Corey Adam, a political comedian from Minneapolis, joined a mass social media switcheroo last week.

That was when Mr. Adam, 39, a conservative and libertarian, watched Twitter and Facebook add labels to social media posts from President Trump and other Republicans who falsely claimed he had won the election. Many of the labels said the assertions were disputed. And on Twitter, some of Mr. Trump’s tweets were hidden completely.

To Mr. Adam, the social media companies appeared to be singling out conservative voices. So he decided to shift to Parler, a social networking app that he has used on and off for a year, and to largely ignore those two big platforms, he said.

“Facebook started muting, deleting and labeling every conservative political post in my feed,” Mr. Adam said. “If you’re going to do something, you have to be fair to both sides. You don’t just get to pick one side to promote.”

Mr. Adam was one of millions of people who have migrated away from Facebook and Twitter since the election. As the companies have clamped down on misinformation, they have clashed with Republicans and conservatives who have spread lies about the election’s outcome, leading to claims that the tech platforms are censoring them.

Among those who have spoken out are Mark Levin, a far-right radio host with millions of listeners, who vented on his show last week that the tech and media companies were not representing the conservative point of view. Maria Bartiromo, a Fox News anchor, also expressed frustration with Twitter and said it was blocking conservatives’ statements.

But Mr. Levin, Ms. Bartiromo and others did not stop there. They directed their followers to other social media apps and news sites that have positioned themselves as alternatives to Facebook and Twitter. The beneficiaries are Parler, a Twitter-like app that describes itself as the world’s “premier free speech social network,” the right-wing media app Newsmax, and other social sites like MeWe and Rumble, which have purposely welcomed conservatives.

Over the weekend, Parler shot to the top of Apple’s App Store in downloads. As of Monday, it had eight million members, nearly double the 4.5 million it had last week. Rumble said it projected 75 million to 90 million people will watch a video on its site this month, up from 60.5 million last month. And Newsmax said more than 3 million people watched its election night coverage and that its app has recently been in the top-10 daily apps downloaded from Apple’s App Store.

While social media sites marketed at conservatives have existed for years, they have often struggled to catch on more widely. Their invigoration now may add to a fracturing of the information ecosystem.

“There are real dangers around a fractured misinformation system, especially as it relates to organizing against our electoral integrity,” said Shannon McGregor, a professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and senior researcher at the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life.

But Ms. McGregor said she was skeptical that any migration would lead to permanent departures from Facebook and Twitter. “If there is no one to argue with, no omnipresent journalists or media entities to react to, how long will it last?” she said.

Facebook and Twitter declined to comment. The companies have denied censoring conservatives and typically point to their terms of service when an account breaks the rules. And while many conservatives are upset about their content being labeled or hidden, they are less willing to acknowledge that their posts can often clash with Facebook’s guidelines around disinformation and harmful content.

Next week, Twitter’s chief executive, Jack Dorsey, and Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, are scheduled to testify at a congressional hearing over their sites’ treatment of an unsubstantiated New York Post article that was critical of Hunter Biden, the son of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. The hearing was called by Republicans who were incensed that the sites initially limited the distribution of the article.

Despite the conservative ire, Facebook and Twitter have long taken a mostly hands-off approach to digital speech. In recent months, however, the companies ramped up their efforts to prevent election misinformation. Facebook and Twitter said they would label false posts and slow down how quickly they could be shared, among other moves. They said many of the changes would be temporary.

Last week after the polls closed, Facebook and Twitter began using many of those measures. When Mr. Trump posted that the election was being stolen from him, the companies labeled his messages. Facebook on Thursday also took down a rapidly growing Facebook group, Stop the Steal, which promoted the idea of a stolen election.

That moved people like Mr. Adam to switch to alternative apps like Parler, which is owned in part by the conservative media personality Dan Bongino. Founded in 2018 by two Nevada-based software engineers, John Matze and Jared Thomson, Parler — which is named after the French word meaning “to speak” — has said it is a free speech platform, with much looser guidelines around what people can post to the site.

On Parler, users can see posts about MAGA fodder and QAnon, the pro-Trump conspiracy theory that asserts that some top Democrats are satanic pedophiles. Anti-Semitic theories abound. Donald Trump Jr., Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, and Rudolph W. Giuliani, President Trump’s personal lawyer, all have Parler accounts.

“Parler is a breath of fresh air for those weary and wary of the way they’ve been treated by our competitors,” Jeffrey Wernick, Parler’s chief operating officer, said in a statement. “Our growth is not attributable to any one person or group, but rather to Parler’s efforts to earn our community’s trust.”

Parler’s recent growth has been so staggering that thousands of users have complained about how difficult it was to sign up because of the logjam of people creating new accounts. Mr. Matze said in a letter to Parler’s community on Tuesday that the influx “strained our networks’ capacity and caused some glitches and delays,” but the site was fixing the problems.

Some new Parler users said the site was an alternative to extreme platforms like Gab, another social media site that has been a haven for racist memes and content. Andrew Torba, founder and chief executive of Gab, said in an email, “Jesus is King, speak freely on Gab.com.” He also sent a link noting that Gab had seen record user growth over the last week.

Others have gravitated to Rumble, a video site founded in 2013 that has emerged as a conservative YouTube. Rumble makes money in a variety of ways, including by running ads and selling its technology.

Chris Pavlovski, Rumble’s founder and chief executive, said the site had been on a “rocket ship” of growth since the summer — and even more so since the election. Representative Devin Nunes, Republican of California, and Mr. Bongino are on Rumble and have seen their audiences expand rapidly on the site, he said.

Mr. Pavlovski added that Rumble prohibits explicit content, terrorist propaganda and harassment. But he said it was largely not in the business of sorting out misinformation or curbing speech.

“I don’t want to pretend to sit here and know what the truth is or have the capabilities to know how to do that,” he said. On other platforms, he added, “people are not allowed to have debate anymore.”

Many people have also sought out further-right news publications. That has been a boon for Newsmax, a right-wing news website and television channel founded in 1998 by the conservative journalist Christopher Ruddy. Last week, Newsmax gained steam after Fox News called the swing state of Arizona in favor of Mr. Biden, incensing Mr. Trump’s base. (The New York Times has not called Arizona in favor of either candidate.)

Melissa Zepeda, 32, a Republican and a registered nurse in northern Mississippi, said she and several of her co-workers recently switched to Newsmax from Fox News after it showed “favoritism to Biden.” Newsmax has not called the election in favor of Mr. Biden, one of the few news outlets not to do so.

“So far, I like that they are non-biased, and cover a variety of information, not just the election,” Ms. Zepeda said.

Mr. Ruddy, Newsmax’s chief executive and a confidant of Mr. Trump’s, said viewership and social media interactions with his site have soared. The surge came partly from conservatives who were searching for a place where their opinions are represented, he said. He added that it was important for publishers to have ideological diversity.

“There’s a liberal echo chamber that’s pretty damn big,” he said. “Conservatives just have less options, but if they seek them out, they’re there.”

It might be too early to know whether a widespread, permanent shift away from major outlets will last, especially given the reach of Facebook, Twitter and Fox News. While conservative threats of mass migration away from mainstream apps and news have occurred periodically, people still seem to return to the biggest platforms.

Ms. Zepeda, a longtime Facebook user, said she would keep her Facebook account to maintain access to the pictures she’s uploaded over the years. But she expects to drop the social network as a daily destination, joining one of the many Facebook groups that are planning a “Mass Exit off Facebook to Parler & MeWe,” scheduled for Friday.

“I’m tired of the bias towards Democrats and liberals,” she said.

The Food and Drug Administration has granted emergency authorization of a Covid-19 antibody treatment made by Eli Lilly that is similar to a therapy given to President Trump shortly after he contracted the coronavirus.

The decision, announced on Monday by the agency, is likely to be seen as a valuable tool to treat patients with Covid-19 at a time when the pandemic is raging across the United States, hospitals are overwhelmed and doctors have few options to treat the disease.

Eli Lilly said that its treatment, called bamlanivimab, should be administered as soon as possible after a positive coronavirus test, and within 10 days of developing symptoms. The authorization applies only to people newly infected with the virus, and the agency said it should not be used in hospitalized patients. It is authorized for people who are 12 and older and at risk for developing a severe form of Covid-19 or being hospitalized for the condition. The F.D.A. said that included people who were over 65 and obese — a key group that early studies have shown can benefit the most from the treatment.

“It’s a great day for science and medicine — sort of a feat of what’s possible,” said Dr. Daniel M. Skovronsky, the chief scientific officer of Eli Lilly. The company and its collaborators, including the National Institutes of Health, he said, were able “to create a new drug, manufacture it, test it in clinical trials, and get it authorized for use in just seven months.”

In October, the company announced that it had reached a $375 million deal to sell 300,000 doses of the treatment to the U.S. government.

The emergency authorization for Eli Lilly raised immediate questions about who would get access to the treatment at a time when emergency authorizations for coronavirus vaccines might still be weeks or months away. The news came on the same day that Pfizer announced positive early results from its coronavirus vaccine trial. That vaccine might get emergency authorization sometime this year, but even then it would not be available to most Americans until well into 2021.

In a statement on Monday, Alex M. Azar II, the health secretary and a former executive at Eli Lilly, said the F.D.A.’s emergency authorization for bamlanivimab was a “step forward” in “bridging us to the rollout of safe and effective vaccines.”

Eli Lilly has said that it expects to have enough doses to treat up to one million people by the end of the year, and that it will be able to significantly increase production thereafter. But that means that even in the best-case scenario, there won’t initially be enough to curb a virus that is now infecting more than 110,000 people a day in the United States.

“It’s kind of the best times for these therapies to enter, because they can have an impact,” said Dr. Walid F. Gellad, who leads the Center for Pharmaceutical Policy and Prescribing at the University of Pittsburgh. “It’s also the worst time because we don’t have enough doses, and it’s going to add to the backlog of testing.”

Dr. Skovronsky said the company has been working “nonstop” since March to manufacture as many doses of the treatment as possible, without knowing if it would be successful. “It’s something I wish we had infinite supplies of medications of, for sure.”

Eli Lilly will begin shipping the treatment to the national distributor AmerisourceBergen, which will allocate it with help from the federal government. AmerisourceBergen also helped distribute the antiviral drug remdesivir, the first drug that the F.D.A. approved to treat Covid-19. The company said that decisions about distribution would be overseen by the federal government and would be based on the number of confirmed Covid-19 cases in each state or territory for the previous seven days. Each week, state health departments will then decide where those doses should go.

Antibody treatments enjoyed a burst of publicity in October, when Mr. Trump received an infusion of a cocktail made by the biotech company Regeneron and then enthusiastically promoted the drug. In a video released on Oct. 7, the president claimed without evidence that it was a “cure.”

In early studies, Regeneron’s cocktail of two powerful antibodies has shown promise at keeping the infection in check, reducing emergency room visits and hospitalizations in patients who get the treatment early in the course of their disease. Regeneron has also applied for emergency authorization with the F.D.A.

But it is impossible to know whether the Regeneron treatment helped Mr. Trump. He was given multiple drugs while at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, and many people recover from the coronavirus on their own.

Last month, former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who spent time with Mr. Trump in the days leading up to his diagnosis, said he had received Eli Lilly’s experimental treatment shortly after he tested positive for the coronavirus.

For months, outside researchers have been closely watching the development of antibody treatments. And top White House officials have been agitating for faster progress. At one point over the summer, Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, lashed out at drug officials on Operation Warp Speed, the administration’s vaccine and therapy development program, for what she saw as sluggishness in setting up clinical trials for antibody treatments, according to one senior administration official.

The president and two of his top advisers — Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, and Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law — have called Dr. Stephen M. Hahn, the F.D.A. commissioner, to press for speed in agency reviews, two other senior officials said.

Although neither Regeneron nor Eli Lilly has completed its antibody trials, evidence so far suggests that such treatments work best early in the course of the disease, before the virus has gained a foothold in the body.

The F.D.A.’s emergency authorization covers only a single antibody treatment developed by Eli Lilly, but the company is also developing a combination of two antibodies that has shown that it could be more effective in reducing the viral load in patients. In an early analysis, the two-antibody combination reduced the hospitalization of newly infected patients by about 5 percent. Eli Lilly has said it plans to apply for emergency authorization for the combination treatment this month, but will only have about 50,000 doses of that therapy before the end of the year.

Early evidence shows that the antibody treatments do not work well once people are sick enough to be hospitalized. Eli Lilly stopped giving its treatment to hospitalized patients in a government-run trial, because the company said it did not seem to be helping them. And Regeneron paused enrolling the sickest hospitalized patients in one of its trials.

In issuing the emergency authorization, the F.D.A. said that the treatment had not been shown to benefit hospitalized patients and that monoclonal antibodies like bamlanivimab might be associated with worse outcomes when given to hospitalized Covid-19 patients who need high-flow oxygen or mechanical ventilation.

This creates a problem for distributing the treatment, because it is only for people who are not hospitalized, yet those people must be infused intravenously by a health care provider. Getting it to the right people will require quick turnarounds in testing, as well as coordination among federal, state and hospital officials — many of the same challenges that have complicated the U.S. response to the pandemic.

Under the federal agreement with Eli Lilly, the treatment will be available at no cost to patients, though health care providers can charge to administer it.

The emergency use authorization, or E.U.A., was previously an obscure corner of regulatory law that mostly escaped broad public attention. But during the pandemic, it has become a centerpiece of the Trump administration’s health policy: Since February, the F.D.A. has granted hundreds of emergency authorizations related to coronavirus, many for diagnostic tests and others for personal protective equipment, blood-purification devices, ventilators and therapies.

In making their decision, F.D.A. scientists had to weigh the need for solid evidence that the treatment works with the urgent need for a useful drug as the pandemic accelerates again in the United States. Unlike a full F.D.A. approval, which requires a rigorous vetting of clinical trial data showing a drug is safe and effective, an emergency authorization simply requires the potential benefits of a drug to outweigh its risks.

But the emergency authorization for Eli Lilly may have the unintended effect of complicating the role of clinical trials in proving the treatment’s effectiveness for different age groups. If the drug becomes more widely available, fewer people might want to sign up for clinical trials and risk the possibility that they will receive a placebo.

Rachel Maddow has devoted many of her prime-time monologues to criticism of President Trump over the last four years. Now Ms. Maddow, the top-rated MSNBC host, may not be on the air when her network delivers the final results of his re-election campaign.

For three nights, she had spent hours covering the protracted election, spaced apart from her fellow hosts Joy Reid and Nicole Wallace “at a physical distance that belies our emotional closeness,” as she put it during an election night broadcast. On Friday, Ms. Maddow said on Twitter that she had gone into quarantine after a “close contact” tested positive for the coronavirus.

“I’ve tested negative thus far, but will be at home quarantining ’til it’s safe for me to be back at work without putting anyone at risk,” Ms. Maddow wrote.

The decision to stay away from the anchor desk will separate her from Ms. Wallace and Ms. Reid, as well as her colleagues Brian Williams and Steve Kornacki, as they monitor the vote count in the six states that NBC News had yet to give to either President Trump or Joseph R. Biden Jr.: Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

Ms. Maddow last appeared before the cameras on Thursday night, when she tweaked Mr. Kornacki over his fondness for khakis and reminded viewers that she and her fellow anchors were not the ones who determined when the network called election results.

After MSNBC quickly cut away from Mr. Trump’s White House briefing on Thursday, citing misinformation, Ms. Maddow wondered aloud whether fact-checking by news organizations “turns Trump-supporting Republicans off mainstream media entirely.”

Ms. Wallace responded that Trump supporters had long since decamped to “a genre that’s far more in line with science fiction.”

On Friday, in her post on Twitter, Ms. Maddow said she was “wishing everyone patience and calm; may these remarkable times bring out the best in all of us.”

President Trump and Fox News have a complicated relationship. Election Day did not help.

The cable news channel that kick-started Donald J. Trump’s political career was suddenly in the position of signaling its potential end. The network’s early call of Arizona on Tuesday night for Joseph R. Biden Jr. infuriated Mr. Trump and his aides, who publicly pressured Fox News executives to retract the call.

The network held firm — even as two of its biggest stars, Laura Ingraham and Jeanine Pirro, attended Mr. Trump’s defiant early-morning speech in the East Room of the White House.

The election-night split screen underscored the fine line that Fox News’s anchors and opinion hosts have walked in the past 24 hours. By Wednesday afternoon, Fox News was the closest of any major network to calling the presidential race for Mr. Biden — not the outcome that many fans of its pro-Trump programming may have wanted.

Fox News was also the only major cable network to carry a news conference on Wednesday held by the president’s lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, who was making baseless claims of election fraud. But the channel promptly cut away to announce a major development: It projected a win in Michigan for Mr. Biden, placing him at the doorstep of the presidency.

And shortly after Bret Baier, the network’s chief political anchor, emphasized to viewers on Wednesday that Mr. Trump’s threatened litigation could throw the race into doubt — even if Mr. Biden was projected to win 270 electoral votes — Fox News’s politics editor, Chris Stirewalt, threw cold water on some of the Trump campaign’s baseless claims.

“Lawsuits, schmawsuits,” Mr. Stirewalt said. “We haven’t seen any evidence yet that there’s anything wrong.”

Fox News has long occupied an unusual position in the Trump orbit. The network is home to some of the president’s most vociferous defenders, including Sean Hannity, Ms. Ingraham, and the hosts of “Fox & Friends.” But Mr. Trump frequently takes potshots at its news division and polling operation.

“Fox has changed a lot,” Mr. Trump said Tuesday morning on “Fox & Friends.” “Somebody said, ‘What’s the biggest difference between this and four years ago?’ I say, ‘Fox.’”

The president is a vociferous viewer and constant critic, praising preferred hosts by first name at rallies (“Jeanine!” “Tucker!”) and dialing up the network’s chief executive, Suzanne Scott, to complain about coverage. He has hired (and fired) former network personnel; belittled its hosts while also agreeing to interviews; and relied on Mr. Hannity’s political advice while bashing news anchors like Chris Wallace and Shepard Smith, who left the network for CNBC.

In the wake of Tuesday’s Arizona call, a mixed view of Fox News had spread to some of Mr. Trump’s allies. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a Republican who rose to fame on the strength of Fox News guest appearances, bashed the network for what he deemed an insufficiently swift projection of a Trump win in his home state.

“For Fox to be so resistant to calling Florida and yet jumping the gun on Arizona, I just thought was inexplicable,” Mr. DeSantis told reporters in Tallahassee on Wednesday. “I don’t think that that was done without some type of motive, whether it’s ratings, whether it’s something else.”

In fact, members of Fox News’s decision desk explained repeatedly that the network’s polling team — which reports to the news division and is sequestered on election night — was merely adhering to a rigorous analysis. The network’s data team, led by Arnon Mishkin, relies on a proprietary model that draws on data from The Associated Press.

Still, some Fox News personalities speculated whether Arizona would remain in Mr. Biden’s column. “There may be some tightening there,” Mr. Baier said on Wednesday, summarizing arguments from the Trump campaign, while Bill Hemmer used an interactive map to conjure ways Mr. Trump could eke out a win in Pennsylvania.

But when Mr. Hemmer asked if the network might consider reversing the Arizona call, Mr. Stirewalt laughed. “Not that I see,” he said.

Mr. Wallace also offered a grim prognosis for the president. “It’s real simple math now,” he said, shortly after Fox News projected that Mr. Biden would win Wisconsin. Pointing to Mr. Biden’s advantages in Nevada and Michigan, he said: “If he just holds on to his lead in those two states, he’s the 46th president of the United States.” (Fox News would call Michigan just over an hour later.)

Mr. Hannity did not appear on Fox News on election night; he was poised to return on Wednesday evening. The degree to which Fox News’s prime-time opinion hosts embrace Mr. Trump’s baseless claims of fraud will be closely scrutinized.

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By: Michael M. Grynbaum and John Koblin
Title: Fox News Helped Fuel Trump’s Rise. Now It’s Reporting on a Possible Fall.
Sourced From: www.nytimes.com/2020/11/04/business/media/fox-news-election-night.html
Published Date: Wed, 04 Nov 2020 23:46:21 +0000