Day: March 1, 2022

Major League Baseball has canceled opening day, with Commissioner Rob Manfred announcing Tuesday the sport will lose regular-season games over a labor dispute for the first time in 27 years after acrimonious lockout talks collapsed in the hours before management’s deadline.

Manfred said he is canceling the first two series of the season that was set to begin March 31, dropping the schedule from 162 games to likely 156 games at most. Manfred said the league and union have not made plans for future negotiations. Players won’t be paid for missed games.

“My deepest hope is we get an agreement quickly,” Manfred said. “I’m really disappointed we didn’t make an agreement.”

After the sides made progress during 13 negotiating sessions over 16 1/2 hours Monday, the league sent the players’ association a “best and final offer” Tuesday on the ninth straight day of negotiations.

Players rejected that offer, setting the stage for MLB to follow through on its threat to cancel opening day.

“Not a particularly productive day today,” Manfred said.

At 5:10 p.m., Manfred issued a statement that many fans had been dreading: Nothing to look forward to on opening day, normally a spring standard of renewal for fans throughout the nation and some in Canada, too.

The ninth work stoppage in baseball history will be the fourth that causes regular season games to be canceled, leaving Fenway Park and Dodger Stadium as quiet in next month as Joker Marchant Stadium and Camelback Park have been during the third straight disrupted spring training.

“The concerns of our fans are at the very top of our consideration list,” Manfred said.

The lockout, in its 90th day, will plunge a sport staggered by the coronavirus pandemic and afflicted by numerous on-field issues into a self-inflicted hiatus over the inability of players and owners to divide a $10 billion industry. By losing regular-season games, scrutiny will fall even more intensely on Manfred, the commissioner since January 2015, and Tony Clark, the former All-Star first baseman who became union leader when Michael Weiner died in November 2013.

“Manfred gotta go,” tweeted Chicago Cubs pitcher Marcus Stroman.

Past stoppages were based on issues such as a salary cap, free-agent compensation and pensions. This one is pretty much solely over money.

This fight was years in the making, with players angered that payrolls decreased by 4% from 2015 through last year, many teams jettisoned a portion of high-priced veteran journeymen in favor of lower-priced youth, and some clubs gave up on competing in the short term to better position themselves for future years.

The sport will be upended by its second shortened season in three years. The 2020 schedule was cut from 162 games to 60 because of the pandemic, a decision players filed a grievance over and still are litigating. The disruption will create another issue if 15 days of the season are wiped out: Stars such as Shohei Ohtani, Pete Alonso, Jake Cronenworth and Jonathan India would be delayed an extra year from free agency.

Players would lose $20.5 million in salary for each day of the season that is canceled, according to a study by The Associated Press, and the 30 teams would lose large sums that are harder to pin down. Members of the union’s executive subcommittee stand to lose the most, with Max Scherzer forfeited $232,975 for each regular-season day lost, and Gerrit Cole $193,548.

Scherzer and free-agent reliever Andrew Miller were present for talks. Both stopped to sign autographs for fans as they left Roger Dean Stadium, the vacant spring training home of the St. Louis Cardinals and Miami Marlins where negotiations have been held since the start of last week.

The first 86 games of the 1973 season were canceled by a strike over pension negotiations, the 1981 season was fractured by a 50-day midseason strike over free agency compensation rules that canceled 713 games, and a strike that started in August 1994 over management’s attempt to gain a salary cap canceled the final 669 games and led to a three-week delay of the 1995 season, when schedules were cut from 162 games to 144.

Players and owners entered deadline day far apart on many key issues and unresolved on others. The most contentious proposals involve luxury tax thresholds and rates, the size of a new bonus pool for pre-arbitration players, minimum salaries, salary arbitration eligibility and the union’s desire to change the club revenue-sharing formula.

While the differences had narrowed in recent days, the sides remained apart, with how far apart depending on the point of view.

MLB proposed raising the luxury tax threshold from $210 million to $220 million in each of the next three seasons, $224 million in 2025 and $230 in 2026. Players asked for $238 million this year, $244 million in 2023, $250 million in 2024, $256 million in 2025 and $263 in 2026.

MLB proposed $25 million annually for a new bonus pool for pre-arbitration players, and the union dropped from $115 million to $85 million for this year, with $5 million yearly increases.

MLB proposed raising the minimum salary from $570,500 to $675,000 this year, with increases of $10,000 annually, and the union asked for $725,000 this year, $745,000 in 2023, $765,000 in 2024 and increases for 2025 and 2026 based on the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners.

Source: Voice of America

As Russia’s war in Ukraine plays out for the world on social media, big tech platforms are moving to restrict Russian state media from using their platforms to spread propaganda and misinformation.

Google announced Tuesday that it’s blocking the YouTube channels of those outlets in Europe “effective immediately” but acknowledged “it’ll take time for our systems to fully ramp up.”

Other U.S.-owned tech companies have offered more modest changes so far: limiting the Kremlin’s reach, labeling more of this content so that people know it originated with the Russian government, and cutting Russian state organs off from whatever ad revenue they were previously making.

The changes are a careful balancing act intended to slow the Kremlin from pumping propaganda into social media feeds without angering Russian officials to the point that they yank their citizens’ access to platforms during a crucial time of war, said Katie Harbath, a former public policy director for Facebook.

“They’re trying to walk this very fine line; they’re doing this dance,” said Harbath, who now serves as director of technology and democracy at the International Republican Institute. “We want to stand up to Russia, but we also don’t want to get shut down in the country. How far can we push this?”

Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, announced Monday that it would restrict access to Russia’s RT and Sputnik services in Europe, following a statement by European Union President Ursula von der Leyen over the weekend that officials are working to bar the sites throughout the EU.

Google followed Tuesday with a European ban of those two outlets on YouTube.

The U.S. has not taken similar action or applied sanctions to Russian state media, leaving the American-owned tech companies to wrestle with how to blunt the Kremlin’s reach on their own.

The results have been mixed.

RT and other Russian-state media accounts are still active on Facebook in the U.S. Twitter announced Monday that after seeing more than 45,000 tweets daily from users sharing Russian state-affiliated media links in recent days, it will add labels to content from the Kremlin’s websites. The company also said it would not recommend or direct users to Russian-affiliated websites in its search function.

Over the weekend, the Menlo Park, California-based company announced it was banning ads from Russian state media and had removed a network of 40 fake accounts, pages and groups that published pro-Russian talking points. The network used fictitious persons posing as journalists and experts, but didn’t have much of an audience.

Facebook began labeling state-controlled media outlets in 2020.

Meanwhile, Microsoft announced it wouldn’t display content or ads from RT and Sputnik, or include RT’s apps in its app store. And Google’s YouTube restricted Russian-state media from monetizing the site through ads, although the outlets are still uploading videos every few minutes on the site.

By comparison, the hands-off approach taken by TikTok, a Chinese platform popular in the U.S. for short, funny videos, has allowed pro-Russian propaganda to flourish on its site. The company did not respond to messages seeking comment.

One recent video posted to RT’s TikTok channel features a clip of Steve Bannon, a former top adviser to ex-President Donald Trump who now hosts a podcast with a penchant for misinformation and conspiracy theories.

“Ukraine isn’t even a country. It’s kind of a concept,” Bannon said in the clip, echoing a claim by Russian President Vladimir Putin. “So when we talk about sovereignty and self-determination it’s just a corrupt area where the Clintons have turned into a colony where they can steal money.”

Already, Facebook’s efforts to limit Russian state media’s reach have drawn ire from Russian officials. Last week, Meta officials said they had rebuffed Russia’s request to stop fact-checking or labeling posts made by Russian state media. Kremlin officials responded by restricting access to Facebook.

The company has also denied requests from Ukrainian officials who have asked Meta to remove access to its platforms in Russia. The move would prevent everyday Russians from using the platforms to learn about the war, voice their views or organize protests, according to Nick Clegg, recently named the company’s vice president of global affairs.

“We believe turning off our services would silence important expression at a crucial time,” Clegg wrote on Twitter Sunday.

More aggressive labeling of state media and moves to de-emphasize their content online might help reduce the spread of harmful material without cutting off a key information source, said Alexandra Givens, CEO of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington-based non-profit.

“These platforms are a way for dissidents to organize and push back,” Givens said. “The clearest indication of that is the regime has been trying to shut down access to Facebook and Twitter.”

Russia has spent years creating its sprawling propaganda apparatus, which boasts dozens of sites that target millions of people in different languages. That preparation is making it hard for any tech company to mount a rapid response, said Graham Shellenberger at Miburo Solutions, a firm that tracks misinformation and influence campaigns.

“This is a system that has been built over 10 years, especially when it comes to Ukraine,” Shellenberger said. “They’ve created the channels, they’ve created the messengers. And all the sudden now, we’re starting to take action against it.”

Redfish, a Facebook page that is labeled as Russian-state controlled media, has built up a mostly U.S. and liberal-leaning audience of more than 800,000 followers over the years.

The page has in recent days posted anti-U.S. sentiment and sought to down play Russian’s invasion of Ukraine, calling it a “military operation” and dedicating multiple posts to highlighting anti-war protests across Russia.

One Facebook post also used a picture of a map to highlight airstrikes in other parts of the world.

“Don’t let the mainstream media’s Eurocentrism dictate your moral support for victims of war,” the post read.

Last week, U.S. Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia sent letters to Google, Meta, Reddit, Telegram, TikTok and Twitter urging them to curb such Russian influence campaigns on their websites.

“In addition to Russia’s established use of influence operations as a tool of strategic influence, information warfare constitutes an integral part of Russian military doctrine,” Warner wrote.

Source: Voice of America