Search

1. Long-term threats, legacy of mining
- Unstable old salt mines below Stassfurt that have to be monitored and water flows have to be management to prevent ground movement
- so far, more than 800 buildings, including an 500-year old church had to be demolished. Currently, ground movement is under control
- 27 waste heaps and contaminted sites within the city that contain many very hazadous chemical compunds. They were never properly cleaned up

2. Long-term threats, ongoing causes
- by-products of salt mining and refining are collected in large landfills that leak salt into sorrounding areas. There are no plans how these landfills can be remediated, they have to be mananged indenfinitely
- soil erosion of arable land around the city by high intensity farming of crops for livestock production and bioenergy
- toxic waste produced by waste incarceration plant is pumped into former salt mining caves where it solidifies and becomes impossible to recover

3. Short term threats
- explosion in bionenergy plant in 2020
- leakage of ammonia at public street in 2014
- pollution of river bode with ammonia and chloride by CHIECH Soda, massive fish kills every summer
- air pollution, cause unknown, probably mostly by metalworks industry

Staßfurt is a small city in the East German Bundesland Saxony-Anhalt with about 24 thousand inhabitants. Like many cities and villages in the area, it faces huge demographic problems: The population is shrinking rapidly, consists mostly of older people, unemployment is high, percentage of highly educated people is low. The city has a long history of salt mining that goes back to the 13th century. Many inhabitants proudly refer to Staßfurt as the "Cradle of potash-mining" ("Wiege des Kalibergbaus"). Unfilled salt mining shafts that were flooded by groundwater had to be abandoned and started to cave in. Over 800 buildings in the city center had to be demolished because of instabilities, among them a 500-year old church. Nevertheless, salt mining and a metallic industry that developed alongside it is still the largest economic sector in Staßfurt. The city is still permeated by an old mining culture that becomes visible in traditional festivals, clubs (Bergmannsverein e.V. Staßfurt) and the playing of traditional miner's song on offical occasions (Steigerlied).

An oversight board of 20 well-known, reputable individuals has been (publically) convened to make final decisions about contested content removal from the platform. 

Critics note that content removal is not the only ethical issue Facebook has, and Siva Vaidhyanathan notes that the proprietary algorithm that shows people content is a serious issue over which this board has no authority. 

Joan Donovan notes that the slow legalistic pace will not keep up even when damaging content is a serious ethical issue, as even only a few hours is sufficient for viral digital content to reach huge audiences: 

Joan Donovan, the research director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center and an expert on media manipulation, raised concerns that the board would become “weaponized” by bad actors, who will use it as another opportunity to get their issues into the press.

“This theory of oversight is heavily informed by legal scholarship, which is slow and administrative and technical in nature, when we need something much more suited to the speed of the technology itself,” she said. “They’re going forward with this really long drawn out procedural mechanism that doesn’t address what the problem is – which is that viral content only needs to be on the internet for 4-8 hours for it to do its damage.”

Looking at the scale of the “infodemic” facing Facebook amid the coronavirus pandemic, Donovan said that the much more pressing concern is to solve the problem of “information curation, especially in a place like Facebook, that helps guide the user toward correct content and information rather than putting them in the middle a landfill and saying, ‘You sort it out’.” The oversight board is ultimately a distraction from “what really needs to happen”, she said, “which is to design technology that doesn’t allow for the expansive amplification of disinformation and health misinformation”.