.
“I want to congratulate the workers of Canada Goose for this amazing victory,” Richard A. Minter, a vice president and international organizing director for Workers United, said in a statement. “I also want to salute the company. No employer wants a union, but Canada Goose management stayed neutral and allowed the workers the right to exercise their democratic vote.”
Reacting to the vote, the company said: “Our goal has always been to support our employees, respecting their right to determine their own representation. We welcome Workers United as the union representative for our employees across our manufacturing facilities in Winnipeg.”
Canada Goose was founded under a different name in the 1950s. It began to raise its profile and emphasize international sales after Dani Reiss, the grandson of its founder, took over as chief executive in 2001. Mr. Reiss committed to keeping production of parkas in Canada.
The private equity firm Bain Capital purchased a majority stake in the company in 2013 and took it public a few years later.
The union vote came after accusations this year that Canada Goose had disciplined two workers who identified themselves as union supporters. Several workers at Canada Goose’s Winnipeg facilities, where the company’s work force is mostly immigrants, also complained of low pay and abusive behavior by managers.
The company has denied the accusations of retaliation and abuse and said that well over half its workers in Winnipeg earned wages above the local minimum of about 12 Canadian dollars (about $9.35).
Workers United is also seeking to organize workers at several Buffalo-area Starbucks stores, three of which are in the middle of a mail-in union election in which ballots are due next week.
Nearly 30 percent of workers are unionized in Canada, compared with about 11 percent in the United States.
Read moreCredit…Jim Wilson/The New York Times
The payments company Square said on Wednesday that it was changing its name to Block, a nod to one of the main focuses of the company’s chief executive, Jack Dorsey, an enthusiast for cryptocurrency and the blockchain technology it runs on.
Mr. Dorsey said Monday he was stepping down from the helm of his other company, Twitter, a move that many believed was so that he could dedicate more of his attention to cryptocurrency and to Square.
Block will become the name of the “corporate entity,” with Square continuing to be the segment of the company that helps people and businesses process payments, the company said in a news release. The parent company also owns Tidal, a music streaming service, Cash App, a payment service, and a developer platform focused on Bitcoin called TBD54566975. Square said there would be no organizational changes made to the company other than the name change.
“The name has many associated meanings for the company — building blocks, neighborhood blocks and their local businesses, communities coming together at block parties full of music, a blockchain, a section of code, and obstacles to overcome,” the company said in its release. It expects the name change to be official on Dec. 10.
Mr. Dorsey has in recent years grown more fascinated by cryptocurrencies and the promise of decentralization that blockchain technology could allow for. In 2019, he said Twitter would help create a decentralized type of social media in which users could make their own algorithms and moderate their own communities. The only thing in his Twitter bio is “#bitcoin.”
A foray deeper into cryptocurrencies and blockchain could be alluring for Mr. Dorsey, who in his last few years as a social media chief executive spent increasing amounts of time defending Twitter’s role in disseminating misinformation, testifying in front of politicians and receiving frequent criticism from former President Donald J. Trump, who was barred from Twitter shortly after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Mr. Dorsey did not reference cryptocurrencies or the blockchain in a brief quote in the news release about his company’s name change, saying only that despite the new name, “our purpose of economic empowerment remains the same. No matter how we grow or change, we will continue to build tools to help increase access to the economy.”
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