READING 1: YouTube, X and Google must consider their decisions on Brand

Russell Brand has 6.6 million subscribers on YouTube, which is about the same number as he
had before the latest allegations about rape, sexual assault and emotional abuse became public.

It’s a sizeable audience – a little bigger, for example, than the more wholesome Ant and Dec can
pull in for ITV on a Saturday evening – and one that has clearly not been so repulsed by the
claims about him to make the effort to unsubscribe. Nor has Google (corporately listed as
Alphabet Inc), owner of YouTube, seen fit to “cancel” Mr Brand, who must bring them (as well
as himself) substantial revenues.

As was apparent on the very evening the story broke, Mr Brand was still able to fill a theatre,
though his performance was reportedly distracted. His fan base, misguided or not, are sticking
with him, most remarking that he is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law – ie beyond
reasonable doubt and setting a relatively high bar before they withdraw their adulation.

Unlike some past episodes of celebrity scandal, he’s not being obviously and immediately
shunned. Indeed, he suffered more ignominy after the appalling “Sachsgate” incident. He has
also received the huge bonus, from a profile and audience-building point of view, of vocal
support from the richest person on the planet: Elon Musk. Whatever else happens, it seems Mr
Brand will have a friend in Musk and a platform on X, formerly Twitter (and a blue tick, of
course). It also looks like YouTube/Google/Alphabet is in no rush to judgement.

This illustrates the changing nature of online celebrity, and how what used to be career-ending
revelations can have comparatively little effect on the popularity of figures who thrive on their
status, however bogus, as “outsiders”; anti-Establishment figures who present a threat to the
supposedly corrupt “mainstream media”.

The balance of power has shifted. The most extreme example is of course Donald Trump – who
has also come out in support of Mr Brand – who skilfully manipulates his base so that every
fresh charge laid against him in a court boosts his popularity (though not enough on a sustained
basis to necessarily see him back in the White House). The rise of social media has allowed such
techniques to develop in ways that would have been unimaginable in the past.

Yet, social media these days isn’t some sort of hippy hobby. It is just as capitalistic in habit and
controlled by corporate interests as the established players. The commercial interests of so-called
‘‘alternative media’’ – in reality, the new media establishment – are controlled by fabulously
wealthy vested interests or even foreign powers.

The difference is that the mainstream media, on the whole, is still doing its job in investigating
those in public life and their behaviour, and reporting their findings, properly verified and legally
sound. Everything is undertaken conscientiously and published in the public interest – which is
more than can be said for some of the conspiratorial cesspits of social media.

For those who say Mr Brand is being subjected to “trial by media”, the truth is that the media are
doing no such thing. They are merely presenting facts: verified witness accounts for example and
actual “in plain sight” broadcast videos – and as far as possible, giving both sides of the story.
In his case, Mr Brand has claimed he has witnesses of his own to disprove the accusations. Very
well, he can bring them forward. He can sue the media organisations concerned. He can clear his
name, if he wishes, and shame those who have traduced him. He can produce evidence that he is
indeed himself the victim of those with “an agenda” hostile to him, one of his Trumpian lines of
defence. But Mr Brand has as yet done none of those things. Meanwhile, the court of public
opinion is plainly divided on him.

For all the perfectly justified focus on the BBC and Channel 4 about what their respective
managements knew about Mr Brand, it is some time since their one-time star talent was on their
books and their screens. The questions now are for the likes of YouTube and X, and other online
platforms.

They, like the older broadcasters, book publishers, filmmakers, theatre owners and agencies have
a clear choice. They can choose to continue to be associated with Mr Brand with all that has been
said about him and with what he stands for; or they can choose to scale back or sever their
connections until they are satisfied that, irrespective of any legal proceedings, he is the sort of
person they wish to give a platform to.

The right of free speech as practised on social media, as elsewhere, does not entail an obligation
to grant anyone and everyone an automatic right to access to a platform. As they say in such
circles, free speech doesn’t necessarily equate to “free reach”.

The newer media platforms have a responsibility to safeguard themselves from moral stain and
to protect their own reputations and, thus, commercial viability.

In general, they are not obliged, under any constitution, to host conspiracy theories, hate speech,
vile antisemitic and racist propaganda or fake news. The case of Mr Brand has to be judged in its
own particular characteristics, and he should be treated fairly. Yet YouTube and X do need to
take another look at what kind of man they think he is.

READING 2: Farmers warn supermarkets agriculture is ‘on its knees’

Farming and food leaders have sent an open letter to the “big six” supermarkets urging them to
treat suppliers more fairly amid warnings that British agriculture is “on its knees”.

The letter, sent to the chief executives of Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda, Morrisons, Aldi and Lidl,
claims that the supermarkets’ buying practices are “all too often imbalanced, short term and
wasteful” and are leaving farmers “struggling to survive”.

Its more than 100 signatories include industry bodies Sustain and The Soil Association, chefs
Rick Stein and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, conservationist Ray Mears and TV presenters Julia
Bradbury and Jimmy Doherty.

It reads: “Farmers are denied commitment or security – with whole crops rejected at the last
minute in favour of cheaper options elsewhere, or just because supermarkets change their mind.
“Good food ends up rotting in the field. Farmers are left without payment for their crops. And
without a stable, reliable income, they are struggling to survive.

“These practices threaten the livelihoods of hard-working farmers, and jeopardise the availability
of fresh, healthy, and locally-grown food for shoppers. If farms continue to close, the British
produce that customers know and love risks disappearing from your shelves altogether.”

One potato farmer said: “I’ve not grown for the major supermarkets for five years, and I would
never go back. It cost me £25,000 to grow the crop – they just said, ‘We don’t want them now’ –
that was it, 60 metric tonnes of potatoes wasted.”

The farmer added: “There is no way I would grow for the supermarkets again. They’ll squash
you to keep the prices down. You just don’t know how much to expect in terms of income, and
at times you end up taking huge financial hits and wasting so much food. We need a fairer,
shorter, and more transparent food chain.”

The letter is part of the Get Fair About Farming campaign launched by the Riverford Organic
vegetable box firm, which is calling for reform of the grocery supply code of practice to better
protect farmers, and sets out ‘‘charter principles’’ for supermarkets, urging them to “pay what
you agreed to pay, buy what you committed to buy, agree on fair specifications, commit for the
long term and pay on time”.

Guy Singh-Watson, founder of Riverford Organic, said: “British Agriculture is on its knees, and
that’s why most small family farms think that they’re not going to be in business in the next
generation. Is that what we want from our countryside? Is that what we want from our food
system? Is that what we want from farmers? Farmers need to be treated fairly; they need some
commitment from supermarkets.

“Sustainable trading relationships are based on cooperation, good communication and trust as
much as competition. A brutal, short-term focus on annual price negotiations is supporting
supermarket margins while destroying British farming along with the landscape, wildlife, and
rural communities it once supported.

“Exploitation of family farms, the march to scale and the destruction of our countryside is not an
inevitable result of a free market; it is driven by unbalanced trading relationships, deceitful
marketing, externalised costs and a government that has abdicated responsibility in the hell-bent
pursuit of cheap food at any cost. Given the information, all polls show the British public wants
better and would even pay a little more if they knew it went to support better farming.”

Mr Singh-Watson said there was no need for fairer conditions for farmers to mean higher prices
for customers.

“I don’t think food needs to be expensive. A bigger proportion of the price needs to go back to
the farmer instead of processors and supermarkets,” he said.
Kath Dalmeny, chief executive of Sustain, the alliance for better food and farming, said:
“Farmers and food suppliers need far better protection from unfair and sometimes abusive
practices by the big supermarkets. Retailers make unreasonable demands, create waste, and keep
too much of the value.

“Our own research shows that farmers and growers typically get less than a penny of the profit
on packs of everyday foods. Many are thinking of leaving farming because it is such hard work
for so little financial return, just when we need to increase production and consumption of
sustainable fruit and veg. Government must step in and strengthen the rules so that more and
better fruit and veg is available and affordable for all.”

Sue Pritchard, chief executive of the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission, said: “This
call from Riverford highlights the precarious position of many farmers, especially smaller
businesses working hard to provide citizens with healthy food grown in ways that don’t cost the
earth.

“This is a critical moment for leadership from supermarkets who have the power and opportunity
to help create a greener, healthier world.”

READING 3: Stop Obsessing About Having the Perfect Career Plan

Get the degree, get the job offer, get that first promotion. Then what?

The set paths that used to shape so many careers are eroding fast these days. Instead of handing
out fancy new titles at every performance review, companies like Meta Platforms are cutting
layers of middle managers. Law firms are testing watered-down partnership models.

A Washington, D.C., area lawyer I talked to said that even partners at his firm were gripped by
uncertainty about keeping pace on the corporate treadmill. A police officer in Tennessee told me
his career path felt more like a narrowing tunnel. Positions above him never seemed to open up,
and the raises he’d expected felt just out of grasp.

No matter the profession, the promise of a system propelling you steadily forward is now often a
facade. Companies are changing strategy on a dime—from hiring at breakneck speed, to cutting
jobs just as fast. Technology like artificial intelligence is reshaping the value of white-collar
work.

“The idea that all of us could continually step up the career ladder was a false promise,” says
Helen Tupper, chief executive of a global career development and training firm.

Instead, Tupper suggests asking yourself: What is it I want to be known for?

The answer might be a brilliant presenter or a decisive leader. Exactly where is less important,
she says. Look for not just new roles but projects that expose you to new people, like sitting on a
committee or helping out an international office. Preserve your earning power by negotiating a
raise with a lateral move, or ask for money to use toward education. Think of this moment as an
opportunity to have more choice in the work you do, rather than following a trail someone else
carved out.

And level with yourself. Trying to embody some perfect LinkedIn profile, with a cascade of
titles in stair-step order, might just be a fantasy. Hitching yourself to one path leaves you
vulnerable when things change.

“Not every move you make has to be absolutely perfect,” says Tupper, co-author of the book
“The Squiggly Career.”

Certainty meets reality

Alex Robb spent years checking the boxes to becoming a vet: getting into a prestigious college,
doing surgical research in veterinary school, matching into postgraduate training.

The work was grueling, but “I had this sort of comfort and certainty around everything,” he
says.
He landed at an animal hospital in Denver and settled in. Dreaming of running the whole
organization one day, he got his M.B.A. on the side. Then an acquisition and restructuring hit the
hospital, eliminating the department head position he’d been interviewing for.

“What am I going to do now?” he says he thought.

He left and spent a year testing out different work settings as a contract veterinarian. The
exploration led him to a job he loves: co-founding a group of animal hospitals and running his
own location, which he opened in 2021.

Looking back, he wonders if there were some downsides to hewing so closely to a set path.
Could he have been more well-rounded or creative if he hadn’t been so laser-focused?

The questions we all ask

Riley Sheehey, an education major with an artistic bent, remembers being terribly jealous of her
girlfriends the summer after college graduation. They’d parlayed internships into jobs in big
cities or were gearing up for grad school. Meanwhile, she was working at her same old summer
camp and trying to figure out what to do with her life.

Twelve years later, Sheehey is a successful watercolor artist with her own line of fabric and
wallpaper, and has watched those same friends question their paths. She’s glad she faced the
reckoning early.

At some point, she says, you’re going to ask yourself: “Even though this is laid out for me, is this
what I want to be?”

READING 4: Disinformation wars: The fight against fake news in the age of AI
In October 2021, Phil Howard, an internet researcher at the University of Oxford, was alerted to
a preposterous story on social media. It alleged that the covid-19 pandemic was started by a
shipment of Maine lobsters that arrived in Wuhan, China, days before the first outbreak. He and
his colleagues spent months trying to track down the source and didn’t get to the bottom of it –
except that it probably originated in China, possibly through the state-owned TV channel
CGTN.

“I felt my career had hit a new low,” says Howard. “What was so ridiculous was the enormous
effort that we needed to expose a ridiculous attempt to manipulate public opinion. I realised that
I didn’t want to do that work myself, so I decided to try and come up with an initiative that
would do something about the problem in a systematic way.”

Today, Howard is chair of a new organisation called the International Panel on the Information
Environment, one of many initiatives pushing back against the pollution of the information
ecosystem. Regulators, too, are finally lacing up their own boots after spending years sitting on
their hands.

The stakes couldn’t be higher, with the recent rise of generative artificial intelligence and its
capacity to produce persuasive disinformation on an industrial scale. Many researchers are
saying that the next two years are make or break in the information wars, as deep-pocketed bad
actors escalate their disinformation campaigns, while the good guys fight back. Which side
prevails will determine how the information environment – and everything it shapes, from
people’s beliefs about vaccines to the outcomes of elections – will operate for the foreseeable
future.

Misinformation and its nefarious cousin disinformation, defined as misleading information that is
seeded deliberately, have been around for thousands of years. But the advent of social media was
a watershed in the sense that it put the tools of disinformation into the hands of the masses, with
seismic consequences

Why fake news spreads fast

Research shows that fake news spreads six times as fast as true news, says former Google
employee Tristan Harris, who now runs the Center for Humane Technology in San Francisco.
“Even though there’s a very small number of extreme voices out there, social media takes that 5
per cent of the population and then stretches it out over the whole movie screen of humanity.”

Why false information spreads so far and wide is well known. The algorithms that serve up
content on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and X (formerly Twitter) have two overriding
goals: to capture and keep people’s attention, and to motivate them to share content by rewarding
them for doing so. The more provocative the content, the more successful that strategy. “People
are getting social rewards for sharing very emotionally provoking information or information
that’s not the most accurate,” says Gizem
Ceylan at Yale University. Moreover, the act of sharing becomes habitual. “Over time, you
become like a pigeon pecking at a button with the hope of getting food, but you don’t realise it,”
she says.
Ceylan’s research demonstrates how the problem manifests. In an experiment, she and two
colleagues showed Facebook users true and fake headlines and asked them whether they would
share each of them. The heaviest users of the site said they would share 37 per cent of the fake
headlines and 43 per cent of the true ones. “They were completely insensitive to the truthfulness
of the information,” says Ceylan. Most people want an unpolluted information environment, she
adds. The trouble is that the reward structure of social media thwarts the will of the people.

READING 5: Drinking alcohol doesn't give people 'beer goggles' after all

Contrary to popular belief, people may not get “beer goggles” after a few drinks. Researchers
have found that consuming a few alcoholic drinks doesn’t make other people seem more
attractive, but may give individuals the courage to approach those who they already found
attractive.

Previous studies that supported the concept of “beer goggles” showed a small, inconsistent effect
and usually tested the idea by having people drink alcohol by themselves, says Molly Bowdring
at Stanford University, California.

Bowdring and her colleague Michael Sayette at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,
wanted to investigate this concept in a more social setting, so recruited 18 pairs of friends, all
heterosexual men.

First, the men rated the attractiveness of 16 women who they didn’t know based on photos and
videos. They then chose four of the women who they would most like to meet, which they were
told may happen in a future study.

The men were then given straight cranberry juice, which they knew contained no alcohol. After
half an hour, they were asked to rate the attractiveness of the same group of women and who
they would most like to meet.

This experiment was then repeated on a different day, with the same men judging a separate
group of 16 women. This time, they were then given a cocktail of cranberry juice and vodka,
containing enough alcohol to raise their blood alcohol concentration to roughly 0.08 per cent, the
legal driving limit in the US. This is the equivalent of drinking around three standard-strength
vodka-based drinks, says Bowdring.

The researchers found that drinking alcohol didn’t affect how the men rated the women’s
attractiveness. However, after just the cranberry juice, some of the men said they would most
like to meet women they didn’t necessarily find the most attractive. But after the cocktail, they
were almost twice as likely to say they wanted to meet those who they considered the most
attractive.
Alcohol may “free us from our preoccupation with rejection”, according to the researchers. “For
some people, interacting with attractive others can be intimidating, so alcohol may be reducing
some of that fear,” says Bowdring.

Most of the men, and the women they saw, were white. The researchers therefore hope to repeat
their experiment with a more ethnically diverse make-up of people. They also want to test
heterosexual women to see whether alcohol affects how attractive they find men, as well as
studying people of non-heterosexual orientations.

The researchers also tested the concept of “beer goggles” after the participants drank a relatively
small amount of alcohol. “I’m very curious about whether [alcohol] dose size or if intoxication
timing matters,” says Bowdring.

“By making participants believe that the pictures they were viewing were of people they could
choose to interact with in the future, the research team added a nice element of realism, which
has been missing from previous research in this area,” says Rebecca Monk at Edge Hill
University in Lancashire, UK.