So Election Day is over, but the election continues.
The world’s attention has turned to a set of swing states still counting important mail-in votes, particularly Pennsylvania. So what exactly is happening today? How are counts happening? Is the election fair and secure?
“I urge everyone to remain patient,” Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar said in a press conference today, “We are going to accurately count every single ballot.”
“The vote count, as I’ve said many times, is never done on the day of election night. The counties are doing this accurately as quickly as they possibly can.”
Across the state, mail-in ballots postmarked on or before Election Day are still arriving—don’t forget there have been significant postal delays—and so counting continues. The Republican state legislature declined to change Pennsylvania law, which meant that processing of over 2.5 million mail-in votes could only begin on Tuesday morning, while other states started the process much earlier. So the processing starts later, the counting starts later, and the work is greater for mail-in ballots.
“The practical labor associated with mail-in ballots has more steps than in-person voting,” said Eddie Perez, a Texas-based election administration expert with the nonpartisan OSET Institute. But, he added, “Both in human and technology features, there’s a lot of safeguards for mail-in ballots.”
Here’s a concise but thorough rundown of the counting, security, and integrity process right now in Pennsylvania:
Ballots and envelopes were sent out only to registered and verified voters who requested them.
Election officials receive the ballot and envelope within three days of Election Day—although this deadline may be challenged by Republicans.
Officials verify that each ballot is associated with the exact, eligible voter on the rolls.
Ballots are validated with voter records in exactly the same way as in-person votes.
To prevent fraud, each ballot and envelope has computer-readable codes and exact physical features like style, size, weight, and design that allow the computers to identify which specific elections, precincts, content, and additional validation information the vote applies to.
Signatures on the ballot envelopes are matched against a central database by bipartisan teams.
Envelopes are opened and paperwork removed in a specific and legally-mandated procedure.
Ballots that fail to pass these security measures are sent for further investigation, or for follow-up with the voter.
Decades of history, independent study, and these extra security steps explain why mail-in ballots are not easily susceptible to fraud, and why attempts to paint them as frail are baseless disinformation, a false narrative propagated first and foremost by the president of the United States. In decades of increasing mail-in voting around the United States, widespread fraud is nonexistent.
The Trump campaign, having now lost in the key swing state of Wisconsin, has said it will sue in Michigan and Pennsylvania to stop the ongoing counting of ballots, while falsely claiming victory despite many votes still remaining uncounted. Votes counted earlier in the process favor Trump, while the mail-in votes from Democratic areas that are still being counted are expected to favor Biden.
The counting in Pennsylvania could carry on through Friday.
There is one more scenario to address. Pennsylvania automatically recounts votes if the result is within 0.5%. A loser can request and pay for a recount by going to court and alleging errors in the vote count.
So far there is no reason to believe any such errors have occurred but, as has been said so many times, there is still a long way to go in Pennsylvania—and that means there may still be a long way to go for everyone.
The election results will start to come in as early as 7pm Eastern Time on Tuesday, when seven states begin closing the polls. The next few hours will see more polls close around the country, more votes processed, more counts updated. But we won’t have the final result that night.
This isn’t unusual: In the US, counting votes and officially certifying them always goes on longer than Election Day, and the coronavirus means the counting will probably take longer than that. But on Sunday, Axios reported that President Trump intends to prematurely declare victory if it looks like he’s leading in the early returns, even if there are still millions of votes left to be counted. He has denied this specific claim, but it is in line with his long campaign to undermine the legitimacy of the election, and matches his promise to use lawyers to stop ballot counting in Pennsylvania as soon as polls close—even though the state will still have many mail-in ballots left to count and report.
So what exactly will happen if a candidate prematurely declares victory before the contest is truly over?
Social media
This the front line. Any premature declaration will likely hit American networks like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube first, so the way these platforms handle this kind of activity will inform what happens next. Those three sites are planning to use labeling to deal with this kind of disinformation.
Twitter, the president’s social media platform of choice, says it will prominently label misleading tweets about election results from candidates, as well as any viral tweet. Disputed announcements will be met with a label that says “Official sources may not have called the race when this was Tweeted.”
To confirm results, the company will be leaning on state and local election officials as well as major national news outlets with dedicated election coverage desks. At least two sources will have to confirm the results of a race before a candidate can tweet about results without a warning label being applied.
YouTube, which has been a top campaign advertising battleground, will place an information panel on videos prematurely declaring victory. That will link to Google’s election results feature, which is being produced in partnership with the Associated Press.
“We’ll also continue to raise up authoritative content from news organizations and reduce the spread of borderline election misinformation,” said Google spokesperson Ivy Choi. “Additionally, if a piece of content, in the course of prematurely declaring victory, misleads viewers about voting or encourages interference in democratic processes, we will remove that in accordance with our community guidelines.”
When the polls close, all Google’s ad platforms—including YouTube and its search engine—will pause ads that reference the 2020 election. That may cut off another potential avenue for disinformation across the company’s internet empire.
Facebook is placing its own hopes in labels as well, including a preemptive notification in news feeds to follow authoritative news outlets like Reuters and the Associated Press for election results. Facebook’s normal response to false news is to reduce its spread on the network and partner with fact-checkers for additional labeling.
Elsewhere, TikTok’s policy reduces the visibility of posts prematurely claiming victory and is working on an “expedited” schedule with fact checking partners around Election Day.
The 2020 “Support Black Lives at MIT” petition by the Black Graduate Student Association (BGSA) and Black Students’ Union (BSU): http://bgsa.mit.edu/sbl2020
What does America with defunded police look like? Here is one version:
.@AOC's answer to "what does defund the police look like?" was "a suburb" and that is totally gonna be my answer from now on pic.twitter.com/JIlIfngMCv
California Governor Gavin Newsom made a bold attempt today to ban sales of new gas-guzzling cars and trucks, marking a critical step in the state’s quest to become carbon neutral by 2045. But the effort to clean up the state’s largest source of climate emissions is almost certain to face serious legal challenges, particularly if President Donald Trump is re-elected in November.
Newsom issued an executive order that directs state agencies, including the California Air Resources Board, to develop regulations requiring every new passenger car and truck sold in the state to be zero-emissions vehicles by 2035. That pretty much limits future sales to electric vehicles (EVs) powered by batteries or hydrogen fuel cells. Similar rules would go into effect for most medium and heavy-duty vehicles by 2045.
If those rules are enacted, the roughly 2 million new vehicles sold in the state each year will all suddenly be EVs, providing a huge boost to the still nascent sector.
“California policy, especially automotive policy, has cascading effects across the US and even internationally, just because of the scale of our market,” says Alissa Kendall, professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Davis.
Indeed, the order would mean more auto companies will produce more EV lines, scaling up manufacturing and driving down costs. The growing market would, in turn, create greater incentives to build out the charging or hydrogen fueling infrastructure necessary to support it all.
The move also could make a big dent in transportation emissions. Passenger and heavy-duty vehicles together account for more than 35% of the state’s climate pollution, which has proven an especially tricky share to reduce in a sprawling state of car loving-residents (indeed, California’s vehicle emissions have been ticking up).
But Newsom’s executive order only goes so far. It doesn’t address planes, trains, or ships, and it could take another couple decades for residents to stop driving all the gas-powered vehicles already on the road.
Whether the rules go into effect at all, and to what degree, will depend on many variables, including what legal grounds the Air Resources Board uses to justify the policies, says Danny Cullenward, a lecturer at Stanford’s law school focused on environmental policy.
One likely route is for the board to base the new regulations on tailpipe emissions standards, which California has used in the past to force automakers to produce more fuel-efficient vehicles, and nudge national standards forward. But that approach may require obtaining a new waiver from the Environmental Protection Agency allowing the state to exceed the federal government’s vehicle emissions rules under the Clean Air Act, the source of an already heated battle between the state and the Trump administration.
Last year, Trump announced he would revoke California’s earlier waiver to set tighter standards, prompting the state and New York to sue. So whether California can pursue this route could depend on how courts view the issue and who is sitting in the White House come late January.
It’s very likely that the automotive industry will challenge the rules no matter how the state goes about drafting them. And the outcome of those cases could depend on which court it lands in—and, perhaps eventually, who is sitting on the Supreme Court.
But whatever legal hurdles it may face, California and other states need to rapidly cut auto emissions to have any hope of combating the rising threat of climate change, says Dave Weiskopf, senior policy advisor with NextGen Policy in Sacramento.
“This is what science requires and it’s the next logical step for state policy,” he says.
The news: Early on Monday, Reddit banned r/The_Donald, a once-notorious pro-Trump forum, for repeated rule-breaking. CEO Steve Huffman announced that it was just one of 2,000 subreddits banned by the site as it institutes rule changes designed to make the platform less accommodating to hateful and abusive communities.
The other news: Later in the day, livestreaming video service Twitch announced that it had temporarily suspended President Trump’s account for rebroadcasting comments about Mexican immigrants that broke its “hateful conduct and harassment policies.”
The other, other news: YouTube, meanwhile, followed by banning several far-right and racist creators, including white supremacists David Duke, Richard Spencer, and Stefan Molyneux.
Better late than never? Monday’s bans were preceded by policy changes at Twitter and Facebook that shifted, to a degree, how the platforms handle rule-breaking behavior by accounts linked to the president and the far right. r/The_Donald was once a core organizing point for the pro-Trump internet, with a record of bringing extremist content in front of bigger and bigger audiences. In late 2016, Huffman limited the reach of the subreddit after it figured out how to get the site’s algorithms to promote pro-Trump content. By then, r/The_Donald members were already involved in spreading the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, and volunteer moderators had asked Huffman to do more to fight the abuse and harassment their communities faced from r/The_Donald members.
But will it do anything? In reality, r/The_Donald had been nearly dormant for months, as the Washington Post noted—and most of the other banned subreddits were tiny or inactive. A few others were notable, however, including r/ChapoTrapHouse, associated with the left-wing podcast of the same name; and r/gendercritical, a “feminist” subreddit with more than 60,000 members that regularly promoted transphobic views.
In an advance towards conquering covid-19, doctors in Michigan say an antibody drug may sharply cut the chance patients on a ventilator will die.
The problem: The pandemic viral disease is infecting millions and for those who end up on a ventilator in an ICU, the odds are grim. More than half are dying.
The drug: Doctors at the University of Michigan set out to control the haywire immune reaction that pushes some covid-19 patients into a death spiral. To do it, they gave 78 patients on ventilators the drug tocilizumab, which blocks IL-6, a molecule in the body that sets off a reacting to an infection. (The drug is sold by Roche under the tradename Acterma.)
The result: The doctors say in a preprint that patients who got the drug were 45% less likely to die than those who didn’t. But there’s a big caveat to the result, which is that the doctors knew which patients got the drug, and which didn’t. Their picks could have been biased— people more likely to improve anyway, for example—so further studies are needed.
Emerging cocktail: In late May, Roche said it would start a trial to combine its IL-6 blocker combined with remdesivir, an antiviral drug with modest benefits that got emergency approval in the US for treating covid-19. That drug is meant to block the virus from replicating.
By combining the two drugs, doctors may be closing in on a cocktail able to cut the death rate from the virus, a step that would help society return to normal.
Four years ago, a Breitbart writer famed for championing a harassment campaign targeting women in video games used his air time during a White House press briefing to blast Twitter. He was angry that he’d lost his verification badge, that little blue check mark, after the company said he had repeatedly violated the platform’s rules against inciting harassment. But he insisted that Twitter was actually punishing him for something else.
“It’s becoming very clear,” Milo Yiannopoulos told Josh Earnest, then the press secretary for the Obama administration, in March of 2016, “that Twitter and Facebook in particular are censoring and punishing conservative and libertarian points of view.” Later that year, Twitter banned him entirely following his role in a harassment campaign against the actress Leslie Jones after she starred in a remake of Ghostbusters that swapped the original male lead roles for female ones, infuriating misogynists. In response, he claimed that Twitter was now a “a no-go zone for conservatives.”
Other conservative and far-right figures have regularly lodged similar complaints in the years since, depicting Twitter’s enforcement of its policies against abuse and misinformation as a crusade against anti-conservative bias; the charges have then filtered up into conservative and mainstream press coverage. But the issue came to a head this week, after Twitter appended fact-checks to two of President Trump’s tweets, noting that they contained misleading claims about mail-in voting.
Trump attacked the move as censorship and promised a response. He’s just signed an executive order that could penalize major social-media companies for perceived censorship of conservative views.
This moment feels like an inevitable escalation of a conflict that has been playing out across the major social-media companies, but particularly Twitter, for years—one that Yiannopoulos’s White House stunt foreshadowed. As platforms reckon with their role in amplifying misinformation, abuse, and extreme views, the arguments about content moderation that once lived on the fringes of Twitter’s rules increasingly involve people at the very center of mainstream power.
“Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices,” Trump tweeted to his 80 million followers this week. “We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen.” His comments were covered widely in the media, as are many of his more inflammatory or conspiratorial tweets.
Hours before news of the coming executive order broke, Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway went on Fox News and encouraged viewers to hound a Twitter employee, spelling out his account handle and blaming him for the decision to fact-check the president’s tweets. “Somebody in San Francisco go wake him up and tell him he’s about to get a lot more followers,” she said.
This cycle has been set off in the past when Twitter has rolled out new policies designed to protect targets of abuse, suspended far-right accounts for rule violations, or stepped up efforts to slow the spread of misinformation. It begins with waves of speculation arguing that Twitter isn’t actually, say, enforcing its new abuse policies but instead implementing a secret anti-conservative agenda that must be stopped. Then there’s a rush to find and target someone responsible for implementing it. The blueprint dates back at least to Gamergate, the harassment campaign championed by Yiannopoulos targeting women in video-game development, whose supporters also claimed instead to be fighting a conspiracy against them ( “It’s actually about ethics in gaming journalism”).
The president uses his own account to continually test Twitter’s boundaries, and now he’s become the catalyst for a new cycle. In just the past week, he’s used his platform to amplify conspiracy theories suggesting that MSNBC host Joe Scarborough murdered a staffer and to spread misinformation about mail-in voting in an earlier series of tweets that were not subject to fact-check labels. He thanked a “Cowboys for Trump” account that tweeted a video where an unidentified man proclaimed that “the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.” (After cheers from the audience, the speaker then clarifies that he meant the comment “politically.”) The widower of the deceased staffer at the heart of the Scarborough conspiracy theory has begged Twitter to intervene.
The company had not taken any action against those tweets as of Thursday, although it has indicated that it is working to expand the labeling system that was used to flag some of Trump’s tweets about mail-in voting.
Until the fact-checking labels were introduced to two of Trump’s tweets on Tuesday, the platform had scrupulously avoided enforcing its rules against Trump’s account. Some explanations for the enforcement loopholes have cited the newsworthiness of otherwise rule-breaking content and Trump’s status as the head of a government.
But Trump, despite the lack of evidence to support claims of systemic social-media bias against conservatives, has repeatedly promised to take up the issue on behalf of some of his more prominent supporters. In 2018, he accused Google of “rigging” news search results against conservative media, repeating a version of a claim that Trump supporters—including vloggers Diamond and Silk—had circulated in conservative media for a few days earlier. Diamond and Silk (whose real names are Lynnette Hardaway and Rochelle Richardson) claimed at a House Judiciary Committee hearing that April that they were being “censored” by Facebook because of their support for Trump.
In 2019, Trump met with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and reportedly took the opportunity to complain about losing Twitter followers. On the same day as that meeting, Trump tweeted that the platform was “very discriminatory.” He later tweeted that his administration was “closely” monitoring conservatives’ complaints of censorship. Later that year, Trump held a “social-media summit” with dozens of his most passionate online supporters to air their collective complaints that Google, Facebook, and Twitter were censoring them.
None of these claims have to be true to be popular, which is something Trump and his online supporters know well. They just need to sound controversial enough to grab attention—or, better yet, redirect it from something else.
The news: Twitter added a fact checking label to two tweets from US President Donald Trump’s Twitter account on Tuesday. The tweets from @realDonaldTrump (the president’s popular personal account that also serves as his main social media presence) claimed that mail-in voting would be “substantially fraudulent” and lead to a “Rigged Election.” It is the first time that Twitter has labeled tweets from his account in this way.
What Twitter did: Twitter introduced new warning labels and fact checking messages earlier this month for tweets containing false or misleading information, including from world leaders. The labels on Trump’s tweets encourage users to “get the facts about mail-in ballots” and link to a Twitter-curated summary of the false claims and what third-party fact-checkers have to say about it. Since announcing the policy, Twitter has mainly applied these labels to tweets containing potentially harmful misinformation about covid-19.
There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent. Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed. The Governor of California is sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone…..
Why it took so long: Twitter has been reluctant to enforce its own rules against Trump’s tweets in the past. Although Trump has tweeted and retweeted many seemingly rule-breaking, a few loopholes protected him, including exceptions for tweets from government entities and considerations for the “newsworthiness” of an otherwise rule-breaking tweet. Last year, Twitter announced that, in rare cases, it would limit the reach of tweets from large accounts held by government officials that were in violation of its rules. The covid-19 “infodemic” has forced most social media platforms to change how they enforce their rules as potentially dangerous misinformation about the pandemic spreads.
What about Trump’s other misleading tweets? Over the past several days, the president has tweeted several other things that appeared to violate Twitter’s policies. Last Wednesday, Trump falsely tweeted that Nevada was sending out “illegal” vote-by-mail ballots, and promised to “hold up” funding to Nevada and Michigan if they pursued mail ballots for the presidential elections. Those tweets, according to Twitter at the time, did not violate their policies against election misinformation because they didn’t directly try to dissuade people from voting. The platform’s election integrity policies prohibit using Twitter for “the purpose of manipulating or interfering in elections or other civic processes.”
Twitter also declined to take action against some of Trump’s tweets promoting a false conspiracy theory suggesting that MSNBC host Joe Scarborough was, while serving in congress, responsible for the death of an intern in 2001. In fact, investigators found no evidence of foul play, and there is no mystery surrounding the cause of death. The widow of the staffer wrote a letter to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey last week asking him to remove the tweets. After the letter was published in the New York Times on Tuesday, Twitter released a statement saying that they were “deeply sorry about the pain these statements” caused, and that they were “working to expand existing product features and policies so we can more effectively address things like this going forward, and we hope to have those changes in place shortly.”
This report is part of “The global AI agenda,” a thought leadership program by MIT Technology Review Insights examining how organizations are using AI today and planning to do so in the future. Featuring a global survey of 1,004 AI experts conducted in January and February 2020, it explores AI adoption, leading use cases, benefits, and challenges, and seeks to understand how organizations might share data with each other to develop new business models, products, and services in the years ahead.
Within Asia-Pacific, how do executives see AI playing out in their business? What are the main use cases thus far, and what challenges do they face in AI deployment? The main findings of the report are as follows:
Some 56% of Asian respondents to our survey had deployed AI in their operations by 2017, compared with less than a third of North American respondents and 35% on average across other regions. By 2019, nearly 96% of Asian respondents reported AI deployments, above the 85% average of respondents from the other regions.
While AI is certainly a widely used technology, it is still at the fringes of many business processes. In line with the global trend, nearly half of survey respondents expect AI to be used in between 21% and 30% of business processes in three years’ time. A further 24% expect AI to touch up to 40% of business processes.
Our survey finds that enterprises in Asia are using AI most extensively today in IT management (selected by 62% of respondents as a top-three area for AI), followed by customer service and research and development. The area where AI is set to grow the fastest by 2022 is across sales and marketing departments.
Asia-Pacific is ahead of other regions in using AI for purposes such as the personalization of products and services and determining pricing. These trends are likely connected to the region’s leadership in e-commerce. Research company eMarketer estimates e-commerce across Asia-Pacific grew 25% in 2019 (faster than all other regions) to reach $2.271 trillion, representing 64.3% of global e-commerce spending.
The greatest benefits achieved thus far have been in improved risk management, accelerated time to market, and better management decision-making capabilities. Within these areas, Asia is seeing greater success than other regions.
My first taste of coronavirus panic came early one morning in January. An email with the heading important information please read arrived from our son’s elementary school, just minutes before we put him on the bus. The parents of one of his teachers, who had recently returned from China, had been infected—Singapore’s cases 8 and 9, as it turned out—and the teacher in question was being quarantined.
Singapore was among the first countries to suffer an outbreak. In the months since, it has been at once reassuring and unnerving to watch its journey from an early hot spot to a kind of haven state, holding out doggedly against an invader that has infiltrated so many others.
Early commentary in the West focused on the failings of China’s autocratic system, which hid the severity of Wuhan’s outbreak—at what we now know to be catastrophic cost. The more the epidemic has spread, the more it has become clear that Western liberal democracies have badly mishandled it too, ending up with severe outbreaks that could—perhaps—have been avoided.
Yet it makes little sense to view the coronavirus as some kind of perverse vitality test for liberal and authoritarian regimes. Instead we should learn from the countries that responded more effectively—namely, Asia’s advanced technocratic democracies, the group once known as the “Asian Tigers.” In the West the virus exposed creaking public services and political division. But Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea have managed better, while Singapore and Taiwan have kept the disease almost entirely under control, at least for now.
Lessons learned
Partly this shows the benefits of experience. The Asian “technocracies,” as geopolitical thinker Parag Khanna dubs them, all suffered SARS outbreaks beginning in 2002, as well as more recent minor scares, such as H1N1 in 2009. These experiences, bruising at the time, helped government planners think through contingencies, developing outbreak management plans and stockpiling essential goods. Taiwan accumulated millions of surgical masks, coveralls, and N95 respirators for medical staff, and kept tens of millions more for the public.
“Your test is positive. The ambulance will arrive there in 20 minutes. Pack your stuff.”
It was also thanks in part to SARS that Asian countries understood the need for rapid action, as Leo Yee Sin, head of the NCID, noted back in early January. At that point, covid-19 was still being referred to as a “mystery pneumonia.” Around the region, passengers on flights from affected parts of China were given mandatory temperature checks. As the crisis deepened, those flights were canceled, and then borders were closed entirely. Not every country followed quite the same model of response: Hong Kong and Japan shut their schools early, while Singapore kept its open. But all acted quickly, in coordinated responses led by experts.
There were new treatment centers too, including Singapore’s National Centre for Infectious Diseases (NCID), a 330-bed facility opened just last year, which stands a 10-minute drive from my office. A friend—Singapore’s case 113—ended up there for weeks in March, having caught the virus on a trip to Europe and begun to feel symptoms on his flight back home. He was first taken to the center for a test—“The scene was pretty post-apocalyptic, with everyone in plastic suits with big goggles and masks, in rooms filled with plastic partitions”—but was sent home to isolate and await results. He got a call back a few hours later. “They told me, ‘Your test is positive,’” he remembered, while still in isolation at the center in late March. “The ambulance will arrive there in 20 minutes. Pack your stuff.”
Technology mattered too. China deployed extensive and invasive surveillance to bring the virus’s spread under control, pushing tech giants to track and monitor hundreds of millions of citizens. New apps proliferated, notably the Alipay Health Code, which assigned users a rating of green, yellow, or red, based on their personal health records with the company. The app, which shared information with Chinese police and other authorities, in effect decided who was quarantined at home and who was not.
Asia’s democracies often took more basic routes, monitoring and managing the outbreak with tools no more advanced than phones, maps, and databases. Singapore in particular rolled out an admired contact tracing system, in which centralized teams of civil servants tracked down and contacted those who might have been affected. Their calls could be shocking. One minute you were oblivious at work; the next minute the Ministry of Health was on the phone, politely informing you that a few days before you had been in a taxi with a driver who subsequently fell ill, or sitting next to an infected diner at a restaurant. Anyone getting such a call was sternly instructed to sprint home and self-isolate.
What made this possible was that anyone infected could be grilled for hours. “They sat me down and interrogated me about my travel: every day, minute by minute,” my friend told me. “Where did I go? Which taxi did I take? Who was I with? For how long?” The process of tracking and tracing was laborious but produced impressive results. Nearly half of the roughly 250 people infected in Singapore by mid-March first learned that they were at risk when someone from the government called and told them.
Just as efficient was South Korea’s testing regime, which in January forced local medical companies to work together to develop new kits and then rolled them out aggressively, allowing planners to keep track of the pandemic’s spread. South Korea had tested about 300,000 people by late March, roughly as many as the United States had managed by then, but in a country with a population one-sixth as large.
Clear communication
Transparency was another factor, though perhaps a less expected one in Asia’s more autocratic societies. True, media coverage early on was more muted and respectful in countries like Japan and Singapore than in places like the UK, where aggressive reporting highlighted all manner of details that public authorities might have preferred to play down, such as contingency plans to open up a morgue in London’s Hyde Park.
Nonetheless, open communication from governments has been a consistent pattern in Asia’s more successful responses. Singapore put prominent front-page advertisements in the media, including early campaigns to try to stop citizens with no symptoms from buying up surgical masks and causing shortages for those who needed them. Taiwan and South Korea provided reliable and open data to citizens, along with regular social-media briefings.
As the pandemic worsened, I took a trip to the United States, sure to be the last for quite some time—departing through the forests of temperature checks and body heat scanners that by then lined the corridors of Changi Airport.
For the week I was away, I got calmly factual updates pinged to my phone roughly three times a day from the Singaporean government via WhatsApp, giving details about new infections and what the authorities were doing in response.
This focus on open information was another lesson taken from earlier crises. During the SARS crisis, as well as the 2015 outbreak of Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), administrations in countries like South Korea were criticized for hiding information and damaging public trust. This time they appear to have concluded that frequent updates from politicians and health experts were a more effective technique against viral misinformation.
This is not to pretend that everything has been perfect. Japan messed up its response to the arrival of the Diamond Princess cruise ship in Yokohama, and—like the US—has faced persistent questions since about its own lack of testing equipment.
Hong Kong’s government was widely criticized too, in the aftermath of recent street protests that badly eroded public confidence. Hong Kong’s citizens, however, have shown extraordinary willingness to self-isolate—which may in part be because they distrust the state’s ability to solve the crisis, not because they meekly follow government orders.
Indeed, the examples of Hong Kong and Taiwan, itself a rambunctious democracy, give the lie to the notion that Asian nations have succeeded in this crisis because their citizens are more likely to do as they are told than free-spirited Italians or North Americans.
This idea has uncomfortable echoes of an older, racist debate about so-called “Confucian” cultures, which thinkers like the US political scientist Samuel Huntington described as hierarchical, orderly, and tending to value harmony over competition. As with talk of “Chinese flu” or sudden outbreaks of Sinophobia on American street corners, this line of thinking tells us little about why some countries performed well and others did not.
Preparation is key
Only last October, the Economist Intelligence Unit produced a lengthy report ranking nations by global epidemic preparedness. The US came top, followed by Britain and the Netherlands; Japan and Singapore were 21st and 24th, respectively. However this league table was compiled, it seems to have proved entirely wrong.
Asia has provided many examples of policies that worked—from China’s speedy hospital construction to South Korea’s aggressive testing to Singapore’s contact tracing and open public communication—while in the West, governments that seemed well situated to deliver a swift response have been found wanting.
The thread uniting the countries that did well was that, whether democratic or not, they were strong, technocratically capable states, largely unhampered by partisan divisions. Public health drove politics, rather than the other way around.
Western liberal economies neglected the kind of state capacity in public health and pandemic preparedness that Asian states have quietly been building up.
The truth of this is likely to be cruelly revealed as the virus spreads elsewhere around Asia, and in particular to places like India and sub-Saharan Africa, where state capacity is notoriously weak.
Many such countries have tried to lock down their populations, as the advanced economies did before them. But even if they can slow the virus’s spread, they do not have the benefit of strong health systems, let alone the kind of testing and contact tracing regimes that kept much of Asia safe.
This Asian advantage in competence might not endure into forthcoming phases of the covid-19 crisis, as focus shifts to managing a dramatic economic recession—an area where many Western administrations have recent experience in the wake of the 2008 crash. Governments like those of Britain and the US have already unveiled sizable stimulus packages. But it is undeniable that as they struggled to recover from that financial crisis, Western liberal economies neglected the kind of state capacity in areas like public health and pandemic preparedness that Asian states have quietly been building up. Coronavirus was a test, and the world’s supposedly most advanced nations have all too visibly failed.
All this is damaging to the global reputation of the United States in particular. It was only in 2014 that Barack Obama’s administration managed to lead a global response to an Ebola outbreak in western Africa. Now, six years later, Donald Trump has barely been able to organize a response in his own country.
China is already using this fact to suggest the superiority of its autocratic model of government.
That would be a bad lesson to draw. What matters instead is a new divide between two kinds of countries: those with states that can plan for the long term, act decisively, and invest for the future, and those that cannot.
James Crabtree is an associate professor of practice at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. He is author of The Billionaire Raj.
