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Digital strategy for my online presence on piktochart

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Digital strategy for my online presence on piktochart

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https://create.piktochart.com/output/53802473-my-visual

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Privacy policy of Facebook.

I am writing my privacy policy on Facebooks privacy settings. In relation to the five rights and the right to remove what you have put up; Facebook keeps your data for as long as it needs for it to provide services to the user.

Once the user deletes their account everything on the account is deleted but information other users of Facebook have posted about you is not deleted. From Facebooks privacy settings it seems that once you delete information from your Facebook it is deleted from the server.

Facebook can preserve information on the server if they believe it is necessary to do so, for example to prevent illegal activity or harm being caused. They may also preserve the information of purchases, financial transaction data, made on Facebook if it is subject to legal request.

In relation to the right of who has access to your data and for what purposes, on Facebook their third party services that are integrated with them have access to information on you. WhatsApp is a third party service of Facebook meaning that WhatsApp has access to your age, user ID, your friends list, language, and country you are based in. Facebook claims it collects all this data like the data of your location, payment information, device information, connection information, the apps you go to through their service and how the user uses their services, like the content the user views or engages with and the duration or frequency the users’ activities and who they interact with on the app all to simply personalise suggestions and content. They also claim the purpose of this is to improve measuring systems and advertising and to promote safety on and off their services and to verify accounts.

The right to safety and support of knowing where to go when things go wrong is clearly explained in the privacy of Facebook. You can block someone on Facebook meaning they can no longer contact you or add you as a friend, they also cannot see your profile or what you post. In the privacy of Facebook, they also show you who you can contact with further problems and if  you have or problems with their privacy policies through TRUSTe. They also give you the address of the data controller of Facebook in Ireland,

Facebook Ireland Ltd.

4 Grand Canal Square

Grand Canal Harbour

Dublin 2 Ireland.

There was no information on the informed conscious use or knowing that the internet wants to keep you on it and how to avoid this in the privacy settings so I didn’t include any of this in the privacy policy, I imagine they do not make it clear if they mentioned this right in the policy as they may not want to make it clear that they want to keep you on the service.

There is very little mention of digital literacy the privacy policy of Facebook does mention the use of your information in different sites and their third party services, but it does not mention much purpose in what you are using or creating. But I included that it could preserve some information if needed.

I included the deleting of what you post on Facebook as it is portrayed that once you delete something from your account it is deleted from the server. This seems better than Instagram’s system of it not being deleted from the system when you delete a post.

I also included the right of who has access to your data, as it seems like a lot of data and information to be shared with other services just to manage and improve shortcuts for you on Facebook?

The information it included for the right for safety and support of knowing where to go when something goes wrong is clear and it is good that they give you the address of the data controller of Facebook in Ireland, so I decided to include this in my privacy policy of Facebook.

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https://www.linkedin.com/in/roisin-o-neill-20251820a/

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All these beaches are along the coast of Ireland.

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Creating a how-to video with Screencasting and Youtube

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Creating a how-to video with Screencasting and Youtube

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Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies Recipe by Tasty [Video] | Recipe [Video] | Vegan chocolate chip, Vegan chocolate chip cookies, Vegan cookies

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Nov 25, 2018 - Here's what you need: sugar, dark brown sugar, salt, refined coconut oil, non-dairy milk, vanilla extract, flour, baking soda, vegan semi-sweet chocolate, vegan dark chocolate

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Rustic Mason Jar SconceMason Jar Decor Home Decor Mason Jar | Etsy | Mason jar wall sconce, Mason jar sconce, Decorated jars

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May 31, 2018 - FLOWERS and lights INCLUDED! This is a set of 2 or 3 gorgeous and perfectly rustic country mason jar wall sconces! They include a saw-tooth hanger for easy hanging and come in you choice of finish. Scroll through the listing to see all of your customization options.

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32 Cheap Places to Travel When You're On a Budget [Video] [Video] | Cheap places to travel, Travel fun, Travel

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Sep 4, 2020 - On a budget and looking for some cheap places to travel around the world? From North America to Africa we have you covered with some awesome affordable destinations.

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🪐 @adorabliss | Room inspiration bedroom, Room decor bedroom, Dream rooms

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Aug 5, 2020 - This Pin was discovered by roisin o. Discover (and save!) your own Pins on Pinterest

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Pin by Maria Leonard on love your body with/without make-up in 2021 | Minimalist nails, Dream nails, Glamour nails

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Jan 15, 2021 - This Pin was discovered by Maria Leonard. Discover (and save!) your own Pins on Pinterest

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Dem Eyes | Evil eye nails, Eye nail art, Nails inspiration

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Jul 2, 2015 - This Pin was discovered by roisin o. Discover (and save!) your own Pins on Pinterest

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3 개만 필요로하는 7 개의 무 퓨즈 여름 의상 포뮬러 | Cute outfits, Fashion inspo outfits, Indie outfits

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Jul 27, 2020 - 이 여름 복장 아이디어는 쉽게 얻을 수 있습니다. 필요한 물건을 여기에서 쇼핑하십시오.

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The company has created a board that can overrule even Mark Zuckerberg. Soon it will decide whether to allow Trump back on Facebook.

On a morning in May, 2019, forty-three lawyers, academics, and media experts gathered in the windowless basement of the NoMad New York hotel for a private meeting. The room was laid out a bit like a technologist's wedding, with a nametag and an iPad at each seat, and large succulents as centerpieces. There were also party favors: Facebook-branded notebooks and pens. The company had convened the group to discuss the Oversight Board, a sort of private Supreme Court that it was creating to help govern speech on its platforms. The participants had all signed nondisclosure agreements. I sneaked in late and settled near the front. "Clap if you can hear me," the moderator, a woman dressed in a black jumpsuit, said.

Since its founding, in 2004, Facebook had modelled itself as a haven of free expression on the Internet. But in the past few years, as conspiracy theories, hate speech, and disinformation have spread on the platform, critics have come to worry that the company poses a danger to democracy. Facebook promised to change that with the Oversight Board: it would assemble a council of sage advisers-the group eventually included humanitarian activists, a former Prime Minister, and a Nobel laureate-who would hear appeals over what kind of speech should be allowed on the site. Its decisions would be binding, overruling even those of Mark Zuckerberg, the company's founder. Zuckerberg said he had come to believe that a C.E.O. shouldn't have complete control over the limits of our political discourse. "Maybe there are some calls that just aren't good for the company to make by itself," he told me.

In 2019, Facebook agreed to let me report on the process, and I spent eighteen months following its development. Last month, the board ruled on its first slate of cases, which dealt with, among other topics, the glorification of Nazis and misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic. In the next few months, it will decide an even larger question: whether Donald Trump should be cut off indefinitely from his millions of followers for his role in inciting the insurrection at the Capitol, on January 6th. Nathaniel Persily, a law professor at Stanford, told me, "How the board considers the issues and acts in that case will have dramatic implications for the future of the board, and perhaps for online speech in general."

In the beginning, Facebook had no idea how the board would work. To come up with ideas, the company held workshops with experts in Singapore, New Delhi, Nairobi, Mexico City, Berlin, and New York. "My job was to go all over the world and get as much feedback as possible," Zoe Darmé, who oversaw the consultation process, told me. At the workshop in New York, in the hotel basement, participants sat at tables of eight or nine and ran simulations of cases. I sat between Jeff Jarvis, a journalism professor, and Ben Ginsberg, a Republican lawyer who represented George W. Bush in Bush v. Gore.

For our first case, the moderator projected a picture of a smiling girl in a yearbook photo, with a cartoon thought bubble that read "Kill All Men." Facebook had removed the post for violating its hate-speech rules, which ban attacks based on "sex, gender identity." To many, this seemed simplistic. "It's a joke," one woman said. "There has to be an exception for humor." Facebook's rules did include a humor exception, for instances in which the user's intent was clear, but it was difficult to discern this person's motivation, and attendees worried that a broad carve-out for jokes could easily provide cover for hate speech. Carmen Scurato, who works at Free Press, an Internet-advocacy organization, pointed out the historical disadvantage of women, and argued that hate-speech policies ought to take power dynamics into account. In the end, the group voted to restore the photo, though no one knew exactly how to write that into a rule.

This kind of muddy uncertainty seemed inevitable. The board has jurisdiction over every Facebook user in the world, but intuitions about freedom of speech vary dramatically across political and cultural divides. In Hong Kong, where the pro-democracy movement has used social media to organize protests, activists rely on Facebook's free-expression principles for protection against the state. In Myanmar, where hate speech has contributed to a genocide against the Rohingya, advocates have begged for stricter enforcement. Facebook had hoped, through the workshops, to crowdsource beliefs about speech, but the results were more contradictory than anticipated. In New York, for example, sixty per cent of people voted to reinstate the "Kill All Men" post, but only forty per cent did so in Nairobi. Amid other theories, Darmé speculated, "Where countries are perhaps more concerned about safety, because they live in an area with less rule of law-and therefore there's a chance of a group actually maybe trying to kill all men-there's less concern about free speech." The full explanation is likely more complex; regardless, the divergent results underscored the difficulty of creating a global court for the Internet.

Some of the workshops devolved into disarray. In Singapore, Nairobi, and New Delhi, a few participants refused to sign the nondisclosure agreements, protesting Facebook's lack of transparency; in Germany, someone commandeered the microphone and berated the company for killing democracy. "We had to learn to put on our body armor," Darmé said. In New York, the session remained civil, but just barely. Some participants thought that the board would be ineffectual. "The whole thing seemed destined for failure," Sarah T. Roberts, a professor of information studies at U.C.L.A., told me. "Skeptics will think it's captured by the corporate interest of Facebook. Others will think it doesn't do enough, it's a pseudo-institution." Some predicted the board would come to have grand ambitions. Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia, said, "If the board is anything like the people invited to New York, I wouldn't be surprised if it got out of control and became its own little beast that tried to change the world one Facebook decision at a time."

Participants had been instructed to use an app called Slido to submit questions for group discussion, which could be voted up or down on the agenda. The results were projected on a screen at the front of the room. The app had worked well abroad, but in New York it became a meta-commentary on content moderation. Sophisticated questions about "automatic tools for takedowns" and the "equity principle with diverse communities" were soon overtaken by a joke about "Game of Thrones." Posts were initially anonymous, but users quickly found a way around the system; "Harold" wrote, "I figured out how to identify self," which provoked laughter. The moderator shouted to regain control of the room. In the midst of the chaos, someone posted, "Can we abandon Slido and talk?," which quickly accumulated likes.

The idea that Facebook, like a fledgling republic, would need to institute democratic reforms might have seemed silly a decade ago. In 2009, shortly after the company was criticized for quietly changing its terms of service to allow it to keep users' data even after they deleted their accounts, it released a video of Zuckerberg, clad in an uncharacteristic button-up shirt and a tie, announcing a "new approach to site governance." People would be able to vote on Facebook's policies; the company called it "a bold step toward transparency." In the first referendum, on whether to change the terms of service, only 0.32 per cent of users voted. "In its own eyes, Facebook has become more than merely a recreational website where users share photos and wish each other a happy birthday," a columnist for the Los Angeles Times wrote. "It is now a global body of citizens that should be united and protected under a popularly ratified constitution. But it's hard to have a democracy, a constitution or a government if nobody shows up." In 2012, the project was quietly shuttered, and, as with Crystal Pepsi, Google Wave, and the Microsoft Zune, no one remembers that it existed.

This was still a hazily optimistic time for Facebook. The company promised to "give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected." As more users joined tech platforms, companies instituted rules to sanitize content and keep the experience pleasant. Airbnb removed housing ads that displayed Nazi flags; Kickstarter disallowed crowdfunding for "energy food and drinks"; Etsy told users to be "helpful, constructive, and encouraging" when expressing criticism. Facebook hired content moderators to filter out pornography and terrorist propaganda, among other things. But, because it saw itself as a "neutral platform," it tended not to censor political speech. The dangers of this approach soon became apparent. Facebook now has some three billion users-more than a third of humanity-many of whom get their news from the site. In 2016, Russian agents used the platform in an attempt to sway the U.S. Presidential election. Three years later, a white supremacist in New Zealand live-streamed a mass shooting. Millions of people joined groups and followed pages related to QAnon, a conspiracy theory holding that the world is controlled by a cabal of Satan-worshipping, pedophilic Democrats. The First Amendment has made it difficult for the U.S. government to stop toxic ideas from spreading online. Germany passed a law attempting to curb the dissemination of hate speech, but it is enforceable only within the country's borders. As a result, Facebook has been left to make difficult decisions about speech largely on its own.

Over time, the company has developed a set of rules and practices in the ad-hoc manner of common law, and scholars have long argued that the system needed more transparency, accountability, and due process. The idea for the Oversight Board came from Noah Feldman, a fifty-year-old professor at Harvard Law School, who has written a biography of James Madison and helped draft the interim Iraqi constitution. In 2018, Feldman was staying with his college friend Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, at her home in Menlo Park, California. One day, Feldman was riding a bike in the neighboring hills when, he said, "it suddenly hit me: Facebook needs a Supreme Court." He raced home and wrote up the idea, arguing that social-media companies should create "quasi-legal systems" to weigh difficult questions around freedom of speech. "They could cite judicial opinions from different countries," he wrote. "It's easy to imagine that if they do their job right, real courts would eventually cite Facebook and Google opinions in return." Such a corporate tribunal had no modern equivalent, but Feldman noted that people need not worry: "It's worth recalling that national legal systems themselves evolved from more private courts administered by notables or religious authorities." He gave the memo to Sandberg, who showed it to Zuckerberg. For a few years, Zuckerberg had been thinking about establishing a "legislative model" of content moderation in which users might elect representatives to Facebook, like members of Congress. A court seemed like a better first step.

In November, 2018, Feldman gave a short presentation to Facebook's corporate board, at Zuckerberg's invitation. "I didn't feel like I was convincing my audience," he told me. Feldman recalled that some members felt such a body wouldn't sufficiently improve the company's legitimacy; others worried that it could make decisions that would contradict Facebook's business interests. A few minutes in, Zuckerberg defended the proposal. He noted that a huge proportion of his time was devoted to deliberating on whether individual, high-profile posts should be taken down; wouldn't experts be better at making those decisions? The idea remained controversial, but Facebook's corporate structure allows Zuckerberg to make unilateral decisions. Soon after, he ordered the project to begin. "I was kind of stunned," Feldman told me. "Like, holy shit, this is actually going to happen."

One day in June, 2019, an Uber dropped me off at Facebook's campus, in a parking lot full of Teslas. For the past couple of years, while working as a law professor, I had been researching how tech companies govern speech. That morning, I headed into MPK 21, a five-hundred-thousand-square-foot building designed by Frank Gehry, with a rooftop garden inhabited by wild foxes. (Signs discourage interaction with them.) Walls are plastered with giant posters bearing motivational phrases like "Nothing at Facebook Is Somebody Else's Problem" and "The Best Way to Complain Is to Make Things." When you visit, you register at a touch-screen kiosk and sign a nondisclosure agreement pledging that you won't divulge anything you see. The company knew that I was coming as a reporter, but the woman at the desk didn't know how to print a pass without a signed agreement; eventually, another employee handed me a lanyard marked "N.D.A." and said, "We'll just know that you're not under one."

I began by shadowing Facebook's Governance and Strategic Initiatives Team, which was tasked with creating the board. The core group was made up of a dozen employees, mostly in their thirties, who had come from the United Nations, the Obama White House, and the Justice Department, among other places. It was led by Brent Harris, a former consultant to nonprofits who frequently arrived at our meetings eating a granola bar. The employees spent much of their time drafting the board's charter, which some called its "constitution," and its bylaws, which some called its "rules of the court." During one meeting, they used pens, topped with a feather, to evoke the quills used by the Founding Fathers.

The group was young and highly qualified, but it was surrounded by tech executives who sometimes became actively involved. Early drafts of the charter included a lot of dry, careful legal language, but in later versions some of it had been stripped out. "Feedback is coming from people high in the company, who are not lawyers," Harris told me, during one meeting. I noted that someone had changed all references to "users" in the charter to "people," which seemed to imply that the board governed not only Facebook's customers but everyone in the world. Harris exchanged glances with another employee. "Feedback is coming from people very high in the company," he said. I later learned from the team that Zuckerberg had been editing the charter to make it "more approachable."

Employees on the governance team sometimes referred to themselves as "true believers" in the board. Kristen Murdock, who was an intelligence officer in the Navy before coming to Facebook, told me, "This is going to change the face of social justice on the Internet." But some executives did not hold it in the same regard. Elliot Schrage, then the head of global policy and communications, told people involved that he was skeptical of the project and did not think it could be improved. (Schrage claimed, through a spokesperson, that he was "fully supportive of efforts to improve governance" but that he "did have concerns about how to build a credible program.") Nick Clegg, a former Deputy Prime Minister of the U.K. who was supervising the governance team, told me, in 2019, that he was reluctant to let the board weigh in on sensitive topics, at least early on. "I would love to think that we'd have a relatively uncontroversial period of time," he said. At one point, a director of policy joked about ways to make the board seem independent, asking, "How many decisions do we have to let the Oversight Board win to make it legit?"

In time, the workings of the court came together. The board originally included twenty members, who were paid six-figure salaries for putting in about fifteen hours a week; it is managed by an independent trust, which Facebook gave a hundred and thirty million dollars. ("That's real money," a tech reporter texted me. "Is this thing actually for real?") According to Facebook, as many as two hundred thousand posts become eligible for appeal every day. "We are preparing for a fire hose," Milancy Harris, who came to the governance team from the National Counterterrorism Center, said. The board chooses the most "representative" cases and hears each in a panel of five members, who remain anonymous to the public. Unlike in the Supreme Court, there are no oral arguments. The user submits a written brief arguing her case; a representative for the company-"Facebook's solicitor general," one employee joked-files a brief explaining the company's rationale. The panel's decision, if ratified by the rest of the members, is binding for Facebook.

The "most controversial issue by far," Darmé told me, was how powerful the board should be. "People outside the company wanted the board to have as much authority as possible, to tie Facebook's hands," she said. Some wanted it to write all of the company's policies. ("We actually tested that in simulation," Darmé said. "People never actually wrote a policy.") On the other hand, many employees wondered whether the board would make a decision that killed Facebook. I sometimes heard them ask one another, in nervous tones, "What if they get rid of the newsfeed?"

As a result, the board's powers were limited. Currently, users can appeal cases in which Facebook has removed a post, called "take-downs," but not those in which it has left one up, or "keep-ups." The problem is that many of Facebook's most pressing issues-conspiracy theories, disinformation, hate speech-involve keep-ups. As it stands, the board could become a forum for trolls and extremists who are angry about being censored. But if a user believes that the company should crack down on certain kinds of speech, she has no recourse. "This is a big change from what you promised," Evelyn Douek, a Harvard graduate student who consulted with the team, fumed, during one meeting. "This is the opposite of what was promised." Users also currently can't appeal cases on such issues as political advertising, the company's algorithms, or the deplatforming of users or group pages. The board can take cases on these matters, including keep-ups, only if they are referred by Facebook, a system that, Douek told me, "stacks the deck" in Facebook's favor. (Facebook claims that it will be ready to allow user appeals of keep-ups by mid-2021, and hopes eventually to allow appeals on profiles, groups, and advertising as well.)

Perhaps most important, the board's rulings do not become Facebook policy in the way that a Supreme Court precedent becomes the law of the land. If the board decides that the company should remove a piece of content, Facebook is obligated to take down only that post; similar posts are taken down at Facebook's discretion. (The company states that it will remove "identical posts with parallel context" based on its "technical and operational capacity.") Policy recommendations are only advisory. This significantly narrows the board's influence. Some hope that the recommendations will at least exert public pressure on the company. "Facebook undermines its goals and its own experiment if it restricts the impact of the board's decisions or just ignores them," Douek told me. Others felt let down. "It's not what people told us they wanted," Darmé said. "They wanted the board to have real power over the company."

In August, 2019, the governance team met with advisers, over snacks and seltzer, and discussed who should sit on the board. A security guard stood outside, making sure that no one explored the offices unattended. (He stopped me on my way out and told me that I couldn't leave without an escort.) The people selected for the board would determine its legitimacy, and how it ruled, but the experts had trouble agreeing on who could be trusted with this responsibility. One attendee suggested letting the first board members choose the rest, to preserve their independence from the company. Lauren Rivera, a professor at Northwestern's business school, cautioned against this approach: "It's empirically proven that when you have a group self-select, in the absence of any kind of guidance, they just pick more people that look like them." The experts then began giving their own ideas. Journalists said that the board should be mostly journalists. International human-rights lawyers said that it should be all international human-rights lawyers. Information scientists said that it should be "anyone but lawyers." A white man at a think tank said that it should be populated with "regular people."

Ultimately, to select its would-be judges, Facebook opened a public portal, which received thousands of nominations. It got suggestions of candidates from political groups and civil-rights organizations. It also used its initial workshops to scout potential candidates and observe their behavior. "The thing about the global consultancy process is that it was also maybe Facebook's first true global recruiting process," Brent Harris told me later. Jarvis, the journalism professor at the New York workshop, said, "It's so Facebook of them." He added, "They never called me. I wonder what I said."

The number of people that Facebook planned to have on the board kept changing. I imagined the team sweating over a "Law & Order"-style corkboard of photographs. At one point, Kara Swisher, a tech journalist who has been critical of Facebook, nominated herself. "I would like to formally apply to be judge and jury over Mark Zuckerberg," she wrote in the Times. Facebook didn't take her up on it. A reporter sent me an encrypted text saying he had two sources telling him that Barack Obama would be on the board. When I asked Fariba Yassaee, who oversaw the search for members, about high-profile candidates, she smiled. "The people we're looking at are incredibly impressive, but they also are able to do the hard work that being on the board will entail," she said. "They need to be team players." In May, the first board members were announced. They included Helle Thorning-Schmidt, a former Prime Minister of Denmark; Catalina Botero Marino, a former special rapporteur for freedom of expression to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights; Alan Rusbridger, the former editor of the Guardian; and Tawakkol Karman, an activist who won the Nobel Peace Prize, in 2011, for her role in Yemen's Arab Spring protests.

The slate was immediately controversial. Some employees were angry about the appointment of Michael McConnell, a retired federal judge appointed by George W. Bush. In 2000, McConnell argued before the Supreme Court that the Boy Scouts should be allowed to exclude gay people. (This year, during a Zoom class at Stanford Law School, he recited a quote that included the N-word. He defended this as a "pedagogical choice," but pledged not to use the word again.) "We all knew what people outside and inside the company were expecting: board members who respect all people and all cultures, including respect for L.G.B.T.Q. rights," Darmé, who had since left Facebook, told me. "Can you really have someone on the board who's argued something like this all the way to the highest court in the land?" Others believed that, considering that half of the country is Republican, disregarding such views would be undemocratic. "It is not a thing you can really say right now, but the vast majority of the world is much more ideologically conservative than Menlo Park," Harris said. "How do you reflect that on the board? Or do you decide, No, we're just not going to have that?"

People familiar with the process told me that some Republicans were upset about what they perceived to be the board's liberal slant. In the months leading up to the appointments, conservative groups pushed the company to make the board more sympathetic to Trump. They suggested their own lists of candidates, which sometimes included members of the President's family, most notably Ivanka and the President's sons. "The idea was, either fill this board with Trump-supporting conservatives or kill it," one person familiar with the process said. In early May, shortly after the board members were announced, Trump personally called Zuckerberg to say that he was unhappy with the makeup of the board. He was especially angry about the selection of Pamela Karlan, a Stanford Law professor who had testified against him during his first impeachment. "He used Pam as an example of how the board was this deeply offensive thing to him," the person familiar with the process said. Zuckerberg listened, and then told Trump that the members had been chosen based on their qualifications. Despite the pressure from Trump, Facebook did not change the composition of the board. (Trump declined to comment.)

Several candidates declined to be considered. Jameel Jaffer, the director of the Knight First Amendment Institute, told me, "I was worried, and still am, that Facebook will use membership on the board as a way of co-opting advocates and academics who would otherwise be more critical of the company." But others saw it as a way to push Facebook in the right direction. Julie Owono, a board member and the head of Internet Sans Frontières, told me, "I had expressed interest in joining the board because I feel, and still do, that Facebook is doing a terrible job on hate speech in environments that are already very tense." Thorning-Schmidt, the former Prime Minister of Denmark, told me, "I needed to know this would be independent from Facebook and that Facebook would commit to following our decisions." She met with Zuckerberg and asked that he give his word: "I had to hear it from Mark Zuckerberg myself. And he said yes."

Critics of the board believe that it will prove to be little more than a distraction. "I think it's a gigantic waste of time and money," Julie Cohen, a law professor at Georgetown, said. She believes that its star-studded panel and lavish funding will prevent regulation while allowing the company to outsource controversial decisions. And, since it can currently rule only on individual posts, the board can't address Facebook's most fundamental problems. In mid-May, for example, a video called "Plandemic," which claimed that vaccine companies had created COVID-19 in order to profit from the pandemic, went viral on the platform. It was taken down within a few days, but by that time it had already been seen by 1.8 million people. Ellen P. Goodman, a law professor at Rutgers, believes that Facebook needs to add more friction to the circulation of content; anything catching fire, she said, should be subject to a "virality disruptor" that stops further spread until the content has been reviewed. Zephyr Teachout, a law professor at Fordham, says that the company should do away with targeted advertising, which incentivizes the promotion of incendiary, attention-grabbing posts. "If the core of our communications infrastructure is driven by targeted ads, we will have a toxic, conflict-driven communications sphere," she said. She also argues that the company is too big and needs to be broken up through antitrust litigation.

This summer, I spoke with Zuckerberg over Zoom. He wore a Patagonia fleece and sat in a wood-panelled room in front of a large marble fireplace. He had been heavily involved in the board's creation: editing documents, reading memos, reviewing possible members. "I don't see any path for the company ever getting out of the business of having to make these judgments," he told me. "But I do think that we can have additional oversight and additional institutions involved." He hoped, he said, that the board would "hold us accountable for making sure that we actually get the decisions right and have a mechanism for overturning them when we don't."

He looked tired. He seemed more at ease talking about "product" or "building tools" than he did discussing ethics or politics. It struck me that he was essentially a coder who had found himself managing the world's marketplace of ideas. "The core job of what we do is building products that help people connect and communicate," he said. "It's actually quite different from the work of governing a community." He hoped to separate these jobs: there would be groups of people who built apps and products, and others-including Facebook's policy team and now the board-who deliberated the thorny questions that came along with them. I brought up a speech he gave at Georgetown, in 2019, in which he noted that the board was personally important to him, because it helped him feel that, when he eventually left, he would be leaving the company in safe hands. "One day, I'm not going to be running the company," he told me. "I would like to not be in the position, long term, of choosing between someone who either is more aligned with my moral view and values, or actually is more aligned with being able to build high-quality products."

I asked what kinds of cases he hopes the board will take. "If I was them, I'd be wary of choosing something that was so charged right off the bat that it was immediately going to polarize the whole board, and people's perception of the board, and society," he told me. He knew that critics wished the board had more power: "This is certainly a big experiment. It's certainly not as broad as everyone would like it to be, upfront, but I think there's a path for getting there." But he rejected the notion that it was a fig leaf. "I'm not setting this up to take pressure off me or the company in the near term," he said. "The reason that I'm doing this is that I think, over the long term, if we build up a structure that people can trust, then that can help create legitimacy and create real oversight. But I think there is a real risk, if it gets too polarized too quickly, that it will never be able to blossom into that."

In April, 2020, the board members met for the first time, over Zoom. Facebook employees cried and took a screenshot. "It was such a profound experience to see this thing take on a life of its own," Heather Moore, who came to Facebook from a U.S. Attorney's office, said. After that, board members attended training sessions, which included icebreakers and trust exercises; in one, they brought pictures that represented pivotal moments in their lives. "Whether we can get along well enough to disagree and stay on mission is crucial and quite unknown," John Samples, a member who works at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, told me. The group quickly came under intense public pressure to stand up to the company. In June, a nonprofit called Accountable Tech began targeting the board on Facebook with ads that included their photos and addressed them by name: "Pam Karlan: speak up or step down"; "Tell Michael McConnell: don't be complicit." Members often felt the need to assert their independence. The company assigned readings, some of which were, according to a board member, "just P.R. crap from Facebook," and employees sat in on early meetings and mock deliberations. "We're out of our mind if we're in an oversight position and the people who are teaching us about what we're overseeing are the people we're meant to oversee," the board member said. After complaints, Facebook employees stopped being invited to the meetings.

In October, Facebook began allowing appeals from a random five per cent of users, like a new Instagram feature, and the board's jurisdiction was rolled out over the next month. Its docket included a post from an American user about Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, and one from a user in Myanmar claiming that there is "something wrong with Muslims psychologically." Owono told me, "I never imagined I'd have to ask myself these kinds of hard questions so rapidly." They reviewed the company's Community Standards, a ten-thousand-word document that codifies Facebook's speech policies, and consulted precedents in international human-rights law. One debate that has arisen among board members mirrors the division on the Supreme Court between "textualist" and "living" interpretations of the Constitution. Some believe that their job is to hew more closely to Facebook's policies. "Our job is to ask, 'What does the text mean?' " one member told me. "We don't have much legitimacy if we just start making stuff up." Others believe that they should use their power to push back against Facebook's policies when they are harmful. Nicolas Suzor, a law professor from Australia, and a board member, told me, "I was worried we'd end up with decisions that were limited to the facts, but people are brave."

In one of the board's first cases, a user had posted photos and described them as showing churches in Baku, Azerbaijan, that had been razed as part of the ongoing persecution of Armenians in the region. He complained about "Azerbaijani aggression" and "vandalism," and referred to Azerbaijanis using the word " taziki," which literally means "washbowls" but is a play on a Russian slur. Facebook had taken down the post as hate speech, but some board members felt that it was strange to apply this rule to a complaint against a dominant group. The panel asked for a report from UNESCO, received a comment from the U.N. special rapporteur on minority issues, and another from a think tank in Ukraine, who told them that persecuted groups often used offensive language in their struggle for equality. "We learned that, during a conflict, it's usually accepted that people would use harsh words, so there's this idea that, especially when minority rights are at risk, there's a custom to allow more harsh discourse," a board member told me. "I'd never heard of that before, and I found it compelling." In the end, they voted to take the post down, though not everyone agreed. The opinion suggested that a minority of the members "believed that Facebook's action did not meet international standards and was not proportionate," and that the company "should have considered other enforcement measures besides removal."

In another case, someone in France had posted a video and accompanying text complaining that the government had refused to authorize a combination of azithromycin and hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug, as a treatment for COVID-19. Many on the right, including Trump and the French professor Didier Raoult, have claimed that hydroxychloroquine cures the illness, though the claim has been debunked, and scientists have warned that the medication can cause dangerous side effects. The user claimed that "Raoult's cure" was being used elsewhere to save lives and posted the video in a public group with five hundred thousand members. Facebook worried that it might cause people to self-medicate, and removed it. According to one person on the board, members of the panel "who have lived in places that have had a lot of disinformation in terms of COVID-19" agreed with this decision, believing that, "in the midst of this huge pandemic affecting the entire world population, decisive measures may be adopted." But others noted that the post was pressing for a policy change, and worried about censoring political discussions. "No matter how controversial it would seem to us, those questions and challenges are what helps scientific knowledge advance," the board member said. They found that Facebook's standard for censoring such speech, interpreted under international human-rights law, involved determining whether it was likely to incite direct harm. Because the combination of medicines was not available over the counter in France, they decided that the risk of causing people to self-administer was low. They voted to restore the post but encouraged the company to append a link to more reliable scientific information.

When the board was just three weeks old, Black Lives Matter protests were sweeping the country, and Trump posted on both Facebook and Twitter threatening to send in the military to subdue them, writing, "When the looting starts, the shooting starts." His language echoed that of the segregationist George Wallace, who threatened civil-rights protesters in similar terms. Twitter flagged the tweet as violating its rules against "glorifying violence," but Facebook left it unmarked. Zuckerberg released a statement saying, "I disagree strongly with how the President spoke about this, but I believe people should be able to see this for themselves." In an interview on Fox News, he noted that he didn't think the company should be the "arbiter of truth" on political issues. Angry employees staged a virtual walkout and raised the idea, in a leaked Q. & A., of letting the board hear the case. A few days after the incident, Suzor, the Australian law professor, suggested a full-board meeting. Users couldn't appeal Facebook's decision to the board-it hadn't yet started taking cases, and the post was a keep-up-but it debated the issue nonetheless.

Several members were shocked by Trump's threats and initially wanted to meet with Zuckerberg or release a statement condemning the platform's decision. "I was furious about Zuck's 'arbiter of truth' double-down," one board member told me. Others felt that taking a partisan stand would alienate half the country and lose the board legitimacy. "Seventy-five million people voted for Trump," Samples said. "What are you going to do about it?" The group discussed whether it should weigh in on matters outside its remit that are nevertheless of public importance. Jamal Greene, one of the co-chairs, told me, "The general sentiment was 'no' for right now, and maybe 'no' ever, but certainly not before we're even doing the thing that we're supposed to be doing." After two hours of discussion, the members decided to stay mum. "Moralistic ranting is not going to make a difference," Samples said. "Building up an institution that can slowly answer the hard questions? That might."

They didn't have much time for institution-building. On January 6th, a group of Trump supporters who disputed the results of the Presidential election stormed the Capitol, taking selfies, making threats, and attempting to disrupt the peaceful transition of power. Trump had urged on the mob by repeatedly claiming, on Facebook and elsewhere, that the election had been stolen from him. Hundreds of thousands of people had used the site to spread the claim, and to organize the rally at the Capitol. Afterward, Trump released a video tepidly disavowing violence and reiterating his claims of a fraudulent election. He tweeted, "These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long." Facebook removed two of Trump's posts. The next morning, in a statement from his own Facebook, Zuckerberg announced an indefinite suspension of Trump's account. "In this moment, the risk to our democracy was too big," Sheryl Sandberg said, in an interview. "We felt we had to take the unprecedented step of what is an indefinite ban, and I'm glad we did." The next day, Twitter permanently banned him.

Many felt that the decision was an important step. "The platforms failed in regulating the accounts, of course, since he was inciting violence, and they banned him for that only after egregious violence resulted," Susan Benesch, the founding director of the Dangerous Speech Project, told me. "But banning him did lower his megaphone. It disrupted his ties with his large audience." Others expressed concern that Facebook had wielded its power to silence a democratically elected leader. "The fifth most valuable corporation in the U.S., worth over seven hundred billion dollars, a near monopoly in its market niche, has restricted a political figure's speech to his thirty million followers," Eugene Volokh, a law professor at U.C.L.A., said. "Maybe that's just fine. Maybe it's even a public service. But it's a remarkable power for any entity, public or private, to have." Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, described Trump's removal from Twitter as "problematic," and Alexey Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, tweeted, "I think that the ban of Donald Trump on Twitter is an unacceptable act of censorship."

In an interview, Sandberg noted that Trump could appeal the removal of his posts. But only Facebook had the power to refer his suspension to the board. In conversations with Facebook's leadership, members of the governance team and the board's trust argued that failing to bring the case before the board would undermine its legitimacy. Harris likened the board to Tinkerbell: "At the end of the day you can build all the things, but you just have to have enough people that believe in order to make it real." Members seemed eager to take it on. One texted me, "If not us, who? And if not now, when?" Even Clegg, who had initially favored a slower rollout of the board, wanted it to hear the case. "As far as I'm concerned, this was a no-brainer," Clegg told me. "Why wouldn't you send it to the Oversight Board? If you didn't, you'd be hobbling it right from the beginning." The day after Joe Biden's Inauguration, Facebook sent the case, asking the board to rule on whether Trump should remain indefinitely banned from the platform. Clegg added, when we spoke, that if the board can "answer also about political leaders in analogous situations, we'd be keen to hear."

Board members found out that they were getting the case only a half hour before the public did. Members eagerly watched the board's internal Web site to see if they had been selected for the panel. They will now have two more months to deliberate it. Civil-society groups like the Center for Democracy & Technology and R Street, a conservative think tank, are submitting comments on the case-the equivalent of filing amicus briefs-arguing for or against Trump's reinstatement. Trump has the opportunity to submit a brief arguing why he should be reinstated. "The board's Trump decision may affect the liberties and, yes, lives of hundreds of millions," Samples told me. "Few U.S. Supreme Court cases ever hold such potential for good or for ill." Ronaldo Lemos, a board member and law professor in Rio de Janeiro, told me that he believes the board has a lot of work ahead. "The Oversight Board is not going away anytime soon," he said. "We're not going anywhere."

Read More About the Attack on the Capitol

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Inside the Making of Facebook's Supreme Court

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The company has created a board that can overrule even Mark Zuckerberg. Soon it will decide whether to allow Trump back on Facebook. On a morning in May, 2019, forty-three lawyers, academics, and media experts gathered in the windowless basement of the NoMad New York hotel for a private meeting.

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Interviews with 19 current and former officers show how failures of leadership and communication put hundreds of Capitol cops at risk and allowed rioters to get dangerously close to members of Congress.

The riot squad defending the embattled entrance to the west side of the U.S. Capitol was surrounded by violence. Rioters had clambered up the scaffolding by the stage erected for the inauguration of President Joseph Biden. They hurled everything they could get their hands on at the cops beneath: rebar, plywood, power tools, even cans of food they had frozen for extra damage.

In front of the cops, a mob was mounting a frontal assault. Its members hit officers with fists and baseball bats. They grabbed at weapons slung from the officers' waists. They unleashed a barrage of M-80 firecrackers. Soaked in never-ending streams of bright orange bear spray, the officers choked on plumes of acrid smoke that singed their nostrils and obscured their vision.

One officer in the middle of the scrum, a combat veteran, thought the rioters were so vicious, so relentless, that they seemed fueled by methamphetamine. To his left, he watched a chunk of steel strike a fellow officer above the eye, setting off a geyser of blood. A pepper ball tore through the air over his shoulder and exploded against the jaw of a man in front of him. The round, filled with chemical irritant, ripped the rioter's face open. His teeth were now visible through a hole in his cheek. Blood poured out, puddling on the pavement surrounding the building. But the man kept coming.

The combat veteran was hit with bear spray eight times. His experience overseas "was nothing like this," he said. "Nothing at all."

Over the last several weeks, ProPublica has interviewed 19 current and former U.S. Capitol Police officers about the assault on the Capitol. Following on the dramatic video of officers defending the building that House lawmakers showed during the first day of the impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump, the interviews provide the most detailed account to date of a most extraordinary battle.

The enemies on Jan. 6 were Americans: thousands of people from across the country who had descended on the Capitol, intent on stopping Congress from certifying an election they believed was stolen from Trump. They had been urged to attend by Trump himself, with extremist right-wing and militia leaders calling for violence.

Many of the officers were speaking to reporters for the first time about the day's events, almost all anonymously for fear of retribution. That they spoke at all is an indication of the depth of their frustration over the botched response. ProPublica also obtained confidential intelligence bulletins and previously unreported planning documents.

Combined, the information makes clear how failures of leadership, communication and tactics put the lives of hundreds of officers at risk and allowed rioters to come dangerously close to realizing their threats against members of Congress.

In response to questions for this story, the Capitol Police sent a one-sentence email: "There is a multi-jurisdictional investigation underway and in order to protect that process, we are unfortunately unable to provide any comment at this time."

The interviews also revealed officers' concerns about disparities in the way the force prepared for Black Lives Matter demonstrations versus the pro-Trump protests on Jan. 6. Officers said the Capitol Police force usually plans intensively for protests, even if they are deemed unlikely to grow violent. Officers said they spent weeks working 12- or 16-hour days, poised to fight off a riot, after George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police - even though intelligence suggested there was not much danger from protesters.

"We had intel that nothing was going to happen - literally nothing," said one former official with direct knowledge of planning for the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. "The response was, 'We don't trust the intel.'"

By contrast, for much of the force, Jan. 6 began like any other day.

"We normally have pretty good information regarding where these people are and how far they are from the Capitol," said Keith McFaden, a former Capitol Police officer and union leader who retired from the force following the riot. "We heard nothing that day."

For the members of the riot squad who formed the first line of defense on the Capitol's lower west terrace on Jan. 6, the lack of information could not have come with higher stakes.

Thrust into the most intense battle of the insurrection, the roughly two dozen officers bought lawmakers crucial time to scramble for safety. For about 100 heart-pounding minutes, they slipped and skidded across a stone surface slick with blood and bear spray, attempting to hold their ground against a rampaging mass of thousands.

To many of them, it felt like no one was in charge of the Capitol's defense. All they could hear on the police radio were desperate cries for help.

At one point, the combat veteran was forced to stumble back from the line, his face so covered in bear spray he could barely see or breathe.

When he came to, a surge spilled over to his south. The crowd pushed over several bike racks. He realized the unfathomable had happened. His squad had lost the line; the mob could now enter the Capitol. There was no choice but to fall back. The officers stumbled over blood and debris until they were pressed against a limestone wall at the rear of the terrace. The mob had them cornered.

The officers, drained from their standoff, found a narrow staircase leading to an entrance of the building. But it could fit only one officer at a time. So they took turns climbing it as the crowd closed in, screaming obscenities and threatening murder.

"You fucking faggots!" one shouted. "You're not even American!"

Waiting to climb the stairs, the combat veteran feared the worst. "This is where they'll find my body," he thought.

The Intelligence: "A Normal Fucking Day"

On the morning of Jan. 4, members of a civil disturbance unit gathered in a briefing room. A small group of officers were shown a document from Capitol intelligence officials that projected as many as 20,000 people arriving in Washington that week. The crowd would include members of several militia and right-wing extremist groups, including the Proud Boys, the Boogaloo Bois and the white supremacist Patriot Front. Some were expected to be armed, according to one officer who attended the briefing. The document anticipated that there could be violence.

The officers weren't allowed to physically share the document with anyone else, but they relayed its substance to the rest of their squad in a separate meeting. Together, the unit members discussed possible scenarios and pored over a map of the Capitol and its surroundings to identify vulnerable areas that could erupt in conflict.

The iconic west front of the Capitol emerged as an obvious target. Donald Trump was going to speak at the Ellipse across from the White House; from there, it's a direct walk past the Washington Monument and the reflecting pool outside the Capitol to the western facade of the building. The riot squad knew that if the crowd was going to violently confront police, that's where it would probably happen.

But the intelligence the unit relied on to make that judgment was not widely shared within the department. Several officers assigned to other commands told ProPublica they received no warning whatsoever going into Jan. 6. "We went to work like it was a normal fucking day," one said.

"It was business as usual," said another, who has been on the force for more than 15 years. "The main thing we were told was to be on the lookout for counterdemonstrators."

The Capitol Police force is made up of four main divisions, each responsible for safeguarding its own section of the Capitol complex. But ProPublica learned that these divisions operate in silos, often out of sync with one another. On Jan. 6, their failure to coordinate led to disastrous results. One group of officers was left stranded, separated from their riot gear, which sat unused on a parked bus near the Capitol while unprotected officers endured beatings with metal pipes and flagpoles.

The officers said that in the past, weekly Capitol Police intelligence briefings had kept the force well-informed about potential security threats from upcoming events. But those briefings stopped years ago.

Several weeks before Jan. 6, many officers were ordered by their leadership to return their helmets because they were so old, the officers said. One officer told ProPublica he had received his helmet decades ago, and the padding was rotted out. Many said their helmets were never replaced. On the day of the riot, the department only had helmets available in medium size, one officer said. Many officers didn't have gas masks. Most hadn't received riot training in years.

"They've been asking about this for over 10 years - this kind of equipment, this kind of training," said one officer, who asked for anonymity out of concern for retribution. "We've always talked about the big one."

McFaden, the officer who retired last month after more than two decades as a Capitol Police officer, said that the communication failure going into Jan. 6 was consistent with recent history.

As second-in-command at the Capitol Police union, McFaden said, he met with then-Chief Steven Sund and other leaders of the force every two weeks.

"We'd consistently ask them, for years, 'What are the contingency plans for upcoming events?'" McFaden told ProPublica. "We'd always get either a no response, or that things were in flux and it's a national security issue and we can't divulge that information at this time."

In the absence of communication from the upper ranks on how to prepare, officers turned to social media or to each other.

One officer said he first heard about the planned protest a week before, when a friend from another federal agency called him to say, as he recalled: "You all are gonna have your hands full next week. You got some mean boys coming up there." The officer was confused. "What do you mean?" he replied.

As the day drew nearer, the chatter became more tense. Twitter and Facebook were abuzz with hotel rooms filling up, and Trump supporters were pouring into Washington, announcing their plans to initiate a "civil war" or "revolution." On a well-trafficked pro-Trump forum, one of the most popular posts from Jan. 5 said Congress "has a choice to make tomorrow": certify Trump's victory, or "get lynched by patriots."

Officers, particularly the younger ones, spent shifts glued to their phones, forwarding ominous posts to their sergeants.

Similar warnings reached the Capitol Police's intelligence division. ProPublica obtained a previously unreported 17-page Capitol Police operational plan that showed select officials were notified of "numerous social media posts" encouraging protesters to arrive armed.

The document, which is dated Jan. 5, also states that white supremacists and the Proud Boys were expected to attend the rally, along with "other extremist groups," including antifa, the left-wing movement that has clashed with far-right groups and drawn the ire of some Republicans. The plan called for "counter-sniper teams" on the Capitol dome and officers monitoring for concealed weapons, but did not discuss a potential breach of the Capitol.

Other intelligence reports reviewed by ProPublica reveal inconsistencies - a sign of internal confusion about how best to respond.

ProPublica also obtained four daily reports from the department's intelligence division that were shared widely among commanders of the force, spanning the dates Jan. 4 through Jan. 7. The documents make no mention of expected extremist groups or the possibility that demonstrators would be armed. Instead, they note simply that "folks could organize a demonstration on USCP grounds."

The intelligence reports provide a kind of threat scale that gauges the likelihood of arrests. The Jan. 6 rally was scored as "improbable," meaning it had a 20% to 45% chance of resulting in arrests. Two small anti-Trump counterdemonstrations organized by local left-wing and antifascist groups were assigned the same risk level.

Sund, who submitted his resignation as chief of the Capitol Police on Jan. 7, later said he had tried to call in the National Guard two days before the riot. He said the sergeants-at-arms - the House and Senate officials responsible for security of lawmakers - denied his request. Both officials have since resigned. Reached by phone, former House sergeant-at-arms Paul Irving declined to comment. Former Senate sergeant-at-arms Michael Stenger did not immediately respond to a message left by phone.

In an emailed response to questions for this story, Sund said he and other departmental leaders were not responsible for assigning risk levels to upcoming events, and that he is "not sure of the process" the Capitol Police intelligence division uses to assess risk. He said intelligence was shared with division commanders to pass along to their troops, and that he emailed the assistant and deputy chiefs on Jan. 5 to ensure officers knew what to expect the following day. Sund also said "the force did much more to prepare for the events of January 6 than we did to prepare for BLM demonstrations," including expanding the perimeter around the Capitol and coordinating support from Metropolitan police. He said any "breakdown in communication" on Jan. 6 was "surely the result of the extraordinary events of that day."

He also defended his actions in an eight-page letter to congressional leaders dated Feb. 1, saying, in essence, that he and his fellow leaders did the best they could with the information they had.

Sund said he ordered an "all hands on deck" response, meaning every available officer "would be working." He said he deployed about 250 specialized crowd control officers, "approximately four platoons" of which were outfitted in riot gear. He said that during the riot he urgently requested help from a variety of federal and local agencies. He added that the Capitol Police ordered more helmets and received about 100 of them on Jan. 4. But he acknowledged that "a number of systems broke down."

"I also wish we had had better intelligence and warnings as to the possibility of this type of military style armed insurrection," Sund wrote, pointing out that there was a shared responsibility across a number of agencies. "The entire intelligence community seems to have missed this."

Run-Up to the Riot: "If Something Happens, Just Find Work"

At 7 a.m. on Jan. 6, an officer on the department's midnight shift finished work and got into his car near the Capitol. Already, swarms of people were walking past, waving Trump flags. He sat in the driver's seat for a minute, watching. He called up an old colleague and marveled at the crowd.

The officer was surprised his superiors were letting him off duty. During the Black Lives Matter protests last summer, the night shift had often been held over to help. But he hadn't heard anything from his bosses, so he drove home to the Maryland suburbs and went to sleep. When he woke up, he saw on television what was happening and sped back, following an unmarked police car that had its lights flashing.

Meanwhile, officers belonging to the riot squad were making their way into the district to start their shifts. They could see throngs of people pouring out of Union Station, the railway hub within sight of the Capitol. They, too, were startled by the number of people on the streets that morning - it seemed that at every red light, a hundred demonstrators crossed in front of them. The officers hurried to prepare themselves for a long day.

At 10 a.m., as Trump supporters began to gather to listen to the president, the riot squad held roll call at a building a few blocks from the Capitol steps. There was little new to share from the intelligence division. Instead, the riot squad's sergeants played clips found on social media: videos of protesters meeting in cities across the country, getting ready to drive to D.C. They told officers to make sure they had filters in their gas masks and snacks in their pockets.

With no real direction from their superiors, the sergeants tried to get their troops mentally prepared.

"You guys all drove in, you guys saw the same thing we did," one of the sergeants told the officers, according to members of the team. "If something happens," another instructed, "just find work."

The unit put on their riot gear: helmets and body armor. Shields were placed in strategic areas around the Capitol complex, though some officers later said they could not get to them. One sergeant gave officers a final warning. "If this goes good, then we'll laugh about it," he told them. "But if it goes bad, it'll change your life and you'll never forget about it. They'll talk about this for years and years and years."

The riot squad members got on a bus to await their orders.

Sitting in his gear, one officer was struck by the age range of the people in attendance. "People had their little kids, 2-year-olds, babies in strollers," he recalled. An elderly woman with a walker inched toward the Capitol: "Every two steps, she has to stop and catch her breath."

After about an hour, the radio crackled: A possible bomb had been found outside the Republican National Committee headquarters, southeast of the Capitol complex. Capitol Police officers raced to the scene.

On the bus, the information did not set off panic. Suspicious packages are discovered all the time on the Hill; usually they are false alarms.

Then another, more urgent call went out. A 10-33, code for an officer in distress. An officer had been knocked backwards and hit her head on a flight of steps. The outer perimeter surrounding the west front of the Capitol had been breached.

Normally, the sergeants on the bus would wait for orders. But one snapped. "Fuck this, we're going," he said. The bus steered around the Capitol, barely squeezing between parked cars and protesters that had clogged a drive alongside the building.

Realizing they were effectively marooned, the sergeants ordered the riot squad off the bus. They began to walk across a wide lawn outside the Capitol.

As the officers drew closer, they realized that the lower section of the building's west terrace was guarded only by what is known as a "soft squad," officers with little protective gear dressed in neon yellow outerwear and baseball caps. The rioters were attempting to pull away metal barricades known as "bike racks," and striking officers with their fists. With about 150 yards to go, the squad members broke into a dead sprint.

Once they reached the lower steps, the riot officers spread out behind the soft squad, tapping its members out, one by one. The riot squad came into formation in front of their less-protected colleagues: about two dozen officers attempting to hold 120 feet of open space, behind the line of barricades.

Looking out toward the Mall and the Washington Monument, the squad realized the grass had disappeared from view, blocked out by a crowd of thousands.

The Attack: "Pick a Side"

At about 1 p.m., Trump gave a rousing speech to protesters, suggesting they head to the Capitol to protest the election certification. "We're going to walk down" to the Capitol, where they must "fight," he said.

"We're going to the Capitol," he told the increasingly agitated crowd of protesters. "We're going to try and give [Republicans] the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country."

Vice President Mike Pence had just arrived in the House Chamber. The lawmakers awaiting him still hadn't realized just how dire the situation was becoming.

To Sund, it was already clear that "the situation was deteriorating rapidly," he wrote in his letter. He requested support from a number of agencies, including the Secret Service, and asked the sergeants-at-arms to authorize the National Guard and declare a state of emergency. According to the letter, Sund recalled that Irving, the House sergeant-at-arms, said he "needed to run it up the chain of command."

Outside on the lower west terrace, the rioters had begun launching their offensive. At first, they pushed officers from across the bike racks, almost testing to see what they could get away with. Soon it became a fistfight. In what felt like minutes, it turned into an all-out brawl involving scores of armed rioters.

To the police on the line, it seemed like every time they shoved one protester back, three more surged ahead to take their place.

"Some of them, as they are holding a thin blue line flag, looked you dead in the eye and said, 'Pick a side,'" one officer told ProPublica.

One officer hit a demonstrator and watched a pistol pop out of the rioter's waistband. The officer picked the weapon up off the ground and, with no time or backup to initiate an arrest, put it in his pocket and continued fighting.

Plumes of tear gas billowed behind the police line. Officers were startled by the sight of department commanders joining their desperate troops to defend the Capitol.

Inspector Thomas Loyd, the man in charge of the department's Capitol Division, threw off his hat and raised his fists. Deputy Chief Eric Waldow waded into the crowd. With the build of a linebacker, he cut a menacing figure, throwing punches as the bear spray stained his white uniform orange.

The two are now revered by the department's rank and file, who complain that other leaders were missing in action. Waldow and Loyd referred ProPublica to the Capitol Police public information office, which declined to comment.

The only other high-ranking official who officers said they heard on the radio that day was Yogananda Pittman, the department's assistant chief for protective and intelligence operations. Multiple officers told ProPublica that Pittman addressed the troops only once on the radio, when she ordered that the Capitol be locked down. Loyd, the union said in a public statement in January, had already given the same order about an hour before.

Elsewhere, another riot squad was in even worse shape. These officers had been dispatched to help quell a group of protesters gathered near a monument west of the Capitol. But they had been instructed by their superior officers to leave their gear on a bus. Now they were separated from the bus, defenseless.

"They were holding back some protesters, with just bike racks," said McFaden. "Well, those bike racks actually were used as weapons against the officers. Who had the bright idea of sending a hard squad with no gear? ... The coordination was just not there."

McFaden said that one member of that squad was hit in the head by a bike rack and knocked unconscious.

As the battle raged, officers stationed away from the combat were still trying to figure out if they were authorized to respond. They heard calls on their radios for "all available units." But officers at fixed posts didn't know what that meant.

"How the fuck am I supposed to know if I'm available?" thought one officer, stationed at a perimeter post with no rioters in sight. The officer's supervisors didn't know either. The group decided to stay put: If they left, there was a chance their post could be overrun. They were stuck listening to their colleagues fight and cry for help over the radio.

McFaden was also stationed away from the rioters, tasked with guarding a parking garage on the Rayburn House Office Building's west side. From his post, he had a clear view of the battle on the west front, but he'd received orders to stay at the garage entrance. At 56 years old, he had worked for the Capitol Police House Division for more than 20 years. He was slated to retire in just a few weeks. Now he was watching, powerless, as flash-bang grenades went off in front of a building he was sworn to protect.

By this point, time had become a blur to the officers at the west front. But somewhere around 1:15 p.m., it felt for a moment like the cavalry arrived. Dozens of officers in black riot gear came over the wall on the south side of the terrace. Washington's Metropolitan Police Department, the only other members of law enforcement on the west front in riot gear that day, had arrived.

But the reinforcements could only slow the crowd. About an hour and a half after the Metropolitan police arrived, the rioters broke through the line. In the melee, a rioter was captured on video hurling a fire extinguisher at the Capitol police. It struck an officer in the head, giving him a concussion, according to his colleagues. That officer was one of at least two to be assaulted with such a device that day; another, Brian Sicknick, died from his injuries the following day.

The rioters pulled at least two of the Capitol Police officers in riot gear into the crowd, stealing their batons and pepper spray and setting off a kind of human tug of war, before other officers were eventually able to pull their colleagues out.

Soon, the police had their backs against a wall. They formed a semicircle, doing their best to defend themselves against jabs with flagpoles and shots from bear spray canisters and pepper spray guns.

The officers made their way toward the staircase leading up to the second floor of the west terrace. A line of officers pushed each other up the narrow steps. When they got to the terrace, they rushed through a door leading to the inside of the building. Metropolitan police formed a wall of riot shields behind them, sealing off the entrance.

The crowd never made it through the doors. Video footage shows a Metropolitan police officer trapped in the door, screaming in agony. As the police poured inside, some members of Congress were still on the House floor, yet to be evacuated.

At around this time, Sund was on a conference call with four different agencies and had just learned that he needed Pentagon approval to activate the National Guard. According to Sund's letter, Lt. Gen. Walter Piatt, the director of Army staff, remained skeptical. "I don't like the visual of the National Guard standing [in] a line with the Capitol in the background," Piatt said, suggesting that the guard relieve Capitol Police officers from their fixed posts instead. Piatt and the Department of Defense did not immediately respond to an emailed list of questions. (In a statement on Jan. 11, Piatt denied making such a comment. He later acknowledged that he "may" have said it.)

Once inside, the riot squad searched desperately for water. The pepper spray and bear spray cocktail was overwhelming, seeping through the tiny breathing holes of their masks.

Officers spat out phlegm and vomited into trash cans. When they eventually found water, they rushed to wash the chemicals out of their eyes and put their helmets back on. They climbed up another flight of stairs to get to the Capitol crypt, the circular room directly beneath the rotunda.

As the officers ascended, they met more rioters, who were being pushed down the stairs by Metropolitan police. The Capitol police felt like they were swimming upstream through a mob, grabbing the protesters by their limbs and shoulders as they tried to reach the next level of the Capitol.

One officer said the crypt looked like something out of a Michael Bay movie, trash strewn everywhere, the air thick with smoke.

After the crypt was cleared, another officer made it to the Capitol rotunda. He said he still can't shake the scene: On the walls, a 19th-century frieze depicted the Battle of Lexington and the signing of the Declaration of Independence; on the ground, pepper balls whizzed into the crowd and the smell of chemicals wafted through the air.

McFaden, too, finally got a call to jump into the action, and was ordered to the rotunda. When he arrived beneath its domed ceiling, already breathless from the run over, he got hit in the face with bear spray.

"I felt like you could fry an egg on my forehead," he said.

The Aftermath: "I Don't Trust the People Above Me to Make Decisions to Bring Me Home Safe"

By about 4 p.m., other agencies had arrived in the rotunda: FBI SWAT teams, police officers from surrounding counties. Law enforcement moved in lines two or three deep, pushing the demonstrators out of the building's east doors.

With their guns drawn, officers teamed up and began searching the Capitol, clearing rooms one by one. Members of Congress were now huddled with their staff, cowering petrified behind furniture they had piled against their office doors.

The first 150 or so members of the National Guard finally arrived at 5:40 p.m.

"I still cannot fathom why in the midst of an armed insurrection, which was broadcast worldwide on television, it took the Department of Defense over three hours to approve an urgent request for National Guard support," Sund wrote in his letter. In response to questions for this story, the National Guard sent a timeline that confirmed their 5:40 p.m. arrival and referred ProPublica to a press release stating they worked with Capitol and Metropolitan police "to assist with an immediate response."

At around 8 p.m., Capitol Police declared the complex secure. It was pitch-black outside by the time the riot squad that fought on the west front reunited. There was little conversation. They sat exhausted on the steps by the Memorial Door, helmets at their feet, staring at each other in disbelief. Some hugged each other. Others cried.

One saw that he had missed 17 calls and nearly 100 text messages. High school friends he hadn't spoken to in years reached out on Instagram. In text after text, the same words: "I saw the news." "Call me when you get this." "I love you."

The messages made some of the news coverage that came later, in which police were accused of siding with the mob, easier to stomach. He knew nothing he had done that day could be construed as complicit with the rioters. It looked like at least some of his friends and relatives knew it too.

Several officers said they didn't get home until the early morning hours of the next day. One said when he got home he went straight to his washing machine to put his bear-spray-soaked uniform into a cold-water wash. Another said that he could not get rid of the smell or the itch of the chemicals for days.

For a week afterward, one officer said, he cried nightly. Three Capitol Police officers died in early January: Brian Sicknick, who was beaten over the head with a fire extinguisher; Howard Liebengood, who died by suicide following the riot; and Eric Marshall, who died of cancer four days before the riot. Almost 140 Capitol and Metropolitan police officers were injured, according to a union statement. One had two cracked ribs and two smashed spinal discs.

A week or so later, McFaden and union chair Gus Papathanasiou met with leadership for the first time since Sund's resignation on Jan. 7. Acting Chief Pittman, Assistant Chief Chad Thomas and other senior officers were in attendance.

Loyd, the inspector who had thrown punches on the west front, was also there. McFaden had the sense that Loyd was only brought in to defuse tension with the union, which had more questions than leadership had answers.

Pittman acknowledged that the force was in a dark place and a culture change was sorely needed. But McFaden said the acting chief quickly became taciturn. When she was asked where she and her fellow chiefs were during the riot and why they weren't on the radio, she dodged the question.

Meetings with union leadership usually last at least an hour, but after 30 minutes, McFaden said, Pittman got up to leave for another engagement.

The union leaders were enraged. They turned to Thomas and asked why he wasn't on the radio that day.

"He said he was trying to do that for like 10 to 15 seconds, and he couldn't get on the radio," McFaden said. "This event lasted for hours. ... I mean, come on." Pittman and Thomas did not respond to calls for comment.

It was only through Pittman's testimony at a closed Congressional briefing on Jan. 26 that most Capitol Police officers learned that the force did in fact have intelligence warnings of possible violence. She admitted that the department failed to adequately act on it.

The officers said they are still waiting for an apology. Many are looking for new jobs.

"Let's face it. Now the whole world knows where the vulnerabilities of the Capitol are," said one officer. "I don't trust the people above me to make decisions to bring me home safe."
Kirsten Berg and Zipporah Osei contributed reporting.

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"I Don't Trust the People Above Me": Riot Squad Cops Open Up About Disastrous Response to Capitol Insurrection

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Interviews with 19 current and former officers show how failures of leadership and communication put hundreds of Capitol cops at risk and allowed rioters to get dangerously close to members of Congress. The riot squad defending the embattled entrance to the west side of the U.S. Capitol was surrounded by violence.

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 Comparing Pinterest and Pocket for managing information :

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 Comparing Pinterest and Pocket for managing information :

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There is a significant difference between the information itself that can be found on the different platforms. Pinterest is clearly mainly photos that can sometimes bring you to links of similar photos. Pinterest allows you to save and pin photos and information. Pocket also allows you to save the information to your list and you can highlight and favorite certain stories and articles of your choice. Pinterest discover page is very altered to the images you save or pin and on pocket it is the same but also gives you different varies of topics still.

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Pocket seems to hold much more information than Pinterest as it contains many articles rather than focusing on images which is more like Pinterest. There is a article or piece on almost any topic you can think of and many of them are very interesting, like the ones I have linked, I learned interesting facts that I will keep in mind in the future. The articles and pieces range from entertainment pieces like the 'Framing Britney and the Empathy of a simple Timeline' to more factual and studied pieces like the 'Psychological Reactance' piece.

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The documentary Framing Britney Spears, the newest installment of the New York Times Presents series for FX and Hulu, is an hour-long deep dive into the history of the pop icon's rise to fame and fortune and her almost immediate media implosion. Its particular focus is on the "Free Britney" movement, an increasingly urgent call among Spears fans, and now her peers,for the court to release Britney from the legal conservatorship that gives her father, Jamie Spears, immense control over her career, her estate, her relationships, and her health. It is a thorough, considerate, and enraging hour, giving careful attention to Spears's unusual legal status and also to the nightmarish storm of media obsession that drove so much of her public image.

Over the past several years there've been a few of these major reconsiderations of women who were once widely portrayed as irredeemable disasters - messes, trash, villains, laughingstocks - and who look quite different with even a few years of distance. Britney Spears joins a list that includes Monica Lewinsky, Anita Hill, Marcia Clark, Lorena Bobbitt, and Tonya Harding, an unbelievably tragic list of women whose entire lives were destroyed by media depictions that failed, first and foremost, to treat them as human beings.

There's a simple decision in Framing Britney Spears, though, that seems like a neutral, painfully obvious storytelling choice. By and large, the hour runs through Spears's life with a detailed, chronological timeline. There's a little bit of foreshadowing here and there; it starts with the existence of the "Free Britney" movement and then jumps back to explain how we got to this place. But mostly, Framing Britney Spears makes the call to just walk through Britney's life, step by step.

For big buzzy documentaries in the past year, a clear, straightforward, and mostly chronological rehashing of the subject's life goes weirdly against the grain. , , The Last Dance, and the earlier docuseries Surviving R. Kellyeach bounced through events with a willy-nilly frenzy. There's appeal in fucking with and distorting the timeline: Filmmakers can create surprise reveals, hold back interesting information in order to punch up cliffhangers, and generally soup up the overall drama of a story by leaping around through history. For the gain of an extra-exciting narrative, though, the cost is often coherence, legibility, and a basic relationship between cause and effect.

I figured I knew all that, watching Tiger King and The Vow. I knew that those series' willingness to hop around in time was probably confusing some elements of the story, and knew that if it was illuminating some aspects of the culture they were trying to describe, the timeline confusion was likely also obscuring other truths about the lived experiences of the participants. But it wasn't until Framing Britney Spears, directed and produced by the Times' Samantha Stark,that I appreciated exactly how much a straightforward, chronological timeline can be not just an aid for audience coherence, but a tool of radical empathy for the people at the center of the story.

Without the linear outline of Britney's time in the spotlight that Framing Britney Spears buildsitself around, what now stands out to me as acentral, fundamental event in Spears's life might've remained a footnote. At the height of her career in the early 2000s, she got married to Kevin Federline, quickly got pregnant in her early 20s, had two children who were born only 12 months apart, and then divorced her husband very shortly after her second child was born. Everything in Spears's "downfall" - the shaved head, the umbrella incident with a paparazzi's car, the question of her fitness as a mother, the apparently sudden frustration with all her media attention, the newly troubling partying, the in-treatment care, everything - came right after she had two small children in the middle of a fracturing marriage.

If you cast those events as separate from Britney's life experiences, if you cut them away from the plain chronology of her life, they look like something intrinsic and troubling about who Britney is as a person. She seems unstable, with no particular cause for being so except that she's unhinged and uncontrollable. The subsequent conservatorship, where her father takes control of her body as well as her finances, looks like comfortable paternalism because she needs some paternalism. She's out of control! Of course she needs someone to take a firm hand in her life.

But seen in the context of the events that had immediately preceded Britney's public meltdowns, the "problem" of Britney Spears that needs to be solved looks instead like a deep, incredibly painful and unaddressed trauma, played out in public without her consent. I can't say whether Spears was experiencing postpartum depression, of course, and the documentary doesn't pursue that path very far. It does mention that Spears's mother Lynne raised the possibility at the time, though, and it presents a clip of Spears in an interview while she's pregnant with her second child, growing extremely emotional as she describes the pain of her private life being under such intense public scrutiny at that point in her life."I feel like they're taking cheap shots," she tells interviewer Matt Lauer. (Ugh.) "What do you think it'll take to get the paparazzi to leave you alone?" Lauer asks. "I don't know," she says, and starts to cry.

The talking-head narrators of Framing Britney Spears (who include, among others, New York Times senior editor Liz Day and critic-at-large Wesley Morris)do not put the question bluntly to the audience, but the timeline nevertheless offers an implicit criticism of the widespread public perception of Spears. How could we have mocked this one aspect of her life, while ignoring everything that came before? How could we question her fitness as a parent, while utterly failing to empathize with her circumstances as a parent? How could we be such enthralled consumers of her personal life, while cheerfully ignoring the blatant, incredible stresses of her personal life?

The as-it-happenedtreatment of Spears's life presents a fuller, more empathetic picture of her, and it also emphasizes something distinct and distinctly awful about the arc of her public image. She begins her music career as a teenager who, like most teens, wants to be seen as an adult. But in Spears's case, the issue of her age becomes a core tension in her career. At the height of "Oops, I Did It Again," she is simultaneously too young and too old, which is the spark of her appeal and the engine of most Spears controversy. She's seen as having too much agency: She's too powerful for men to resist, and she lures young kids into behaving as she does. And yet by the time Spears is actually an adult, a parent with her own children, she's seen as an uncontrollable child. Her father is justified in stepping in to infantilize her, to take away her agency at exactly the moment when she's old enough to wield it responsibly.

As much as anything else, Britney's story is about never being the right age to take charge of your own life. It's an illogical and unwinnable trap, and while I think that element would be visible in any thoughtful analysis of Britney's media portrayal, it's just devastatingly palpable when presented against the unembellished timeline of her life. She gets older, but the media depiction of her somehow goes backward: She's a teen too grown-up; an adult too childlike.

Framing Britney Spears made me long for a more considerate treatment of chronological time in most documentary frameworks, even those like The Vow or Tiger King that have to stretch their stories across many episodes and rely on timeline messiness to help amp up the tension. It's not going to be the case for every documentary, but for so many of the high-drama public deep dives into salacious material, some meaningful consideration of the timeline might be surprisingly revelatory. People experience their lives as one event after another. Honestportraits of people should consider doing the same.

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Framing Britney and the Empathy of a Simple Timeline

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The documentary Framing Britney Spears , the newest installment of the New York Times Presents series for FX and Hulu, is an hour-long deep dive into the history of the pop icon's rise to fame and fortune and her almost immediate media implosion.

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In our daily lives, we don't invert our bodies enough. This little stretch before going to sleep helps to open up the chest and get some blood flowing to the heart and brain. It feels good too!

For people who are hunched over their desk at an office, it also relieves some of the damage.

Streaming services want you to watch more, they want you to be addicted to their service. I used to end up watching 3 episodes in a row when I planned to watch one because I was too lazy to stop when the next episode auto-played.

Turn the feature off and make sure your control is next to the TV so you physically have to get up to continue watching. It gives you a circuit breaker to choose to do something else with your time and move your body.

There are so many things we can buy to make us lazier and make us do less work. Do you really need Alexa to turn the lights on and off rather than walking over to the switch yourself?

Work out how many steps/calories buying the product will cost you and make sure you replace it if you decide to buy. Don't cut out simple everyday movements to make time to not go to the gym.

The Chair Testis used by doctors to test functional fitness. If you are young and healthy it might sound easy but it's a key ability that diminishes as we age and can reduce our quality of life. Modern life means we sit for long periods which can weaken our muscles and make it harder to stand.

This doesn't mean you need to break your back squatting at the gym. Try sneaking in a few squats whenever you finish in the bathroom. It might only be 10 squats a day but over time, it adds up.

Balance is overlooked until it's gone. How incredible is it that most of us can go about the majority of our lives and stay steady on our feet? After injuries or with old age, balance can decrease and contribute to painful falls.

The time you can spend standing on one leg is a great indicator of overall brain health too. I sneak balance training into my day by standing on my left leg when I brush my teeth in the morning and on my right in the evening. I wobbled a lot at the start but now I can hold 2 minutes on each leg without a problem.
: Dan Schmelter, a 75-year-old from Indiana, goes the extra mile. He uses brushing time as the beginning of a stretching routine that he continues after his electric toothbrush pings to say time is up. He varies this every day to keep nimble. Thanks for sharing!
Despite a decade in martial arts, I had awful posture because of the way I sat when using a computer. The gap I left between my butt and the backrest of the chair weakened my back muscles.

I don't aim for perfect posture, I only make sure my butt is always flush against the backrest. By doing this, the other aspects of good seated posture feel more natural.

Here's a secret, mobile apps are designed to make you enjoy using them as much as possible. It's good business sense and they want your attention. Yet mobile websites are far more clunky because developers have far less freedom to create a great experience for you.

If you want to spend less time on your phone then choose the poorer user experience. Anyone who has used Instagram's mobile website will know it's far harder to become addicted and as an extra win, you don't receive any notifications!

Surprisingly, humans didn't evolve to spend half their waking hours staring at a screen. The 20-20-20 rule is simple:

Set a timer for every 20 minutes to look away from a screen for 20 seconds at an object 20 feet away.

Make sure to blink while you are focused on the object in the distance too. While following this rule isn't a license to spend 16 hours in a computer chair, it can help reduce the strain on your eyes.

I'm willing to bet 99% of the time, most people don't get a call in the middle of the night that they needed to deal with urgently. We don't need to sleep with our phones.

Blue light late at night messes with our body clock and waking up with a need to check your phone instantly screams addiction. Take back control of your mornings by leaving your phone in another room on airplane mode. At the very least you'll have extra motivation to get out of bed and start your day.

I didn't have Twitter until this year and I wasn't ready for the constant outrage. The trending bar at the side is almost always some kind of drama I don't need to know about.

Several people I followed for their insights used their platform to post rants about dubious information. I did myself a favor and unfollowed people who wanted to enrage rather than inform me. How Twitter sees an event often isn't how it actually plays out.

Research found people who shopped on an empty stomach were more likely to impulse buy food to meet their cravings. Whatever diet works best for you is what you want to stick to and it's easier to avoid temptations when your belly is satisfied.

I've made the mistake of going shopping just before dinner and coming back with a pack of cookies to eat while I cook.

It can take 15-20 minutes for our brain to register that we are full as we process our food. If you jump straight into dessert, you'll only feel the bloating and food coma effects afterward!

We can confuse hunger and thirst pretty easily and many adults are chronically dehydrated. Try drinking a glass of water before your meal to be sure you're eating because you are actually hungry.

You've probably heard the drink a glass of water advice when you wake up. But do you do it? Instead, bring the body out of its dehydrated state because there's already a glass staring at you in the morning when you get up. Put it in front of your alarm so you can't ignore it.

We don't need sugar in tea and coffee. We don't really need sugar in most places it's added but hot drinks are one of the few places where we do the deed ourselves.

Most of us get more than enough sugar as it is judging from the diabetes explosion in the western world. The great thing about stopping this sugar habit is your taste buds adjust after a couple of weeks so you won't miss it.

The cosmetics and make-up industry is booming yet many of us neglect to protect our skin. Even when it's cold or cloudy, UV rays from the sun can still do damage. It's not only about having skin that looks youthful but it prevents skin cancer too.

The easiest way is to pick a moisturizer that includes a sun protection factor of at least 30. It's such a small change, why wouldn't you make it?

If you live in a country with a cold and dark winter like me, you are probably vitamin D deficient in this period. Vitamin D comes from sunlight naturally and helps regulate the immune system.

I leave my spray next to my toothbrush and it's near impossible for me to skip even if I'm in a rush.

Eating mindfully means you give your taste buds the chance to enjoy your food. It gives our minds much needed rest from being plugged in all the time and helps us work out when we are full so we don't overeat.

I found this hard when I started doing it, which says a lot about how addicted to my smartphone I was. If it's the same for you, it should shock you into knowing change is needed.

It's easy to stick to foods we know we like but the human body is designed for a variety of nutritional sources. Modern supermarkets have a huge variety of fresh food available so it's easy to grab a new one on top of your usual shop each time.

The different colors of vegetables signify different essential nutrients so by mixing things up we reduce our chances of severe deficiencies. As a bonus, you'll find new healthy foods you like the taste of and can get more of in the future!

The average American checks their phone 52 times a day. Yet according to breathing experts like Rangan Chatterjee and James Nestor, we rarely breathe as deeply as we should.

We can pair up our instinct to check our phones with a reaction of taking a deep breath. Before you touch your phone, breathe in for 3 seconds, hold it for 4 seconds, and release for 5 seconds. This trains us to improve our breathing capability and introduces a delay where there's a chance we'll decide we don't need our phone anyway.

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20 Realistic Micro-Habits To Live Better Every Day

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In our daily lives, we don't invert our bodies enough. This little stretch before going to sleep helps to open up the chest and get some blood flowing to the heart and brain. It feels good too! For people who are hunched over their desk at an office, it also relieves some of the damage.

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You're reading this with a cup of coffee in your hand, aren't you? Coffee is the most popular drink in many parts of the world. Americans drink more coffee than soda, juice and tea - combined.

How popular is coffee? When news first broke that Prince Harry and Meghan were considering Canada as their new home, Canadian coffee giant Tim Hortons offered free coffee for life as an extra enticement.

Given coffee's popularity, it's surprising how much confusion surrounds how this hot, dark, nectar of the gods affects our biology.

Coffee's ingredients

The main biologically active ingredients in coffee are caffeine (a stimulant) and a suite of antioxidants. What do we know about how caffeine and antioxidants affect our bodies? The fundamentals are pretty simple, but the devil is in the details and the speculation around how coffee could either help or harm us runs a bit wild.

The stimulant properties of caffeine mean that you can count on a cup of coffee to wake you up. In fact, coffee, or at least the caffeine it contains, is the most commonly used psychoactive drug in the world. It seems to work as a stimulant, at least in part, by blocking adenosine, which promotes sleep, from binding to its receptor.

Caffeine and adenosine have similar ring structures. Caffeine acts as a molecular mimic, filling and blocking the adenosine receptor, preventing the body's natural ability to be able a rest when it's tired.

This blocking is also the reason why too much coffee can leave you feeling jittery or sleepless. You can only postpone fatigue for so long before the body's regulatory systems begin to fail, leading to simple things like the jitters, but also more serious effects like anxiety or insomnia. Complications may be common; a possible link between coffee drinking and insomnia was identified more than 100 years ago.

Unique responses

Different people respond to caffeine differently. At least some of this variation is from having different forms of that adenosine receptor, the molecule that caffeine binds to and blocks. There are likely other sites of genetic variation as well.

There are individuals who don't process caffeine and to whom drinks like coffee could pose medical danger. Even away from those extremes, however, there is variation in how we respond to that cup of coffee. And, like much of biology, that variation is a function of environment, our past coffee consumption, genetics and, honestly, just random chance.

We may be interested in coffee because of the oh-so-joyous caffeine buzz, but that doesn't mean that caffeine is the most biologically interesting aspect of a good cup of coffee.

In one study using rats, caffeine triggered smooth muscle contraction, so it is possible that caffeine directly promotes bowel activity. Other studies, though, have shown that decaffeinated coffee can have as strong an effect on bowel activity as regular coffee, suggesting a more complex mechanism involving some of the other molecules in coffee.

Antioxidant benefits

What about the antioxidants in coffee and the buzz that surrounds them? Things actually start out pretty straightforward. Metabolic processes produce the energy necessary for life, but they also create waste, often in the form of oxidized molecules that can be harmful in themselves or in damaging other molecules.

Antioxidants are a broad group of molecules that can scrub up dangerous waste; all organisms produce antioxidants as part of their metabolic balance. It is unclear if supplementing our diet with additional antioxidants can augment these natural defences, but that hasn't stopped speculation.

Antioxidants have been linked to almost everything, including premature ejaculation.

Are any of the claims of positive effects substantiated? Surprisingly, the answer is again a resounding maybe.

Coffee and cancer

Coffee won't cure cancer, but it may help to prevent it and possibly other diseases as well. Part of answering the question of coffee's connection to cancer lies in asking another: what is cancer? At its simplest, cancer is uncontrolled cell growth, which is fundamentally about regulating when genes are, or are not, actively expressed.

My research group studies gene regulation and I can tell you that even a good cup of coffee, or boost of caffeine, won't cause genes that are turned off or on at the wrong time to suddenly start playing by the rules.

The antioxidants in coffee may actually have a cancer-fighting effect. Remember that antioxidants fight cellular damage. One type of damage that they may help reduce is mutations to DNA, and cancer is caused by mutations that lead to the misregulation of genes.

Studies have shown that consuming coffee fights cancer in rats. Other studies in humans have shown that coffee consumption is associated with lower rates of some cancers.

Interestingly, coffee consumption has also been linked to reduced rates of other diseases as well. Higher coffee consumption is linked to lower rates of Parkinson's disease and some other forms of dementia. Strikingly, at least one experimental study in mice and cell culture shows that protection is a function of a combination of caffeine and antioxidants in coffee.

Higher coffee consumption has also been linked to lower rates of Type 2 diabetes. Complexity, combined effects and variation between individuals seems to be the theme across all the diseases.

At the end of the day, where does all this leave us on the biology of coffee? Well, as I tell my students, it's complicated. But as most reading this already know, coffee will definitely wake you up in the morning.
Thomas Merritt is a Professor and Canada Research Chair, Chemistry and Biochemistry, at Laurentian University.

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The Biology of Coffee, One of the World's Most Popular Drinks

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You're reading this with a cup of coffee in your hand, aren't you? Coffee is the most popular drink in many parts of the world. Americans drink more coffee than soda, juice and tea - combined. How popular is coffee?

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When researchers make a joke in the title of an academic paper, you know what's inside is going to be good.

Here's the title I'm referencing: "A 50-year review of psychological reactance theory: Do not read this article."

How did you feel when you read the phrase "Do not read this article"?

If you thought "now I'm definitely going to read the article," then you got the joke and experienced the phenomenon described in the paper: psychological reactance.

Psychological reactance is our knee-jerk negative reaction to being told what to do.

It's why when you werea teenager and your mom told you to put on your jacket before going out, you'd probably not put on your jacket - just 'cause. Only later did you realize you should have taken your mom's advice as you hear your teeth chattering in the cold.

It's the reason you bristle when your manager asks you to do a task and you grumble to yourself about being micromanaged. Later you realize the task was critical to winning that big project and you promoting your career.

We hate the feeling of being bossed around, even when doing as we're told is good for us.

According to researchers, almost everyone has this mental reflex against being told what to do. It kicks in whenever we feel that our freedom or autonomy is threatened.
We often do things against our best interests because we want to protect our freedom to behave the way we want.
Psychological reactance isn't inherently bad. If people are too compliant, they're vulnerable to manipulation. But psychological reactance can, at times, prevent us from doing things that we should do, sometimes even things we want to do - like be helpful to others.

Recently, as I was clearing the dishes from the dinner table, I asked my daughter if she could wash the dishes. "I was going to, dad!" She said. "But now that you asked me to, I don't want to anymore." Ahh, reactance strikes again! I should have known better.

Psychological reactance can sabotage you in bizarre, even ironic ways. For example, that knee-jerk impulse of "don't tell me what to do!" can kick in even when it's you telling yourself what to do.

This is particularly common when you're trying to make commitments and follow through on them by building a schedule, a technique I recommend in my book, Indistractable.

You may have scheduled time for something that you legitimately want to do - say, working out or reading a nonfiction book. But when it comes time to start exercising or sit down to read per your schedule, you might feel a bit of reactance.

Even though you yourself are the one who's telling you what to do, you may still react against being told what to do. Crazy, right?

This occurs because, at the moment, it doesn't feel like you telling yourself what to do. Rather, it's you from the past, when you made your schedule, telling yourself what to do right now.

Psychologists tell us this paradox is why we're often hypocrites - saying we'll do something, but when the time comes, we don't.

Now that you understand psychological reactance, you have the power to recognize and disarm it. Instead of flaking on commitments because of a knee-jerk feeling, you can change your perspective on the situation.

To disarm psychological reactance, you need to change the way you talk to yourself. Instead of thinking you "have to" do something, tell yourself you "get to" do it.

By changing the dialogue, you empower yourself. Now you're in charge. You're not being told what to do; you're choosing to make time for something that matters to you.

Your freedom isn't being threatened; it's being exercised.

Disarming psychological reactance takes practice, but it's worth learning how to deal with this uncomfortable feeling that all too often leads us off track.

Try changing the way you deal with reactance and until then - whatever you do, don't share this article!
- Nir Eyal is a former Lecturer at Stanford and is the bestselling author of Nir offers a complimentary Indistractable workbook on his blog, NirAndFar.com Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products and Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life. Indistractable won numerous honors and was named one of the Best Books of the Year by Amazon.

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Psychological Reactance: Why We Sabotage Our Own Goals

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When researchers make a joke in the title of an academic paper, you know what's inside is going to be good. Here's the title I'm referencing: "A 50-year review of psychological reactance theory: Do not read this article." How did you feel when you read the phrase "Do not read this article"?

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Col. Paris Davis, who retired from the U.S. Army Special Forces, photographed this month in Alexandria, Va. While fighting in the Vietnam War in 1965, Mr. Davis performed a stunning series of heroic acts during an 18-hour battle, including dragging three wounded men to safety after he had been shot five times. Credit... Michael A. McCoy for The New York Times

Comrades repeatedly told the Army that Capt. Paris Davis, one of the first Black officers in the Special Forces, deserved the Medal of Honor. The Army kept losing the paperwork.

Col. Paris Davis, who retired from the U.S. Army Special Forces, photographed this month in Alexandria, Va. While fighting in the Vietnam War in 1965, Mr. Davis performed a stunning series of heroic acts during an 18-hour battle, including dragging three wounded men to safety after he had been shot five times. Credit... Michael A. McCoy for The New York Times

Capt. Paris Davis was in the thick of a pre-dawn raid on an enemy camp in Vietnam when a grenade blasted out several of his teeth and, more troubling, tore off part of his trigger finger. Then enemy fire started pelting the Special Forces team he commanded. His most experienced sergeant was shot down. Then the demolitions specialist. Then the only medic.

It was June 18, 1965, and according to after-action reports, 26-year-old Captain Davis was suddenly the last American standing with a ragtag company of 90 South Vietnamese volunteers, pinned down by hundreds of enemy troops.

Certain that he was as good as dead, he began fighting without fear of consequence, pulling his M-16 trigger with his pinkie, sprinting repeatedly into open ground to rescue teammates, and refusing to leave the fight, even after being shot several times.

He made it out alive, and was immediately nominated for the military's highest award, the Medal of Honor. But the Army somehow lost the nomination. His frustrated commander resubmitted it, and inexplicably the nomination disappeared again.

His teammates pushed several more times over the years for the medal, only to be met, they said, with silence and indifference. They eventually came to believe the Army's inaction had nothing to do with what the captain had done in 1965, and everything to do with who he was: One of the first Black officers in the Special Forces.

"What other assumption can you make?" said Ron Deis, 77, who was the youngest soldier on the team in 1965 and is one of a group of veterans who are still pressing for Mr. Davis to receive the award.

"We all knew he deserved it then," Mr. Deis said during an interview from his home in Anchorage, as he wiped away tears. "He sure as hell deserves it now."

After 55 years of trying, the group got a sign of hope in January. Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher C. Miller personally ordered an expedited review of the lost nomination, to be completed by March. The resulting report will then go up the chain to the Secretary of the Army, the Secretary of Defense and finally President Biden. If they all sign off, Mr. Davis, now 81, may finally be recognized.

The Army declined to comment on the award, or answer questions about the reasons for earlier delays, saying in a statement that its policy is not to discuss any award until a final decision is made.

In a recent video interview from his home in Arlington, Va., Mr. Davis, who retired from the Army as a colonel in 1985 after a highly decorated career,shook his head and smiled at the mention of the long delayed submission. He downplayed the significance of "all this stuff, medals and all that," adding, "People need to keep on keepin' on," he said. "We've got to make this a better world. That's how I feel."

Image

Capt. Paris Davis, center, gave a tour of his camp in South Vietnam to the commander of U.S. forces there, Gen. William Westmoreland, left. Credit... via Ron Deis

Over generations, there are examples of the military struggling with bias when it came to recognizing valor. In the segregated forces that served in World Wars I and II, no Black soldiers were awarded the Medal of Honor, despite clear examples of selfless heroism. It was only decades later that some presidents worked to correct past injustices, but veterans' groups say there remains much more to be done.

When Captain Davis took command of a Special Forces team in 1965, he was a tough but thoughtful college graduate with soft-spoken Midwestern humility, his fellow soldiers said. The son of a foundry worker in Ohio, he had studied political science on an R.O.T.C. scholarship at Southern University in Louisiana, played football and was named an All-American at halfback. In the Army, his quick mind and explosive strength earned him a spot in the elite and unruly Special Forces.

He arrived in Vietnam a month after the bloody civil rights march in Selma, Ala., at a time when the Special Forces, like the country as a whole, were fraught with racial tension. As a rare Black officer in the Special Forces, he was warned by his commander, he would have to work twice as hard.

"You're going to have an all-white team, and you have some guys from Alabama and one from Mississippi - it could be a rough thing," Mr. Davis recalled his commander saying.

The young captain tried to be friendly, but told his men straight away that if they called him anything besides "sir," he wouldn't waste time reporting them, he would just knock them to the ground.

The team was airdropped in a remote farming district of Binh Dinh Province, a thoroughfare for enemy troops heading south, where they were to train a force of local volunteers. The United States would eventually send thousands of troops to try to hold that province, but in early 1965, Captain Davis's team numbered just 12.

He recalled that, as his commander had warned, not all of the men liked taking orders from a Black officer. But combat became a powerful unifier, and over time the team grew close.

Soldiers forget race when they are fighting together, Captain Davis said in a 1969 television interview. "We're a kin. Not ethnically, but by virtue of being Americans."

As the June 18 raid began, he and three other Special Forces soldiers crept silently through the jungle before the sun was up, leading a file of South Vietnamese troops to strike an enemy camp. Captain Davis and the team's master sergeant, a Texan named Billy Waugh, stormed into the enemy commander's hut and killed him at close range, according to witness statements and Army records. Then the team surged through the camp, throwing grenades and shooting everything that moved. Caught sleeping, scores of North Vietnamese troops died in their cots, while others fled into the jungle.

The captain was congratulating the team on a successful raid when enemy bugles sounded, announcing a counterattack by a much larger force.

Mr. Davis holds a photo of himself taken during his Army days. The Pentagon is conducting an expedited review of his nomination for the Medal of Honor. Credit... Michael A. McCoy for The New York Times

The team was pushed back into a muddy rice paddy with no cover. A sniper bullet shattered the knee of Master Sergeant Waugh, and two more splintered his foot. On the edge of the paddy, the team's weapons specialist was knocked out by a mortar blast, and the medic was shot through the head.

Captain Davis and his company of local volunteers took refuge on a small hill, and spent the next 10 hours holding off waves of attackers, some getting close enough that he killed one with the butt of his M-16.

When American fighter jets bombed the enemy's positions, instead of taking cover, Captain Davis used the distraction to sprint out and rescue his wounded teammates, the after-action reports show. First he brought in the weapons specialist. Then he ran to get the master sergeant, but was shot through the leg and had to retreat. During the next bomb strike, he limped back out across the rice field and grabbed the sergeant. A bullet clipped Captain Davis's arm this time, but he hoisted the sergeant over his shoulder and carried him back to safety.

Reinforcements arrived and found Captain Davis wounded and covered in blood. The major in command ordered him to evacuate, but he refused, saying he still needed to rescue his medic.

Under the cover of friendly fire, he lurched again into the open, grabbed the wounded medic and started crawling back. "Am I going to die?" he recalled the medic mumbling to him. His reply: "Not before me."

All four of the Special Forces soldiers made it out alive that day. Master Sergeant Waugh went on to a storied 40-year career as a C.I.A. agent. Now 91, Mr. Waugh declined to be interviewed for this article, saying his memory was failing. In a summary of the battle he wrote in 2016, Mr. Waugh wrote about his former commander, "I only have to close my eyes to vividly recall the gallantry."

Knowing that Captain Davis's heroism easily cleared the bar for the Medal of Honor, his commander, Maj. Billy J. Cole, immediately submitted his name. "He has showed as much cold courage as any human I've ever heard of," Major Cole proudly told the newspaper that covered their home base at Fort Benning, Ga.

But nothing happened. The major pushed for an inquiry. In 1969, a hearing determined that no record of the original nomination could be found and directed the Army to resubmit it. The file disappeared again.

Over the decades since then, men from the team petitioned their senators to revive the matter, without success. Major Cole, who died in 2003, grew so frustrated that in later years he wondered aloud if the obstacle might be race, according to his daughter, Carol Cole, who helped him write a memoir. She said that failing to get the medal for Captain Davis "was one of his greatest regrets."

The cause was picked up in 2014 by a group of veterans and volunteers who specialize in winning recognition for overlooked Special Forces soldiers. They pieced together tattered newspaper clippings, yellowed Army files and firsthand accounts, and got their work into the hands of high-ranking Pentagon officials who moved the award forward.

After the Army, Mr. Davis started a small newspaper in Virginia called The Metro Herald, for 30 years regularly publishing articles about the accomplishments of Black residents and local civil rights issues. During that time, he said in the interview, he gave little thought to why he had repeatedly run into danger in 1965 to save his men, or why the medal nomination kept getting lost.

"I use this term a lot: Life suddens upon you, it just suddens upon you," he said. "Every day, something comes up that you don't expect."

After some thought, he smiled and added, "I'm not a victim of anything. The other night, I tried to write down the things I'm a victim of. I couldn't think of a thing."

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A Black Soldier's Heroism, Overlooked in 1965, May Finally Be Lauded in 2021

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Comrades repeatedly told the Army that Capt. Paris Davis, one of the first Black officers in the Special Forces, deserved the Medal of Honor. The Army kept losing the paperwork. Col. Paris Davis, who retired from the U.S. Army Special Forces, photographed this month in Alexandria, Va.

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