Black Activists Warn that Facebook Hasn’t Done Enough to Stop Racist Harassment – Mother Jones

“People get blocked all the time for just saying the word ‘white,’” Faison recently reiterated. “It’s all still the same.” Meanwhile, Facebook has allowed threats against Faison and BLM activists to remain up. In early June, one man whose page appears dedicated to harassing BLM activists, posted a video of Faison with an all-caps message: “I WOULD LOVE TO WAKE UP TO THE NEWS THAT SOMEONE OFFED THIS EVIL BITCH.” As one commenter on the BLM Sacramento Facebook page wrote, “Facebook is so ridiculous. I reported his page and profile and the crazy posts hes made and everything came back as meeting community standards. HOW? What he said about Tanya is basically a death threat.” It’s not clear if Facebook ultimately took any action, but at some point the harasser changed “offed” to “offended.” The post remains up, and in context, the threat remains clear. Another post last month by the same harasser read that “I’d like to give a shout out to all the good people that have been making looters disappear and never be seen again.” The message, which was followed by an emoji of two beers clinking together, was set against a skull-theme backdrop. It is still up.

Such threats, coupled with activists’ own pages and posts coming down or being deleted, “hinders the work” of racial justice organizers, Faison says. “If they’re not able to go on social media, they can’t go live when something’s happening. It impacts what we’re doing. It impacts it in a huge way because we use social media platforms to inform people.” The number of videos of police brutality that went viral during the first weeks of the protests make it clear that access to social media is, indeed, crucial to such activists.

 

Source: Black Activists Warn that Facebook Hasn’t Done Enough to Stop Racist Harassment – Mother Jones

America’s international students are facing deportation. This is a disaster | Gayatri Devi | Opinion | The Guardian

The threat to evict international students from our campuses appears to be an attempt to financially blackmail universities already poised on the edge of precarity brought about by the pandemic, as well as an attempt to exploit the pandemic to kick non-white immigrants out of the country.

Education should not be used to exclude and disenfranchise students. These extreme F-1/M-1 visa restrictions are an act of blatant educational discrimination. There should be no difference between a citizen student and an international student. The absence of either is of imminent concern.

 

Source: America’s international students are facing deportation. This is a disaster | Gayatri Devi | Opinion | The Guardian

Revealed: legislators’ pro-pipeline letters ghostwritten by fossil fuel company | US news | The Guardian

The records, obtained by the watchdog group the Energy and Policy Institute and provided to the Guardian, show that three North Dakota state legislators and a Williams county, North Dakota, commissioner signed and mailed letters to Ferc and the US army corps of engineers that reproduced word-for-word letters sent to them by MDU Resources’ political strategists.

Source: Revealed: legislators’ pro-pipeline letters ghostwritten by fossil fuel company | US news | The Guardian

Indigenous Americans had contact with Polynesians 800 years ago, DNA reveals | World news | The Guardian

Whether peoples from what is today Colombia or Ecuador drifted thousands of kilometres to tiny islands in the middle of the Pacific, or whether seafaring Polynesians sailed upwind to South America and then back again, is still unknown. But what is certain, according to a study in Nature, is that it took place hundreds of years before Europeans set foot in either region, and left individuals scattered across what became French Polynesia with signature traces of the New World in their DNA.

Source: Indigenous Americans had contact with Polynesians 800 years ago, DNA reveals | World news | The Guardian