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Showing posts with label Vox - Recode. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Vox - Recode. Show all posts

Thursday, August 6, 2020

Trump issued an executive order effectively banning TikTok if it doesn’t sell in the next 45 days

President Donald Trump is reportedly expected to issue an order compelling social media app TikTok to sell its US operations. | Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

The new order is the latest in Trump’s escalating crackdown on the Chinese-owned app over alleged national security concerns.

President Trump issued an executive order on Thursday night that will effectively ban any US company or individual from making transactions with ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of the TikTok app, after 45 days.

While this conditional ban on TikTok’s US business operations will likely face serious legal challenges, and it’s unclear how immediately enforceable it is, the order creates a serious challenge for TikTok, a wildly popular video streaming app with some 100 million US users.

For months, Trump and other bipartisan politicians have periodically raised concerns about TikTok as a potential national security threat, worrying that the app’s Chinese parent company could censor content in the US or access American users’ sensitive data at the behest of the Chinese Communist Party.

The executive order states that TikTok “automatically captures vast swaths of information from its users,” and that this “threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information — potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.”

The company has vehemently denied these accusations, saying repeatedly that it does not share user data with the Chinese government. But reports last year showed a lack of TikTok content about subjects controversial with the Chinese government — such as videos of the Hong Kong protests. These reports have fueled US government suspicions that the company is influenced by the Chinese government, particularly as China has been expanding its surveillance state in recent years and US-China diplomatic relations have become more strained.

Trump has gone back and forth about how he planned to take action on TikTok. As recently as last Friday, he warned of an eminent executive ban on TikTok. On Monday though, Trump seemed to reverse his stance and said in a White House press briefing that instead of banning it, he would allow a US-based company to purchase the app.

“I don’t mind if — whether it is Microsoft or someone else — a big company, a secure company, a very American company, buys it,” said Trump about TikTok. Trump also warned that TikTok will be “out of business in the United States” by September 15 if the company doesn’t reach a deal to sell by then. Now, the executive order has established timeline of 45 days from Thursday (which would be September 20) for the sale to happen before TikTok will no longer be able to conduct business as usual in the US.

Though TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, is best known as a place where teens share short, often lighthearted musical videos, it has become the center of geopolitical controversy between the US and China over technological power.

But getting rid of an app used by some 100 million Americans isn’t easy, even if you’re the president. According to a New York Times report on Sunday, after Trump’s advisers convinced him that an executive action to ban TikTok would face severe legal and political consequences, Trump decided he would allow the tech giant Microsoft to continue its previous talks to buy the app, which had reportedly been in the works for weeks. Since Microsoft is a US-based company, the idea is that if Microsoft took control, it would ensure all of TikTok’s user data is stored in the US, secure from the potentially prying eyes of the Chinese government. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella talked to Trump about it over the weekend, according to a Microsoft blog post published on Saturday evening, and has agreed to work out a deal — or not — by September 15.

Here’s a rundown of the recent controversy surrounding TikTok and what’s expected to happen next:

TikTok’s political troubles

TikTok has faced intense political scrutiny for months leading up to Trump’s executive order.

Republicans escalated their attacks on TikTok this summer, with some bipartisan support from Democrats as well. Last Thursday, Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) sent a letter to the Justice Department demanding that the agency open an investigation into TikTok and Zoom over reported violations of “Americans’ civil liberties” and national security concerns about relationships between these companies and China. This followed statements in July from Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who both said the Trump administration was considering banning TikTok altogether.

For the past year, it’s been thought that the app has been under government review for national security reasons. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin confirmed this last week, and said he’s expecting the review to conclude soon. The government committee in charge of this review, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), has the power to recommend the president force TikTok to sell to a US company.

Even if Trump can’t enforce a full-on ban, a government decision that forces TikTok’s parent company to sell it off would be a game changer for the social media industry, and would threaten to disrupt the app’s extraordinary popularity. And for established social media giants Facebook and Google, the decision could significantly weaken their fiercest new competitor.

A forced sale of TikTok could have negative consequences beyond the people running TikTok, too. The move threatens to jeopardize the success of an app that’s had a meteoric rise from a relative underdog to one of the most downloaded apps in the world. And since TikTok is one of the only recent social media startups to compete with tech giants like Facebook, weakening TikTok could further concentrate power among a few tech giants in the US.

“While we do not comment on rumors or speculation, we are confident in the long-term success of TikTok,” a spokesperson for TikTok told Recode on Friday, adding the company is “committed to protecting their privacy and safety as we continue working to bring joy to families and meaningful careers to those who create on our platform.”

How a sale would work

You may be asking how Trump can force a company as popular as TikTok to sell itself, or go so far as to try to ban it. The answer is complicated and bureaucratic.

To force a sale, Trump could issue an order for ByteDance to divest from TikTok through CFIUS, an interagency committee that reviews foreign acquisitions and investments in US businesses that can threaten national security. The committee, chaired by Mnuchin, has the power to block or reverse mergers and acquisitions involving US and foreign companies.

Increasingly, the agency has been exercising its authority over foreign-owned tech companies operating in the US. Last year, CFIUS helped block one of the biggest deals in tech history, after Trump followed its recommendations to stop Singapore-based Broadcom from acquiring the US semiconductor company Qualcomm. The committee also forced Chinese owners to divest from the dating app Grindr and the health startup PatientsLikeMe.

But as Brookings Institution fellow Geoffrey Gertz has written, tech companies weren’t always the target of CFIUS. In the past, the committee “tended to focus on companies with military or intelligence connections,” but more recently, personal data and high-tech intellectual property have become a bigger focus for the committee.

Last year, CFIUS started investigating ByteDance, which had purchased the Chinese-owned lip-sync video platform Musical.ly in 2017 and then rebranded and launched a similar app in the US under the name TikTok. When that investigation comes to a close, the committee’s recommendations will reportedly lead to Trump’s order for ByteDance to sell TikTok or divest its US operations.

It’s unclear how CFIUS would enforce a potential unwinding of ByteDance and TikTok, but last year, the committee issued a $1 million fine to an undisclosed company for not following through on a mitigation agreement, its first penalty of that kind. It could also fine TikTok — or Trump could just continue to dangle the threat of banning TikTok altogether, no matter how legally or politically contentious that would be.

In a press briefing on Monday, Trump said that whoever ends up owning TikTok should pay the Treasury department of the US government a “substantial amount of money” as part of the deal. As some have pointed out, including Axios’s Dan Primack, Trump’s comments could be “skating very close to announcing extortion.” It’s not immediately clear how Trump would try to ensure the US government gets a cut of the sale or whether it’s even legal to do that.

What comes next

If Microsoft or another major US company does purchase TikTok, it’s likely that TikTok as we know it would remain largely unchanged.

TikTok is a valuable brand in a lucrative industry with a massive, devoted user base — so for Microsoft, buying TikTok would be an opportunity to seriously compete with other major tech companies like Facebook and Google in the social media space.

Microsoft also has experience when it comes to purchasing already successful companies and allowing them to retain their independence — as it did when it acquired the platform for software developers, GitHub, in 2018, and the video game Minecraft in 2014.

Depending on how Microsoft chooses to run TikTok — if it acquires it — the app could continue to grow, and with the backing of a major US tech company, it might more seriously take on other social media companies, including Facebook. Microsoft isn’t the only potential buyer — other firms could try to buy TikTok or share ownership. Reportedly, Microsoft may invite outside investors to join them in the deal, according to the Wall Street Journal.

It’s too soon to say what impact a sale would have on the app’s popularity and growth. But in the meantime, there are plenty of Clippy jokes to make.

On Monday, a spokesperson for TikTok told Recode in a statement that the company is “committed to continuing to bring joy to families and meaningful careers to those who create on our platform as we build TikTok for the long term. TikTok will be here for many years to come.”

Update, August 6, 9:54 pm ET: This article has been updated to include news of Trump’s executive order against TikTok.

Update, August 3, 3:05 pm ET: This article has been updated to include new comments from President Trump and new reporting about ongoing negotiations between Microsoft and TikTok.


Support Vox’s explanatory journalism

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Wednesday, August 5, 2020

Facebook took down a Trump post for the first time 

President Trump Holds News Conference In The White House Briefing Room Facebook has taken down a Trump post for containing harmful misinformation about Covid-19 and children. | Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images

Trump’s false claims about Covid-19 and children are harmful misinformation, according to Facebook’s policies.

Facebook has taken down a post by President Trump containing false statements about children’s susceptibility to Covid-19. It’s the first time the company has enforced its rules that ban harmful speech on one of Trump’s posts.

The post that Facebook removed is a Fox video clip in which Trump makes an incorrect statement, saying that children are “almost immune” to Covid-19. That isn’t true; children are not immune to the virus. Trump posted the clip on his personal Facebook account.

Facebook said it’s taking down the video because it violates its policy against spreading harmful misinformation about Covid-19. It’s the latest development in the ongoing debate about whether Facebook should more strictly police false statements made by politicians like Trump on its platform. Until now, the company has largely held off on moderating political speech because Facebook says it aims to be an open platform for communication rather than an “arbiter of truth.” But Facebook has taken a hard line on Covid-19 misinformation since the beginning of the pandemic — and Trump’s post crossed that line.

“This video includes false claims that a group of people is immune from COVID-19 which is a violation of our policies around harmful COVID misinformation,” a spokesperson for Facebook said in a statement to Recode.

While researchers think the harmful effects of Covid-19 are less severe for children than for adults, kids can still get the disease (hundreds of children at a summer camp in Georgia recently became infected with Covid-19), and some children have died from it. Scientists are also still trying to understand the long-term effects of the disease, even in patients who have milder cases.

In President Trump’s statements on Fox, he falsely claimed, “If you look at children, children are almost — and I would almost say definitely — but almost immune from this disease.” He added, “I don’t know how you feel about it, but they [children] have much stronger immune systems than we do somehow for this. They do it. They don’t have a problem.”

On Twitter, Trump posted the same Fox News clip, which was originally posted by the @TeamTrump campaign account. But by Wednesday evening, a spokesperson for Twitter told Recode that the video violated its rules on Covid-19 misinformation, and that the account owner (in this case, @TeamTrump) will be required to remove the tweet before they can post again. The spokesperson said this was not a suspension. Twitter has blocked the post from view in the meantime.

For years, Trump has made false claims on Facebook — in recent months he has made incorrect statements about topics such as mail-in voting and Joe Biden’s platform on policing. Independent fact-checkers which are part of Facebook’s fact-checking network have flagged these posts as incorrect on their own sites, but Facebook has not labeled them as such on its platform because its rules exempt politicians from being fact-checked. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly said that he does not want his company to be an “arbiter of truth” — and that the company does not fact-check political speech.

By contrast, in May, Twitter started fact-checking some of Trump’s posts, such as when it labelled posts in which he made false claims about mail-in voting in California, as “misleading,” and directed users to accurate information about vote-by-mail.

Facebook has faced increasing criticism from leading Democratic politicians, disinformation experts, civil rights organizations, and even some its own employees for not enforcing its own policies when Trump uses its platform to spread misinformation, or when it didn’t moderate a “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” post he shared in response to Black Lives Matter protests in late May.

The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

When it comes to political ads on its platform, which are distinct from ads, Facebook has moderated Trump before on a few occasions. In June, Facebook took down a Trump campaign ad that displayed Nazi insignia. And in March, Facebook took down another Trump ad which contained a link to a Trump campaign survey that was marketed as a link to the US census. And the company has labeled (but not fact-checked) some of Trump’s posts on his personal page containing false statements about voting by adding links to these posts that share voter information. The company, as a policy, adds these labels to all posts about voting in the 2020 US presidential election, regardless of their veracity or who posts them.

But this is the first time time the company has actually taken down one of Trump’s posts — which is sure to anger Republicans, some of whom have long complained of alleged (and unproven) anti-conservative bias on social media platforms, despite the success of many leading conservatives like Trump on the platform to date.



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Monday, August 3, 2020

Last week the US wanted to break up Big Tech. Now it’s trying to supersize it.

President Trump is seated between Apple CEO Tim Cook and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Donald Trump sits next to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at a 2017 event. | Chip Somodevilla / Getty

The TikTok/Microsoft deal — if it happens — will make it harder to shrink Facebook or Google. Do you think Donald Trump cares about that?

Last week, US lawmakers hauled the heads of four giant tech companies into a virtual antitrust hearing, ostensibly over concerns their companies are too big.

This week, the president of the United States is sort-of-kind-of-maybe trying to help a different giant US tech company become even bigger — by forcing the Chinese owners of TikTok to sell it to Microsoft.

There are all kinds of perspectives on a potential sale of TikTok from ByteDance to Microsoft. Some rational people think it’s a good idea: They don’t want the popular social video app with a huge presence in the US to be controlled by a Chinese company because Chinese companies are, in various ways, extensions of the Chinese government.

Others quite rightly worry about potential retaliation from China against US companies that do business in that country, as well as the breakdown of the entire concept of an open internet.

But it seems to me that one of the striking parts of the whole deal would be that the US government, which says it worries about the reach and power of its homegrown tech giants, is now actively encouraging a deal that would supersize one of those giants.

Which suggests that the US isn’t really worried about the reach and power of its tech giants.

Caveat time! There are many confounding, surprising, and improbable components to the ByteDance-TikTok-Microsoft-White House-China story, which is very much a moving target. This afternoon, for instance, Donald Trump insisted that in order for the deal to go through, the US government would have to get a “very substantial portion” of any sale price if Microsoft does buy TikTok from ByteDance.

Trump, of course, says all kinds of things, all the time. Many of those things are not true. But if he actually means it this time, it means the deal looks much less likely than it did a few hours earlier.

And while we’re at it, let’s be clear that it’s hard to make a real antitrust argument against a Microsoft-TikTok deal, at least as antitrust law works in the US right now: TikTok may worry the social media giant Facebook, but Facebook still dwarfs TikTok; same thing for Google’s YouTube. Facebook, for instance, says it has 256 million users in the US and Canada; TikTok says it is at 100 million.

It’s also not a coincidence that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was not in Washington last week, testifying along with the heads of Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon. With the exception of its Xbox gaming platform, Microsoft has a very modest consumer internet presence in the US psyche*. If any big tech company is going to acquire TikTok, it would be Microsoft.

But let’s also be very clear: While Microsoft has turned itself into a giant tech company that focuses on business customers, it is still very much a Giant Tech Company — one that the US government spent years trying to break up because of the way it abused its status as the dominant computer operating system in the 1990s.

In its last 12 months, Microsoft generated a staggering $143 billion in revenue — for context, that’s two Facebooks. And while its growth is coming from enterprise customers and cloud services, Microsoft still dominates personal computers. If you’re not reading this on a phone or tablet, the odds are very high you’re reading this on a Microsoft Windows-powered machine.

In short: If you were worried about the concentration of tech power in the US, you wouldn’t add the most consequential new social media platform in years to a company that made $44 billion in profits — four Amazons — last year. (That said! In the near term, Facebook execs won’t complain while Microsoft figures out, structurally and technically, how to separate TikTok from its current owner/operators and rebuilt large portions of it. Big companies usually expect to take a year or more to swallow up a significant acquisition; this one could be way more difficult.)

If US lawmakers were truly concerned about the power of tech giants, they would be actively be debating laws to rein that in, instead of punting the work to enforcement agencies like the DOJ and the FTC. And an entire faction of US politicians wouldn’t spend their time in important antitrust hearings focusing on made-up claims that big internet companies are bad because they censor conservatives.

If anything, you could argue that a TikTok sale to Microsoft makes it even less likely that we’ll see real antitrust movement against Google or Facebook. If that deal goes through, both companies can credibly argue that TikTok is now an even fiercer rival to their business because it has Microsoft behind it.

Again: I’m happy to entertain arguments for or against TikTokSoft — it’s a genuinely fascinating and important inflection point for tech and world politics. But next time you tell me the US government is Very Worried About Big Tech, you’re going to have work much harder to convince me.

* Not for lack of trying: If Microsoft had succeeded in its attempt to buy Yahoo many years ago, or if it hadn’t burned billions trying to build a consumer ad business, maybe things would be different.


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The TikTok-Microsoft-Trump drama, explained

President Donald Trump is reportedly expected to issue an order compelling social media app TikTok to sell its US operations. | Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Trump says he isn’t banning the app — for now — because he’s open to having Microsoft buy it instead.

President Trump won’t try to ban TikTok in the US — at least for now. On Monday, he reversed his stance on the wildly popular video streaming app and said in a White House press briefing that instead of banning it, he would allow a US-based company to purchase the app.

“I don’t mind if — whether it is Microsoft or someone else — a big company, a secure company, a very American company, buys it,” said Trump about TikTok. Trump also warned that TikTok will be “out of business in the United States” by September 15 if the company doesn’t reach a deal to sell by then.

Though TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, is best known as a place where teens share short, often lighthearted musical videos, it has become the center of geopolitical controversy between the US and China over technological power.

For months, Trump and other bipartisan politicians have periodically raised concerns about TikTok as a potential national security threat, worrying that the app’s Chinese parent company could censor content in the US or access American users’ sensitive data at the behest of the Chinese Communist Party.

The company has vehemently denied these accusations. But reports last year showed a lack of TikTok content about subjects controversial with the Chinese government — such as videos of the Hong Kong protests. These reports have fueled US government suspicions that the company is influenced by the Chinese government, particularly as China has been expanding its surveillance state in recent years and US-China diplomatic relations have become more strained.

Over the past few days, TikTok reentered the spotlight when Trump told reporters on Friday evening that he planned to ban the app effective “immediately” — saying he would do so using emergency economic powers or an executive order.

But getting rid of an app used by some 100 million Americans isn’t easy, even if you’re the president. According to a New York Times report, after Trump’s advisers convinced him that an executive action to ban TikTok would face severe legal and political consequences, Trump agreed that instead of issuing a ban, he would allow the tech giant Microsoft to continue its previous talks to buy TikTok, which had reportedly been in the works for weeks. Since Microsoft is a US-based company, the idea is that if Microsoft took control, it would ensure all of TikTok’s user data is stored in the US, secure from the potentially prying eyes of the Chinese government. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella talked to Trump about it over the weekend, according to a Microsoft blog post published on Saturday evening, and has agreed to work out a deal — or not — by September 15.

Here’s a rundown of the recent controversy surrounding TikTok and what’s expected to happen next:

TikTok’s political troubles

TikTok has faced intense political scrutiny for months now, long before Trump’s latest call for a ban.

Republicans have escalated their attacks on TikTok this summer, with some bipartisan support from Democrats as well. Last Thursday, Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) sent a letter to the Justice Department demanding that the agency open an investigation into TikTok and Zoom over reported violations of “Americans’ civil liberties” and national security concerns about relationships between these companies and China. This followed statements in July from Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who both said the Trump administration was considering banning TikTok altogether.

For the past year, it’s been thought that the app has been under government review for national security reasons. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin confirmed this last week, and said he’s expecting the review to conclude soon. The government committee in charge of this review, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), has the power to recommend the president force TikTok to sell to a US company.

Even if Trump doesn’t issue a full ban, a government decision that forces TikTok’s parent company to sell it off would be a game changer for the social media industry, and would threaten to disrupt the app’s extraordinary popularity. And for established social media giants Facebook and Google, the decision could significantly weaken their fiercest new competitor.

A forced sale of TikTok could have negative consequences beyond the people running TikTok, too. The move threatens to jeopardize the success of an app that’s had a meteoric rise from a relative underdog to one of the most downloaded apps in the world. And since TikTok is one of the only recent social media startups to compete with tech giants like Facebook, weakening TikTok could further concentrate power among a few tech giants in the US.

“While we do not comment on rumors or speculation, we are confident in the long-term success of TikTok,” a spokesperson for TikTok told Recode on Friday, adding the company is “committed to protecting their privacy and safety as we continue working to bring joy to families and meaningful careers to those who create on our platform.”

How a sale would work

You may be asking how Trump can force a company as popular as TikTok to sell itself, or go so far as to try to ban it. The answer is complicated and bureaucratic.

To force a sale, Trump could issue an order for ByteDance to divest from TikTok through CFIUS, an interagency committee that reviews foreign acquisitions and investments in US businesses that can threaten national security. The committee, chaired by Mnuchin, has the power to block or reverse mergers and acquisitions involving US and foreign companies.

Increasingly, the agency has been exercising its authority over foreign-owned tech companies operating in the US. Last year, CFIUS helped block one of the biggest deals in tech history, after Trump followed its recommendations to stop Singapore-based Broadcom from acquiring the US semiconductor company Qualcomm. The committee also forced Chinese owners to divest from the dating app Grindr and the health startup PatientsLikeMe.

But as Brookings Institution fellow Geoffrey Gertz has written, tech companies weren’t always the target of CFIUS. In the past, the committee “tended to focus on companies with military or intelligence connections,” but more recently, personal data and high-tech intellectual property have become a bigger focus for the committee.

Last year, CFIUS started investigating ByteDance, which had purchased the Chinese-owned lip-sync video platform Musical.ly in 2017 and then rebranded and launched a similar app in the US under the name TikTok. When that investigation comes to a close, the committee’s recommendations will reportedly lead to Trump’s order for ByteDance to sell TikTok or divest its US operations.

It’s unclear how CFIUS would enforce a potential unwinding of ByteDance and TikTok, but last year, the committee issued a $1 million fine to an undisclosed company for not following through on a mitigation agreement, its first penalty of that kind. It could also fine TikTok — or Trump could just continue to dangle the threat of banning TikTok altogether, no matter how legally or politically contentious that would be.

In a press briefing on Monday, Trump said that whoever ends up owning TikTok should pay the Treasury department of the US government a “substantial amount of money” as part of the deal. As some have pointed out, including Axios’s Dan Primack, Trump’s comments could be “skating very close to announcing extortion.” It’s not immediately clear how Trump would try to ensure the US government gets a cut of the sale or whether it’s even legal to do that.

What comes next

If Microsoft or another major US company does purchase TikTok, it’s likely that TikTok as we know it would remain largely unchanged.

TikTok is a valuable brand in a lucrative industry with a massive, devoted user base — so for Microsoft, buying TikTok would be an opportunity to seriously compete with other major tech companies like Facebook and Google in the social media space.

Microsoft also has experience when it comes to purchasing already successful companies and allowing them to retain their independence — as it did when it acquired the platform for software developers, GitHub, in 2018, and the video game Minecraft in 2014.

Depending on how Microsoft chooses to run TikTok — if it acquires it — the app could continue to grow, and with the backing of a major US tech company, it might more seriously take on other social media companies, including Facebook. Microsoft isn’t the only potential buyer — other firms could try to buy TikTok or share ownership. Reportedly, Microsoft may invite outside investors to join them in the deal, according to the Wall Street Journal.

It’s too soon to say what impact a sale would have on the app’s popularity and growth. But in the meantime, there are plenty of Clippy jokes to make.

On Monday, a spokesperson for TikTok told Recode in a statement that the company is “committed to continuing to bring joy to families and meaningful careers to those who create on our platform as we build TikTok for the long term. TikTok will be here for many years to come.”

Update, August 3, 3:05 pm ET: This article has been updated to include new comments from President Trump and new reporting about ongoing negotiations between Microsoft and TikTok.


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Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.



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