vox--2020-09-09--The Supreme Court is already considering another threat to abortion rights

Last June , Chief Justice John Roberts provided a brief reprieve to abortion providers — joining his liberal colleagues in striking down a Louisiana anti-abortion law .
But that reprieve could be very short-lived : A case now before the justices could give them a vehicle to undercut the right to terminate a pregnancy .
If the Trump administration gets its way in Food and Drug Administration v. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists , the Supreme Court could force many patients seeking abortions to undergo unnecessary surgeries , despite the fact that those patients could safely terminate their pregnancy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ assuming that these individuals are able to find a doctor to perform the surgery in the first place .
The case turns on whether the courts should relax long-standing FDA-imposed restrictions on the drug mifepristone , which is commonly used in medication abortions , in order to make the drug easier to obtain during the Covid-19 pandemic .
In the short term , a victory for the Trump administration would leave in place long-standing rules requiring health providers to dispense mifepristone to abortion patients in person .
During ordinary times , this restriction @ @ @ @ @ @ @ patients .
But , as explained below , the same restriction could potentially prevent many pregnant individuals from obtaining an abortion altogether while the pandemic still rages .
Any time the Roberts Court hears an abortion case , moreover , the abortion right is at risk — because a majority of the Supreme Court is skeptical of whether that right should exist in the first place .
Indeed , if the Court follows the path laid out in the Trump administration ’ s brief in American College , many abortion patients could lose @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Roberts ’ s decision to invalidate the Louisiana law in June Medical Services v. Russo ( 2020 ) was a somewhat surprising development , as Roberts has fairly consistently opposed abortion rights during his career on the bench .
But June Medical was also a very narrow victory for abortion advocates .
The chief justice ’ s opinion turned on the fact that the Louisiana law at issue in June Medical was nearly identical to a Texas law the Court struck down just four years earlier .
Roberts spent much of his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with many of his Court ’ s decisions protecting abortion , and even dropping hints about how anti-abortion advocates can help undermine abortion rights in the future .
June Medical , in other words , turned out the way it did because abortion opponents brought the weakest possible case to the Supreme Court — a case that was in all relevant respects indistinguishable from another case that the Court recently decided .
The new case pending before the justices , Food and Drug Administration v. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists , does @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are several reasons to suspect that Roberts will return to his anti-abortion roots in American College .
Even if this were not an abortion case , and even if Roberts were not typically opposed to abortion rights , Roberts has urged courts to defer to public health officials during the pandemic .
He ’ s unlikely to support a lower court decision that disagreed with the FDA ’ s judgment regarding a drug used in abortions .
And , with four other anti-abortion justices on the Supreme Court , if Roberts does flip @ @ @ @ @ @ @ College , that will almost certainly be enough to form a majority .
Mifepristone , the drug at the center of American College , is part of a two-drug regimen used to induce abortion .
Mifepristone causes pregnancy tissue and the lining of the uterus to break down and separate from the uterus itself .
About a day or two after taking mifepristone , the patient takes a second drug , misoprostol , which causes uterine contractions and expels the uterus ’ s contents .
Although patients may take mifepristone at home , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be distributed at hospitals , clinics , or medical offices — meaning that it can not be dispensed by a retail or mail-order pharmacy .
Thus , at a time when many health providers are moving toward telemedicine to protect themselves and their patients from the coronavirus , abortion providers and their patients must risk in-person contact .
The limit on who can dispense the drug stretches back to when mifepristone was originally approved by the FDA in 2000 , while Bill Clinton was president .
The FDA also reviewed its restrictions on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 2016 — all during the Obama administration — and it left the requirement that the drug be dispensed by health care providers in place .
But while this requirement imposes a relatively minor burden on people seeking abortions during normal times , it is significantly more burdensome during the coronavirus pandemic .
Many clinics have either closed or reduced the number of patients who are allowed to visit , in order to reduce the spread of Covid-19 .
But that means that fewer patients are able to obtain mifepristone at those clinics .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ travel to a clinic — especially if they rely on public transportation — because of the risk that they could be exposed to the coronavirus during this trip .
As one expert witness testified in the American College case , the requirement that drugs be dispensed in-person “ unnecessarily increases the infection risk for patients , their families , health care professionals , and the larger communities in which they work and live.
” The FDA , moreover , has relaxed similar restrictions on other drugs unrelated to abortion during the pandemic , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for mifepristone .
As the plaintiffs note in their brief , the FDA has taken “ ‘ extraordinary actions ’ to reduce viral transmission by suspending in-person requirements for drugs , including potentially lethal controlled substances like opioids , and urging the use of telemedicine ‘ whenever possible.
’ ” Yet it ’ s left the in-person dispensing restriction in place for mifepristone .
In light of all of these factors , a federal trial court held that the requirement that mifepristone must be dispensed in-person to patients by health providers should be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the public health emergency triggered by Covid-19 .
“ The In-Person Requirements impose a substantial obstacle to abortion patients seeking medication abortion care , ” wrote Judge Theodore D. Chuang .
As Chuang noted , the dual barriers raised by the pandemic and the in-person requirements “ delay abortion patients from receiving a medication abortion , which can either increase the health risk to them or , in light of the ten-week limit on the Mifepristone-Misoprostol Regimen , prevent them from receiving a medication abortion at all.
” After a federal appeals @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s order , the Trump administration went to the Supreme Court , seeking a stay of that order .
And , if that stay is granted , it could send a very clear signal to lower court judges that the right to an abortion should not be robustly enforced .
The Trump administration says it ’ s fine to restrict medication abortions so long as patients can have unnecessary surgeries The low-water mark for abortion rights , at least after Roe v. Wade ( 1973 ) , was the Supreme Court ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Prior to Gonzales , the Court applied a strong presumption against abortion restrictions that might endanger patient health .
As the Court held in Stenberg v. Carhart ( 2000 ) , “ where substantial medical authority supports the proposition that banning a particular abortion procedure could endanger women ’ s health , ” a ban on a particular abortion procedure must “ include a health exception when the procedure is ‘ necessary , in appropriate medical judgment , for the preservation of the life or health of the mother.
’ ” But Gonzales @ @ @ @ @ @ @ procedure known as intact dilation and extraction , despite the fact that the federal ban did not include an exception protecting “ the life or health of the mother.
” Rather , Gonzales held that state and federal lawmakers have “ wide discretion to pass legislation in areas where there is medical and scientific uncertainty.
” Thus , if physicians disagree about whether intact dilation and extraction is ever necessary to protect the health of a patient , Congress can resolve this disagreement in favor of a ban on the procedure .
Significantly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on intact dilation and extraction did not prohibit another “ commonly used and generally accepted method ” of abortion that could be used as an alternative to intact dilation and extraction .
Thus , the Court reasoned , a ban on this one particular method of abortion “ does not construct a substantial obstacle to the abortion right ” because patients could still obtain a different form of abortion .
The Trump administration wants to turn this line in Gonzales into a rule that would block many abortion patients from obtaining the safest @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Trump administration ’ s brief , restrictions on the use of mifepristone are appropriate — even if those restrictions effectively prevent many pregnant individuals from receiving a medication abortion altogether — because these patients could still have surgical abortions .
The in-person dispensing requirement , the Trump administration argues , has “ no effect on the availability of surgical abortions , a method that this Court has treated as safe for women.
” Thus , they claim , the fact that another ( far more invasive ) means of obtaining an abortion is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to impose restrictions on medication abortion .
So long as surgical abortions are available , the American College plaintiffs can not attack restrictions on medical abortion “ simply because [ they ] would prefer another alternative.
” That ’ s an aggressive reading of the Court ’ s decision in Gonzales .
As the plaintiffs explain in their brief , the thrust of their case is that “ patients incur grave COVID-19 risk by engaging in unnecessary travel and physical proximity to other people as a condition of obtaining ” a medication abortion @ @ @ @ @ @ @ more risk if they are forced to “ travel to a health center for a more invasive procedure ” such as a surgical abortion .
And that ’ s assuming that these patients are even able to obtain a surgical abortion in the first place .
Many clinics are already operating at reduced capacity due to the pandemic and have reduced the number of surgeries they perform as a result .
These already stressed clinics are unlikely to be able to accommodate a rush of patients seeking surgeries in lieu of a medication @ @ @ @ @ @ @ likely that this Supreme Court — with its conservative Republican majority — will , at the very least , give very serious consideration to the Trump administration ’ s arguments .
Moreover , when the administration seeks a stay of a lower court order , the justices typically decide whether to grant that request fairly quickly , and without oral arguments or full briefing .
That means that the Court could potentially hold that the government may block patients from receiving medication abortions — and force these patients to have more invasive surgical @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to terminate their pregnancy — as soon as this week .
Roberts is likely to uphold the restrictions on mifepristone , but it ’ s unclear if he ’ ll go as far as the Trump administration wants him to go In June Medical , the four most conservative justices all voted to uphold Louisiana ’ s attempt to shut down many of its abortion clinics .
Those four justices are almost certain to support additional restrictions on the right to an abortion .
Meanwhile , the four liberal justices are typically fairly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Roberts , who almost always votes with his conservative colleagues in abortion cases ( among other things , Roberts joined the majority in Gonzales ) , as the closest thing to a swing vote in American College .
There ’ s good reason to believe that Roberts is likely to uphold the in-person restrictions on mifepristone .
Indeed , there ’ s good reason to believe that Roberts is likely to uphold any similar restriction on a drug , regardless of whether that drug is used in abortions .
For one thing , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ public health officials during the Covid-19 pandemic , even when those officials take steps that implicate constitutional rights .
In South Bay United Pentecostal Church v. Newsom ( 2020 ) , Roberts broke with his fellow conservatives to uphold a California public health order limiting the number of people who could gather in a place of worship .
“ The precise question of when restrictions on particular social activities should be lifted during the pandemic is a dynamic and fact-intensive matter subject to reasonable disagreement , ” Roberts wrote in his South Bay @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Constitution principally entrusts ‘ [ t ] he safety and the health of the people ’ to the politically accountable officials of the States ‘ to guard and protect.
’ ” A similar logic could apply in American College .
That is , the task of determining whether it is safe to obtain mifepristone via a mail-order pharmacy , or some other method , is left to the FDA .
And , if plaintiffs disagree with that judgment , courts should defer to the FDA .
Roberts , moreover , joined the Gonzales @ @ @ @ @ @ @ government has “ wide discretion ” to restrict abortion in areas “ where there is medical and scientific uncertainty.
” To be sure , the primary plaintiff in the American College case is the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists , an organization with an unusual amount of credibility to opine on whether medical uncertainty exists in a particular case .
But the College also believed that doctors should be allowed to perform intact dilation and extraction prior to Gonzales , and the Court did not defer to the College ’ s judgment @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reason to suspect , in other words , that Roberts is likely to resolve a disagreement between the FDA and the College regarding how to safely dispense mifepristone in favor of the government agency .
That said , the fact that the FDA is likely to prevail in American College does not mean that Roberts will go so far as to declare that medication abortions can effectively be banned so long as surgical abortions are available .
For one thing , when the Court stays a lower court decision , it often does @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not explain the majority ’ s reasoning .
So even if Roberts agrees with the Trump administration 's arguments , he may not write those arguments into a binding opinion .
If the Court does produce a majority opinion , moreover , there ’ s no guarantee that Roberts will embrace the broad new restriction on abortion rights proposed by the Trump administration .
He could dispose of this case in a relatively narrow opinion holding that courts should defer to public health officials during the pandemic , much like the Supreme Court @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fact remains that the Court has five justices who are broadly skeptical of abortion rights .
So any time an abortion case reaches the Supreme Court , the Court ’ s Republican majority could potentially use that case to cut back on the right to terminate a pregnancy — or even to eliminate the right altogether .
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Last June, Chief Justice John Roberts provided a brief reprieve to abortion providers — joining his liberal colleagues in striking down a Louisiana anti-abortion law. But that reprieve could be very short-lived: A case now before the justices could give them a vehicle to undercut the right to terminate a pregnancy.
If the Trump administration gets its way in Food and Drug Administration v. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the Supreme Court could force many patients seeking abortions to undergo unnecessary surgeries, despite the fact that those patients could safely terminate their pregnancy with medication — and that’s assuming that these individuals are able to find a doctor to perform the surgery in the first place.
The case turns on whether the courts should relax long-standing FDA-imposed restrictions on the drug mifepristone, which is commonly used in medication abortions, in order to make the drug easier to obtain during the Covid-19 pandemic.
In the short term, a victory for the Trump administration would leave in place long-standing rules requiring health providers to dispense mifepristone to abortion patients in person. During ordinary times, this restriction imposes a fairly minor burden on such patients. But, as explained below, the same restriction could potentially prevent many pregnant individuals from obtaining an abortion altogether while the pandemic still rages.
Any time the Roberts Court hears an abortion case, moreover, the abortion right is at risk — because a majority of the Supreme Court is skeptical of whether that right should exist in the first place. Indeed, if the Court follows the path laid out in the Trump administration’s brief in American College, many abortion patients could lose access to the safest form of abortion.
Roberts’s decision to invalidate the Louisiana law in June Medical Services v. Russo (2020) was a somewhat surprising development, as Roberts has fairly consistently opposed abortion rights during his career on the bench. But June Medical was also a very narrow victory for abortion advocates.
The chief justice’s opinion turned on the fact that the Louisiana law at issue in June Medical was nearly identical to a Texas law the Court struck down just four years earlier. Roberts spent much of his June Medical opinion explaining why he disagrees with many of his Court’s decisions protecting abortion, and even dropping hints about how anti-abortion advocates can help undermine abortion rights in the future.
June Medical, in other words, turned out the way it did because abortion opponents brought the weakest possible case to the Supreme Court — a case that was in all relevant respects indistinguishable from another case that the Court recently decided. The new case pending before the justices, Food and Drug Administration v. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, does not suffer from similar weaknesses.
There are several reasons to suspect that Roberts will return to his anti-abortion roots in American College. Even if this were not an abortion case, and even if Roberts were not typically opposed to abortion rights, Roberts has urged courts to defer to public health officials during the pandemic. He’s unlikely to support a lower court decision that disagreed with the FDA’s judgment regarding a drug used in abortions.
And, with four other anti-abortion justices on the Supreme Court, if Roberts does flip back to the anti-abortion side in American College, that will almost certainly be enough to form a majority.
What’s at stake in American College?
Mifepristone, the drug at the center of American College, is part of a two-drug regimen used to induce abortion. Mifepristone causes pregnancy tissue and the lining of the uterus to break down and separate from the uterus itself. About a day or two after taking mifepristone, the patient takes a second drug, misoprostol, which causes uterine contractions and expels the uterus’s contents.
Although patients may take mifepristone at home, the FDA only permits this drug to be distributed at hospitals, clinics, or medical offices — meaning that it cannot be dispensed by a retail or mail-order pharmacy. Thus, at a time when many health providers are moving toward telemedicine to protect themselves and their patients from the coronavirus, abortion providers and their patients must risk in-person contact.
The limit on who can dispense the drug stretches back to when mifepristone was originally approved by the FDA in 2000, while Bill Clinton was president. The FDA also reviewed its restrictions on mifepristone in 2011, 2013, and 2016 — all during the Obama administration — and it left the requirement that the drug be dispensed by health care providers in place.
But while this requirement imposes a relatively minor burden on people seeking abortions during normal times, it is significantly more burdensome during the coronavirus pandemic. Many clinics have either closed or reduced the number of patients who are allowed to visit, in order to reduce the spread of Covid-19. But that means that fewer patients are able to obtain mifepristone at those clinics.
Meanwhile, patients may be afraid to travel to a clinic — especially if they rely on public transportation — because of the risk that they could be exposed to the coronavirus during this trip. As one expert witness testified in the American College case, the requirement that drugs be dispensed in-person “unnecessarily increases the infection risk for patients, their families, health care professionals, and the larger communities in which they work and live.”
The FDA, moreover, has relaxed similar restrictions on other drugs unrelated to abortion during the pandemic, but it has not made such accommodation for mifepristone. As the plaintiffs note in their brief, the FDA has taken “‘extraordinary actions’ to reduce viral transmission by suspending in-person requirements for drugs, including potentially lethal controlled substances like opioids, and urging the use of telemedicine ‘whenever possible.’” Yet it’s left the in-person dispensing restriction in place for mifepristone.
In light of all of these factors, a federal trial court held that the requirement that mifepristone must be dispensed in-person to patients by health providers should be suspended until 30 days after the end of the public health emergency triggered by Covid-19.
“The In-Person Requirements impose a substantial obstacle to abortion patients seeking medication abortion care,” wrote Judge Theodore D. Chuang. As Chuang noted, the dual barriers raised by the pandemic and the in-person requirements “delay abortion patients from receiving a medication abortion, which can either increase the health risk to them or, in light of the ten-week limit on the Mifepristone-Misoprostol Regimen, prevent them from receiving a medication abortion at all.”
After a federal appeals court refused to block Judge Chuang’s order, the Trump administration went to the Supreme Court, seeking a stay of that order. And, if that stay is granted, it could send a very clear signal to lower court judges that the right to an abortion should not be robustly enforced.
The Trump administration says it’s fine to restrict medication abortions so long as patients can have unnecessary surgeries
The low-water mark for abortion rights, at least after Roe v. Wade (1973), was the Supreme Court’s 2007 decision in Gonzales v. Carhart.
Prior to Gonzales, the Court applied a strong presumption against abortion restrictions that might endanger patient health. As the Court held in Stenberg v. Carhart (2000), “where substantial medical authority supports the proposition that banning a particular abortion procedure could endanger women’s health,” a ban on a particular abortion procedure must “include a health exception when the procedure is ‘necessary, in appropriate medical judgment, for the preservation of the life or health of the mother.’”
But Gonzales upheld a federal ban on an abortion procedure known as intact dilation and extraction, despite the fact that the federal ban did not include an exception protecting “the life or health of the mother.” Rather, Gonzales held that state and federal lawmakers have “wide discretion to pass legislation in areas where there is medical and scientific uncertainty.”
Thus, if physicians disagree about whether intact dilation and extraction is ever necessary to protect the health of a patient, Congress can resolve this disagreement in favor of a ban on the procedure.
Significantly, Gonzales also noted that the ban on intact dilation and extraction did not prohibit another “commonly used and generally accepted method” of abortion that could be used as an alternative to intact dilation and extraction. Thus, the Court reasoned, a ban on this one particular method of abortion “does not construct a substantial obstacle to the abortion right” because patients could still obtain a different form of abortion.
The Trump administration wants to turn this line in Gonzales into a rule that would block many abortion patients from obtaining the safest method of abortion. According to the Trump administration’s brief, restrictions on the use of mifepristone are appropriate — even if those restrictions effectively prevent many pregnant individuals from receiving a medication abortion altogether — because these patients could still have surgical abortions.
The in-person dispensing requirement, the Trump administration argues, has “no effect on the availability of surgical abortions, a method that this Court has treated as safe for women.” Thus, they claim, the fact that another (far more invasive) means of obtaining an abortion is available means that the FDA is free to impose restrictions on medication abortion. So long as surgical abortions are available, the American College plaintiffs cannot attack restrictions on medical abortion “simply because [they] would prefer another alternative.”
That’s an aggressive reading of the Court’s decision in Gonzales. As the plaintiffs explain in their brief, the thrust of their case is that “patients incur grave COVID-19 risk by engaging in unnecessary travel and physical proximity to other people as a condition of obtaining” a medication abortion. But those same patients face even more risk if they are forced to “travel to a health center for a more invasive procedure” such as a surgical abortion.
And that’s assuming that these patients are even able to obtain a surgical abortion in the first place. Many clinics are already operating at reduced capacity due to the pandemic and have reduced the number of surgeries they perform as a result. These already stressed clinics are unlikely to be able to accommodate a rush of patients seeking surgeries in lieu of a medication abortion.
Nevertheless, it’s likely that this Supreme Court — with its conservative Republican majority — will, at the very least, give very serious consideration to the Trump administration’s arguments.
Moreover, when the administration seeks a stay of a lower court order, the justices typically decide whether to grant that request fairly quickly, and without oral arguments or full briefing. That means that the Court could potentially hold that the government may block patients from receiving medication abortions — and force these patients to have more invasive surgical procedures or to give up their right to terminate their pregnancy — as soon as this week.
Roberts is likely to uphold the restrictions on mifepristone, but it’s unclear if he’ll go as far as the Trump administration wants him to go
In June Medical, the four most conservative justices all voted to uphold Louisiana’s attempt to shut down many of its abortion clinics. Those four justices are almost certain to support additional restrictions on the right to an abortion. Meanwhile, the four liberal justices are typically fairly protective of abortion rights.
That leaves Roberts, who almost always votes with his conservative colleagues in abortion cases (among other things, Roberts joined the majority in Gonzales), as the closest thing to a swing vote in American College.
There’s good reason to believe that Roberts is likely to uphold the in-person restrictions on mifepristone. Indeed, there’s good reason to believe that Roberts is likely to uphold any similar restriction on a drug, regardless of whether that drug is used in abortions.
For one thing, Roberts has advised courts to defer to public health officials during the Covid-19 pandemic, even when those officials take steps that implicate constitutional rights. In South Bay United Pentecostal Church v. Newsom (2020), Roberts broke with his fellow conservatives to uphold a California public health order limiting the number of people who could gather in a place of worship.
“The precise question of when restrictions on particular social activities should be lifted during the pandemic is a dynamic and fact-intensive matter subject to reasonable disagreement,” Roberts wrote in his South Bay opinion. He added that “our Constitution principally entrusts ‘[t]he safety and the health of the people’ to the politically accountable officials of the States ‘to guard and protect.’”
A similar logic could apply in American College. That is, the task of determining whether it is safe to obtain mifepristone via a mail-order pharmacy, or some other method, is left to the FDA. And, if plaintiffs disagree with that judgment, courts should defer to the FDA.
Roberts, moreover, joined the Gonzales majority, with its conclusion that the government has “wide discretion” to restrict abortion in areas “where there is medical and scientific uncertainty.”
To be sure, the primary plaintiff in the American College case is the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, an organization with an unusual amount of credibility to opine on whether medical uncertainty exists in a particular case. But the College also believed that doctors should be allowed to perform intact dilation and extraction prior to Gonzales, and the Court did not defer to the College’s judgment in that case.
There is good reason to suspect, in other words, that Roberts is likely to resolve a disagreement between the FDA and the College regarding how to safely dispense mifepristone in favor of the government agency.
That said, the fact that the FDA is likely to prevail in American College does not mean that Roberts will go so far as to declare that medication abortions can effectively be banned so long as surgical abortions are available. For one thing, when the Court stays a lower court decision, it often does so in a brief order that does not explain the majority’s reasoning. So even if Roberts agrees with the Trump administration's arguments, he may not write those arguments into a binding opinion.
If the Court does produce a majority opinion, moreover, there’s no guarantee that Roberts will embrace the broad new restriction on abortion rights proposed by the Trump administration. He could dispose of this case in a relatively narrow opinion holding that courts should defer to public health officials during the pandemic, much like the Supreme Court did in South Bay.
But the fact remains that the Court has five justices who are broadly skeptical of abortion rights. So any time an abortion case reaches the Supreme Court, the Court’s Republican majority could potentially use that case to cut back on the right to terminate a pregnancy — or even to eliminate the right altogether.


vox--2020-09-09--Right-wing media thrives on Facebook. Whether it rules is more complicated.

A few years ago , New York Times columnist Kevin Roose decided he wanted to get a better look at what was happening on Facebook .
Because Facebook does not offer much data about activity on its platform , Roose turned to a Facebook-owned tool called CrowdTangle , which lets journalists and researchers see which public posts are getting the highest levels of engagement .
It seemed revealing at first glance .
“ I started collecting this data without any kind of agenda .
I was just fascinated by it personally , ” Roose told Recode .
“ I was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I was seeing on Twitter was from the one that the data showed was happening on Facebook.
” There , he says he discovered what he calls a “ parallel media universe ” where extreme right-wing pages reign supreme .
Consistently , Roose found , conservative pages were beating out liberals ’ in making it into the day ’ s top 10 Facebook posts with links in the United States , based on engagement , like the number of reactions , comments , and shares the posts receive .
That seems to provide @ @ @ @ @ @ @ conservatives , a complaint often trotted out by Republicans despite lacking any significant data to support their claims of systemic bias .
In fact , these numbers would make it seem that Facebook is almost entirely dominated by conservative voices .
But the problem is , we don ’ t actually know if this is the case because engagement with public posts only measures one part of what users do on Facebook ’ s platform and can ’ t really reveal the extent of conservative influence there .
Critics have insisted that Roose @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the whole story .
In late July , the head of Facebook ’ s News Feed , John Hegeman , chimed in , emphasizing that “ these lists don ’ t represent what most people see ” on Facebook , pointing to non-public data showing that the list of what ’ s most seen on Facebook tells a less-partisan tale , with outlets like the Los Angeles Times and BuzzFeed capturing high amounts of attention .
This prompted several journalists to ask why Facebook won ’ t just make the type of data @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Roose has doubled down on his analysis of what gets the most engagement on Facebook .
In July , he created a standalone Twitter account , called Facebook ’ s Top 10 , devoted to these calculations , which now has over 16,000 followers ( and copy-cat accounts that do the same roundup for posts in Italy and in Sweden ) .
While acknowledging its limitations , he ’ s floated that the engagement data can indicate what ’ s really “ a rough gauge of what ’ s grabbing America ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ useful reality check for Democrats.
” Essentially , Roose thinks this Facebook activity might be the “ silent majority ” that ’ s more supportive of Trump than liberals would like .
There ’ s now a running debate among academics , analytics experts , and observers like Roose around what we know about what ’ s happening on Facebook and why .
Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan recently argued that “ Likes , ” comments , and shares are just a small part of what people actually see on Facebook , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ conclusions from these interactions alone or to know what they might mean for an election .
Meanwhile , CrowdTangle co-founder and chief executive Brandon Silverman conceded that there are limits to the data his tool provides , but he argues that it ’ s still helpful for understanding how public pages behave .
So , now weeks before a pivotal presidential election , everyone is arguing about what ’ s happening on Facebook and what it means .
Everyone seems to agree that focusing on the available engagement data has some serious limitations @ @ @ @ @ @ @ understand the goings-on of the most politically significant social media network in the United States , if not the world .
Trouble is , we don ’ t have any idea when , or if , Facebook will lift that curtain .
On Facebook , engagement is just one part of the story Lots of stuff happens on Facebook , but what ’ s publicly available is not a perfect representative slice of the platform overall .
Again , what CrowdTangle measures — and what Roose ’ s Top 10 lists catalog — @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
But your interactions in the public spaces of Facebook represent a small chunk of what you do on the platform .
Many posts , messages , groups , and pages are private , so what you do there doesn ’ t get captured by CrowdTangle .
Roose says that he tries to focus his research by looking at US-based posts that include links from pages .
That excludes , for instance , posts that are just status updates or posts that just include an image .
With these search constraints in place @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a regular pattern of public right-wing pages capturing many more interactions than their left-leaning counterparts .
If you ’ re a liberal , it might worry you that , according to this metric , posts from pages belonging to Diamond and Silk or Ben Shapiro are regularly outperforming more progressive content like , say , the page belonging to Occupy Democrats .
That counts posts like Ben Shapiro commenting on Nancy Pelosi ’ s recent hair salon visit ( and linking to a Daily Wire article about it ) .
What doesn ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , is your friend posting “ Vote for Joe Biden !
” as a status only available for view by friends .
But again , the CrowdTangle engagement data doesn ’ t take into account much of what people do on Facebook .
According to Aviv Ovadya , the founder of the Thoughtful Technology Project , CrowdTangle can be useful for understanding what public Facebook is up to , but there ’ s much more to Facebook than that .
“ There are better ways of getting at what the entire set of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ said Ovadya , pointing to Facebook data from another firm called NewsWhip .
The engagement that CrowdTangle measures involves users making a certain type of effort .
Engaging with content on Facebook is not the same thing as seeing it or agreeing with it .
It ’ s also something that not everybody does .
Consider how often you actually take the step to “ Like , ” comment on , or share content from a public page instead of just passively scrolling through your News Feed .
Different people also engage in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ use Facebook five minutes a day or 20 minutes a week , ” said Nyhan , the Dartmouth professor .
“ There ’ s some people on Facebook eight or 10 hours a day .
So you can get huge engagement numbers catering to that deeply devoted base of hyper-engaged Facebook users.
” And then there ’ s the hate-like and the hate-share .
This is what happens when someone engages with a post from a page but doesn ’ t necessarily support what the post says .
“ Reactions are both positive @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , a data scientist currently working with Code for Democracy .
“ Without directionality to the ranking of reactions , it ’ s hard to know if people are reacting positively because they agree or they ’ re hate-commenting or hate-angry-facing , basically.
” The fact that engagement data can be so misleading is why people like Hegeman , the Facebook News Feed boss , have suggested that a better mechanism for tracking activity on Facebook might be measuring reach : how many people actually see a particular post , link , or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has argued that reach data offers a more complete picture of what ’ s popular , Facebook seems shy about publicly sharing that information on a regular basis .
“ I would give my left arm to track reach on Facebook , ” Roose told Recode , conceding there ’ s a lot that CrowdTangle doesn ’ t capture .
“ If Facebook would like us to be tracking something other than interactions on public pages , groups , and verified profiles , it has a very easy way of making that possible @ @ @ @ @ @ @ done it so far.
” Of course , data about engagement on Facebook isn ’ t useless .
It does reflect what kinds of posts people are willing to devote effort to responding to , and it ’ s also one of the factors that influences recommendations throughout the Facebook platform .
But putting too much stock into the type of engagement data Roose has been sharing raises questions about how Facebook handles content posted by conservatives .
Censorship on social media has been a hot-button issue for conservatives since at least 2016 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ employees suppressed conservative voices in Facebook ’ s trending news section , which the company later removed from the site .
Despite the protestations of certain Republican lawmakers , there ’ s no strong , empirical evidence that Facebook is systematically biased against conservatives .
In some cases , the company has directly intervened to help right-wing voices .
And again , the high levels of engagement on right-leaning Facebook pages would seem to suggest that conservative content is more popular than ever .
Still , high levels of engagement on Facebook is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a silent majority capable of swinging the election one way or the other .
It might be more accurate to say that this heightened activity suggests that conservatives have found more concentrated and highly engaged audiences than liberals have with these kinds of posts .
“ There is a thriving pages ecosystem on Facebook , where highly emotive content performs well , ” Nyhan explained , “ and many conservative publishers appear at the top of the highest-performing pages and URLs for generating engagement.
” He emphasized that what people do on Facebook @ @ @ @ @ @ @ what they do in the voting booth .
Different data tells different stories about Facebook .
More data could help .
One of the challenges in studying what ’ s politically going on for Facebook ’ s users is that different users use Facebook differently , and it ’ s very easy to end up essentially comparing digital apples to digital oranges .
When people do stuff on Facebook , they do it differently for different types of content .
Silverman , the CrowdTangle chief , points out that people are more likely @ @ @ @ @ @ @ clicking through to read it , while the exact reverse is true of celebrity gossip reports .
Looking at the most-engaged public posts of all types of Facebook content — not just links but also photos , videos , and so on — reveals a snapshot of what ’ s popular on Facebook that ’ s somewhat different from what Roose is broadcasting , Silverman says .
If you look at data beyond the engagement on posts from public pages , the story of what ’ s popular on Facebook looks a bit @ @ @ @ @ @ @ analytics firm , calculates the most popular publications on Facebook by looking at reactions , shares , and comments to links that are shared not only publicly on the social network but also privately .
Monthly rankings from NewsWhip show a mix of ideological leaning in outlets whose content is performing well on Facebook .
Of course , what the New York Times is trying to accomplish on Facebook might differ from the objectives of Fox News .
Some of these actors , such as the Daily Wire , have their content boosted @ @ @ @ @ @ @ might explain that site ’ s recent climb to huge levels of engagement .
Whether conservatives appear to be getting more engagement overall , however , is up for debate .
As the NewsWhip data showing engagement data from both public and private pages reveals , total engagement on Facebook is a bit more balanced than what Roose ’ s top 10 lists suggest .
But as those lists reveal , there is evidence of a trend in which certain kinds of conservative content — mostly emotion-driven , deeply partisan posts — attract @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Tuesday reported that the most-engaged articles on Facebook in the past 24 hours included a slew of conservative media articles .
“ Anger travels really , really well on Facebook , ” Roose told Recode .
“ I think the commentators that have sort of excelled at packaging grievances and presenting them to people in an attractive way have really gotten a lot of mileage.
” Noting he doesn ’ t have supporting data , he hypothesizes that liberals , generally , trust a more fragmented set of sources of media than conservatives @ @ @ @ @ @ @ success makes it to the top of his list .
Facebook , for its part , did not comment on why conservative pages do well by this metric .
Facebook is important , even if we don ’ t know how the platform matters Even if we were able to understand the full extent of activity on Facebook , the link between behavior on the platform and real-life political behavior isn ’ t clear .
That ’ s not to say other mechanisms , like polls , are perfect at indicating voting behavior @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Facebook in political discourse is still difficult to truly understand .
That ’ s probably why Facebook announced in late August that it would bring on social scientists , including Nyhan , to help study the influence of Facebook ’ s systems on American democracy .
But for those hoping to understand the platform in real time — or at least before the election — that won ’ t be so satisfying .
For those watching Facebook ’ s own CrowdTangle data in the meantime , don ’ t get your hopes up @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of other data points we ’ d also love to add , ” CrowdTangle ’ s Silverman told Recode .
“ And those are all conversations that are constantly happening for us internally.
” But it wasn ’ t clear when , how , and if that would happen .
In the meantime , Roose insists that media outlets keep their eyes glued to the biggest social media platform and work with the data they do have .
“ I think people feel like I ’ m trying to prove a point by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ making an argument for this data , ” he says .
“ I guess the argument that I feel like I ’ m making is that people should pay attention to what ’ s happening on Facebook.
” Open Sourced is made possible by Omidyar Network .
All Open Sourced content is editorially independent and produced by our journalists .
Help keep Vox free for all Millions turn to Vox each month to understand what ’ s happening in the news , from the coronavirus crisis to a racial reckoning to what is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ presidential election of our lifetimes .
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A few years ago, New York Times columnist Kevin Roose decided he wanted to get a better look at what was happening on Facebook. Because Facebook does not offer much data about activity on its platform, Roose turned to a Facebook-owned tool called CrowdTangle, which lets journalists and researchers see which public posts are getting the highest levels of engagement. It seemed revealing at first glance.
“I started collecting this data without any kind of agenda. I was just fascinated by it personally,” Roose told Recode. “I was fascinated by how different the world that I was seeing on Twitter was from the one that the data showed was happening on Facebook.”
There, he says he discovered what he calls a “parallel media universe” where extreme right-wing pages reign supreme. Consistently, Roose found, conservative pages were beating out liberals’ in making it into the day’s top 10 Facebook posts with links in the United States, based on engagement, like the number of reactions, comments, and shares the posts receive. That seems to provide evidence against the notion that Facebook censors conservatives, a complaint often trotted out by Republicans despite lacking any significant data to support their claims of systemic bias. In fact, these numbers would make it seem that Facebook is almost entirely dominated by conservative voices. But the problem is, we don’t actually know if this is the case because engagement with public posts only measures one part of what users do on Facebook’s platform and can’t really reveal the extent of conservative influence there.
Critics have insisted that Roose’s numbers can’t tell the whole story. In late July, the head of Facebook’s News Feed, John Hegeman, chimed in, emphasizing that “these lists don’t represent what most people see” on Facebook, pointing to non-public data showing that the list of what’s most seen on Facebook tells a less partisan tale, with outlets like the Los Angeles Times and BuzzFeed capturing high amounts of attention. This prompted several journalists to ask why Facebook won’t just make the type of data Hegeman cited publicly available.
Meanwhile, Roose has doubled down on his analysis of what gets the most engagement on Facebook. In July, he created a standalone Twitter account, called Facebook’s Top 10, devoted to these calculations, which now has over 16,000 followers (and copycat accounts that do the same roundup for posts in Italy and in Sweden). While acknowledging its limitations, he’s floated that the engagement data can indicate what’s really “a rough gauge of what’s grabbing America’s attention” and serve as a “useful reality check for Democrats.” Essentially, Roose thinks this Facebook activity might be the “silent majority” that’s more supportive of Trump than liberals would like.
There’s now a running debate among academics, analytics experts, and observers like Roose around what we know about what’s happening on Facebook and why. Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan recently argued that “likes,” comments, and shares are just a small part of what people actually see on Facebook, and that it’s difficult to draw conclusions from these interactions alone or to know what they might mean for an election. CrowdTangle co-founder and chief executive Brandon Silverman conceded that there are limits to the data his tool provides, but he argues it’s still helpful for understanding how public pages behave.
So now, weeks before a pivotal presidential election, everyone is arguing about what’s happening on Facebook and what it means. Everyone seems to agree that focusing on the available engagement data has some serious limitations and that we need more data to understand the goings-on of the most politically significant social media network in the United States, if not the world. Trouble is, we don’t have any idea when, or if, Facebook will lift that curtain.
On Facebook, engagement is just one part of the story
Lots of stuff happens on Facebook, but what’s publicly available is not a perfect representative slice of the platform overall. Again, what CrowdTangle measures — and what Roose’s Top 10 lists catalog — is engagement with public posts on Facebook. But your interactions in the public spaces of Facebook represent a small chunk of what you do on the platform. Many posts, messages, groups, and pages are private, so what you do there doesn’t get captured by CrowdTangle.
Roose says he tries to focus his research by looking at US-based posts that include links from pages. That excludes, for instance, posts that are just status updates or posts that just include an image. With these search constraints in place, Roose says he’s finding a regular pattern of public right-wing pages capturing many more interactions than their left-leaning counterparts.
The top-performing link posts by U.S. Facebook pages in the last 24 hours are from:
1. Franklin Graham
2. Donald Trump 2020 Voters
3. Ben Shapiro
4. Ben Shapiro
5. David J. Harris Jr.
6. Fox News
7. Sarah Palin
8. Ben Shapiro
9. An0maly
10. Robert Reich — Facebook's Top 10 (@FacebooksTop10) September 7, 2020
If you’re a liberal, it might worry you that, according to this metric, posts from pages belonging to Diamond and Silk or Ben Shapiro are regularly outperforming more progressive content like, say, the page belonging to Occupy Democrats. That counts posts like Ben Shapiro commenting on Nancy Pelosi’s recent hair salon visit (and linking to a Daily Wire article about it). What doesn’t get counted, as an example, is your friend posting “Vote for Joe Biden!” as a status only available for view by friends.
But again, the CrowdTangle engagement data doesn’t take into account much of what people do on Facebook. According to Aviv Ovadya, the founder of the Thoughtful Technology Project, CrowdTangle can be useful for understanding what public Facebook is up to, but there’s much more to Facebook than that. “There are better ways of getting at what the entire set of Facebook users are interacting with,” said Ovadya, pointing to Facebook data from another firm called NewsWhip.
The engagement that CrowdTangle measures involves users making a certain type of effort. Engaging with content on Facebook is not the same thing as seeing it or agreeing with it. It’s also something that not everybody does. Consider how often you actually take the step to like, comment on, or share content from a public page instead of just passively scrolling through your News Feed. Different people also engage in different ways.
“Lots of people use Facebook five minutes a day or 20 minutes a week,” said Nyhan, the Dartmouth professor. “There’s some people on Facebook eight or 10 hours a day. So you can get huge engagement numbers catering to that deeply devoted base of hyper-engaged Facebook users.”
And then there’s the hate-like and the hate-share. This is what happens when someone engages with a post from a page but doesn’t necessarily support what the post says.
“Reactions are both positive and negative,” said Kathy Qian, a data scientist who co-founded Code for Democracy. “Without directionality to the ranking of reactions, it’s hard to know if people are reacting positively because they agree or they’re hate-commenting or hate-angry-facing, basically.”
The fact that engagement data can be so misleading is why people like Hegeman, the Facebook News Feed boss, have suggested that a better mechanism for tracking activity on Facebook might be measuring reach: how many people actually see a particular post, link, or publisher. But even though the company has argued that reach data offers a more complete picture of what’s popular, Facebook seems shy about publicly sharing that information on a regular basis.
“I would give my left arm to track reach on Facebook,” Roose told Recode, conceding there’s a lot that CrowdTangle doesn’t capture. “If Facebook would like us to be tracking something other than interactions on public pages, groups, and verified profiles, it has a very easy way of making that possible, and it just hasn’t done it so far.”
Of course, data about engagement on Facebook isn’t useless. It does reflect what kinds of posts people are willing to devote effort to responding to, and it’s also one of the factors that influence recommendations throughout the Facebook platform.
But putting too much stock into the type of engagement data Roose has been sharing raises questions about how Facebook handles content posted by conservatives. Censorship on social media has been a hot-button issue for conservatives since at least 2016, when Gizmodo reported that some Facebook employees suppressed conservative voices in Facebook’s trending news section, which the company later removed from the site. Despite the protestations of certain Republican lawmakers, there’s no strong, empirical evidence that Facebook is systematically biased against conservatives. In some cases, the company has directly intervened to help right-wing voices. And again, the high levels of engagement on right-leaning Facebook pages would seem to suggest that conservative content is more popular than ever.
Still, high levels of engagement on Facebook is not quite proof that there’s a silent majority capable of swinging the election one way or the other. It might be more accurate to say that this heightened activity suggests that conservatives have found more concentrated and highly engaged audiences than liberals have with these kinds of posts.
“There is a thriving pages ecosystem on Facebook, where highly emotive content performs well,” Nyhan explained, “and many conservative publishers appear at the top of the highest-performing pages and URLs for generating engagement.” He emphasized that what people do on Facebook also doesn’t necessarily correlate with what they do in the voting booth.
Different data tells different stories about Facebook. More data could help.
One of the challenges in studying what’s politically going on for Facebook’s users is that different users use Facebook differently, and it’s very easy to end up essentially comparing digital apples to digital oranges.
When people do stuff on Facebook, they do it differently for different types of content. Silverman, the CrowdTangle chief, points out that people are more likely to interact with political content without actually clicking through to read it, while the exact reverse is true of celebrity gossip reports. Looking at the most-engaged public posts of all types of Facebook content — not just links but also photos, videos, and so on — reveals a snapshot of what’s popular on Facebook that’s somewhat different from what Roose is broadcasting, Silverman says.
If you look at data beyond the engagement on posts from public pages, the story of what’s popular on Facebook looks a bit different. NewsWhip, a social media analytics firm, calculates the most popular publications on Facebook by looking at reactions, shares, and comments to links that are shared not only publicly on the social network but also privately. Monthly rankings from NewsWhip show a mix of ideological leaning in outlets whose content is performing well on Facebook.
Of course, what the New York Times is trying to accomplish on Facebook might differ from the objectives of Fox News. Some of these actors, such as the Daily Wire, have their content boosted through systematic, coordinated networks, which might explain that site’s recent climb to huge levels of engagement. Whether conservatives appear to be getting more engagement overall, however, is up for debate. As the NewsWhip data showing engagement data from both public and private pages reveals, total engagement on Facebook is a bit more balanced than what Roose’s top 10 lists suggest.
But as those lists reveal, there is evidence of a trend in which certain kinds of conservative content — mostly emotion-driven, deeply partisan posts — attract large levels of engagement. NewsWhip on Tuesday reported that the most engaged articles on Facebook in the past 24 hours included a slew of conservative media articles.
“Anger travels really, really well on Facebook,” Roose told Recode. “I think the commentators that have sort of excelled at packaging grievances and presenting them to people in an attractive way have really gotten a lot of mileage.” Noting he doesn’t have supporting data, he hypothesizes that liberals, generally, trust a more fragmented set of sources of media than conservatives, which could contribute to why right-wing success makes it to the top of his list.
Facebook, for its part, did not comment on why conservative pages do well by this metric.
Facebook is important, even if we don’t know how the platform matters
Even if we were able to understand the full extent of activity on Facebook, the link between behavior on the platform and real-life political behavior isn’t clear. That’s not to say other mechanisms, like polls, are perfect at indicating voting behavior either, but the actual role of Facebook in political discourse is still difficult to truly understand.
That’s probably why Facebook announced in late August that it would bring on social scientists, including Nyhan, to help study the influence of Facebook’s systems on American democracy. But for those hoping to understand the platform in real time — or at least before the election — that won’t be so satisfying. For those watching Facebook’s CrowdTangle data in the meantime, don’t get your hopes up.
“There’s a lot of other data points we’d also love to add,” CrowdTangle’s Silverman told Recode. “And those are all conversations that are constantly happening for us internally.” But it wasn’t clear when, how, or if that would happen.
In the meantime, Roose insists that media outlets keep their eyes glued to the biggest social media platform and work with the data they do have. “I think people feel like I’m trying to prove a point by doing this, like I’m making an argument for this data,” he says. “I guess the argument that I feel like I’m making is that people should pay attention to what’s happening on Facebook.”
Open Sourced is made possible by Omidyar Network. All Open Sourced content is editorially independent and produced by our journalists.


vox--2020-09-09--The UK threatens to renege on the Brexit deal it signed with the EU just a year ago

The United Kingdom is threatening to renege on parts of its Brexit agreement with the European Union , potentially violating international law and upending trade negotiations with the bloc .
On Wednesday , the UK government introduced the UK Internal Market Bill , an anodyne-sounding piece of legislation that ’ s anything but .
The bill targets a specific part of the EU-UK Withdrawal Agreement , otherwise known as the Brexit deal — the same deal that Prime Minister Boris Johnson struck with the European Union last October , which ultimately allowed the UK to leave the EU with a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ When the UK separated from the EU , it entered into a transition period in which both sides were supposed to work out their future relationship on everything from trade to security .
That ’ s what ’ s been happening since — or not happening , really , as negotiations have largely stalled .
That has meant the prospects of striking a comprehensive deal before the end-of-year deadline were looking slimmer and slimmer .
Enter the United Kingdom with a curveball of sorts .
The UK Internal Market Bill would change some @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Protocol , which covered one of the thorniest issues in the first round of negotiations on the Brexit deal .
Northern Ireland , which is part of the UK , shares a border with Ireland , which is part of the EU .
Keeping that border open to enable the free flow of goods and people is central to the Good Friday Agreement , a 1998 peace deal that sought to put an end to decades of conflict in Northern Ireland through seamless North-South cooperation .
The Northern Ireland Protocol was designed to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ happened in the larger trade talks between the EU and the UK .
But Johnson ’ s government has now decided it would like to make unilateral changes to a plan it agreed to less than a year ago — undermining the agreement and the already tenuous negotiations with the EU on any future relationship .
The Brexit deal is an international treaty , so if the UK were to approve this legislation , it would be violating international law .
And the British government has admitted that ’ s exactly what it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ does break international law in a very specific and limited way , ” Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis told the House of Commons on Tuesday , in response to a question from a member of Parliament .
Breaking international law , even in a “ very specific and limited way , ” is still , well , breaking international law .
( The UK ’ s top government lawyer quit in apparent protest . )
Johnson has shown he ’ s willing to push the boundaries of the law — proroguing Parliament , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ also be a pressure tactic in negotiations , an attempt to shake up stagnant talks with the EU .
But this move could backfire , derailing UK ’ s negotiations with the EU and showing that the UK is not serious about its commitments .
It also sets a troubling precedent beyond Brexit .
Just as it ’ s striking out on its own and trying to make trade deals with the rest of the world , the UK may no longer be seen as a reliable or trustworthy partner .
And if @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of law can so easily stomp on a treaty when it doesn ’ t suit it , it will be much harder to prevent allies and adversaries alike from doing the same .
How we got here It took a while to get there and many things happened along the way , but in the end , the EU and the UK agreed to a Brexit deal last year .
That deal , or withdrawal agreement , was essentially the Brexit divorce papers : what the UK and EU needed to do to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sticking points of that phase centered on the status of the border between Northern Ireland and Ireland .
Hardcore Brexit supporters , Johnson among them , opposed the initial plan ( the “ Irish backstop ” ) , which they saw as keeping the UK trapped within the EU ’ s institutions .
Johnson was able to renegotiate the arrangement when he became prime minister last year .
The deal Johnson made would keep Northern Ireland closely aligned with many EU rules , including on goods .
That avoided any checks on the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ But it also meant that some goods flowing between Great Britain and Northern Ireland would be subject to checks , in case they risked ending up in Ireland — and as a result , anywhere in the EU ’ s single market .
Many of the details of how this would work in practice still needed to be implemented , and a EU-UK joint committee was supposed to figure that out .
That ’ s what the EU and UK agreed to in the Brexit deal , which both sides ratified .
This @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 31 , 2020 , and set up phase two of Brexit : negotiating that future trade relationship by December 31 , 2020 .
Those negotiations have not been going well at all , and both sides are at odds on key issues , specifically state aid and fisheries .
The latter is as much a symbolic issue as an economic one , but the state aid is really the crux of the problem .
The EU is insisting that if the UK wants tariff-free access to its markets , it can ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ industries or businesses , or by lowering standards on things like the environment or labor to try to give British businesses a boost .
But for the UK , which wanted to Brexit so it could be a rule-maker instead of a rule-taker , following EU rules is the opposite of what Brexit was supposed to deliver .
It ’ s particularly anathema to the Brexiteers , who remain a vocal chunk of Johnson ’ s Conservative Party .
( The issue of state aid also intersects with that of Northern Ireland , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ state aid . )
Add a pandemic , which consumed leaders ’ attentions and complicated negotiations by relegating EU and UK diplomats to meeting via videoconference this spring , and the prospect of a deal between the UK and the EU looked grim .
A “ no-deal ” scenario is still a possibility : All of the catastrophically disruptive things that could have happened if the UK left the EU without a plan in place before Brexit could still occur — trade disruptions and gridlocks at points of entry , just to name @ @ @ @ @ @ @ UK remain stuck .
And unlike last time , the upcoming December 31 , 2020 , deadline is harder to fudge , as it ’ s written into that same withdrawal agreement — which , again , is an international treaty .
But the UK is now essentially saying , “ Sure , it ’ s an international treaty — but so what ?
” What the UK is proposing ( the very , very short version ) EU-UK talks on their future relationship resumed in London this Tuesday .
Johnson urged the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and set an October 15 deadline for reaching some sort of agreement .
The EU , in turn , has told the UK that it needs to get real about its own demands .
But just as things already looked bad , the United Kingdom broke the news that , actually , it wanted to revisit the first Brexit deal and make some unilateral changes to that protocol on Northern Ireland .
The text of the proposed legislation was introduced Wednesday .
The prime minister ’ s office has defended it as an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the protocol in case talks between Brussels and London fall apart .
Amazingly , Johnson claimed the pressure of getting a deal done quickly left some issues open-ended , and the UK had to fill in the gaps .
“ It was agreed at pace in the most challenging possible political circumstances to deliver on a decision by the British people , with the clear overriding purpose of protecting the special circumstances of Northern Ireland , ” Johnson ’ s spokesperson said Wednesday .
In 2019 , though , Johnson said the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that takes back control ” and referred to it as an “ oven-ready deal.
” But this legislation is more than a few tweaks ; it ’ s pretty clear that this is the UK doing what it wants .
The legislation says it will “ have effect notwithstanding inconsistency or incompatibility with international or other domestic law.
” The legislation would affect state aid , and also the flow of goods between the rest of Great Britain and Northern Ireland .
Here ’ s an example that Colin Murray , a reader @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Newcastle , explained to me : the EU-UK joint committee is supposed to decide which goods flowing from Great Britain to Northern Ireland might be subject to tariffs if they ’ re at risk of making it into the EU single market .
But if they can ’ t agree , then the default is the goods may be at risk .
So now the UK is saying , actually , nope , we just get to decide — never mind all that commission stuff .
The UK ’ s proposed legislation would @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the withdrawal agreement .
The Northern Ireland Protocol was the compromise plan to keep that border open on the island or Ireland .
But it always came with this caveat that it would entail checks somewhere else .
But Johnson has repeatedly downplayed the need for those checks , though he himself agreed to them .
And now it looks very much like an attempt to wriggle out of that reality .
“ The UK knew what it was signing up to , ” Murray said .
“ Now , simply , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it signed up to.
” By possibly backtracking on this plan , the UK brings back uncertainty to the status of Northern Ireland .
It raises the dilemma once again : How to protect the EU single market while also avoiding the return of a hard border between Northern Ireland and Ireland ?
This was the very thing the protocol agreed to between the UK and EU attempted to solve .
Now , the UK is muddying that , increasing fears that this move could undermine the Good Friday Agreement .
Neither the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are there quite yet .
The EU has warned the UK it can ’ t break international law , and it may reportedly seek legal action if the UK goes ahead with the legislation .
“ This would break international law and undermines trust .
Pacta sunt servanda = the foundation of prosperous future relations , ” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen wrote on Twitter , using a Latin phrase meaning “ agreements must be kept.
” What does all this really mean ?
The UK introduced text to this legislation @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that hasn ’ t actually happened yet , and would still require Parliament to agree .
Johnson has , thanks to elections last year , a very big majority in the House of Commons .
But some Conservatives , including our old friend Theresa May , worry that this legislation would undermine trust in the UK .
Experts I spoke to see a few different dynamics driving this decision .
One is Johnson himself , who used the furor over Brexit to get into power and replace May as prime minister .
He @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” and while he achieved an exit , that deal might not have been as “ oven-ready ” as advertised , the fine print a little less favorable to the UK than Johnson promised .
This is almost an attempt to try to fudge reality , again .
Also , the future negotiations aren ’ t going well .
That impasse is making the prospect of a no-deal exit more likely .
So this may be Johnson ’ s attempt to see who might blink first , a kind of “ macho brinkmanship @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Richard Whitman , professor of political and international relations at the University of Kent , who spoke to me before the text of the bill was introduced , told me that the timing could be seen as a provocative move .
The UK is , in a way , warning the EU , he said : “ If we don ’ t do a deal between the two of us on the future relationship , then there ’ s an awful lot of loose ends that are probably going to be tied up @ @ @ @ @ @ @ them up rather than necessarily negotiate them with you to tie them up.
” And for Johnson ’ s supporters who are skeptical of the EU and want the hardest break with the bloc possible , this may be the kind of leadership they want to see : someone who isn ’ t going to be bullied by those EU bureaucrats .
And if the EU and the UK do make a deal , Johnson can help sell it as a victory , proof that his pressure campaign against the EU worked .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ UK is tough on the EU , it ’ ll cave — may be unrealistic .
It could have the opposite effect , and blow up the Brexit negotiations for good .
It ’ s pretty simple : Why would the EU want to keep negotiating with the UK if they know the UK is going to renege on the very things they negotiated just last year ?
Why would the EU make compromises and concessions if the UK will just turn around and do whatever it wants ?
The implications extend beyond @ @ @ @ @ @ @ want to make a trade deal , or any agreement , if the UK is not a reliable partner ?
“ Internationally , this potentially sets a bad precedent for future trade deals and risks damaging the UK ’ s reputation , ” Chris Stafford , a doctoral researcher in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham , told me in an email .
“ International trade deals take a lot of time and effort to negotiate , so some countries may be hesitant to do this if @ @ @ @ @ @ @ just ignore such agreements when it suits them.
” This is particularly relevant with the United States , which is in negotiations with the UK on a trade deal .
Members of Congress , including Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi , have said they wouldn ’ t approve any US-UK trade deal if the UK violates the law and threatens the Good Friday Agreement .
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden ’ s foreign policy adviser also reiterated the candidate ’ s commitment to the Northern Ireland peace process on Twitter , linking @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Johnson ’ s attempts to wiggle out of the Brexit deal .
All in all , the UK ’ s bill may make the prospect of a no-deal more likely , not less .
That would be bad for all parties , but particularly for the UK .
It could cause serious economic disruption at the exact same time the country , and the world , are trying to recover from the economic catastrophe caused by Covid-19 .
But , weirdly , the pandemic-caused economic crisis could actually help Johnson and his allies @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fallout that comes from the Brexit debacle .
If the UK public is focused on the pandemic and its consequences , they may not be paying attention to Brexit anymore .
There will be economic disruption — but there ’ s already economic disruption .
As Murray said , the UK government can file it all under Covid-19 , diverting the blame for a problem of their own making .
Help keep Vox free for all Millions turn to Vox each month to understand what ’ s happening in the news , from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to what is , quite possibly , the most consequential presidential election of our lifetimes .
Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment : to empower you through understanding .
But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn .
Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers , your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work , and helping everyone make sense of an increasingly chaotic world .
Contribute today from @ @ @ @ @ @

The United Kingdom is threatening to renege on parts of its Brexit agreement with the European Union, potentially violating international law and upending trade negotiations with the bloc.
On Wednesday, the UK government introduced the UK Internal Market Bill, an anodyne-sounding piece of legislation that’s anything but. The bill targets a specific part of the EU-UK Withdrawal Agreement, otherwise known as the Brexit deal — the same deal that Prime Minister Boris Johnson struck with the European Union last October, which ultimately allowed the UK to leave the EU with a deal on January 31, 2020.
When the UK separated from the EU, it entered into a transition period in which both sides were supposed to work out their future relationship on everything from trade to security. That’s what’s been happening since — or not happening, really, as negotiations have largely stalled. That has meant the prospects of striking a comprehensive deal before the end-of-year deadline were looking slimmer and slimmer.
Enter the United Kingdom with a curveball of sorts.
The UK Internal Market Bill would change some of the terms in the Northern Ireland Protocol, which covered one of the thorniest issues in the first round of negotiations on the Brexit deal. Northern Ireland, which is part of the UK, shares a border with Ireland, which is part of the EU. Keeping that border open to enable the free flow of goods and people is central to the Good Friday Agreement, a 1998 peace deal that sought to put an end to decades of conflict in Northern Ireland through seamless North-South cooperation.
The Northern Ireland Protocol was designed to protect those interests, no matter what happened in the larger trade talks between the EU and the UK. But Johnson’s government has now decided it would like to make unilateral changes to a plan it agreed to less than a year ago — undermining the agreement and the already tenuous negotiations with the EU on any future relationship.
The Brexit deal is an international treaty, so if the UK were to approve this legislation, it would be violating international law. And the British government has admitted that’s exactly what it is doing. “Yes, this does break international law in a very specific and limited way,” Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis told the House of Commons on Tuesday, in response to a question from a member of Parliament.
Breaking international law, even in a “very specific and limited way,” is still, well, breaking international law. (The UK’s top government lawyer quit in apparent protest.) Johnson has shown he’s willing to push the boundaries of the law — proroguing Parliament, for instance — but this seems to also be a pressure tactic in negotiations, an attempt to shake up stagnant talks with the EU.
But this move could backfire, derailing the UK’s negotiations with the EU and showing that the UK is not serious about its commitments.
It also sets a troubling precedent beyond Brexit. Just as it’s striking out on its own and trying to make trade deals with the rest of the world, the UK may no longer be seen as a reliable or trustworthy partner. And if a democratic country that champions the rule of law can so easily stomp on a treaty when it doesn’t suit it, it will be much harder to prevent allies and adversaries alike from doing the same.
How we got here
It took a while to get there and many things happened along the way, but in the end, the EU and the UK agreed to a Brexit deal last year.
That deal, or withdrawal agreement, was essentially the Brexit divorce papers: what the UK and EU needed to do to break up. One of the big sticking points of that phase centered on the status of the border between Northern Ireland and Ireland.
Hardcore Brexit supporters, Johnson among them, opposed the initial plan (the “Irish backstop”), which they saw as keeping the UK trapped within the EU’s institutions. Johnson was able to renegotiate the arrangement when he became prime minister last year.
The deal Johnson made would keep Northern Ireland closely aligned with many EU rules, including on goods. That avoided any checks on the border between Northern Ireland and Ireland. But it also meant that some goods flowing between Great Britain and Northern Ireland would be subject to checks, in case they risked ending up in Ireland — and as a result, anywhere in the EU’s single market.
Many of the details of how this would work in practice still needed to be implemented, and a EU-UK joint committee was supposed to figure that out.
That’s what the EU and UK agreed to in the Brexit deal, which both sides ratified. This allowed the UK to leave on January 31, 2020, and set up phase two of Brexit: negotiating that future trade relationship by December 31, 2020.
Those negotiations have not been going well at all, and both sides are at odds on key issues, specifically state aid and fisheries. The latter is as much a symbolic issue as an economic one, but the state aid is really the crux of the problem.
The EU is insisting that if the UK wants tariff-free access to its markets, it can’t try to undercut the EU by subsidizing industries or businesses, or by lowering standards on things like the environment or labor to try to give British businesses a boost.
But for the UK, which wanted to Brexit so it could be a rule-maker instead of a rule-taker, following EU rules is the opposite of what Brexit was supposed to deliver. It’s particularly anathema to the Brexiteers, who remain a vocal chunk of Johnson’s Conservative Party. (The issue of state aid also intersects with that of Northern Ireland, because NI must follow EU rules on state aid.)
Add a pandemic, which consumed leaders’ attentions and complicated negotiations by relegating EU and UK diplomats to meeting via videoconference this spring, and the prospect of a deal between the UK and the EU looked grim.
A “no-deal” scenario is still a possibility: All of the catastrophically disruptive things that could have happened if the UK left the EU without a plan in place before Brexit — trade disruptions and gridlocks at points of entry, just to name a few — could still occur if the EU and UK remain stuck. And unlike last time, the upcoming December 31, 2020, deadline is harder to fudge, as it’s written into that same withdrawal agreement — which, again, is an international treaty.
But the UK is now essentially saying, “Sure, it’s an international treaty — but so what?”
What the UK is proposing (the very, very short version)
EU-UK talks on their future relationship resumed in London this Tuesday. Johnson urged the EU to show “more realism” and set an October 15 deadline for reaching some sort of agreement. The EU, in turn, has told the UK that it needs to get real about its own demands.
But just as things already looked bad, the United Kingdom broke the news that, actually, it wanted to revisit the first Brexit deal and make some unilateral changes to that protocol on Northern Ireland. The text of the proposed legislation was introduced Wednesday.
The prime minister’s office has defended it as an attempt to clear up “ambiguities” in the protocol in case talks between Brussels and London fall apart. Amazingly, Johnson claimed the pressure of getting a deal done quickly left some issues open-ended, and the UK had to fill in the gaps.
“It was agreed at pace in the most challenging possible political circumstances to deliver on a decision by the British people, with the clear overriding purpose of protecting the special circumstances of Northern Ireland,” Johnson’s spokesperson said Wednesday. In 2019, though, Johnson said the agreement was a “great new deal that takes back control” and referred to it as an “oven-ready deal.”
But this legislation is more than a few tweaks; it’s pretty clear that this is the UK doing what it wants. The legislation says it will “have effect notwithstanding inconsistency or incompatibility with international or other domestic law.”
The legislation would affect state aid, and the flow of goods between the rest of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Here’s an example that Colin Murray, a reader in public law at the University of Newcastle, explained to me: The EU-UK joint committee is supposed to decide which goods flowing from Great Britain to Northern Ireland might be subject to tariffs if they’re at risk of making it into the EU single market.
But if they can’t agree, then the default is the goods may be at risk. So now the UK is saying, actually, nope, we just get to decide — never mind all that commission stuff.
The UK’s proposed legislation would, quite simply, violate the terms of the withdrawal agreement. The Northern Ireland Protocol was the compromise plan to keep that border open on the island or Ireland. But it always came with this caveat that it would entail checks somewhere else. But Johnson has repeatedly downplayed the need for those checks, though he himself agreed to them. And now it looks very much like an attempt to wriggle out of that reality.
“The UK knew what it was signing up to,” Murray said. “Now, simply, the government doesn’t like what it signed up to.”
By possibly backtracking on this plan, the UK brings back uncertainty to the status of Northern Ireland. It raises the dilemma once again: how to protect the EU single market while also avoiding the return of a hard border between Northern Ireland and Ireland.
This was the very thing the protocol agreed to between the UK and EU attempted to solve. Now, the UK is muddying that, increasing fears that this move could undermine the Good Friday Agreement.
Neither the UK nor the EU, though, are there quite yet. The EU has warned the UK it can’t break international law, and it may reportedly seek legal action if the UK goes ahead with the legislation.
“This would break international law and undermines trust. Pacta sunt servanda = the foundation of prosperous future relations,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen tweeted, using a Latin phrase meaning “agreements must be kept.”
What does all this really mean?
The UK introduced text to this legislation to break its Brexit deal, but that hasn’t actually happened yet, and would still require Parliament to agree. Johnson has, thanks to elections last year, a very big majority in the House of Commons. But some Conservatives, including our old friend Theresa May, worry that this legislation would undermine trust in the UK.
Experts I spoke to see a few different dynamics driving this decision. One is Johnson himself, who used the furor over Brexit to get into power and replace May as prime minister. He promised to “get Brexit done,” and while he achieved an exit, that deal might not have been as “oven-ready” as advertised, the fine print a little less favorable to the UK than Johnson promised. This is almost an attempt to try to fudge reality, again.
Also, the future negotiations aren’t going well. That impasse is making the prospect of a no-deal exit more likely. So this may be Johnson’s attempt to see who might blink first, a kind of “macho brinkmanship,” as Murray put it.
Richard Whitman, professor of political and international relations at the University of Kent, who spoke to me before the text of the bill was introduced, told me that the timing could be seen as a provocative move. The UK is, in a way, warning the EU, he said: “If we don’t do a deal between the two of us on the future relationship, then there’s an awful lot of loose ends that are probably going to be tied up — in ways that we will tie them up rather than necessarily negotiate them with you to tie them up.”
And for Johnson’s supporters who are skeptical of the EU and want the hardest break with the bloc possible, this may be the kind of leadership they want to see: someone who isn’t going to be bullied by those EU bureaucrats. And if the EU and the UK do make a deal, Johnson can help sell it as a victory, proof that his pressure campaign against the EU worked.
But this idea — that if the UK is tough on the EU, it’ll cave — may be unrealistic. It could have the opposite effect, and blow up the Brexit negotiations for good.
It’s pretty simple: Why would the EU want to keep negotiating with the UK if it knows the UK is going to renege on the very things they negotiated just last year? Why would the EU make compromises and concessions if the UK will just turn around and do whatever it wants?
The implications extend beyond Brexit, too: Why would anyone want to make a trade deal, or any agreement, if the UK is not a reliable partner?
“Internationally, this potentially sets a bad precedent for future trade deals and risks damaging the UK’s reputation,” Chris Stafford, a doctoral researcher in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham, told me in an email. “International trade deals take a lot of time and effort to negotiate, so some countries may be hesitant to do this if the UK shows it is willing to just ignore such agreements when it suits them.”
This is particularly relevant with the United States, which is in negotiations with the UK on a trade deal. Members of Congress, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, have said they wouldn’t approve any US-UK trade deal if the UK violates the law and threatens the Good Friday Agreement. Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s foreign policy adviser also reiterated the candidate’s commitment to the Northern Ireland peace process on Twitter, linking to a New York Times story about Johnson’s attempts to wiggle out of the Brexit deal.
All in all, the UK’s bill may make the prospect of a no-deal more likely, not less. That would be bad for all parties, but particularly for the UK. It could cause serious economic disruption at the exact same time the country, and the world, are trying to recover from the economic catastrophe caused by Covid-19.
But, weirdly, the pandemic-caused economic crisis could actually help Johnson and his allies by providing some cover for any economic fallout that comes from the Brexit debacle. If the UK public is focused on the pandemic and its consequences, they may not be paying attention to Brexit anymore. There will be economic disruption — but there’s already economic disruption. As Murray said, the UK government can file it all under Covid-19, diverting the blame for a problem of their own making.
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