Everyone knows Facebook is doing the opposite of helping ensure the integrity of the 2020 election, so it makes sense it would pay Teen Vogue to run a fake article titled “How Facebook Is Helping Ensure the Integrity of the 2020 Election.”

When the article ran on Wednesday, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s machiavellian chief operating officer posted on her Facebook page, "Great Teen Vogue piece about five incredible women protecting elections on Facebook. Since 2016, we've worked to stop the spread of misinformation, fight foreign interference and voter suppression, improve transparency, and encourage people to vote." Lol.

Shortly after the byline-free "article" ran, a notice appeared at the top, which said, “Editor’s note: This is sponsored editorial content.” A little while later, the piece disappeared entirely.

The curious piece, and its sudden disappearance, became a topic of online conversation, prompting Teen Vogue to issue a statement that read, “We made a series of errors labeling this piece, and we apologize for any confusion this may have caused. We don’t take our audience’s trust for granted, and ultimately decided that the piece should be taken down entirely to avoid further confusion."

The New York Times looked into it and got the story:

Facebook pitched the idea for the article last year, when the social media network and the online magazine were in talks about the Teen Vogue Summit, a three-day event that took place in Los Angeles in November, with speakers including the YouTube star Liza Koshy and the film director Greta Gerwig.

Wow, this blew up and imploded and tried to disappear quickly and totally did not disappear at all. Read the rest

Bernie Sanders commissioned the Government Accountability Office to study the consequences of the high degree of indebtedness borne by Millennials; the GAO's report concludes that Millennials dreams are being "crushed" by debts -- primarily student loans -- which have limited their abilities to seek good employment, good housing, and to save for retirement. Read the rest

Teen Vogue has emerged as one of the most progressive mass-media forums in an age of Trumpism and its official misogyny and racism -- it's a Conde Naste magazine aimed at teen girls with a labor reporter who regularly dissects capitalism's failings and writes explainers on the need for a general strike. Read the rest

Kim Kelly is Teen Vogue's labor columnist and has written a series of excellent pieces on labor politics for the #resistance glossy. Read the rest

In the Dept. of It's About Time: Attendees to San Francisco's upcoming Outside Lands festival will not be allowed to wear Native American headdresses anymore. The festival banned the headwear and included it in a long list of other no-nos such as fireworks, totems, and selfie sticks.

In a statement, organizers of the three-day event explain why this form of cultural appropriation will no longer stand. KPIX:

Out of respect for Native American heritage and culture, we do not allow headdresses at Outside Lands. We are committed to creating a safe, respectful and inclusive environment for all.

SFist:

Controversies about white people wearing Native American headgear at music festivals dates back at least five years, when the Bass Coast Festival chose to ban such headdresses out of respect for the fact that the festival was occurring on tribal lands. But the blog Native Appropriations has been calling out festival-goers since 2010. In 2017, one young woman who was called out on Instagram by Native Appropriations for her Coachella headdress issued a public apology that was picked up by Teen Vogue.

image via Chris Beckett/CC Read the rest

Teen Vogue continues its run of excellent, progressive political reporting with Kim Kelly's potted explanation of capitalism, and not a minute too soon, as Kelly explains: "the reason many millennials haven’t been investing in mutual funds or building up their own financial nest eggs isn’t because they’re too broke, or that they lack personal responsibility — it’s because they think our current economic system, capitalism, will cease to exist by the time they are in their 60s." Read the rest

A couple of days ago Teen Vogue published an article about "resistance, rebellion, and revolution" (see Cory's post about it). Today, Teen Vogue has another excellent article along the same lines. It's written by Kim Kelly and is called General Strikes, Explained. With the Trump Shutdown threatening to disrupt functioning society, it's a good time to read this.

A general strike is a labor action in which a significant amount of workers from a number of different industries who comprise a majority of the total labor force within a particular city, region, or country come together to take collective action. Organized strikes are generally called by labor union leadership, but they impact more than just those in the union. For example, imagine the scenario if thousands in your town or city — no matter what their job was or whether or not they were in a union — got together and decided to go on strike to protest police brutality, as happened in Oakland, California, in 2011, after Iraq veteran Scott Olsen was critically wounded by local police when they stormed the Occupy Oakland encampment. The community declared a daylong general strike that ultimately saw thousands of people shut down the Port of Oakland (which was more of a symbolic protest, but still it got the job done).

Image: MicroOne/Shutterstock Read the rest

Teen Vogue continues its excellent tradition of radical reporting with Lucy Diavolo's explainer on the definitions and relative merits and demerits of "resistance," "rebellion" and "revolution." Read the rest

As EFF's Eva Galperin notes, Nicole Kobie's story about resisting surveillance by taping over your webcam "proves that once more, the best and most straightforward tech reporting is being done by Teen Vogue." Read the rest

At the age of 15, Tavi Gevinson was the prodigy founder of Rookie, a latter-day second-coming of Sassy Magazine -- a smart, funny, critical teen magazine that presaged the odd world we live in now, when magazines like Teen Vogue have become highly politicized. Read the rest

The new parental controls in Ios 12 have all the same problems that all parental controls have: they overblock legit material (with a bias for sex-ed, especially sex-ed targeted at girls and queer kids, including Teen Vogue) and underblock all kinds of other material (neo-Nazi publications like The Daily Stormer and Reddit's pornographic /r/Gonewild are not blocked). Read the rest

A Propublica investigation (ed: I am an annual donor to Propublica and urge you to support their work) found dozens of companies who placed help wanted ads on Facebook that used ad-targeting to exclude older workers, a practice that an employment law specialist called "blatantly unlawful." Read the rest

Choosing art to be inked permanently on your body can be a crippling decision, at least for some folks.

Elm Street Tattoo in Dallas, Texas thought of a fun way to make the process simpler. They created a vending machine that picks the art for you.

Yup, for $100 you get one turn of their "Get What You Get" machine. "What you get" is an old-school tattoo design which pops out in a plastic toy capsule and is then inked on your person. If you aren't cool with the design, don't throw a fit because for another $20 you can buy yourself another spin. No one is forced to put the design on their body; however, there are no refunds.

Boogie, a shop employee, told the Dallas Observer, "All of these tattoos I would price out between $160 and $180 ... maybe $250."

Tattoos will be completed on a first-come, first-served basis. If there's no line, you can get yours right away. If all of the artists are booked, you may have to make an appointment.

View this post on Instagram

Get What You Get now at #elmstreettattoo! Drop by the shop and get tattooed! #dallastattoo #2146531392 #walkinswelcome #americantraditional #walkintattoo #deepellum #deepellumtattoo #deepellumart #heartinhandgallery #tattoospeakeasy #heartinhand #getwhatyouget

A post shared by Elm Street Tattoo (@elmstreettattoo) on Aug 8, 2017 at 3:54pm PDT

The shop's co-founder and Ink Master star Oliver Peck writes, "Not a bad design in the bunch."

View this post on Instagram

This Friday at @elmstreettattoo I will be doing tattoos out of the "Get What You Get " machine ...

RuPaul’s Drag Race has morphed from cult reality TV show to mainstream phenomenon, and in this great new piece for Vox, Caroline Framke explores how much the show means specifically to teenagers. As she writes:

When I went to the first DragCon, I was struck by how many of these screaming, sobbing teens — many of them the cis girl teens you might otherwise expect to fight for an autograph from a Harry Styles rather than a Naomi Smalls — swarmed the floor. I knew Drag Race was popular, but I didn’t realize how much it had traveled beyond its initial cult audience of queer men and women already ensconced in drag culture to reach this younger, hungry generation of fans.

The same held true — even more so — at 2017’s DragCon. Time and time again, I watched as kids with braces and fledgling attempts at facial contouring traded intel on which queens would be signing things where, swarmed a Teen Vogue panel (“Resistance in Trump’s America”), posed for pictures while their beaming parents stood by, and struggled to hold back rapturous tears in front of their favorite queens. When they did get the chance to actually ask a question, sure, some took the opportunity to show off their encyclopedic knowledge of which queen threw shade during which challenge, or to ask for the kind of behind-the-scenes gossip not even the infamous Drag Race subreddit might have.

But for the most part, these kids just wanted advice.

After RuPaul’s keynote (the final event of the con), one 19-year-old girl summoned the courage to go up in front of hundreds of fellow fans and ask her idol, through so many sobs we could barely understand her, “How do you wake up in the morning and tell yourself you’re beautiful?”

Embroidery artist Sheena Liam transforms simple thread and cloth into evocative portraits she posts on her Instagram. Here are some of my favorites:

View this post on Instagram

Sometimes it's harder to photograph the details than to sew them. #embroidery #embroideryhoop #embroideryart #handembroidery

A post shared by Liam | 粘悦馨 (@times.new.romance) on Apr 27, 2017 at 11:48pm PDT

View this post on Instagram

親密愛人- 梅艷芳🎶 #handembroidery #embroideryart #embroideryhoop #embroidery #梅艷芳 #親密愛人 #心情

A post shared by Liam | 粘悦馨 (@times.new.romance) on Apr 30, 2017 at 11:06am PDT

View this post on Instagram

#embroideryart #embroidery #embroideryhoop #handembroidery

A post shared by Liam | 粘悦馨 (@times.new.romance) on Apr 25, 2017 at 11:35pm PDT

View this post on Instagram

Eat your feelings. #embroidery #embroideryart #embroideryhoop #handembroidery

A post shared by Liam | 粘悦馨 (@times.new.romance) on May 15, 2017 at 9:47pm PDT

View this post on Instagram

Snip. #handembroidery #embroideryart #embroideryhoop #embroidery

A post shared by Liam | 粘悦馨 (@times.new.romance) on Apr 25, 2017 at 11:46pm PDT

View this post on Instagram

#embroidery #embroideryhoop #embroideryart #handembroidery

A post shared by Liam | 粘悦馨 (@times.new.romance) on Apr 25, 2017 at 11:44pm PDT

View this post on Instagram

#tbt my second time experimenting with thread and braids. #embroidery #embroideryhoop #embroideryart #handembroidery

A post shared by Liam | 粘悦馨 (@times.new.romance) on May 3, 2017 at 2:06pm PDT

View this post on Instagram

Sleepwalker. #embroidery #embroideryart #embroideryhoop #handembroidery #stopmotionanimation #stopmotion

A post shared by Liam | 粘悦馨 (@times.new.romance) on May 25, 2017 at 9:29pm PDT

You can learn more about Liam and her work in this interview/slideshow with Teen Vogue. Read the rest

United CEO Oscar Munoz said that passenger David Dao was "disruptive and belligerent" when he was told that he was going to be kicked off the plane after he bought a ticket and too his seat. But this newly released video shows Dao to be quite calm and reasonable given the circumstances. In the end, Dao was beaten senseless, his nose was broken, teeth were knocked out, and he suffered a concussion. United filled the empty seat with one of its employees.

From Teen Vogue:

A post shared by People Magazine (@people) on Apr 12, 2017 at 1:40pm PDT

On Monday, a video clip surfaced of Chicago Department of Aviation security officials brutally dragging Dao down the aisle of the plane on Sunday night for refusing to involuntarily give up his seat on a United flight went viral on social media. Shortly after the incident, United CEO Oscar Munoz told employees in an email that Dao had acted “disruptive and belligerent," which, in his words, left officers with no choice. However, passenger Joya Cummings uploaded new footage to Facebook showing the moments leading up to the officers' assault on Dao, and it shows a very different story.

“I’m a physician. I have to work tomorrow at 8 o’clock,” he told officers calmly in the video. "No, I am not going. I am not going."

Soon after, officers threatened to "drag [him]" off the plane if he didn't comply. “Then drag me down,” Dao told them. “I am staying right there.”