Washington is back to work this week and so are the Kardashians.
Congress returned from its August recess and some lawmakers are looking into issues like gun reform and impeachment. Meanwhile, “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” season 17 premiered Sunday and Kim Kardashian West debuted her shapewear line with a familiar face.
In this week’s issue we’ll look at KKW mixing activism with entrepreneurship, a new report on disinformation, and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s thoughts on President Trump.
Yours,
👾 How social media companies can prepare for disinformation in 2020
A new report predicting how disinformation is likely to play a role in the 2020 campaign warned that content could come from countries like Iran and China, as well as from domestic sources and even for-profit firms hired to generate disinformation.
The report, written by NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights deputy director Paul Barrett, singled out the Facebook-owned apps Instagram and WhatsApp as two spaces where false content and memes based on disinformation could spread. Axios noted the report looked at Instagram in particular because “disinformation is increasingly based on images as opposed to text.”
The report offers recommendations to social media companies to combat disinformation, including industry-wide collaboration and teaching social media literacy to users, and argues that doing so will improve their brand reputations. You can read the full report here.
🖋️ The Sharpie is one of Trump’s original tools for shaping media coverage
Before he became president, Trump scribbled notes over newspaper or magazine articles he didn’t like, signed them, and sent them to their authors. Since taking office, he’s continued the practice, sending off signed copies of print journalism or printed out tweets to allies in Congress and foreign heads of state. We’ve seen photos of him reading from prepared remarks with notes written in bold, black marker in the margins. Trump loves a Sharpie.
It’s not the best tool for writing anything more lengthy than a short note, but it’s bold and can be used to write over someone, as he’s done on articles. When it’s used on a professional map produced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, people tend to notice.
After Trump showed off a doctored map last week to try to prove the accuracy of his tweet based on outdated information about Alabama being in Dorian’s path, the Sharpie became a meme. It’s easy-to-use and an effective visual trope to point out Trump’s inaccurate statements.
Twitter users did things like draw stick figures over empty parts of the National Mall during Trump’s inauguration to poke fun at Trump’s false crowd size claims while another drew planes over a Revolutionary War painting, referring to his July 4th gaffe. Here’s what The Daily Show and internet artist Saint Hoax did with it:
Instead of admitting his error, Trump doubled down and he and his team responded by trolling. The campaign store sold "fine point markers” to “set the record straight,” and Eric Trump tweeted this pro-Trump meme:
🌳 AOC channels the OG New Deal in Green New Deal posters
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) promoted the Green New Deal with a pair of posters inspired by PSAs and National Park posters released under the New Deal’s Federal One project that put artists to work. The posters show Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx and Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens. They were art directed by Scott Starrett, design director at Tandem, the firm that designed Ocasio-Cortez’s 2018 campaign branding.
Starrett told Yello the project began as a collaboration with the Ocasio-Cortez campaign to make the Green New Deal a “dinner table conversation” and he hopes the posters will remind viewers that everyone has the same access to public spaces like parks and it doesn’t make them “any less valuable for anyone.”
“If in the past, we could find the value in preserving land in order to strengthen our communities, perhaps we can find a common understanding when it comes to preserving a more livable future,” he said.
More posters are planned and will be released as part of collaborations with artists from different areas and backgrounds, Starrett said.
🛍️ KKW taps Alice Marie Johnson for shapewear ad
How’s this for cross promo: Kim Kardashian West mixed activism with entrepreneurship by tapping Alice Marie Johnson to appear in an ad for Skims, her shape wear line (formerly known as Kimono) that launched today. In the video, Johnson wears the Skims sculpting bodysuit, says it makes her “feel free,” and talks about KKW going “to war for me to fight for my freedom” in convincing Trump to commute her lifetime sentence as a first-time nonviolent offender. Other ads for the line feature KKW’s friends and sisters.
👩⚕️ Vaccine stock photos aren’t very good, so this magazine made its own
Self teamed up with the American Academy of Pediatrics to make its own stock photos about vaccines after realizing most of the photos out there were inaccurate or terrifying, like images crying babies.
“We wanted to create stock photography about getting vaccinated that is medically accurate, realistic, and not fear-mongering,” Self explained. The images were used to illustrate their Vaccines Save Lives series, and they’re offering the collection free to use.
💪 Lessons from one celeb-turned-politician to another
Schwarzenegger with “Terminator: Dark Fate” costar Gabriel Luna
In an interview with Men’s Health, bodybuilder-turned-actor-turned-politician Arnold Schwarzenegger said he thinks Trump wants to be him and talked about how he sees Trump making some of the same mistakes he did as governor of California.
“I always complain about Trump not being able to shift from Trump to president,” Schwarzenegger said. “Well, the reason why I say this is because I saw that with myself, that I was not able to shift from Arnold to governor. I was still stuck as Arnold. Arnold always gets things done. I forced my way in there, then I do it and do it and do it and do it, until it gets done. And I felt the same thing I can do with politics. But I learned quickly that that’s really not the way it works. You got to be able to bring people together. It takes much more time, much more effort, but that’s just the way it is. If you don’t like that, don’t get into politics.”
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