Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good Seeing this newsletter as a forward? Subscribe here. October 5, 2021 After a series of Wall Street Journal reports on Facebook's problems—from anti-vaccination content to Instagram's effects on teen girls—Congress heard today from the former Facebook product manager whose leaks informed the Journal's reporting.
It's the latest development in an ongoing story. Facebook has struggled to moderate content as disinformation and hate speech have bloomed. Critics have argued social media is bad for politics, human brains, and emotional health. Legislators have asked questions and threatened regulation. Facebook has maintained that its intentions are good and that its internal controls are appropriate.
But according to The New York Times' Kevin Roose, we're learning something new: that Facebook is weaker than we've realized. To Roose, the Journal's reporting shows "a kind of slow, steady decline that anyone who has ever seen a dying company up close can recognize. ... This kind of decline is not necessarily visible from the outside, but insiders see a hundred small, disquieting signs of it every day—user-hostile growth hacks, frenetic pivots, executive paranoia, the gradual attrition of talented colleagues. … [Facebook's] younger users are flocking to Snapchat and TikTok, and its older users are posting anti-vaccine memes and arguing about politics."
Facebook is powerful, Roose writes, but it's also falling behind the curve. "[I]f Beijing looks to be in a hurry, that's because its rise is almost over," Michael Beckley and Hal Brands declare in the new issue of Foreign Affairs.
As Fareed noted in his latest Washington Post column, China looks shaky economically: It's loaded with debt, its export-driven growth has sputtered with rising wages, and its working population is aging and shrinking. Beckley and Brands write that economic tailwinds of past decades (like a friendly US and opportunities to industrialize) have been replaced by headwinds (like a more-hostile US and a global economy less friendly to trade). China's debt burden and "ghost cities" of massive, vacant developments are cases in point.
Still, China remains geopolitically ambitious, and if its economic clout doesn't match those ambitions, Beckley and Brands predict a frustrated Beijing could grow even more aggressive. Is Afghanistan Really Fertile Ground for Terrorism? As the world wonders if Afghanistan will again become a terrorist haven, Paul R. Pillar, a former senior US intelligence analyst specializing in the near east and South Asia, writes for Foreign Policy that it's unlikely to happen.
"Whatever one thinks of the Taliban," Pillar writes, "they can be counted on to pursue their overriding interest in maintaining political power in Afghanistan. They are highly insular and have no interest in international terrorism. Among their strongest memories is how al Qaeda's 9/11 operation resulted in the biggest disaster the Taliban have ever suffered—being ousted from power and setting back by two decades their quest to rule all of Afghanistan. They have every interest in not letting that happen again, as well as continuing to be the archenemy of the Afghan branch of the Islamic State." As Fareed and others have noted, President Joe Biden has continued many of his predecessor's policies, despite lambasting Donald Trump on the campaign trail. Chief among them, perhaps, is his approach to trade: Biden has maintained tariffs on allies and has declined to join the CPTPP, the successor to the Trans-Pacific Partnership engineered by the Obama administration and abandoned by Trump.
Why is that? At The Atlantic, Annie Lowrey writes that Democratic elites may have failed to appreciate how the party's base thought about free trade and its perceived de-industrializing effects. As both the Democratic and Republican parties have now converged on protectionism, Lowrey suggests US "trade policy is changing from one focused on opening markets and lowering the cost of imports to one focused on American workers. It's a long project, and a complicated one." |
