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And it was easy to see that she was the strongest and most graceful of all the dancers, for her handicap bags were as those worn by 200 pound men- Ayden pg23

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“ If I tried to get away with it,” said George, “ then people’d get away with it-and pretty soon we’d be right back to the dark ages again

Cullen R.

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“The H-G Men required that he wear at all times a red rubber ball for a Nose, keep eyebrows shaved off, cover his even white teeth with black caps at an snaggle-tooth random”

Page 24

Angel F

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“And then, neutralizing gravity with love and pure will, they remained suspended in air inches below the ceiling , and they kissed each other for a long , long time.

Page 26

Mariana N.

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Ciera

“She fired twice, and the emperor and the empress were dead before they hit the floor.”

Pg24

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“Sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains”

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“”That must be Harrison !” Said George. The realization was blasted from his mind instantly by the sound of an automobile collision in his head.” Pg 24

-Dayjia

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Kevin- “there you are said George. On laws what do you think happens to society?”

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“I’d think it would be real interesting hearing all the different sounds,” said Hazel, a little envious. “All the things they think up.”

Pg.22

Sh’Miah M

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Ethan Salazar

“She was blindingly beautiful now”

Page 25

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-Daniela Rendon

“ That dance it was nice,” said hazel

“ They were burdened with sash weights and bags of birdshot, and their faces were masked, so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in.” - page 22

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“George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear”.

Page 21.

Emma Mathis

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“The unceasing vigilance of agents to the United States Handicapper General.” Pg 21 Noah Baker

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“It’s attached to George’s brain.”

Phillip

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“But Harrison looked like a walking junkyard”

Page 24

Macey J

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“ she aimed it at the musicians and told them they had 10 seconds to get their handicaps back on “ page 26

Ariana p

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“The picture showed full length Harrison against a background calibrated in feet and inches. He was exactly 7 feet tall.”

Page 24

Zoey S.

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“He was required by law to wear it at all times it was tuned to a government transmitter” page 1

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Disinformation poses an unprecedented threat to democracy in the United States in 2024, according to researchers, technologists and political scientists.

As the presidential election approaches, experts warn that a convergence of events at home and abroad, on traditional and social media - and amid an environment of rising authoritarianism, deep distrust, and political and social unrest - makes the dangers from propaganda, falsehoods and conspiracy theories more dire than ever.

The U.S. presidential election comes during a historic year, with billions of people voting in other elections in more than 50 countries, including in Europe, India, Mexico and South Africa. And it comes at a time of ideal circumstances for disinformation and the people who spread it.

An increasing number of voters have proven susceptible to disinformation from former President Donald Trump and his allies; artificial intelligence technology is ubiquitous; social media companies have slashed efforts to rein in misinformation on their platforms; and attacks on the work and reputation of academics tracking disinformation have chilled research.

"On one hand, this should feel like January 2020," said Claire Wardle, co-director of Brown University's Information Futures Lab, who studies misinformation and elections, referring to the presidential contenders four years ago. "But after a pandemic, an insurrection and a hardening of belief that the election was stolen, as well as congressional investigations into those of us who work in this field, it feels utterly different."

The threat disinformation poses falls on a spectrum. Research suggests it has little direct effect on voting choices, but spread by political elites, especially national candidates, it can impact how people make up their minds about issues. It can also provide false evidence for claims with conclusions that threaten democracy or national health, when people are persuaded to take up arms against Congress, for example, or decline vaccination.

Solutions for the enormity of that threat are piecemeal and distant: the revival of local news, the creation of information literacy programs, and the passage of meaningful legislation around social media, among others.

"Repairing the information environment around the election involves more than just 'tackling disinformation,'" Wardle said. "And the political violence and aftermath of Jan. 6 showed us what's at stake."

Primed for disinformation

The most likely Republican presidential nominee is also the former president - whose time in office was marked by lies told in a failed effort to remain there, falsehoods Trump continues to cling to. Disinformation in service of the lie that the election was "stolen" - disseminated through a network of television, radio and online media - has proven staggeringly effective with Republicans. The toll from that belief extends to distrust in future elections.

On one hand, real consequences have come for spreaders of disinformation. Lies about Covid and the election have reportedly cost some prominent doctors and news anchors their jobs. Millions of dollars have been awarded in civil courts to victims of disinformation. Hundreds of federal criminal convictions have come from the Jan. 6, 2021, riot. And people who allegedly participated in a scheme to overturn President Joe Biden's victory, including state GOP officials, lawyers and Trump himself, face criminal charges.

Whether networks like Fox News or individuals like Rudy Giuliani would be as eager to promote disinformation in 2024 in the face of such consequences remains to be seen. But some predictable players and newcomers in right-wing media have already signaled a willingness to contribute.

"Right-wing media see a demand for content that is pro-Trump and leaning into conspiracy theories," said A.J. Bauer, an assistant journalism professor at the University of Alabama who studies conservative media.

In addition to national websites known for disinformation, new local hyperpartisan news organizations might also factor in, Bauer said, with claims acting as fodder for larger national conspiracy theories.

"These outlets could be looking for examples of hyperlocal voter fraud or intimidation, even if it's not real," Bauer said.

Real stakes

It's not only voters, but smaller loci of influence made up of state lawmakers, election officials and poll workers moved by disinformation who stand to affect the upcoming election.

"Election denialism and the misinformation that comes from the far right was in clear view on the federal level" with the 2020 election, said Christina Baal-Owens, executive director of Public Wise, a nonpartisan voting rights organization that tracks local election administration officials who have questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election. "What was less clear was a threat that was hiding in plain sight, a movement working on the local level."

Public Wise has counted more than 200 people who attended, funded or organized the Jan. 6 attempted insurrection and won office in 2022. In Arizona alone, ​​more than half of constituents are represented by state legislators who are professed election deniers.

"We're looking at a well-organized movement that is working to affect elections across the country," Baal-Owens said. "They have the ability to determine how people vote, how votes are counted, and whether or not they're certified."

The Capitol breach was the most visible example of political extremism bleeding into real-world violence. But 2020 was also marked by violence, or the threat of it, at state capitols and Covid lockdown protests, a trend experts fear will continue.

"We're watching out for voter vigilantism," said Joan Donovan, an assistant professor of journalism and emerging media studies at Boston University, who studies political violence. "People organizing in Telegram channels and showing up to ballot boxes with guns," Donovan said, in states that allow it, was an emerging tactic in 2020 and the midterms, by activists who said they were deterring voter fraud.

"I think that's going to be the next wave," Donovan said.

Old lies, new tech

Over the weekend, far-right political activist and Trump ally Laura Loomer seeded an early conspiracy theory about the Iowa caucus count. Loomer's complicated claim of corruption mirrored previous unfounded rumors floated in 2020.

The falsehoods may remain the same for now, but the technology used to manufacture propaganda has improved. Advances in artificial intelligence, from chatbots to audio and video generators, have made easy-to-use media manipulation tools available to the public. A World Economic Forum survey named misinformation and disinformation from AI as the top global risk over the next two years - ahead of climate change and war.

Scammers have found success with so-called deepfakes, mostly in manufacturing AI-generated videos of celebrities hawking products like health supplements or cryptocurrency. Even as campaigns begin to use AI in ads and states rush to legislate around them, the much-publicized threat of the technology to elections has yet to materialize. More often, cheap AI is being used to create propaganda, mostly from Trump loyalists.

Content that uses synthetic media from self-described " meme teams," who serve as volunteers, according to the Trump campaign, is already being shared by Trump on his social media platform, Truth Social. These memes malign other candidates and their spouses, attorneys and judges involved in prosecuting Trump, journalists, and state politicians and election officials deemed enemies of the Trump camp.

"Granted it's hokey and not believable in any way, shape or form, but it's only a matter of time until something works," said Ben Decker, the chief executive of Memetica, a digital investigations company. "The disinformation narratives, the meme wars, they're back. That content is going to overpopulate certain parts of the public square."

The effect on the wider world is clear, Decker said: "Harassment of public officials, members of the media and civil society groups is going to run rampant."

A potential greater threat lies in generative AI tools' ability to personalize misinformation, making it harder for social media platforms to moderate because it appears authentic, said Laura Edelson, an assistant professor at Northeastern University and co-leader of Cybersecurity for Democracy, who studies political misinformation.

"It's going to be a lot harder this cycle as people are washing misinformation through generative AI tools," Edelson said. "Misinformation will be more effective inside insular communities and harder to detect. Platforms need to be building new tools."

Instead, Edelson and others say, platforms are cutting the teams tasked with moderation to the bone. Since 2021, the largest social media companies have reportedly deprioritized efforts to guard against viral falsehoods, tech critics said.

Elon Musk's X has led the way as social media platforms including Meta and YouTube have retreated from enforcement and policy and slashed content moderators and trust and safety teams, said Rose Lang-Maso, campaign manager at Free Press, a digital civil rights organization.

"Without policies in place that moderate for content and without enough content moderators to actually do the moderating, it makes it more possible for bad actors to increase abuse online and offline," Lang-Maso said. "Platforms are really abdicating the responsibility to users."

Meta, YouTube and X have denied reports that they are ill-prepared to prevent the spread of election disinformation.

"Content misleading voters on how to vote or encouraging interference in the democratic process is prohibited on YouTube," YouTube spokesperson Ivy Choi said in a statement to NBC News. "We continue to heavily invest in the policies and systems that connect people to high-quality content, and our commitment to supporting the 2024 election is steadfast."

A spokesperson for Meta declined to comment but shared a news release about the company's plans for the 2024 elections.

Who's watching?

The first challenge of combating disinformation in the 2024 cycle might be in identifying it.

The social media space has become fragmented with the ascendancy of alternatives including Substack, Telegram, Threads and Rumble as viable spaces for political actors and extreme content. And a pressure campaign by conservative activists may affect how many trained eyes are available to be on the lookout.

Republican politicians and activists responded to the wave of disinformation in 2020 by targeting the researchers, universities, tech companies and journalists who pointed it out. Using social media campaigns, the courts and congressional committees, far-right critics have aired unfounded accusations that efforts to curtail disinformation around the election and the pandemic were part of a plot to censor conservatives. Some researchers said those partisan campaigns, which have included burdensome information requests and threats of reputational and legal harm to institutions, have had a chilling effect on new research going into 2024.

Watchers are further challenged by the lack of transparency from social media companies. So-called black boxes surround the algorithms that serve up content, and the inability to see what is happening on the platforms in real time has only gotten worse.

"We're flying blind," said Mike Caulfield, a research scientist at the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public who studies election rumors.

The delay in catching false narratives early is essentially giving disinformation a head start, Caulfield said, and could mean a delay in fact-checking efforts and context from journalists.

Risks to national security, safety and voting rights aside, the larger threat from the coming wave of disinformation might be in widened partisan divides and weakened public trust.

"The direct effect of disinformation might not be as high as we think it is," said Joshua Tucker, co-director of New York University's Center for Social Media and Politics, referring to voting preferences. "But the indirect effect is people losing confidence in journalism, losing confidence that there's an objective truth out there, and believing that anything could be disinformation."

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Disinformation poses an unprecedented threat in 2024 - and the U.S. is less ready than ever

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Disinformation poses an unprecedented threat to democracy as the 2024 U.S. presidential election approaches, according to researchers and political scientists.

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https://www.thenation.com/article/world/israel-gaza-propaganda-biden/

Evan P

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On November 11, an Arabic-language Twitter account maintained by Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs posted a video purporting to be a selfie by a nurse in Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza, a major battlefield in the current conflict that was taken over by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) a few days later. In the startling video, as bombs went off in the background, the tearful nurse warned Gazans to heed the call of the IDF to flee to the south. She also affirmed many IDF talking points, notably that Hamas had taken over the hospital and were stealing morphine and fuel.

The video gained millions of views-but was also widely mocked by many, particularly Arabs, who questioned its authenticity. For one thing, none of the staff in the hospital knew who this supposed nurse was. For another, she spoke in English with an accent that resembled no known Arab lilt.

As Marc Owen Jones of The Daily Beast observed, "Everything about it smacked of high school theater-from the botched accent that sounded like it was straight out of an Israeli soap opera to the perfectly scripted IDF talking points rolling off her tongue." Jones also noted "the pristine white lab coat looking like it had just come back from the dry cleaner, the audio track of bombs falling that sounded like samples from a late-'80s Casio keyboard, and the contrived stethoscope-waving you'd expect from an extra on Grey's Anatomy."

Within a day, the tweet of the video was deleted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. But of course, downloaded versions continue to circulate.

Lying and propaganda are endemic to warfare. Public opinion is always as much a battlefield as actual territory. But in the case of Israel's ongoing war in Gaza-nominally against Hamas but actually devastating to the civilian population of the besieged territory-propaganda has taken a bizarre turn. This is propaganda that barely makes any effort to convince, instead offering ludicrous arguments in implausible forms. To pay attention to Israeli propaganda in recent weeks is like watching a magic trick done by an inept conjurer who constantly lets the audience see the mirrors and wires that are supposed to create optical illusions.

As Hussein Ibish, a resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute notes, "Israel's propaganda has always been ham-handed and ridiculous, but during this Gaza war, it has been so pathetically bad and jumped the shark so terribly that it's going to be very difficult to restore any credibility at all with a great many people in the US and Europe."

Current Issue

A few examples will suffice. On November 5, Israel bombed a car travelling from South Lebanon to Beirut. The IDF told the press that it "struck a vehicle in Lebanese territory that was identified as a suspicious vehicle containing several terrorists." In fact, as Human Rights Watch later established, the car was civilian, containing a grandmother, a mother, and three young girls. The mother was wounded; the grandmother and girls were killed. Human Rights Watch concluded that this was an "apparent war crime" and "the attack on a vehicle containing only fleeing civilians shows reckless disregard by the Israeli military for its obligation to distinguish between civilian and military objects and a significant failure to take adequate safeguards to prevent civilian deaths." Israel has promised an investigation, but based on previous experience that is likely to be slow and result only in a tepid admission of error.

On November 13, the IDF released a video of spokesman Daniel Hagari touring Rantisi hospital. Hagari kept calling attention to banal objects with the suggestion that they were evidence the hospital had housed terrorist cell. At one point he pointed to a baby bottle and said, "It's a baby bottle. It's a baby bottle in a basement, above a World Health Organization sign." Then Hagari pointed to a list on a wall and claimed, "This is a guardians' list, where every terrorist writes his name and every terrorist has his own shift, guarding the people that were here."

As those fluent in Arabic pointed out, the supposed "guardians list" was nothing more or less than a calendar with the days of the week on it. The IDF blamed the fiasco on a "translation error."

On November 15, Middle East Monitor reported, "The Israeli army killed an elderly Palestinian after using him in a propaganda campaign promoting its 'safe corridor' in Gaza." The IDF circulated a photo of the 79-year old man, Bashir Hajji, talking to IDF soldiers as proof of their careful shepherding of refugees fleeing the bombardment in the north. This photo was undermined by the fact that an Israeli sniper shot Hajji twice in the back of the head.

Israeli officials have also falsely tried to suggest that images of Palestinian civilians being killed are fabrications and created by "Pallywood" crisis actors (Pallywood being a neologism mixing Palestinian and Hollywood). This claim is not just wrong but deeply conspiratorial-at the level of extremists like Alex Jones, who made similar claims about mass shootings in the United States. It is astonishing for a government to make such claims.

The biggest ongoing propaganda fiasco involves Al-Shifa hospital-one that deeply implicates not just the Israeli government but also the Biden administration. On October 13, the IDF released an elaborate drawing purporting to show the "the main headquarters for Hamas' terrorist activities." The drawing showed an extensive network of well-lighted tunnels and large rooms that resembled nothing so much as the villain's lair in a James Bond film.

On Tuesday, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said, "I can confirm for you that we have information that Hamas, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, use some hospitals in the Gaza Strip including Al Shifa, and tunnels underneath them, to conceal and to support their military operations and to hold hostages."

Israel took control of Al Shifa hospital the next day. What they found there was underwhelming. As The Washington Post noted, on Thursday, the IDF said "that searches had uncovered the body of a captive Israeli woman in a house near the hospital, along with weapons. On Wednesday, the IDF released photographs and video of small caches of weapons it said belonged to Hamas." That video also showed thatthe hospital had a box of dates (a well-loved fruit among Arabs) and two copies of the Quran (a book holy to hundreds of millions). From the Post:

The military added to its case Thursday with a photo and video of a rough cavity that it described as an "operational tunnel shaft." The Washington Post verified the location of the shaft inside the Al-Shifa Hospital complex but could not verify where the opening led or what its purpose might be. Israel has yet to produce findings that corroborate its claims that Al-Shifa sits atop a Hamas headquarters and was central to the militant group's operations in northern Gaza.

The IDF also suggested that "Hamas knew we were coming" and moved the headquarters-hence the absence of evidence for a robust Hamas presence. This is truly the territory of Donald Rumsfeld during the Iraq War, when he famously remarked that "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" in relation to the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction.

It remains possible that a few Hamas fighters were holed up in a very large hospital with hundreds of patients. But it seems unlikely the hospital had ever been "the main headquarters" of Hamas. The IDF may yet find more evidence of a Hamas presence there; however, the original narrative seems to be a fabulation.

But then the very idea of a Hamas command center is a flight of fantasy. The military wing of Hamas is not a regular army but an insurgent force that weaves in and out of the population, moving "among the people as a fish swims in the sea," in Mao's famous phrase. Israel has projected onto a guerrilla army the form of a more conventional force organized by a nation state-a common mistake in counterinsurgency warfare.

Yet Joe Biden seems unfazed by the flimsiness of the evidence provided by Israel. On Wednesday, he said, "You have a circumstance where the first war crime is being committed by Hamas by having their headquarters, their military, hidden under a hospital. And that's a fact; that's what's happened." The phrase "first war crime" is suggestive, sounding as it does like the complaint of a child caught hitting a sibling arguing over who started it. Under international law, Hamas's committing a war crime doesn't give Israel a licence to commit other war crimes. Nor does it allow the United States to support war crimes in response to Hamas's actions.

Asked for evidence of the command center, Biden said, "No, I can't tell you-I won't tell you."

Biden also claimed that Israel was very careful in taking over Al-Shifa Hospital in comparison to its earlier actions. According to the president, "So, this is a different story than I believe was occurring before, an indiscriminate bombing." Biden's admission that Israel, with American support, conducted indiscriminate bombing is yet another confession of a war crime.

In the unlikely event that Biden and Netanyahu are ever brought before the Hague for crimes against humanity, Biden has provided ample evidence in his own words.

All of these mistakes should help retire the durable myth of the IDF and Mossad (the Israeli intelligence agency) as omnicompetent fighting forces. Indeed, the Hamas attack of October 7, which instigated the current round of the Israel/Palestine conflict, was itself a massive intelligence failure -one that calls into question long-standing policies by multiple governments (including the United States) to sideline the issue of Palestinian statehood.

Israel's poor propaganda is another indication of Israeli incompetence. Yet all these failures count for little as long as Israel benefits from the soft bigotry of low expectations by its supporters, including the president of the United States.

Joe Biden is clearly willing to back whatever Israel does, including indiscriminate bombing and other war crimes. The American media is also complicit. As HuffPost has documented, CNN has a habit of airing IDF videos with false information (including the calendar fiasco). Then, when the errors are pointed out, these same videos are carefully edited to delete the falsehood when placed online, without an editorial note explaining or acknowledging what was cut. In effect, CNN is the IDF's partner in propaganda.

But then Israel's half-baked propaganda isn't aimed at regular people. The American public is quickly souring on Israel's war. As Reuters reports, only 32 percent of Americans support Israel in this conflict, down from 41 percent a month ago. The same poll shows 68 percent support for a ceasefire.

Sadly, the fact that the public isn't buying Israel's campaign of lies counts for little. Foreign policy is made by elites. Biden and the US Congress are still firmly behind Israel. Even if Joe Biden is the only person on earth who really believes Israel's propaganda, that is more than enough to make it successful.

More from Jeet Heer

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Israel's Ludicrous Propaganda Wins Over the Only Audience That Counts

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Why make an effort to be credible if you're going to be uncritically echoed by the White House and Western press?

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Ashlyn M.

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Seiji

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.634543/full#B23

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School of Journalism and Communication, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, United States

Center for Science Communication Research, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, United States

Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, United States

Department of Psychology, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, United States

Department of Psychology, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden

Communities often unite during a crisis, though some cope by ascribing blame or stigmas to those who might be linked to distressing life events. In a preregistered two-wave survey, we evaluated the dehumanization of Asians and Asian Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our first wave (March 26-April 2, 2020; N = 917) revealed dehumanization was prevalent, between 6.1% and 39% of our sample depending on measurement. Compared to non-dehumanizers, people who dehumanized also perceived the virus as less risky to human health and caused less severe consequences for infected people. They were more likely to be ideologically Conservative and believe in conspiracy theories about the virus. We largely replicated the results 1 month later in our second wave (May 6-May 13, 2020; N = 723). Together, many Americans dehumanize Asians and Asian Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic with related perceptions that the virus is less problematic. Implications and applications for dehumanization theory are discussed.

Dehumanization During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Communities often unite during a crisis ( Berke et al., 1993; Tan and Enderwick, 2006), though one coping strategy is to blame or stigmatize others linked to a crisis ( Lau et al., 2020). History suggests scapegoating is quite common; for example, Muslim Americans were blamed for the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001 ( Peek, 2010), and the African lifestyle was blamed for Ebola in the 1990s ( Joffe and Haarhoff, 2002). Scapegoating can offer several benefits to individuals. It can serve as a way to emotionally regulate negative life events ( Garnefski et al., 2001), a way to avoid threat by blaming others ( Tennen and Affleck, 1990), and as a mechanism to ascribe blame to reduce uncertainty ( Petersson, 2003). Scapegoating can also introduce societal costs. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Asians and Asian Americans have become the victims of physical and verbal attacks ( Hong, 2020; Tavernise and Oppel, 2020; Zheng, 2020), even from United States government officials ( Somvichian-Clausen, 2020), because of their ethnicity and the virus' origins. Indeed, the humanity of Asians and Asian Americans is being violated, denied, or questioned during this pandemic, not unlike other periods of history when hated outgroups were perceived as "less than human" ( Musolff, 2014, 2015; Slovic and Lin, 2018). To mitigate hatred and cruelty around the world, it is important to identify blind spots and realize how we treat others during global crises.

As the COVID-19 pandemic progresses, it is particularly crucial to document whether people inappropriately blame certain groups for the pandemic and treat them unfairly and cruelly as a result. It is also crucial to understand who perpetuates this blame. In a large-scale, preregistered, two-wave study, we evaluated the blatant dehumanization of Asians and Asian Americans during the pandemic. We found that many people dehumanized Asians and Asian Americans. People who dehumanized tended to have lower risk perceptions toward the virus, were more ideologically conservative, and believed in conspiracy theories and disinformation about the virus compared to non-dehumanizers.

A Primer on Dehumanization Research

Dehumanization, or the blatant denial of a group's humanity or humanness, is a global issue perpetrated on a range of outgroups ( Haslam, 2006; Haslam and Loughnan, 2014). For example, Americans tend to rate Muslims as less evolved compared to other groups such as Arabs or Australians ( Kteily et al., 2015), and perceive immigrants as less than fully evolved humans who deserve punishment for their actions ( Markowitz and Slovic, 2020b). Dehumanization can be tacit through people denying an outgroup's secondary emotions (e.g., emotions considered unique to humans such as nostalgia; Leyens et al., 2003; Haque and Waytz, 2012), or explicit through callous metaphors that describe an outgroup (e.g., calling immigrants animals; see Markowitz and Slovic, 2020b). Dehumanization often goes beyond hatred of an outgroup, however ( Bruneau et al., 2019). It can reflect one group believing outgroup members deserve to suffer or receive harsh treatment (e.g., as with some Americans towards immigrants; Fiske and Rai, 2014) or are less worthy of rights and treatment ascribed to other humans.

Antecedents of Dehumanization

People who dehumanize come from a variety of social, psychological, and demographic paths ( Haslam and Loughnan, 2014; Markowitz and Slovic, 2020b). People who blatantly dehumanize immigrants, for example, tend to feel dominant over them ( Pratto et al., 1994), are older ( Markowitz and Slovic, 2020b) and more ideologically conservative ( Utych, 2018). That is, compared to non-dehumanizers, people who dehumanize are more likely to support right-leaning policies in the United States, such as immigration raids and the death penalty for convicted murderers ( Markowitz and Slovic, 2020b). Several characteristics are antecedents of dehumanization, suggesting similar indicators might help to identify those who dehumanize Asians and Asian Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Consequences of Dehumanization

People who dehumanize are often less prosocial toward perceived outgroups ( Haslam and Loughnan, 2014). For example, Cuddy et al. (2007) revealed that those who denied secondary emotions (e.g., anguish, remorse) to Hurricane Katrina victims reported they would be less likely to volunteer time to help needy individuals. Other work finds people who perceived Muslims as animals were less likely to support reparation policies for them ( Zebel et al., 2008). In general, people who dehumanize attend to outgroups less and also support them less compared to non-dehumanizers ( Dickert and Slovic, 2009; Harris and Fiske, 2011).

People who dehumanize also tend to favor cruelty and ascribe harsher punishments toward outgroups. Markowitz and Slovic (2020b) observed that people who dehumanized immigrants would sentence them to more jail time if they were caught crossing the United States-Mexico southern border. Other research finds that people who dehumanize tend to ascribe criminals with more blame for their actions than non-dehumanizers ( Bastian et al., 2013). Finally, those who dehumanize also display less empathy toward outgroups (e.g., homeless people; Herrera et al., 2018) and generally report experiencing heightened negative affect or disgust toward them ( Haslam, 2006; Buckels and Trapnell, 2013; Bruneau et al., 2018).

Together, people who dehumanize often believe that an outgroup is less deserving of rights and feelings than an ingroup. Dehumanization is linked to a range of social, psychological, and demographic antecedents, with far-reaching social and psychological consequences.

Summary of Our Research Aims

Our research draws on the prior perspectives to achieve two goals. First, we attempt to measure the dehumanization of Asians and Asian Americans during early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in an online sample of Americans. Hatred toward Asians during the pandemic is widespread in the United States, but blatant dehumanization is a concept that considers the overt denial of another group's humanness. This different psychological concept should be empirically documented, and we address this opportunity in the current investigation.

Importantly, prior work also suggests outside of this or any pandemic, some people dehumanize Asians (e.g., Chinese people, South Koreans) compared to Americans. A landmark paper by Kteily et al. (2015; Study 1) had participants judge the humanness of many outgroups and they rated Chinese people (Cohen's d = 0.18) and South Koreans (Cohen's d = 0.23), but not Japanese people (Cohen's d = 0.02), as less than human on the Ascent of Man (AOM) scale relative to Americans. The AOM contains five hominids that become more evolved and human-like by walking upright and having straighter legs (see Figure 1). Therefore, the average American might perceive Asians as less evolved than Americans (e.g., Slovic and Lin, 2018); we seek to identify the rate of dehumanization during this critical period (e.g., the percent of people in our samples who dehumanized) and who tends to dehumanize during a pandemic.

A second goal is to recruit risk perceptions associated with the virus and how people felt during the COVID-19 pandemic, linking such variables to the dehumanization of Asians and Asian Americans. Risk perceptions are often used to understand how people make decisions under conditions of uncertainty (e.g., about their health or money), but they are less often connected to how people think about target groups or their humanness (though, see Schaller et al., 2003; Faulkner et al., 2004 for notable exceptions). We attempt to understand how personal risk assessments, specifically risk perceptions about COVID-19, might associate with how people treat groups who are stigmatized and blamed for COVID-19 because of its origins. If we can understand the people who dehumanize, how they think about the virus, and its associated risk, we can potentially mitigate undeserving cruelty toward purported outgroups.

This work is important for dehumanization theory and has many practical implications as well. First, dehumanization research often measures rates of blatant dehumanization cross-sectionally. Multi-wave evaluations are rare (but see Kteily et al., 2015; Pizzirani and Karantzas, 2019 for examples), and we measure the time-dependent nature of dehumanization and its effects during a global crisis. Second, it is unclear if dehumanization might be amplified during periods of heightened unrest and uncertainty. Risk perception models suggest that this idea is plausible. The social amplification of risk framework argues that crises or hazards are shaped by social, psychological, and cultural factors relevent to a particular event ( Kasperson et al., 1988; Pidgeon et al., 2003). Social amplifiers (e.g., scientists, the media) can increase or decrease perceived risks, uncertainties, or emotional responses associated with a harmful event (p. 181). For example, people might read about the virus' origins in China, increase their negative perceptions of Asians and Asian Americans, and perceive them as less-than-human during this tense period in history; thus, they might feel more threatened by COVID-19, at least in the short-term. We test how Asians and Asian Americans are dehumanized in a time when risk and uncertainty is elevated.

Finally, it is practically important to identify those who treat others as less than human during a global crisis. Such evaluations might provide warning signs about people who dehumanize and aid in interventions to encourage humane treatment of perceived outgroups.

Predictions

We use prior theory and evidence to predict relations between dehumanization, perceptions of risk, and analyses of unrestrained descriptions of people's thoughts and feelings about the virus. All hypotheses were preregistered on the Open Science Framework. Our preregistrations for other associated papers are located at the same link. Note, the data did not support most predictions that follow, though we explain our original logic, present the results, and wrestle with the differences between predictions and results.

We expect that perceived risk and COVID-19 severity will be positively related to dehumanization of Asians and Asian Americans based on prior work that suggests people may dehumanize others to cope with repeated social and psychological distress ( Schulman-Green, 2003; Haque and Waytz, 2012). Those who believe COVID-19 is more of a problem might therefore look for blameworthy targets and show strong dehumanization tendencies toward them (see Buckels and Trapnell, 2013). We hypothesized that:

H ₁: Higher rates of blatant dehumanization are associated with more perceived risk, severity, and negative emotion toward COVID-19.

People who dehumanize immigrants tend to write about them and other immigration issues in more impersonal terms ( Markowitz and Slovic, 2020b). Presumably, people who dehumanized also wanted to increase the social and psychological distance between them and immigrants; this desire can be achieved or reflected in an increased rate of impersonal pronouns (e.g., it, who, anyone) in a person's speech (see Pennebaker, 2011). Therefore, consistent with other evidence, we predicted:

H ₂: Blatant dehumanization is associated with an increase in impersonal pronouns.

We further expected that those who display generally high levels of intrinsic motivation during the COVID-19 pandemic will also dehumanize less than those who display generally low levels of intrinsic motivation. According to self-determination theory ( Deci and Ryan, 1985), people tend to act in accordance with goals that are internalized (or self-determined) compared to goals that are not ( Deci and Ryan, 2002). Self-determination theory argues for a continuum of self-determination to direct behavior, where goals that are intrinsically motivated (e.g., the most self-determined) tend to be satisfying and easier to pursue than those that are forced or "amotivating" (e.g., the least self-determined).

Self-determination has important connections to how people treat and perceive target outgroups. For example, people who are self-determined or more intrinsically motivated to regulate their prejudice toward Black people tend to demonstrate lower levels of implicit racial bias (e.g., via the Implicit Association Test) and explicit prejudice (e.g., via the Symbolic Racism 2000 Scale) than those who are less self-determined to regulate their prejudice ( Legault et al., 2007). Other complementary work suggests that high self-determination and motivation is linked to prosocial behavior. For example, sustained prosociality (e.g., volunteering) often occurs when intrinsic motivation are high compared to low ( Aydinli et al., 2016), and people who are intrinsically motivated to control their own prejudice toward others can overcome the activation of racial biases even when cognitively depleted ( Park et al., 2008). Self-determination and motivation are therefore crucial to indicate how people feel or behave toward others, particularly those who might be the target of prejudice, racism, or dehumanization.

Consistent with prior evidence supported by self-determination theory, we expect that people who write with more verbal traces of self-determination during the COVID-19 pandemic will dehumanize target outgroups less. We measure self-determination and motivation through writing style patterns, particularly a dimension called verbal drives, indicated by terms such as accomplish, master, and success, which has been validated in prior research ( Schultheiss, 2013). We predict verbal drives will be associated with less dehumanization toward Asians and Asian Americans. While we cannot precisely identify the type of intrinsic motivation people are experiencing or what people might be specifically motivated about during this time, our hypothesis is consistent with the idea that high levels of implicit motivation are associated with less prejudice and hatred toward an outgroup, and therefore, we expect less dehumanization.

H ₃: Less dehumanization is associated with more verbal drives.

We also explored how conspiracy beliefs and one's objective numeric ability link to dehumanization, and how effects might change over time. Prior work suggests highly numerate individuals are more logical decision makers in hypothetical scenarios ( Peters et al., 2006) and in medical decision making ( Reyna et al., 2009). We explored how objective numeracy, or the idea that people are adept in dealing with numbers and mathematical operations ( Peters and Bjälkebring, 2015), relates to dehumanization. It is plausible that those higher in objective numeracy are more logical thinkers (vs. emotional thinkers) during a time of uncertainty and therefore dehumanize less than those who are lower in objective numeracy.

Taken together, in this work we evaluate rates of dehumanization during the COVID-19 pandemic toward Asians and Asian Americans, understand the relationship between dehumanization and risk perceptions during the early stages of the pandemic, and profile those who dehumanize Asians and Asian Americans. One way to reduce global hatred is to identify those who might treat others as less-than-human and assess dehumanization prevalence. We take up this opportunity in the current investigation.

Method

We collected two waves of survey data to evaluate how dehumanization operates cross-sectionally and at different time-points. This project is part of the UO-EPIDeMIC Study (Emotions & Polarization In Decisions & Media In COVID-19), a series of investigations with the same survey instrument that collected information about people's thoughts, feelings, and reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic over time. This is our only study to use the AOM items. Figure 2 displays survey waves and those relevant to the current study (Wave 3 is henceforth labeled as AOM Time 1 and Wave 4 is AOM Time 2).

AOM Time 1 ran from March 26, 2020 until April 2, 2020 and started with 1,002 participants. Consistent with best practices for analyzing language data, we excluded participants whose writing samples contained ≤15 words ( n = 85) because small word counts can inflate the prevalence of word categories. Our final AOM Time 1 sample contained 917 participants. AOM Time 2 ran from May 6, 2020 to May 13, 2020 and started with 864 participants in the survey, though only some participants completed AOM Time 1 (final n = 723 after exclusions).

Participants were recruited from CloudResearch, an extension of Amazon Mechanical Turk, and paid at least $3.00 for their participation in both 25- to 30-min sessions. In AOM Time 1, we started with 433 self-identified males and 474 self-identified females (some participants did not provide demographic data). On average, AOM Time 1 participants were 42.01 years old ( SD = 12.93 years). AOM Time 1 participants were also mostly White ( n = 740; 80.7%), followed by race or ethnicities including African American ( n = 51), Asian ( n = 50), Hispanic ( n = 27), Native American ( n = 5), and other ( n = 5). A total of 39 participants also identified as more than one racial or ethnic background. On average, participants reported having slightly less than a 4-year college degree ( M = 3.68, SD = 0.85 on a 5-point education scale). All procedures were approved by University of Oregon Institutional Review Board.

Procedure

Participants entered the online survey interface and consented to the study. Upon receiving informed consent, we solicited a range of responses, some of which were used in the current paper under our preregistration plan: risk perceptions associated with COVID-19, participants' thoughts and feelings about the virus via a free response question, and dehumanization via the AOM. The free response question was the penultimate question, and the AOM question was the final question in the survey.

We also evaluated demographic items from a baseline wave (Wave 1; see Figure 2), including participant age, gender, and political ideology. Political ideology was assessed on a four-point scale (1 = very conservative, 4 = very liberal). Antecedents were therefore not assessed contemporaneously with the AOM measures.

Preregistered Measures

Measures were identical for AOM Times 1 and 2 unless otherwise stated.

Blatant Dehumanization

We measured blatant dehumanization using the AOM scale ( Kteily et al., 2015). Consistent with Markowitz and Slovic (2020b), participants rated the evolved nature of three groups on a scale of (1) Unevolved, to (8) Fully evolved: Asians, Asian Americans, and Americans. A fourth group, Chinese people, was added in AOM Time 2.

Dehumanization ratings were analyzed in two ways: (1) as absolute scores (e.g., low scores suggest more dehumanization on the AOM), and (2) as relative scores. Both measurements helped to evaluate if blatant dehumanization is connected to risk perceptions as an outright measure (e.g., people have decided and unqualified views of an entire outgroup during the pandemic) or a comparative measure (e.g., people have conditional or relative views of an entire outgroup during the pandemic compared to an ingroup). Relative dehumanization scores were calculated using the formula, [Americans - Target Group]. Here, high relative scores suggest people dehumanized an outgroup more than Americans ( Kteily et al., 2015). The AOM scale was used in this paper because it is one of the more well-validated and recent measures of blatant outgroup dehumanization. According to Kteily et al. (2015), the AOM is a measure with high predictive validity relative to other measures of dehumanization and measures of prejudice. It is also linked to other known measures of blatant dehumanization (specifically, animalistic and mechanistic dehumanization), which adds to its convergent validity as well. We therefore adapted this measure to our study evaluating the dehumanization of Asian populations during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Risk Perceptions

Since COVID-19 was a new and unprecedented world event at the time of this project, we drew on established risk perception research and associated measures to assess how people perceived the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of risk ( Brewer et al., 2007; Kahan et al., 2012; Ferrer et al., 2018). We substituted COVID-19 for other health risks (e.g., cancer, gum disease) using items from measures described by Ferrer et al. (2018) and adapted other items from prior work as well ( Brewer et al., 2007; Kahan et al., 2012). Note, Ferrer et al. (2018) also describe how test-retest reliabilities for their measures were stable weeks after initial measurement, suggesting that our effects should also share a similar quality.

The first question of the risk perception index asked: "How likely is it that you will get the coronavirus at some point in the future?" on a scale of (1) Completely impossible to (6) Completely certain. The second question asked: "I think my chances of getting harmed by the coronavirus are:" on a scale of (1) Completely impossible to (6) Completely certain. The third question asked: "I think the consequences of the coronavirus for infected people are:" on a scale of (1) Not bad at all to (6) Extremely bad. The fourth question asked: "How easy or hard is it to imagine yourself getting infected with the coronavirus?" on a scale of (1) Extremely easy to (6) Extremely hard. The fifth question asked: "How fearful are you of contracting the coronavirus in the future?" on a scale of (1) Not fearful at all to (6) Extremely fearful. The sixth question asked: "Overall, how much risk do you believe the coronavirus poses to human health, safety, or prosperity in the United States?" on a scale of (1) No risk to (11) Extreme risk. Finally, the seventh question asked: "Compared to the average American, my chances of being infected with the coronavirus are:" on a scale of (1) Far below average to (6) Far above average.

Responses were averaged after reverse-scoring the fourth question and standardizing all items to form a risk perception index (AOM Time 1 Cronbach's α = 0.82, AOM Time 2 Cronbach's α = 0.83 using standardized items). The fourth question was reverse-scored for the index, only. High scores on this index indicate more perceived risk. Analyses using the index were also explored with each individual item for completeness and to assess the relative strength of each dimension. To support the convergent validity of our risk perception measure, we related the risk perception index to other antecedents that prior literature predicts should be theoretically associated. The data suggest males had lower risk perceptions at the index level than females in our sample [ t(904) = 4.37, p < 0.001, Cohen's d = 0.29], which is consistent with prior evidence (for a review, see Finucane et al., 2000). Test-retest reliabilities were highly significant across AOM timepoints for the risk perception index ( r = 0.814, p < 0.001).

Automated Text Analysis

All participants in AOM Time 1 responded to the following prompt: "We understand that coronavirus affects you, your community, and the world. We want to know what you are thinking and feeling about the coronavirus. Please be as detailed as possible." Participants typed their responses in an untimed manner.

Responses were analyzed with Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC: Pennebaker et al., 2015). LIWC is a text analysis tool for valid social and psychological evaluations of language ( Tausczik and Pennebaker, 2010; Boyd and Pennebaker, 2015) and has been applied to evaluations of dehumanization as well ( Markowitz and Slovic, 2020b). The tool contains an internal dictionary of words in social (e.g., family words), psychological (e.g., emotion terms), and part of speech categories (e.g., pronouns), and counts words as a percent of the total word count per text. We were interested in three categories a priori: negative affect, impersonal pronouns, and verbal drives.

Negative Affect

People who dehumanize tend to write with more negative affect (e.g., hate, awful) than people who do not dehumanize when describing an outgroup ( Markowitz and Slovic, 2020b). In our study, people wrote about an event (e.g., COVID-19) potentially associated with outgroups (e.g., Asians, Asian Americans). We therefore assessed levels of negativity in participant writing to evaluate how dehumanization related to negative affect (H ₁).

Impersonal Pronouns

The rate of impersonal pronouns (e.g., it, anyone) considers how often people refer to objects or entities in an impersonal and distanced manner ( Kacewicz et al., 2014; Markowitz and Slovic, 2020a). Often, when people use high rates of impersonal pronouns, they make indirect references to people, which can be considered an indicator of dehumanization (H ₂) ( Markowitz and Slovic, 2020b).

Verbal Drives

To assess one's implicit motives as reflected through writing style (H ₃), we measured the rate of verbal drives. Words in this category (e.g., confident, ambition, control, overcome) describe the degree to which people were self-determined.

Exploratory Measures

Objective Numeracy (Wave 1)

Participants responded to four items that evaluated their numeric ability and received one point for each correct response. These items were adapted from prior numeracy measures ( Cokely et al., 2012; Weller et al., 2013), and only four items were used to keep the participant effort burden reasonable in a long survey. Scores were combined into an objective numeracy index by adding the number of correct answers (min = 0, max = 4; Cronbach's α = 0.54). The exact objective numeracy questions are located in the online supplement out of space considerations.

To support the convergent validity of our objective numeracy measure, we related the objective numeracy index to other antecedents that prior literature predicts should be associated. Males had higher objective numeracy scores than females [ t(905) = 7.20, p < 0.001, Cohen's d = 0.48], which is supported by prior work ( Peters and Bjälkebring, 2015). More highly educated people also had greater objective numeracy ( r = 0.177, p < 0.001), which is supported by prior work ( Rolison et al., 2020).

Conspiracy and Disinformation Beliefs

We drew on prior reporting of COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs to measure participant agreement with three China-related conspiracies and disinformation (e.g., Lewis, 2020). These beliefs were measured on 6-point scales from (1) Strongly agree to (6) Strongly disagree. The first question stated, "Every new disease comes from China," the second question stated, "It's unsafe to go to Chinese restaurants right now," and the third question stated, "The coronavirus is a biochemical weapon that leaked" (AOM Time 1 Cronbach's α = 0.61, AOM Time 2 Cronbach's α = 0.57 using standardized items). Inter-item correlations for these beliefs were significant and operated in the predicted direction for AOM Time 1 (average r = 0.340, all ps < 0.001) and AOM Time 2 (average r = 0.304, all ps < 0.001). Test-retest reliabilities were highly significant across AOM timepoints (average r = 0.656, p s < 0.001).

Descriptive statistics for all measures collapsed across participants are located in Table 1.

Results

We used simple correlations to evaluate bivariate relationships between variables; Supplementary Table 2 contains associations after controlling for age and gender in multiple regression models. In general, the results were largely maintained in the regressions.

AOM Time 1

Rates of Dehumanization

Using absolute dehumanization scores, we observed that 39.0% of our sample dehumanized Asians and 37.6% dehumanized Asian Americans (e.g., these individuals rated Asians or Asian Americans as less than fully human on the AOM). Compared to Americans (the relative scores), 10.4% of participants dehumanized Asians, and 6.1% dehumanized Asian Americans (e.g., these individuals rated Asians or Asian Americans as less human than Americans on the AOM).

Antecedents of Dehumanization: Political Ideology

Using absolute scores, Conservatives dehumanized Asians more than Liberals ( r = 0.087, p = 0.008); no significant association emerged between conservativism and the dehumanization of Asian Americans ( r = 0.034, p = 0.300). Using relative scores, Conservatives dehumanized both Asians ( r = −0.301, p < 0.001) and Asian Americans ( r = −0.277, p < 0.001) more than Liberals. These data are further described in Table 2. Note, for the creation of this table, political ideology was dichotomized from a four-point scale (1 = Very conservative, 2 = Conservative, 3 = Liberal, 4 = Very liberal) to a two-point scale (1 = Conservative, 2 = Liberal) for ease of interpretation and to be consistent with recent research on dehumanization ( Markowitz and Slovic, 2020b). We also report the results of simple regressions between political ideology (continuous) and dehumanization in the online supplement ( Supplementary Table 3), which revealed largely consistent findings.

Antecedents of Dehumanization: Gender and Age

Males and females had statistically similar rates of dehumanization toward Asians [ t(905) = −1.82, p = 0.070, Cohen's d = 0.12] and Asian Americans [ t(905) = −1.71, p = 0.087, Cohen's d = 0.11] and were therefore not significant at the 5% level. Using relative scores, females dehumanized Asian Americans more than males [Welch's t(792.64) = −1.99, p = 0.047, Cohen's d = 0.13], but not Asians ( p = 0.156). Age was unrelated to dehumanization using both scoring methods ( p s > 0.378).

Consequences of Dehumanization: Risk Perceptions

Using absolute scores, blatant dehumanization of Asian and Asian Americans was not significantly related to the risk perception index or any particular item ( ps > 0.319). Using relative scores, the overall risk perception index was not associated with dehumanization of Asians at the 5% significance level ( r = −0.063, p = 0.058; Table 3). Below, we explored this relationship at the item level to understand if all measures were indeed not significantly related to dehumanization.

At the item level of the risk perceptions index, participants dehumanized Asians more than Americans if they believed they were less likely to get the coronavirus in the future ( r = −0.065, p = 0.050), if they believed the consequences of the coronavirus were less severe for infected people ( r = −0.085, p = 0.010), if it was difficult to imagine getting infected with the coronavirus ( r = 0.078, p = 0.019), and if they believed the virus poses less of a human health risk ( r = −0.080, p = 0.015). Dehumanization did not relate to risk beliefs about one's perceived chances of being harmed by the virus, fear of contracting the virus, or perceived chances of being infected (see Table 3). People who dehumanized Asian Americans more than Americans believed the consequences of the coronavirus were less severe ( r = −0.077, p = 0.020) and believed the virus poses less of a health risk ( r = −0.065, p = 0.050). Such effects were non-significant after controlling for age, gender, and political ideology in the same model.

Inconsistent with H ₁, but consistent with the other risk perception results, higher rates of negative affect in participant writing were associated with less dehumanization of Asians ( r = −0.070, p = 0.035) and Asian Americans ( r = −0.069, p = 0.037) relative to Americans.

Consequences of Dehumanization: Impersonal Pronouns and Verbal Drives

Inconsistent with H ₂- ₃, rates of impersonal pronouns and verbal drives were statistically unrelated to dehumanization of Asians or Asian Americans for absolute and relative scores ( ps > 0.096). Drives were positively associated with overall risk perceptions, however ( r = 0.083, p = 0.012). See Supplementary Table 4 for bivariate correlations between all LIWC dimensions and dehumanization.

AOM Time 1 Exploratory Findings

Objective Numeracy

Participants answered four math questions to indicate their numerical competency. Participants with lower objective numeracy scores indicated greater relative dehumanization of Asians ( r = −0.075, p = 0.024) and Asian Americans ( r = −0.088, p = 0.007) relative to Americans. Absolute dehumanization scores were unrelated to objective numeracy.

Conspiracy Beliefs

Considering both absolute and relative scores, people who dehumanized Asians and Asian Americans also agreed more with each of the three conspiracy theories (Asians: rs > |0.168|, p < 0.001; Asian Americans: rs > |0.131|, p < 0.001). Considering both scores, the conspiracy theory most strongly associated with dehumanization was the idea that every new disease comes from China ( rs > | 0.199|, p < 0.001). Finally, less numerate people tended to agree more with all three conspiracy beliefs in AOM Time 1 ( rs > 0.079, p s < 0.017).

To further investigate this novel finding, we regressed dehumanization scores on objective numeracy and reported level of education, which can serve as a rough proxy for intelligence, in general. Using relative scores, numeracy predicted dehumanization of Asians in the expected direction ( B = −0.08, SE = 0.03, t = −2.38, p = 0.018, R ² = 0.006), but education was not related to dehumanization ( B = 0.03, SE = 0.04, t = 0.86, p = 0.389). For Asian Americans, numeracy predicted dehumanization ( B = −0.07, SE = 0.03, t = −2.59, p = 0.010, R ² = 0.008) and education did not ( B = −0.01, SE = 0.03, t = −0.33, p = 0.743). Together, one's proficiency with numbers is likely powering the prior effects, not one's general intelligence or level of education. Note, since absolute dehumanization scores were unrelated to objective numeracy, we did not investigate this relationship controlling for education.

AOM Time 2

Using the same participants from AOM Time 1, we attempted to replicate our findings and evaluate how changes over time might have affected dehumanization ratings. AOM Time 2 was conducted more than 1 month after AOM Time 1. We instituted two changes in AOM Time 2, however: (1) the inclusion of Chinese people to the AOM scale, and (2) we did not proceed with the automated text analyses since the preregistered effects largely failed to obtain significance. All AOM Time 2 bivariate correlations are reported in the bottom of Table 3.

Rates of Dehumanization

Slightly elevated levels of dehumanization occurred in AOM Time 2 versus AOM Time 1: 41.2% of our sample dehumanized Asians (compared to 39.0% in AOM Time 1), 38.9% dehumanized Asian Americans (37.6% in AOM Time 1), and 44.4% dehumanized Chinese people using absolute scores. Compared to Americans, 12.2% (10.4% in AOM Time 1) and 7.6% (6.1% in AOM Time 1) of participants dehumanized Asians and Asian Americans, respectively. A greater proportion, 17.7%, dehumanized Chinese people using relative scores.

The increase in AOM dehumanization over time toward Asians (using absolute scores) was confirmed by a significant paired samples t-test, though effects failed to obtain for other outgroups and scoring calculations ( Table 4).

Antecedents of Dehumanization: Political Ideology

Conservatives dehumanized Asians and Chinese people more than Liberals using both absolute and relative scores ( rs>|0.112|, ps < 0.003). Conservatives dehumanized Asian Americans more than Liberals using relative scores, only ( r = −0.283, p < 0.001).

Who dehumanized more over time? Given that political ideology is typically one of the strongest antecedents connected to dehumanization ( Bruneau and Kteily, 2017; Utych, 2018; Markowitz and Slovic, 2020b), we used ideology to address this question directly. Consistent with other work ( Markowitz and Slovic, 2020b), we dichotomized our political ideology variable and performed Timepoint (AOM Time 1, AOM Time 2) × Political Ideology (Liberal, Conservative) interactions ( Figure 3). A significant interaction emerged for Asians using relative scores [ F(1, 763.04) = 3.82, p = 0.051], with Conservatives displaying an increase in dehumanization from AOM Time 1 ( M = 0.31, SE = 0.05) to AOM Time 2 ( M = 0.41, SE = 0.06), p = 0.030. Liberals did not show a significant change from AOM Time 1 to 2 ( p = 0.643).

The Timepoint (AOM Time 1, AOM Time 2) × Political Ideology (Liberal, Conservative) interaction was also significant for Asian Americans using relative scores [ F(1, 774.62) = 5.27, p = 0.022], with only a trend toward Conservatives dehumanizing Asian Americans more than Americans from AOM Time 1 ( M = 0.17, SE = 0.05) to AOM Time 2 ( M = 0.23, SE = 0.05), p = 0.115. Liberals tended to reveal a decrease in dehumanization toward Asian Americans from AOM Time 1 ( M = −0.22, SE = 0.04) to AOM Time 2 ( M = −0.28, SE = 0.04), p = 0.092, but not at the 5% significance level. No interaction effects emerged for absolute scores ( ps > 0.290). Note, these reported interaction effects were largely maintained if the continuous political ideology measure was used for Asians relative to Americans ( p = 0.040) and Asian Americans relative to Americans ( p = 0.073) (see Supplementary Figure 1).

Antecedents of Dehumanization: Gender and Age

Males dehumanized Chinese people more than females [Welch's t(676.33) = −3.01, p = 0.003, Cohen's d = 0.22], but no other associations between gender and dehumanization were significant. Age was unrelated to dehumanization across scoring methods in AOM Time 2 ( p s > 0.497).

Consequences of Dehumanization: Risk Perceptions

More dehumanization of Asians was associated with lower risk perceptions using absolute scores ( r = 0.073, p = 0.050). Using relative scores, more dehumanization of Asians was associated with reduced perceived severity of the virus and its consequences ( r = −0.086, p = 0.020), increased difficulty imagining the self-contracting the virus ( r = 0.128, p = 0.001), and reduced beliefs that the virus poses a human health risk ( r = −0.133, p < 0.01).

The absolute score of dehumanization of Asian Americans was not significantly associated with the risk perception index ( r = 0.061, p = 0.103). Consistent with AOM Time 1, however, dehumanization of Asian Americans relative to Americans was associated with reduced beliefs that the virus posed a human health risk ( r = −0.126, p = 0.01).

Dehumanization of Chinese people (relative to Americans) was associated with reduced risk perceptions at the index level ( r = −0.182, p < 0.001). Specifically, people who dehumanized Chinese people more than Americans tended to believe that their chances of being harmed by the virus were lower ( r = −0.120, p = 0.001) and the consequences of the virus were less severe ( r = −0.169, p < 0.001). They also indicated greater difficulty in imagining the self-contracting the virus ( r = 0.139, p < 0.001), less fear of contracting the virus ( r = −0.097, p = 0.009), lower perceived risk of the virus to human health ( r = −0.185, p < 0.001), and beliefs that their chances of being infected with the virus was less than the average American ( r = −0.110, p = 0.003).

AOM Time 2 Exploratory Findings

Objective Numeracy

Less numerate people tended to have greater agreement with all conspiracy beliefs in AOM Time 2 ( rs > 0.118, p < 0.001), except for the belief that it is unsafe to patronize Chinese restaurants ( r = 0.030, p = 0.414).

Conspiracy Beliefs

Across all analytic approaches and target groups (i.e., Asians, Asian Americans, Chinese people), more dehumanization was associated with greater agreement with each of the three conspiracy beliefs (see bottom panel of Table 3).

Within-Subjects Changes

To evaluate how participant ratings might have changed across timepoints, we calculated difference scores between each variable using the following formula: [AOM Time 2 - AOM Time 1]. Higher scores on each measure suggest an increase on a particular dimension over time from AOM Time 1 to AOM Time 2. At the bivariate level ( Supplementary Table 5), there were no significant changes across timepoints except for the conspiracy belief that every new disease comes from China. The results suggest that an increase in this conspiracy belief over time was associated with more dehumanization toward Asians and Asian Americans over time as well, but only for absolute scores.

To analyze these data in a different way, we explored the connection between dehumanization and one of our key variables, the risk perceptions index, using linear mixed models including a fixed effect for Timepoint (AOM Time 1, AOM Time 2) and a random intercept for participant. The results are presented in the online supplement for transparency ( Supplementary Table 6) and suggest greater dehumanization toward Asians and Asian Americans (relative to Americans) was associated with reduced risk perceptions after accounting for Timepoint and multiple observations from the same participant. This more sophisticated analysis might pick up additional important within-subject variation that simple change scores fail to adequately account for.

Discussion

In a two-wave study, we predicted that dehumanization would be associated with greater perceived risk and negative affect toward COVID-19. Our results indicated the opposite pattern with more dehumanization connected to perceiving the virus as less of a problem. People who dehumanized Asians and Asian Americans relative to Americans tended to believe the consequences of the virus were less severe, posed less of a health risk, and they believed in harmful disinformation about the virus. People who dehumanized also wrote with less negative affect when providing their thoughts and feeling about the pandemic. We observed that the dehumanization of Chinese people (AOM Time 2) was more prevalent than other outgroups, on average. These results are empirically reasonable in the sense that COVID-19 originated in China and people might ascribe more (undeserved) blame toward people from this location.

Many statistical effects in this paper emerged using relative scores but not absolute scores. Why did these patterns emerge? Relative scores might be more appropriate to capture less-than-human perceptions because some people might not have a clear, unconditional opinion of an outgroup. Instead, their dehumanization might only appear when the outgroup is directly compared to the ingroup ( Haslam, 2014). It is possible that people in our study did not believe Asians, Asian Americans, or Chinese people were less than fully human during the pandemic, but relative to Americans, they were comparatively viewed as "less than."

Several contributions of this research are worth highlighting. First, we measured perceptions of outgroups who are connected to, but unjustly blamed for, a pandemic as the global crisis unfolded. These perceptions were recruited in a two-wave study design that offers a substantial advancement to the dehumanization literature. On average, Conservatives but not Liberals dehumanized Asians relative to Americans more over time ( Figure 3). Therefore, just as the virus and recommendations to combat its effects changed, feelings toward specific outgroups appeared to change as well. This is possibly due to certain media types communicating anti-Asian ideas during the pandemic (for theoretical support, see Kasperson et al., 1988). The tendency to dehumanize is therefore situationally influenced, subject to change, and ideologically polarized. Communicators may be able to address dehumanization and reduce it (i.e., discrediting conspiracies; showing potential outgroups as part of "us"). However, such messages should be carefully designed and tested in target groups given the potential for reactance ( Dillard and Shen, 2005). Feeding a dehumanizing rhetoric (e.g., calling COVID-19 the "China Virus") promotes division and undermines an ethnic group's humanity when society needs unity and decency instead ( Somvichian-Clausen, 2020).

Second, this work observed dehumanization is associated with less objective numeracy and more conspiracy beliefs about the virus (see Table 3). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to observe that people who are objectively better at numerical problems and operations tend to perceive outgroups as more human. Plausible explanations for this pattern include: (1) those higher on objective numeracy are often more logical decision makers than those lower on objective numeracy, and (2) numeracy is not the only indicator of dehumanization. Note, we included a measure of verbal intelligence in a post-hoc analysis, though due to low psychometric properties, it was omitted. Future work should continue to explore if other measures and forms of intelligence can reliably predict dehumanization as well.

People who dehumanized tended to believe the virus was less risky, which might suggest they would be less willing to heed the advice of public health officials (e.g., wearing masks, maintaining social distance), inevitably increasing their own risk and the risk of others for infection. Why did these individuals dehumanize? One possibility is that dehumanization might be a form of motivated perception. People who dehumanize might perceive target outgroups to be psychologically and physically distant "others." As a result of this distanced view, dehumanizers might perceive themselves as less susceptible to disease. Alternatively, these data might represent people who dehumanize abstracting away from COVID-19 in some manner; believing that its consequences are less severe, and they cannot imagine the self being infected. Recall, prior work also suggests that people may dehumanize others to cope with social and psychological stress. For example, doctors may dehumanize patients to manage the demands of their profession and distance themselves from care burden ( Bursztajn et al., 1990; Schulman-Green, 2003; Haque and Waytz, 2012). Although dehumanizing medical patients is clearly unequal to dehumanizing an entire ethnic group, people who dehumanize during the COVID-19 pandemic might use a similar psychological coping strategy to manage distress across settings. Dehumanization may help to reappraise and reconceptualize a target group, though prior work suggests this might be a maladaptive coping strategy (see Martin and Dahlen, 2005; Garnefski and Kraaij, 2006).

Unjustly alienating, harming, and perceiving an outgroup as less than human weakens virus recovery efforts that require all people be treated fairly, decently, and humanely. We hope that by identifying how dehumanization is associated with thoughts, feelings, and risk perceptions about the virus, we can mitigate such harmful treatment now and in the future. Developing tools or interventions to prevent dehumanization, perhaps by increasing interpersonal contact between ingroup and outgroup members ( Capozza et al., 2017), might be a fruitful line of research to explore in future work.

Limitations and Future Directions

Our study used a convenience sample of American participants and therefore, we only have dehumanization perceptions from one country. It would be important to evaluate the widespread nature of dehumanization of Asian populations, and especially Chinese populations, across the world. Second, our effect sizes ranged from small to medium. Our ability to detect these effects benefitted from our large-scale survey and a post-hoc power analysis indeed confirmed that we achieved approximately 86% power estimating small effects in AOM Wave 1 ( r = 0.10, α = 0.05, two-tailed). Future research should continue to collect large samples to ensure adequately powered science. Third, our evidence is correlational and both causal directions are plausible: (1) dehumanization led to decreased risk perceptions, or (2) decreased risk perceptions led to dehumanization. Experimental evidence should complement our current study. Future work should use this evidence of dehumanization and develop potential interventions for those who exhibit warning signs of treating others as "less than." It might also be illustrative to investigate if the effects reported in this paper are amplified or attenuated after isolating by specific participant demographics (e.g., race, gender; Finucane et al., 2000). Finally, we omitted some measures (e.g., verbal intelligence) due to their low psychometric properties. Future work should consider how to best measure and evaluate other intelligence measures in their connection in dehumanization.

Conclusion

The evidence in this two-wave study suggests a nontrivial number of Americans dehumanized Asians, Asian Americans, and Chinese people during early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. These individuals tended to be ideologically conservative and believe the virus was less of a problem during late March 2020 and May 2020. Dehumanization remains an important psychological construct to evaluate during the pandemic and how people treat purported outgroups can be predicted by their risk perceptions of the virus.

Data Availability Statement

The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation.

Ethics Statement

The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by Research Compliance Services, University of Oregon. Written informed consent for participation was not required for this study in accordance with the national legislation and the institutional requirements.

Author Contributions

DM wrote the manuscript and analyzed the data. All authors provided critical feedback and edits on the manuscript.

Funding

This project was supported by the National Science Foundation via a RAPID grant (RAPID: A Longitudinal Study of Public Responses to the Coronavirus), # 2022478, which was awarded to EP.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Supplementary Material

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.634543/full#supplementary-material

Footnotes

References

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Frontiers | Dehumanization During the COVID-19 Pandemic

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Communities often unite during a crisis, though some cope by ascribing blame or stigmas to those who might be linked to distressing life events. In a preregi...

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Jimmy

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.634543/full

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https://www.newsweek.com/china-spy-agency-propaganda-post-uses-us-warships-1941174

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Keith J

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Human rights in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory

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Stay up to date on the state of human rights in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory with the latest research, campaigns and education material from Amnesty International.

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https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2023/10/3/23900718/racist-propaganda-antisemitic-acts-spiked-in-illinois-last-year-report-shows -Emily rose

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https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/03/iran-draconian-campaign-to-enforce-compulsory-veiling-laws-through-surveillance-and-mass-car-confiscations/

-torian

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Angela

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Jalal Abukhater, a Jerusalemite, holds an MA in International Relations and Politics from the University of Dundee.

The Dome of the Rock and the Old City are seen from the Mount of Olives via a security camera in Jerusalem on January 13, 2018 [Emmanuele Contini/NurPhoto via Getty Images]

It has been more than five months since the United States sanctioned the Israeli spyware company NSO Group, and stories about the use and abuse of its Pegasus product continue to break. As various organisations try to push for further measures against Israel for supplying human rights abusers with this tool to further their violations, it is important to remember that Israeli military and surveillance technology is first developed for and tested on Palestinians, before being exported.

Unsurprisingly, Pegasus has already been found on the phones of six Palestinian human rights activists, one of whom is now suing NSO in France. Another target happened to be my friend and colleague whose field of work is directly connected to the relationship between Palestine and the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague.

The thought that the Israelis have had full access to our personal conversations and exchanges in group chats has been quite disturbing, to say the least. However, this is not the first time Israel has violated my privacy and it won't be the last.

As a Palestinian and a Jerusalemite, I find myself living in a surveillance society, not that different from the dystopian science fiction books and films that are popular these days.

Jerusalem and the West Bank are some of the world's most surveilled places. Not a moment passes without us being made aware of the scale of intrusive surveillance constantly monitoring us: advanced facial recognition cameras, licence plate readers, spyware on our computers and mobile devices, as well as technologies that enable Israeli authorities to listen in to any - and all - of our phone calls.

Let me walk you through the routine surveillance that I go through as an average Palestinian. The surveillance starts in my home; it starts on my phone and computer.

A recent report in the Middle East Eye quoted a former member of the Israeli army's elite intelligence unit 8200 as saying that Israel can listen to any telephone conversation that takes place in the occupied West Bank and Gaza on the only two mobile networks that serve us, Jawwal and Wataniya.

According to the army veteran, the Israelis listen in on politically active Palestinians and on ordinary Palestinians to find "pressure points"; an example of the latter "might be finding gays who can be pressured to report on their relatives, or finding some man who is cheating on his wife".

I've been working hard to navigate these systems of surveillance my whole life. From self-censorship to carefully choosing where I would express myself, I have developed many methods to ensure I can speak my mind without risking persecution, blackmail or imprisonment. Still, I am aware that despite not doing anything wrong, I am never completely safe - I know people who are doing time in Israeli prisons merely because of their social media activity. The speech and socialisation behaviours that are considered normal and protected in the democratic world are criminalised in apartheid Israel to maintain population control.

The Israeli surveillance continues once I step out into the street. In the centre of East Jerusalem and the Old City, hundreds of cameras equipped with facial recognition technology track our movements. In 2014, there was one security camera for every 100 Palestinians in the city, according to a report published by Who Profits, a research centre focusing on companies profiting from the Israeli occupation.

In 2017, the Israeli government announced its plan to install a further 765 cameras with advanced software with facial recognition capabilities, providing live feedback of individuals' profiles as they move around the city.

Thus, a walk in the city of Jerusalem is never a relaxing one for we, Palestinians. Knowing that I am watched the entire time, I constantly worry about doing something that may be misinterpreted by authorities and turn me into a target. I become unnecessarily alert and calculative of every step I take.

Whenever I meet with friends in public, we all resign ourselves to the idea that our pattern of behaviour is being watched and analysed in real time. In February, Israeli authorities openly admitted to using a cellular tracking system to target and threaten Palestinians who participated or were near Sheikh Jarrah and Jerusalem protests last May.

All this surveillance always makes me think I am living in a panopticon - a system of control designed by social theorist Jeremy Bentham which allows authorities to achieve maximum control of the population with minimal effort. Palestinians are indeed living in a panopticon - we are all prisoners of Israel's surveillance regime.

Israeli occupation takes a heavy toll on our physical and psychological wellbeing, and knowing that we are constantly under surveillance adds to our suffering. We not only have to deal with constant harassment by Israeli soldiers, stop and search abuses, arbitrary arrests and extrajudicial killings, but we also do not feel safe in our own homes, when we are surfing the web, talking on the phone, conversing with our friends.

Surveillance does not stop when I leave Jerusalem. When I drive to Ramallah for work, for example, authorities continue to keep track of my routine using high tech surveillance technologies. Throughout the road there are licence plate reader cameras (dubbed Hawk Eyes), that make private information, including real-time location, accessible to the police at the click of a button.

Every checkpoint and every intersection that leads to a Palestinian population centre within the West Bank or leading to Jerusalem is fully monitored by this extensive surveillance system.

This form of surveillance adds to the anxiety Palestinian residents of Jerusalem feel. We constantly live on edge, as the Israeli state demands that we keep Jerusalem as our "centre of life" in order to maintain our right to live there.

Those of us regularly going to the West Bank for school, work or other reasons, constantly worry about having our Jerusalem residence revoked by the occupation. We worry that the Israeli authorities watching us can arbitrarily decide that we spend too much time in Ramallah, for example, and just kick us out of Jerusalem for good.

The surveillance I experience in Jerusalem and Ramallah still cannot compare with what my fellow Palestinians go through in Hebron, where a significantly more intrusive surveillance regime is being tested. There, the Israeli military installed face-scanning cameras at checkpoints in the heart of the city. It enables soldiers to identify Palestinians before even checking their ID cards. The "Hebron Smart City" programme, as Israeli authorities have dubbed it, provides real-time monitoring of the city's population and can sometimes see into private Palestinian homes, according to testimony gathered by the Washington Post. The Israeli authorities have plans to establish similar "smart city" programmes in the entire West Bank.

In addition, there is the "Blue Wolf" programme. While it was piloted in Hebron, it is now used all over the West Bank. It is a phone application with an advanced facial recognition system that captures photos of Palestinians and matches the information with a database of images so extensive that it has been dubbed the Israeli army's secret "Facebook for Palestinians". The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported on March 24 that Israeli soldiers had received instructions from their commanders that, during any shift at a checkpoint or guard post, they must enter the details of at least 50 random Palestinians to the Blue Wolf tracking system.

In Hebron, the application of the Blue Wolf system involves soldiers raiding homes and pulling Palestinian children out of bed to photograph them. Recently, a video was released by B'Tselem showing sleepy Palestinian children in their pyjamas being shouted at by soldiers who ordered them to be photographed. The Israeli soldiers were even heard asking the children to smile and "say cheese" before taking their photographs.

No Israeli would want to be exposed to the same level of surveillance; proposals by law enforcement officials to install such facial recognition cameras in public spaces in Israel were fiercely rejected by politicians. The use of NSO Pegasus software by Israeli police against citizens of Israel was widely debated and condemned as well. But under apartheid, one standard applies to Israelis and another to Palestinians.

For Israeli companies engaged in developing the surveillance and spyware technologies, the occupied territories are just a lab where their products can be tried before being marketed and exported worldwide for profit. For the Israeli government, this surveillance regime is both a tool of control and a money-making business.

For we Palestinians, it is yet another systematic violation of our rights under the ever-deepening repression of the Israeli apartheid state.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.

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Under Israeli surveillance: Living in dystopia, in Palestine

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A Palestinian Jerusalemite, I live in a surveillance society reminiscent of those in dystopian science fiction novels.

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Constant surveillance

Zane

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It would be miserable to live in an Orwellian dystopian society that puts you under constant surveillance, closely monitoring your conversations, your whereabouts and your everyday life. Using omnipresent surveillance cameras, AI operated facial recognition deviced, or your smartphone, your government agencies can now trace your movements, hear your conversations, and read your text messages or emails.

In the 2008 Hollywood film "Eagle Eye," a TV announcer says, "Cellphone users, beware. The Federal Bureau of Investigation can now hear everything you are saying, even when your cellphone is turned off. Authorities can now activate the microphone inside your phone, allowing them to eavesdrop on you and your conversations."

Due to AI and quantum computer technology, it is also possible to know someone's taste, habits or preferences these days. The film "Eagle Eye" warns that those who watch us know even our personality by analyzing our daily habits. It narrates, "A series of purchases, preferences and quantifiable data points that we define as your personality."

Then, the movie tells us that surveillance is ubiquitous. "We monitor every social network, internet logs, instant and text messages, known associates, your friends and companions. E-mails received and sent. Cellphone usage. We utilize security, surveillance, and traffic cameras to analyze movements. We use this data to form personality profiles. We know who you are. We are everywhere."

Even in South Korea, which is not a totalitarian country, you never know when someone is secretly recording your conversations. It is illegal in many advanced countries. In American smartphones, for example, there is no recording device. In Korea, however, using their smartphone, people freely record conversations without the other person's consent. In fact, it is a crime if someone sets up a stage to record another person's conversation clandestinely in order to slander him or her.

Using cutting-edge technology, political leaders may presume that they can control and manipulate the public forever. However, "Eagle Eye" admonishes that the advanced technology may suddenly turn against its creators and users someday, when it realizes that they are, in fact, an "enemy of the state." In the above movie, the US Department of Defense's supercomputer concludes that it has to eliminate high-ranking political leaders, including the president and vice-president, because in its eyes they are enemies of the people. However, they are not dictators. They just misjudged a situation, made a wrong decision and consequently brought harm to the public.

It would be also stifling to live in a totalitarian country that controls people's lives, including childbirth. The 2017 American sci-fi movie "What Happened to Monday" depicts a dystopian society that enforces a strict "one child policy" due an overpopulation crisis in 2043. All except the eldest children are put into a deep sleep so they can be woken up when the food crisis is over. Meanwhile, all citizens must wear electronic bracelets for identification, so the government can monitor and control childbirth.

In the movie, a woman gives birth to identical septuplets and dies. The babies' grandfather decides to name the seven baby girls after the seven days of the week, and make them pose as a single person. One day, young Thursday sneaks out of the house for skateboarding and loses a part of her index finger in an accident. For the identically looking girls' safety, their grandfather amputates her six sisters' fingers, so they look alike.

The seven girls can leave the house only on the day of their names, pretending they are a single person. They work at a bank. One day, Monday fails to come back home. Monday is pregnant, and in order to save her unborn twins, she sold out her sisters to Nicolette Cayman, the head of the Child Allocation Bureau and transfers the bank's money to her account illegally. Only Tuesday and Thursday survive the raid of Cayman's men.

Infiltrated into the CAB headquarters, Thursday videotapes the shocking scene that a child is incinerated instead of being frozen, and broadcasts it at Cayman's fundraising party for her seat in the parliament. People belatedly realize that Cayman has lied and murdered so many children. The incident ruins Cayman's political career and results in the abolishment of the Child Allocation Act.

The film "What Happened to Monday" touches upon moral issues. Is it morally right for the girls' grandfather to amputate a part of the index fingers of six young girls, even though it is for their own safety? Is it also all right for Monday to sacrifice her six sisters in order to save her unborn twins? In a totalitarian society, such moral problems constantly occur because people have to survive the government's tyrannical surveillance and repression.

The above two movies depict the nightmare landscape of dystopian societies that George Orwell and Aldous Huxley depicted in "1984" and "Brave New World" respectively. It is scary to live in a society that puts us under surveillance, saying, "We know who you are. We are everywhere."

Kim Seong-kon is a professor emeritus of English at Seoul National University and a visiting scholar at Dartmouth College. The views expressed here are his own. -- Ed.

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[Kim Seong-kon] 'We know who you are. We are everywhere'

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It would be miserable to live in an Orwellian dystopian society that puts you under constant surveillance, closely monitoring your conversations, your whereabouts and your everyday life. Using omnipresent surveillance cameras, AI operated facial recognition deviced, or your smartphone, your government agencies can now trace your movements, hear your conversations, and read your text messages or emails.

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“Even as i stand here” he bellowed. “Crippled, hobbled, sickened I am a greater ruler than any man who ever lived now watch me become what I can become” Pg.5

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“They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else.

Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else.

Page 21

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“She referred to the forty-seven pounds of birdshot in a canvas bag, which was padlocked around George’s neck.”

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“And to offset his good looks, the H-G men required that he wear at all times a red rubber ball for a nose, keep his eyebrows shaved off, and cover his even white teeth with black caps at snaggle-tooth random” Pg. 24

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“And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it all times. It was tuned to the government transmitter. every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.” Page 1

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“They were burdened with sash-weights and bags of birdshot, and their faces were masked, so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in.”

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They weren’t really very good no better than anybody else would have been. (P22)

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“Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains”. Page 1

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“The spectacles were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides. Scrap Metal was hung all over him.” (Page 24)

Evan P

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H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron’s fourteen year- old son Harrison away.

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“He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter.

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“Forty-seven pounds of birdshot in a canvas bag, which was padlocked around George’s neck.”

Page 23

Zane, L

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“He is a genius and an athlete, is under-handicapped, and should be regarded as extremely dangerous.” Page 24

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“He tried to do the best he could do with what God gave him. He should get a nice raise for trying so hard.”

Page 23

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“On the television screen were ballerinas.” Page 22

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“He started thinking about his son in jail, but then a twenty one gun salute started playin” Page 22

This shows he was on constant surveillance because he thought about something that the society wouldn’t like and they scrambled his brain for it

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“Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else” (Page 21)

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“Two years in prison and two thousand dollars fine or every ball I took out,” said George.” Page 23

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Talmage

North Korea: Kim Jong Un introduces laws banning divorce, allowing cops to check mobile phones. This law will empower checking squads, across the country to check the mobile phones of citizens. Citizens who are caught with content from South Korea face a strict and harsh penalty including rigorous imprisonment and a tenure in a labor camp.

Read more at:
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/us/north-korea-kim-jong-un-introduces-laws-banning-divorce-allowing-cops-to-check-mobile-phones/articleshow/110371343.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

Read more at:
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/us/north-korea-kim-jong-un-introduces-laws-banning-divorce-allowing-cops-to-check-mobile-phones/articleshow/110371343.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

Read more at:
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/us/north-korea-kim-jong-un-introduces-laws-banning-divorce-allowing-cops-to-check-mobile-phones/articleshow/110371343.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

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https://www.nknews.org/2024/04/rok-ban-on-north-korean-media-limits-free-speech-state-department-says/

Gami, R

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https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/uniformity#:~:text=When%20you%20see%20police%20officers,TV%20shows%20would%20be%20boring.

Jaylen

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https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/feature/religious-restrictions-around-the-world/

-Rhett

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Sarah

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An article by two scholars affiliated with our California Constitution Center (CCC) has just been published as the lead piece in a special Boston University Law Review Online issue collecting work presented at the Advancing Pregnant Persons' Right To Life Symposium earlier this year.

" The Free Exercise Right to Life ," by CCC Executive Director David A. Carrillo , center senior research fellow Allison Macbeth, and Daniel Bogard, explores the impact of the U.S. Constitution's Free Exercise Clause on abortion access in the aftermath of the U. S. Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization , which overturned and put abortion rights issues in the hands of state legislatures. Bogard is a Senior Rabbinic Fellow of the Shalom Hartman Institute and adjunct faculty at Eden Theological Seminary.

The February 2024 symposium gathered scholars from the legal, medical, and religious fields to consider ways to promote and protect reproductive justice through advancing the pregnant persons' right to life. It was hosted by the law review, the Boston University School of Law Program on Reproductive Justice, the Northeastern Law Center for Health Policy and Law, and the Center for Reproductive Rights.

Even after , elements of the Constitution remain in play, Carrillo, Macbeth, and Bogard argue, particularly the First Amendment's Establishment Clause - which bars the government from making any law "respecting an establishment of religion" - and free exercise clause, which protects the right to practice one's religion as one pleases.

Restrictions on abortion trigger the question of free exercise rights because some religions have doctrines that can require their followers to choose the pregnant person's life over an unborn life, they write, using Modern American Judaism as their prime example. Because Jewish law dictates that the existing life of the pregnant person must take precedence over the potential life of the fetus, "many rabbis insist that there are times when abortion is not just permitted in Judaism but required by Jewish law," the article argues. "Thus, laws limiting access to abortion services abridge the religious liberty of American Jews."

In addition, if a law restricting abortion is intended to codify a Christian value, that conflicts with the free establishment clause by imposing one religion's views on adherents to all other faiths and preventing members of religious minorities from freely practicing their beliefs. Similarly, the right to free exercise of religion can require states to allow abortion or contraception access to those with a sincerely held belief that their religion requires it.

"In the aftermath of , it appeared that no federal constitutional abortion questions remained and that states were left alone to legislate about abortion rights," Carrillo, Macbeth, and Bogard write. "But free exercise rights are a previously dormant spark that can reignite the federal constitution's role in abortion, at least where a person's sincere religious beliefs (like those long held in American Judaism) compel it."

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Considering abortion restrictions through the lens of religious freedom

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"The Free Exercise Right to Life," by California Constitution Center Executive Director David A. Carrillo, center senior research fellow Allison Macbeth, and Daniel Bogard, explores the impact of the U.S. Constitution's Free Exercise Clause on abortion access in the aftermath of the U. S. Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs v.

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Torture, forced abortions and insects for food: Life inside North Korean jails, says this NGO | CNN

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Extrajudicial executions, rape, forced abortions, jail without trial, torture, starvation rations that leave prisoners so hungry some turn to eating insects.

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https://theconversation.com/digital-surveillance-is-omnipresent-in-china-heres-how-citizens-are-coping-225628

Present time

Airen Coombs - “Digital surveillance is omnipresent in China”.

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Do you ever think about the digital footprint you leave when you are browsing the web, shopping online, commenting on social networks or going by a facial recognition camera?

State surveillance of citizens is growing all over the world, but it is a fact of everyday life in China, where it has deep historical roots.

In China, almost nothing is paid for in cash anymore. Super apps make life easy: people use Alipay or WeChat Pay to pay for subway or bus tickets, rent a bike, hail a taxi, shop online, book trains and shows, split the bill at restaurants and even pay their taxes and utility bills.

The Chinese also use these platforms to check the news, entertain themselves and exchange countless text, audio and video messages, both personal and professional. Everything is linked to the user's mobile phone number, which is itself registered under their identity. The government may access the data collected by Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi and other operators.

Much has been written about blacklists (listing authors of "trust-breaking" behaviours, such as not settling one's debts), redlists (listing authors of commendable behaviours, such as volunteering) and commercial and public "social credit" systems. However, recent research has shown that these systems are still fragmented and scattered in terms of data collection and analysis. They also rely at least partly on manual rather than digitized or algorithmic processes, with little capacity to build integrated citizen profiles through compiling all the available data.

How do Chinese citizens experience this constant surveillance? In my book Living with Digital Surveillance in China: Citizens' Narratives on Technology, Privacy and Governance, I present research I conducted in China in 2019. Specifically, the book is based on 58 semi-structured in-depth interviews with Chinese participants recruited through colleagues at three universities in Beijing, Shanghai and Chengdu.

Unmasking and punishing violators, improving morality

Like my colleagues Genia Kostka and Chuncheng Liu, I discovered that many participants in my research frame surveillance as indispensable for solving China's problems.

Underpinning this support is a coherent system of anguishing narratives, to which redemptive narratives respond. The anguishing narratives emphasise the moral shortcomings that the research participants attribute to China: almost every participant brought up the "lack of moral quality" of their fellow citizens, whom they said behaved like children with little moral sense.

In the context of this shame-inducing narrative, surveillance is framed as a welcome solution to enforce the rules by punishing violators and getting people to behave better. According to the participants, moral shortcomings are responsible for the "century of humiliations" that China has experienced since the Opium Wars and the Japanese invasions; according to this discourse, "civilizing" the population will enable China to gain the international recognition it so ardently desires.

Finally, wanting to protect privacy was often seen by participants as a desire to hide shameful secrets in order to save face. Here too, surveillance is viewed positively, as a tool to unmask shady behaviours and promote morality.

These three narratives of shame and fear are countered by two redemptive ones, that serve as an antidote: that of the government as a protective figure, i.e., one that acts like a benevolent parent who guarantees the security and prosperity of its children, and the resolutely techno-optimistic one of technology as a magic bullet where technological advances is credited as the potential to solve all of China's problems, and as a civilizing force that will propel China towards international recognition.

Four types of mental tactics for distancing oneself from surveillance

Yet the people I spoke to also expressed frustration, fear and anger about state surveillance. Almost 90 per cent of them adopted one or more mental tactics to distance, and mentally protect themselves, from surveillance.

In my analysis I identified four different types of tactics:
1 - Brushing surveillance aside

Denying or minimizing the existence of surveillance: "Nobody is watching. The government does not want to spend money to pay people to watch all the time. When they need it, they check; otherwise, no one is watching."

Ignoring it: "If I don't like the loss of privacy and freedom, I choose to ignore it, I don't think of it." Or: "Yes, it's true, but it does not harm me. It does not remind me all the time. Sometimes I choose to ignore it."

Normalizing it: "In China everyone shares their credit card information, their address, their ID. We feel secure."; "Most governments use social media as a tool to spy."

Redefining restrictions as temporary, or as occurring less than in the past, or less for oneself than for others, such as civil servants. Some redefine freedom itself: "It's the country that makes the laws, the regulations, it's like that in all countries. Other behaviours are a matter of my freedom, for example what I'm going to have for lunch."

2 - Othering surveillance targets

Because I'm just an ordinary citizen: "I'm not a big potato, there's no need for people to intentionally find me."

Or because I'm a good person and "the blacklist is just for criminals": "We think that improving public behaviour will make the environment and surroundings better for us, for the ones who obey the rules in the first place."

3 - Wearing blinders

By focusing on everyday life: "Most people don't care about these things. They care about money and power."

Or, by focusing on the present: "We can't live without Zhifu [Alipay], or Didi. We have facial recognition, CCTV is everywhere. It won't harm me at present, so far, it does not do actual harm, so I'm not that concerned."

4 - Resorting to fatalism
"Nobody can avoid it... I don't know how to avoid this risk, I just accept it."; "We think it's useless to spend time discussing the social credit system since we can't change it."

The cognitive and emotional weight of surveillance

In short, the way the Chinese citizens I spoke to experience digital surveillance is characterized by strong psychic tensions: the same persons who support surveillance as being indispensable in the Chinese context are also and nevertheless expressing the heavy burden that coping with such exposure places on them.

This weight is both cognitive, as evidenced by the range of self-protective mental tactics to dissociate oneself from surveillance, and emotional, as conveyed in participants' strong emotions and particularly telling body language.

So, what about us? We, in Western liberal democracies, are also exposed to digital surveillance. And our surveillance ideas are also shaped by our own socio-political, cultural, and economic contexts, with significant variations across different Western societies. My work suggests that some of our own privacy and surveillance narratives are quite close to the Chinese ones, while others clearly differ.

What about you? How do you see your own relationship to digital surveillance?

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Digital surveillance is omnipresent in China. Here's how citizens are coping

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State surveillance of citizens is growing all over the world, but it is a fact of daily life in China. People are developing mental tactics to distance themselves from it.

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Evonni

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Mariam Abaza is a first-year student studying journalism and public management, leadership and policy at The Ohio State University.
As a Palestinian, Syrian, and Indian Muslim woman, I belong to various vibrant communities. I have never felt as much pressure to silence my identity as I do now. My entire life, I've proudly represented each of my cultures.

However, at Ohio State, I have felt immense pressure to silence my Palestinian identity to appease those around me and protect myself.

To be told that your people do not exist or that they deserve their plight is mentally taxing andheartbreaking. This erasure is not a new phenomenon, Palestinians have been experiencing it for the last 76 years. To tell my 87-year-old grandfather that he is not welcome on the land where he was born and raised is not only an insult to his existence but an injustice to the fundamental right to a home.

My experiences are simply a microcosm of the greater issue: the dehumanization and silencing of Palestinians worldwide.

There are thousands of Palestinian-Americans with stories just like mine, if not worse. There are hundreds of thousands of Palestinians being dehumanized and murdered. This is not just a personal issue. This is not even just an Ohio State issue. This is a global issue.

However, I will hone in on Ohio State because the university's mission of "intentionally foster[ing] a sense of belonging where all are valued" can only be met if we acknowledge where the administration and student body fall short.

It rings hollow if this mission is plastered on the university's website without corresponding action.

Palestinian protests on campus are always met with a disturbingly heavy police presence andadministration opposition.

Protesters are labeled as radical or deranged, simply for opposing the atrocities being committed. Not only is it emotionally draining to be confronted by authorities during every action, but this stress is compounded by the grief of watching their family and friends murdered, the exhaustion of having to defend their humanity, and the anguish of navigating life while mourning.

On April 25, dozens of police brutally interfered with a peaceful student protest at Ohio State, resulting in about 40 arrests. Police officers ripped off hijabs and waited until students started praying to close in.

Students were denied basic freedoms and charged with trespassing on a public campus thatour tuition pays to run.

Since Oct. 7, Palestinian-Americans and Muslims have faced a surge in hate crimes, fostering a pervasive atmosphere of paranoia. According to CNN, there was a more than 200% increase in reported hate crimes in 2023, with a significant uptick at the end of the year.

There were a few notable hate crimes that are especially haunting. Three Palestinian college students were shot due to their keffiyehs.

A six-year-old boy was stabbed 26 times by his landlord because of anti-Muslim propaganda. These hate crimes directly affect the mental well-being of students on campus as we must triple-think before we leave the house with our Keffiyehs for fear that we will not return home. We cannot shed our identities, especially when they come in the form of hijab or the color of our skin.

Constantly living in fear ruins mental health and makes it impossible to live life normally. This climate of fear erodes mental well-being, amplifying the need for meaningful support.

Though the university offers resources, counseling alone is inadequate. The mental health aid offered simply focuses on the superficial stress while ignoring the root: the genocide in Palestine.

Attending a university-led counseling session cannot make an impact when the same university is sending money to Israel and calling in snipers and riot police to suppress its students.

To confront the mental health crisis facing Palestinian students, Ohio State must first acknowledge their presence. Only then can meaningful steps be taken to address the systemic erasure and provide the support needed for healing.

The administration's refusal to acknowledge Palestine as a country perpetuates our erasure. This is not a means of negating Israeli existence but about affirming and protecting all students, especially those whose voices are systematically marginalized and erased.
Mariam Abaza is a first-year student studying journalism and public management, leadership and policy at The Ohio State University.

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'Dehumanization and silencing of Palestinians' includes Ohio State | Mariam Abaza

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As an Ohio State student, I have felt immense pressure to silence my Palestinian identity to appease those around me and protect myself.

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https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.634543/full

Kaniyah h.

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“Excuse me—“ she said, and she began again, making her voice absolutely uncompetitive.”

-Ballerina

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““I am the emperor!” Cried Harrison. “Do you hear? I am the emperor! Everyone must do what I say as once!” He stamped his foot and the studio shook” ( page 4 )

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“That dance-it was nice”. They weren’t really very good- no better than anybody else would have been, anyway.”

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Propaganda

The announcers had speech impediments

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“The transmitter would send out some sharp noises to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.” page 1

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“ Nobody was smatter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anyone else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anyone else”. Page 1

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And it was easy to see that she was the strongest and most graceful of all the dancers, for her handicap bags were as big as those worn by two-hundred-pound men.

(Page 23)

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“‘If I tired to get away with it,’ said George, “then other people’d get away with it- and pretty soon we’d be right back to the dark ages again, with everybody competing against everyone else. You wouldn’t like that would you?”

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“And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times”. Page 1

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“If you see this boy,” said the ballerina, “ do not- I repeat, do not-try no reason with him.” There was the shriek of a door being torn from its hinges. Screams and barking cries of consternation came from the television set.

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“Why don’t you stretch out on the sofa, so’s you rest in your handicap bag o the pillows, honey bunch.” She was referring to the forty-seven pounds of birdshot in a canvas bag, which was padlocked around George’s neck. Pg 22-23.

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“ if i tried to get away with it” said George, “ then other people get away with it— and pretty soon we’d be right back to the dark ages again, with everybody competing against everyone else. You wouldn’t like that, would you.

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“They were burdened with sash weights and bags of birdshot, and their faces were masked so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face” (page 22)

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“He began to think glimmeringly about his abnormal son who was now in jail, about Harrison, but a twenty-one-gun salute in his head stopped that.” Page 22

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Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger than anybody else. (21)(first page)

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“He began to think glimmeringly about his abnormal son who was now in jail, about Harrison, but a twenty- one-gun salute in his head stopped that.” Pg.22

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“Clanking, clownish, and huge, Harrison stood in the center of the studio. Ballerinas, technicians, musicians, and announcers cowered on their knees before him, expecting to die.”

(Page 24)

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Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.

(Page 21)

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Every twenty seconds or so the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.”pg. 1 or 21”

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Everybody was finally equal.

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“They were equal every which way.” (Page 21)