The headline on this CNN story says that “senior” Republicans are getting nervous about Donald Trump’s unwillingness to face reality. Maybe so, though they don’t really offer much evidence of that. In any case it’s apparently a whole different story among non-senior Republicans:

North Carolina Rep. Richard Hudson, who will serve on the House GOP’s leadership team in the next Congress, on Friday characterized the unsubstantiated allegations leveled by the Trump team as “breathtaking” and “serious enough that they need to be investigated.”…Asked if he’d be OK if state legislatures named electors that differed from the outcome of the vote counts in their states, Hudson told CNN: “Yeah, that’s the constitutional process.”

….Asked on Thursday if his state should delay certifying the election, Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar told CNN: “I believe it should.” Gosar also said the “state has the ability” to name its own electors to the Electoral College if the results aren’t certified as part of the “system set up by our founders.” And when asked if he would support the state legislature naming its own electors, Gosar said: “I do.”

How many more Republicans are there who feel the same way? Ten? A hundred? It’s only a matter of clinical interest at this point, but just how low has the party sunk?

Democrats and Republicans alike have been eagerly grilling the CEOs of social media companies lately about their complicity in spreading disinformation. This is being done under the implied threat that if they don’t do something, Congress will do it for them.

I have a problem with this. Two problems, actually. First, everyone would be outraged if Congress hauled in the folks responsible for Rush Limbaugh and Fox News and Sinclair Radio and treated them the same way. So why is social media any different?

But let’s say that First Amendment concerns don’t sway you. Then this should: social media is most likely not a very important cog in the great right-wing disinformation machine anyway. A couple of years ago, Harvard scholars Yochai Benkler, Rob Faris and Hal Robert wrote a book about their research into disinformation, and here’s their conclusion:

Surveys make it clear that Fox News is by far the most influential outlet on the American right — more than five times as many Trump supporters reported using Fox News as their primary news outlet than those who named Facebook. And Trump support was highest among demographics whose social media use was lowest.

Our data repeatedly show Fox as the transmission vector of widespread conspiracy theories. The original Seth Rich conspiracy did not take off when initially propagated in July 2016 by fringe and pro-Russia sites, but only a year later, as Fox News revived it when James Comey was fired. The Clinton pedophilia libel that resulted in Pizzagate was started by a Fox online report, repeated across the Fox TV schedule, and provided the prime source of validation across the right-wing media ecosystem.

In 2017 Fox repeatedly attacked the national security establishment and law enforcement whenever the Trump-Russia investigation heated up. Each attack involved significant online activity, but the spikes in attention and transition moments are associated with Hannity, “Fox & Friends” and others like Tucker Carlson or Lou Dobbs.

More recently they took a look at the right-wing campaign to discredit mail-in voting:

Contrary to the focus of most contemporary work on disinformation, our findings suggest that this highly effective disinformation campaign, with potentially profound effects for both participation in and the legitimacy of the 2020 election, was an elite-driven, mass-media led process. Social media played only a secondary and supportive role.

Kevin Roose’s widely distributed list of top Facebook posts suggests what’s really going on:

Seven of these ten posts are from Fox News or Donald Trump. Facebook may help them get a little more reach than they otherwise would—though probably among true believers who hardly needed any convincing anyway—but it’s old-school media that generated all the attention in the first place. Facebook posters take their lead mainly from Fox and Trump and just follow along.

It also turns out that the “Facebook problem” hinges a lot on boring—but important!—classification issues. Richard Rogers of the University of Amsterdam notes that “fake news” encompasses vastly different things depending on how you define it:

Roomier definitions make the problem larger and result in findings such as the most well-known ‘fake news’ story of 2016. ‘Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President’ began as satire and was later circulated on a hyperpartisan, fly-by-night site (Ending the Fed). It garnered higher engagement rates on Facebook than more serious articles in the mainstream news. When such stories are counted as ‘fake’, ‘junk’ or ‘problematic’, and the scale increases, industrial-style custodial action may be preferred such as mass contention moderation as well as crowd-sourced and automated flagging, followed by platform escalation procedures and outcomes such as suspending or deplatforming stories, videos and sources.

The chart below on the left shows engagement with fake news (pink line) using this “roomy” definition. But what if you restrict the definition of fake news to eliminate sites that are merely hyperpartisan or satirical, instead including only genuine imposter and conspiracy sites? Then you get the chart on the right:

Using this definition it turns out that engagement with fake news is tiny compared to engagement with real news. Of course, that real news includes hyperpartisan sites, and obviously those exist on a continuum that includes a lot of gray areas, but in general it turns out that the real crazytown stuff doesn’t get all that much attention.

None of this is proof positive of anything. But even if you assume the “real” definition of crackpot stuff is somewhere between the two above, it still suggests that we’re overestimating how much of it is getting a serious share of online eyeballs. There’s not much question that Facebook helps to amplify Fox News, and that’s obviously a problem for progressives. But does it justify regulating Facebook? Why not regulate the source instead?

Roughly speaking, I think the evidence points in one direction: When it comes to disinformation the real vectors are elite actors like Donald Trump, Fox News, talk radio, and so forth. They define the agenda, and Facebook just follows along. Relatedly, when elite players don’t play along, disinformation on Facebook gets very little traction.

To the extent that Facebook is yet another amplifier of the right-wing noise machine, it’s a problem. But it’s nowhere near the main problem. That remains just where it’s always been.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through November 20. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

In today’s picture, Hilbert shows off his stretching ability after an exhausting five minutes lying on the patio. That is one handsome cat, isn’t it?

Yesterday I showed you the current COVID-19 death rate in the US compared to similar European countries. The US looked fairly good, down toward the bottom of the pack.

But the US and Europe took different paths to their current levels. In Europe, mortality dropped nearly to zero over the summer. In the US, we never managed to do that. During the entire period from the end of the first wave to the beginning of the second, roughly a thousand people per day were dying. What this means is that if you look at cumulative deaths, the chart gets flipped around:

Now we’re up toward the top of the pack.

The lesson here is that there’s no single answer to “How are we doing?” If you look at cases, we look very high. If you look at deaths, we look fairly low right now but pretty high cumulatively. If you look at positivity rate, we’re fairly low but skyrocketing upward.

And if you just want an overall score without all the caveats? I’d put us maybe a little worse than middle of the pack. We’re not doing as well as superstars like Germany and Denmark, but we’re far from being the worst. Of course, all this might change in a few weeks if we keep going up and Europe starts going down. We’ll have to wait and see.

On Thursday the US topped 2,000 deaths, and deaths per million went above 4. These are both the highest they’ve been since June.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through November 19. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

The year is almost over, but surely there’s time for one or two more pictures of Slot Canyon X? Of course there is! So here you go.

From the New York Times:

When are Republican leaders going to intervene? When does this stop? Enough.

For your consideration:

Yes, we have earthquakes and wildfires and long lines for COVID-19 testing. But we also have lots of rich people.Ringo Chiu/ZUMA

Like every state, California has been bracing for fiscal disaster thanks to plummeting tax revenue caused by COVID-19 lockdowns. But then a funny thing happened:

California’s state budget faces a dramatic boom-and-bust period over the next four years, analysts said Wednesday, a roller-coaster period that could begin with a $26-billion tax windfall and later plunge to a projected deficit of $17.5 billion by the middle of 2025…The large supply of extra cash — equal to almost 20% of all current-year spending out of California’s general fund — is a surprise, Legislative Analyst Gabriel Petek said.

….The state’s tax revenues have remained strong — in part, Petek said, because high-income residents have not suffered any notable setbacks and California’s budget relies heavily on those taxpayers. “The progressive nature of the personal income tax structure has actually worked to the state’s benefit in the current environment,” Petek said.

Shazam! An extra $26 billion that we didn’t expect. How often does that happen?

The weird part of this is that analysts across the board, including most Democrats, have long agreed that California’s heavy dependence on rich taxpayers is a problem. But apparently that isn’t always true. During the pandemic, the rich have actually done fairly well even as ordinary folks have gotten slammed. That’s a bad thing in a cosmic sense, but a good thing in a green-eyeshade tax revenue sense. I can hardly wait for the bloody battles that are about to begin over how we should spend all this manna from heaven.