Opinion The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com 4 — Tuesday, October 8, 2019 Zack Blumberg Emily Considine Emma Chang Joel Danilewitz Emily Huhman Krystal Hur Ethan Kessler Magdalena Mihaylova Max Mittleman Timothy Spurlin Miles Stephenson Finn Storer Nicholas Tomaino Joel Weiner Erin White FINNTAN STORER Managing Editor Stanford Lipsey Student Publications Building 420 Maynard St. Ann Arbor, MI 48109 tothedaily@michigandaily.com Edited and managed by students at the University of Michigan since 1890. MAYA GOLDMAN Editor in Chief MAGDALENA MIHAYLOVA AND JOEL DANILEWITZ Editorial Page Editors Unsigned editorials reflect the official position of The Daily’s Editorial Board. All other signed articles and illustrations represent solely the views of their authors. EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS E very time I open my laptop to write, do homework or do anything productive, I am always faced with a difficult choice. Can I complete the task at hand, or will I get distracted by the likes of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or Reddit? These sites, and others, are what I have deemed the “horsemen of the productivity apocalypse” simply because they are always there in the distance, ready to kill whatever productive momentum I have at any given moment. In all seriousness, social media has become a major problem in today’s day and age. Not simply just for issues of productivity but also for problems such as raising risks of anxiety and depression, massive privacy faults and the spread of disinformation, to name a few. Sites such as Facebook at one point were revered for their innovation and impressive growth; now people scorn them for selling off data and spreading misinformation. How have we come so far in such little time, and what is to be done? These problems generated by social media are not by accident; in fact, they are quite by design. Depending on what kinds of people populate your feed, you may have heard of the term “the attention economy” before. The essential idea is that digital companies, such as Facebook and YouTube, are all competing for your time, i.e. your attention. Every minute you spend on their site generates revenue by way of selling ad space or tracking data to sell. Because social media platforms have a direct incentive to keep you on the site, one of their primary objectives is to design algorithms that accomplish just that. This is why we see features such as endless feeds instead of pages to click through, or constant notifications to draw us back in. However, these intentional design features have also brought more insidious consequences. These types of algorithms are literal addiction machines. Every time we get a like, mention, comment or follow request, our brains get a quick shot of dopamine — the chemical responsible for sensations of pleasure. The problem is, over time, our dopamine receptors can build up a tolerance, and all of sudden we need more stimulus to reach the same “high” — this is the basic science of addiction. In a business model that values only attention and time, social media platforms want people addicted to their site so they log in more frequently and stay on longer. The consequences of operating this machine are serious. A 2017 study published by the Journal of Affective Disorders found that “more time spent using social media was associated with greater symptoms of dispositional anxiety” in adults aged 18-22. It also found that more daily social media use was linked to greater odds of having an anxiety disorder. Furthermore, in another study published in the University of Chicago Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, smartphones may “impair cognitive performance by affecting the allocation of attentional resources, even when consumers successfully resist the urge to multitask, mind-wander, or otherwise (consciously) attend to their phones—that is, when their phones are merely present.” In even more grave circumstances, sites such as YouTube have come under fire for promoting hateful or shocking content in the recommended sections as a way to keep users watching. YouTube has said this is a flaw in an ever-changing algorithm, but the logic is intuitive: People are curious and are more willing to click on shocking or controversial videos, which become more popular, and thus the algorithm shows it to more people. YouTube has an incentive to promote these videos, as our attention via watchtime translates to ad revenue for the platform. To be fair, this type of attention based business model is not unique to modern times. In the past, newspapers would often print attention-grabbing front page headlines to increase sales. The birth of 24-hour cable news in the ’80s also brought a flair for the dramatic to keep consumers from changing the channel. The main difference here is that these other examples didn’t follow people around wherever they went, and didn’t see the same negative effects that we are seeing now in such a magnitude. So how do we fix the problem? Personal choice and responsibility are ultimately important considerations. Meditation, scheduling no-screen times and setting other app limits are a great way to reduce the negative impacts of the attention economy. For me, deleting social apps from my smartphone in order to take away the temptation has proven to be an effective, albeit imperfect, way to combat the system. But as with any addictive substance, there needs to be greater accountability. Limiting features such as endless scrolling, pervasive notifications and demonetizing hateful or shocking content are all possible solutions that these companies ought to take to help curb the issue. Many of these design flaws result from an era of the internet that is now rapidly changing. We can no longer let an entire industry profit from products that cause addiction and anxiety. When many of these companies were founded, the internet was a brand new frontier without rules or precedent. It was a digital Wild West. But just like the Wild West of old, its time may be coming to an end. Pay attention to the economy VARNA KODOTH | COLUMN Doing more than an Instagram story TIMOTHY SPURLIN | COLUMN H ow often do you stop and evaluate what we, as University of Michigan students working to better the climate, are doing to create a space for marginalized communities, minority groups and people of color to share their truth? To an individual who fits within those categories, this isn’t a far-fetched question. Perhaps a better question would be: How often do your social identities pervade your thoughts or influence the work you do? Of these core identities, which ones affect you most often and which ones affect you least often? For the sake of real-world application, let’s deconstruct these questions by using a nationwide issue: women’s health care. It’s truly ironic how women’s health care isn’t that at all, since women aren’t even the primary decision-makers. It’s more accurately described as the domain of elite policymakers, the majority of which do not hold an education rooted in public health or medicine yet make large-scale decisions for women about their bodies and their health. According to the American College of Healthcare Executives, less than 20 percent of executives in leadership at hospitals or public health systems are women. Paradoxically, this is a stark contrast to the 80 percent of mothers who are the primary health care decision-makers in their homes and for their families, as per U.S. Department of Labor data. One then wonders why men in higher places act entitled to controlling the health care policies set forth at the federal, state and local levels. That being said, on the flip side, the Association of American Medical Colleges now report a female majority class profile and the percentage of female physicians is steadily on the rise as per a 2016 census study. It’s happening: Women are making cracks in the glass ceiling. However, the crux of the situation is that this is absolutely not the time for us to sit back and let this phase run its course as we, unfortunately, quite often have. I am exhausted and disturbed to see the continual “short-term memory loss” that the greater majority of millennial Americans actively choose to subscribe to, directly following every important catastrophic event. Women and health care have become collateral damage in the process. For example, the abortion restrictions received a lot of heat in early 2019 and the passionate voices that took a stance have since then quieted or subsided entirely. Why is it that especially when the social justice issues at hand are centered upon marginalized communities or minority groups, the problem is discussed nonstop for, say, two weeks while all of us post and share stories of it on Snapchat and Instagram? And why, at the moment it stops being “trendy,” is it all of a sudden like nothing happened? The only individuals who continue to remember cases like Trayvon Martin are the families and the African- American community members that are affected by it. I agree that there is a benefit to posting on your stories and spreading awareness, but I urge these posters to commit to educating themselves on the issue as a whole. Don’t post about the worsening environmental state of the Earth and then continue to use straws, print single-sided and waste water. Don’t post about female empowerment and then go talk negatively about the women in your own circle behind their backs. Don’t post about a global humanitarian crisis and then not take the initiative to seek out all other unbiased media and news articles. Remember when all your Instagram followers turned their Instagram profile pictures blue? Do you recall what that was for? It’s a sign of solidarity with the people of Sudan. But solidarity isn’t only applicable at certain points of the year. It’s a year- round effort, day in and day out, 24/7 until justice for all is achieved. This isn’t to say that you’re not allowed to switch out your profile picture, but don’t halt the educational process happening behind the scenes. The reality is this: currently, progress in women’s health care is driven by women who are advocating for fellow women. LGBTQ+ individuals are primarily involved in the fight for LGBTQ+ pride. We need to do better. We need to show up for each other. When a social justice issue arises or a humanitarian crisis is taking place halfway across the globe, that is an opportunity for you to selflessly be involved and support those around you. The change we need will not result from women advocating for themselves. Instead, it will result from a shift in perception such that all health care professionals, of all genders, recognize and respond to inequalities and lack of diversity in leadership roles and senior positions. Please note that this does not require you to be in a position to “solve” the problem. Instead, pursue options in which you help to create a safe space for that community to discuss the problem at hand. Recently, during an interview for the South Asian Awareness Network, a social justice organization at Michigan, I was asked to respond to the following question: “What does POC solidarity mean to you?” That’s when I started to see the University community in a more static state rather than a growth state. We’re lucky because POC solidarity is achievable here in Ann Arbor, where diverse communities and multicultural organizations exist and put on a wide variety of cultural events. There is potential that within the University community, we can bridge the gap between the privileges we hold and underserved communities in our backyards and internationally. We can do this simply by allowing the voices of those who deserve to be heard to take charge of their narrative. Varna Kodoth can be reached at vkodoth@umich.edu. Timothy Spurlin can be reached at timrspur@umich.edu. CONTRIBUTE TO THE CONVERSATION Readers are encouraged to submit letters to the editor and op-eds. Letters should be fewer than 300 words while op-eds should be 550 to 850 words. Send the writer’s full name and University affiliation to tothedaily@michigandaily.com. NOAH HARRISON | COLUMN Impeachment is risky but necessary A fter a whirlwind week in which records emerged that President Donald Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, the leading Democratic presidential candidate, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi opened a formal impeachment inquiry against the president. Given the severity of this abuse of power, it seems likely that Trump will become the third president in U.S. history to be impeached. Impeachment will be divisive, politically risky and unlikely to lead to conviction in the Senate. Impeachment is also wholly justified and urgently needed. Efforts to impeach Trump have swirled since the early months of his presidency, but never gained significant traction. Early impeachment votes in 2017 were deemed premature by Democratic leadership and easily defeated. In 2018, Trump was criminally implicated in lawyer Michael Cohen’s trial for breaking campaign finance laws, but was never charged due to existing Justice Department guidelines against indicting sitting presidents, and the matter was overshadowed by the impending release of the Mueller report. The report did not exonerate Trump, but failed to provide smoking- gun proof of collusion or obstruction of justice as many had predicted, and public support for impeachment ebbed. Now, with this latest scandal, impeachment is fully warranted and critically needed to defend democratic rule of law. Trump’s closest allies have rushed to his defense, but make no mistake, the details of the scandal are absolutely damning. To recap: In May, Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, planned to travel to Ukraine and meddle “in (the) investigation” against Biden’s son. Giuliani canceled his trip after backlash over the clear impropriety of his objectives. Giuliani later spoke to Ukrainian diplomats in Paris, but Ukraine found “no wrongdoing” after conducting the investigation. On July 18, Trump delayed $400 million worth of military aid to Ukraine, which is currently in a proxy war against Russia. On July 25, Trump spoke with the Zelensky over the phone. A reconstructed record of the call shows that Trump told Zelensky the U.S. is “very good” to Ukraine, but said he “wouldn’t say that it’s reciprocal necessarily.” Zelensky then brought up military aid and a desire to “buy more Javelin (missiles),” to which Trump immediately responded, “I would like you to do us a favor though.” Trump went on to ask Zelensky to investigate “Crowdstrike” (a debunked conspiracy theory that Russia was not behind 2016 election interference) and “look into” the Biden investigation. Zelensky promised to “look into the situation” and Trump responded that both Giuliani and Attorney General William Barr will be in touch. In August, Giuliani met with Ukrainian officials again. On Aug. 12, a whistleblower filed a complaint about the incident, detailing the call and an apparent effort by the White House to cover it up by hiding the records in a system reserved for ultra- classified documents. The law requires whistleblower complaints to be reported to Congress, but both the White House and the Justice Department advised the Office of the Director of National Intelligence against releasing the complaint, and the complaint was not reported to Congress until Sept. 9 — almost a full month after the complaint was filed. That day, Trump lifted the hold on military aid, but the backlash was already growing and the impeachment inquiry was announced on Sept. 11. Summarized briefly, Trump withheld military aid to Ukraine to pressure Ukraine’s president into investigating Biden, his potential 2020 opponent, and the White House then tried to bury the evidence. In other words, Trump used the powers of his office to attack a political rival and then further used his powers to cover it up. This is what dictators do. Trump’s actions constitute a clear threat to the integrity of our democratic institutions, and the impropriety of the situation cannot be overstated. Abuse of power was the second article of impeachment against President Richard Nixon. Experts say extortion, bribery, breaking campaign finance laws and obstruction of justice are among the crimes Trump and his aides may have committed during the affair. Impeachment is absolutely warranted in response to this latest scandal. Many of Trump’s defenders and some of his critics have pointed to the political impacts of impeachment as an argument against it. As the argument goes, the public is against impeachment, and some speculate the impeachment will backfire on Democrats in 2020. Public opinion on impeachment is malleable and will largely depend on how well each side sells their case, but there is plenty of evidence that the public will back impeachment. Support for impeachment jumped dramatically after news of the Ukraine scandal broke. As of now, by a ten-point margin, a majority of Americans support the impeachment inquiry. Notably, support for impeachment is growing among Democrats, independents and Republicans. Furthermore, when pollsters ask whether it is appropriate for a president to ask a foreign government to investigate a political rival or withhold aid to a country for personally beneficial purposes, voters say no by a 30 and 48-point margin, respectively. These numbers show that the public overwhelmingly disapproves of what Trump did, and support for impeachment could quickly grow as more details emerge. The chances that impeachment removes Trump from office are low but not zero. While many Republicans like Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, and Mike Braun, R-Ind., have rushed to Trump’s defense (while simultaneously admitting they haven’t even read the complaint), other Republicans have acknowledged the severity of the situation. Moreover, former Republican senator Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., speculated 35 of his GOP colleagues would vote for impeachment if the vote were secret, suggesting that Republicans could be open to impeachment if the political winds shift. But even if impeachment is destined for acquittal in the Senate, Democrats have a duty to impeach. The Ukraine scandal reveals the president believes himself to be beyond reproach, acting with reckless disregard for the law. Noah Harrison can be reached at noahharr@umich.edu. The change we need will not result from women advocating for themselves. VARNA KODOTH Impeachment is fully warranted and critically needed to defend the democratic rule of law.