Tuesday, July 31, 2018
Facebook suspends some more quasi-Russian accounts; we really need consolidated paywalls
Facebook reports suspending at least 32 accounts with
pages that behaved in a suspicious manner, trying to spread fake or divisive
news to certain populations, link .
Facebook believes the sites are overseas and
may be Russian, but the IP tracing seems to be much more laundered than before. Facebook believed that the meddling was aimed at the 2018 midterms as well as increasing tribal and social divisiveness.
Some of the accounts tried to push material on
upcoming rallies in Washington. Some had names like “Blac Elevation” and “Eliminate
ICE”.
However, it is disturbing that so many Facebook users
are illiterate and gullible when it comes to receiving news.
I have noticed that not only do most local newspapers
have paywalls now (as well as big city papers), but also so do many periodical
commentary sites – the trend among the latter has increased sharply in recent
months. Many links I give require
paywall subscription to view more than a few articles a month.
As I have noted before, I think Facebook could help by
organizing consolidated paywall accounts, by which users could pick up to maybe
10 reputable publications for a much lower annual price than the sum of them
individually, and could invite reputable newspapers and editorial sites to join.
We really need to get users into the habit of visiting legitimate newspaper sites (including local) and more professional commentary. Of course, I appreciate your visiting me, but I try to refer you to legitimate stories.
Using “private windows”, or multiple browsers and
multiple laptops or phones or tablets could help with the free allowance.
Labels:
elections,
Facebook-specific issues,
fake news,
paywalls,
tribalism
Monday, July 30, 2018
"Legality" of 3-D-printed plastic weapons and their supporting literature will surely lead to private platform censorship online
The State Department reportedly reached an agreement
with Defense Distributed in Texas, and on Wednesday August 1anyone
will be able to download instructions and materials from the company and print a weapon at home. The CNN story is here.
It’s pretty obvious that there is a serious public
safety issue at stake, as the CNN article points out big time.
But there will also be a speech and “first amendment”
issue. While lawful, social media
companies (and YouTube) will certainly feel pressured by the public to ban
these from their platforms (as YouTube does now with most other weapons-related
directive material). This pressure will
even extend to hosting companies, who right now sometimes make operating
private gun sale stores on their servers a violation of their AUP’s. (That generally means most weapons companies
would have to host their own servers.)
It could also extend to domain name registrars, as we saw after Charlottesville
with extreme right wing sites.
Defense Distributed, however, has a fully active
channel in YouTube with a substantial number of subscribers. I’m not sure how
this fits into the YouTube TOS issue now.
Wired has a YouTube video on the issue.
David Hogg has tweeted about the issue (after I
emailed him the first CNN story) and become quite vocal about the public safety
dangers. How will the TSA deal with
this?
It probably is harder to make a weapon at home than
the critics say, hopefully. I’m reminded of the downstream liability of PaladinPress in the 1990s.
Update: July 31
Federal Judge Robert Lasnik has at least temporarily blocked DD from releasing the blueprints online at midnight tonight, ABC11 story here. The plaintiffs included eight states and D.C.
The company is run by Cody Wilson (Arkansas). Vox discussed Trump's ambiguous tweet here. Trump has conceded the NRA position that homemade weapons are illegal even if the plans to make them are not. You get to a logical situation that could even parallel child pornography -- in trying to defend the plans with the First Amendment.
So right now the link on this posting can not lead to these instructions.
Update: July 31
Federal Judge Robert Lasnik has at least temporarily blocked DD from releasing the blueprints online at midnight tonight, ABC11 story here. The plaintiffs included eight states and D.C.
The company is run by Cody Wilson (Arkansas). Vox discussed Trump's ambiguous tweet here. Trump has conceded the NRA position that homemade weapons are illegal even if the plans to make them are not. You get to a logical situation that could even parallel child pornography -- in trying to defend the plans with the First Amendment.
So right now the link on this posting can not lead to these instructions.
Sunday, July 29, 2018
Major social media companies' business models come under even more fire, making them more demanding of quality user engagement
As I climbed on, I just saw an ad for Jaron Lanier’s “10
Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Now”, by Jaron Lanier.
I won’t speculate on the reasons now. I know of Lanier partly through the classical
music world (even all the modern composers now in NYC), but this leads up to
another story in the “Sunday” Wall Street Journal, about the sudden crash in
some social media companies at the end of last week: specifically Facebook and
Twitter. At the moment, Google (Alphabet,
including YouTube and Blogger and G+) seems less affected.
Lanier seems to be noting that social media companies
can make money only by manipulating what you see to feed you ads, that is, by
manipulating you. I don’t feel that way –
my Internet experience evolved in the late 1990s when you searched for news
yourself, and I still do. I came of tech-age during the first dot-com boom and
bubble, before the crash (and before 9/11). But I don’t play ball with these companies. I rarely click on the ads or buy directly
from them.
But of course modern social media comprise “Web 2.0”
where the users make the content rather than the site owner. This blog is still closer to a 1.0 site in
the way it is reached and reacted to.
And because of the ease with which less literate users
are manipulated (for political purposes), and because of the privacy problems for
users, and also because of the increasing liability concerns for platforms
(like FOSTA), the business models for these companies have to be coming under
increasing pressure. It seems as though
they can only make profits by getting people do potentially self-destructive
things.
I’m not sure I buy all this negative hype (it's easy enough to come up with 10 reasons not to do as Lanier says, at least out of a temper tantrum). But I am getting more concerned about the “skin
in the game” idea, where at some point the Pharisee-idea of being noticed for
speech leads to real action. And like it
or not, that requires social engagement with many people whom you may not have wanted
to include in your life in the past.
I can imagine various ways companies could factor user
real-world engagement into their business models. “Pay your own way” might become a slogan. I
won’t elaborate now. (That might come to apply to book self-publishing too, but that's another discussion.) But fantasy is
endless. In the meantime, I note well how Facebook keeps irritating users, me at least, trying to run "my non-profit's" fundraisers under my own name, as if I didn't have my own brand any more. There is still a mentality with some users that "friendship" on social media entitles them to attention they couldn't get in the physical world. But that's a problem for me, too.
Saturday, July 28, 2018
To move to partially selective platforms, you need content that is fact-based: the power grid issue could be a good place to start
The gradual pressure on user-generated content is
indeed nudging me to consider publishing key articles on other platforms. Two
examples might be Medium (guidelines) and Hubpages.
Some of these platforms may offer a self-publishing
option, with some oversight or right to edit, and some have options that are
selective (like Medium’s Mission). It
would be a good question as to whether the changes in Section 230 and the “moderator’s
paradox” will affect these platforms.
The best way to introduce oneself to a platform like
this would be with an article on an issue of public importance and where the
author has much more factual knowledge than the readers.
The article would generally suggest a direction for
public policy or personal action on the basis of evidence from lesser-known
facts, as documented in reputable sources (and maybe some personal experience)
and less on speculation about what could happen.
I’ve outlined some topics for this sort of activity
before. For example, a discussion of the
downstream liability problem for Internet platforms could be largely fact-driven
(with some emphasis on the idea that there are different business models for
different platforms). So could the
history of how platforms have reacted to the threat of increased liability
exposure (as from FOSTA). What sounds more speculative, however, is trying to
predict how platforms may react to political and social pressures in the future
and censor content or weed out customers and users based on, say, community
engagement (Charlottesville broke through a barrier with hosting and domain
name companies).
I think that a good topic that is reasonably factual
and in need of this sort of exposition is the threats to the power grid, both
EMP and (as has gotten attention recently, especially from David Sanger’s
book), cyber. Americans seem divided on
the issue of civil preparedness, with a “conservative” and “gun-owning” crowd insisting
on personal doomsday preparation. My own position has always been that such a
calamity must be prevented.
A number of topics that are fact-oriented come into
play: how EMP works (E1 v E3), comparison to solar storms, and how cyber
hackers get past the “air gap” to get into utilities. The best approach for an article on one of
these platforms would be an “annotated bibliography”; that is, following a
model for a preview of a term paper in undergraduate English back in 1963. (By the way, I remember then – professors wouldn’t
let you keep your own paper after grading, out of fear of “fraternity files” –
what happened to intellectual property rights then?) That is,
present the findings on the topic from well-respected publications and authors
as much as possible. The EMP issue especially
has been a favorite topic of some of the extreme right, and that fact tends to
downplay its credibility in the general public. However, there is slowly
accumulating a body of literature from more mainstream sources, including science
organizations (like Oak Ridge) that this (along with solar storms) could be a
very serious problem, and preventable.
Unfortunately, as we have seem with a much better known issue (climate
change), the public has become so resentful and polarized that it has no
perception of fact v. fiction.
The topic is particularly critical because of the unprecedented dependence of our modern civilization on technology.
The topic is particularly critical because of the unprecedented dependence of our modern civilization on technology.
But right now, this seems like my next assignment.
Thursday, July 26, 2018
When publishing regulations itself is copyright infringement
Imagine if copyright law prevented the public from
having access to rules set up by industry groups that can affect users, like
terms of service or acceptable use policies.
Public.Resource makes some of the standards documents available. I do wonder why one would need to pay (Lulu) for
a copy of “10 Rules for Radicals” if it is p.d.
Nevertheless standards development organizations
accused PR of copyright infringement and got the DC circuit court to agree with
them. Bu the DC Circuit Court of Appeals
just overruled them and sent it back to the lower court and ordered it to
consider fair use.
Electronic Frontier Foundation has an article July 17
as a press release.
Tuesday, July 24, 2018
California state supreme court boosts Section 230 protections in "bad review" cases
Here’s an interesting application of Section 230. The California state supreme court has invoked
the federal Section 230 and ruled that Yelp cannot be compelled to take down a
bad review of a business that is suing the author of the post for defamation.
The case is Hassell v. Bird and secondarily Hassell v.Yelp
Electronic Frontier Foundation has a lead story by Sophia
Cope and Miranda Rutherford.
Hassell seems to have tried to involve a “safe harbor”
(like with copyright and DMCA) process for defamation.
The video above (two years old) applies to the trial court opinion
which had originally ordered that Yelp take the material down.
Sunday, July 22, 2018
Are radical activists really serious about banning speech on "settled issues"?
I had a conversation with a friend Friday night over the
problem of whether activists have any moral leverage in claiming that some subjects
are settled and should be off the table. The "settled issue" claim runs parallel to the "settled precedent" in litigated (even Supreme Court) cases.
We started hearing this more often after Charlottesville,
specifically about white supremacy; but
there are all kinds of other possible issues.
We used to say that about communism.
Other countries are much more specific about certain subject matter. Neo-Nazi speech and Holocaust denial is illegal in Germany, out of a fear that political pressure could grow to bring it back if the speech were tolerated.
Now sometimes on the far Left, especially, you see claims that only the victims of oppression have a right to address it in public spaces. This is a variation of the "skin in the game" idea, as in Nassim Taleb's recent book.
Now sometimes on the far Left, especially, you see claims that only the victims of oppression have a right to address it in public spaces. This is a variation of the "skin in the game" idea, as in Nassim Taleb's recent book.
Yes, I have been criticized for bringing up the military draft
gratuitously, when I am no longer personally exposed to it; and making it more likely
politicians would take it seriously again, by gratuitously "reminding them". (Of course, politicians have brought up making women register for Selective Service!) Also drawing more serious potential objection is the idea of
discussing the “sissy boy” syndrome, and even “demographic winter”. These ideas are supposed to be forgotten forever in this world of political correctness,
The friend said, “What people say this?” Not many, but Silicon Valley is getting
spooked by these more extreme claims of potential group oppression, seen as
hate speech or bullying because of its gratuitousness.
The friend agreed, however, that my working alone, and my
setting this example, tends to weaken group-based activism in general. The impulse to limit speech in some areas as inappropriate for continued public discussion really is politically motivated as a way to protect "oppressed minorities".
Saturday, July 21, 2018
Is court litigation or criminal prosecution open to the public as it progresses? Normally, yes (unless a judge says otherwise)
Thursday, I posted my comments about the court hearing
for the complaint filed by Woodhull Freedom Foundation et al vs. United States,
regarding trying to get an injunction against FOSTA-SESTA (see July 19 for link).
I still have yet to find a major media account of the hearing,
or anything on EFF or Woodhull’s site on the outcome of the hearing.
It strikes me a curious, given the potential
importance of the case. As I noted, the
judge sounded very skeptical of the claims, to me at least – although not in a
political way, more in simply taking words literally in a statute and applying
legal civil and criminal procedure law.
Perhaps it is “rude” for amateurs to comment on “activist”
litigation before a judge does, as if it could spook or slant the outcome if a
judge found it online.
But I can find nothing in the law that says that the course
of any court hearing is confidential, unless there is a very specific
instruction from a judge (as about classified information). It is true that actual photography or
videotaping is normally prohibited in court, but there is nothing that I know
of that makes what was said secret, in so far as someone remembers what
happened or took manual handwritten notes (old school style).
Here is the main source; here also is the federal courts link on it.
There are, of course, some things that happen in
secret for a while (grand juries, usually).
Thursday, July 19, 2018
Doctors still go after patients who post bad reviews; sometimes there have even been criminal charges; more on FOSTA
USA Today offers an unusually detailed story on Thursday,
July 19, 2018 on the issue of negative online reviews on “review sites” like
Yelp, on social media (Facebook) and even on personal blogs, by Jayne O’Donnell
and Ken Alltucker, link here. (There may be a paywall, but this paper is
one of the easiest to find in hardcopy in convenience stores, as I did this
morning on a “doughnut run” before working.)
The article focuses on several cases: A retired military general David Antoon
settled criminal and civil charges regarding his campaign against a Cleveland
Clinic urologist The Clinic is
considered litigious, which can matter because many medical centers around the
country have ties to the Clinic.
A jazz singer in Arizona was sued by a local clinic
after her reviews concerning some cosmetic surgery (but it’s understandable
that cosmetic fields could indeed invite negative reviews).
A Michigan hospital sued family members of an elderly patient
for “tortious interference” (as in the 1999 movie “The Insider”) among other
things.
The article explains that review site (like Yelp) don’t
fact check but they do take down reviews that violate “terms of service” such
as hate speech, or bot generation of reviews or comments. Review stes are
(still) protected by Section 230.
Update: Later July 19
I attended the FOSTA hearing today. No injunction was issued. Here is my best report so far.
Wednesday, July 18, 2018
Zuckerberg stirs controversy as he rationalizes some hate-motivated fake news on Facebook
Mark Zuckerberg has created a lot of controversy today
by suggesting that he does not take down content just because it denies an
accepted fact and tends to promote group hatred. He gave a discussion of why he
allows Holocaust denial to stay on the site, as explained in Fast Company here,
by Cale Guthrie Weissman.
Zuckerberg said he only takes down material that is
directly threatening. I believe that
Facebook doesn’t allow certain materials (like private weapons sales, online
pharmacies) that are at best legally gray and that are perceived as public
safety hazards.
However, remember that recently Facebook published Community
Guidelines (June 27) where it gave a staged explanation of how it handles hate speech,
which it says is very much in the eyes of the beholder.
Material believed to be factually wrong and provocative
does get treated in such a way that fewer people will see it.
The article also goes into why InfoWars might be
allowed (the denial of the Sandy Hook gun attack), although pushed down.
These explanations comport with what was said Tuesday
in a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee, as discussed in the Washington Post as staging a right-wing threat to Section
230.
But in general, the public seems to believe, much more today than a decade ago, that
speakers allowed to publish on online platforms should be expected to take some
responsibility for the literacy (or lack thereof) of their likely audiences,
and should not be permitted to stir dissent by aiming stories they know are
almost certainly historically false at readers whom they know are excitable and
unable to process what they see cognitively.
This gets back to collective, authoritarian theories on propaganda.
Furthermore, many on the Left insist that bringing up “settled
issues” just to look smart and objective is only a snarky way to further “bully”
(uneducated) people in already “oppressed groups
Labels:
fake news,
hate speech,
Section 230,
social media monitoring
Tuesday, July 17, 2018
Should journalists (and even bloggers) need licenses? It's not as easy to refute as we would like
Recently, there has been a lot of rhetoric from some
politicians that we need to crack down on fake news in some formal way.
So one idea that naturally comes up would be the licensing
of journalists. It looks like I covered this problem once in 2012 with regard to an issue in North Carolina. Now the issue surfaces in Indiana (which doesn't want "me"). So here goes.
It’s obvious that “freedom of the press” in the First
Amendment would be jeopardized (and would mean that licensing could meet almost
immediate court challenge). But one can imagine setting up a licensing agency
that is somehow separated legally from partisan politics the way the Fed is, or
the way the FBI is supposed to be. But
Donald Trump has shown so little regard for these separations that one would
have little confidence that he (or other authoritarians) would respect the
independence of such an agency. If Trump wanted to do this, he would be smarter
to behave better with respect to the independence of his FBI, intelligence
services (especially Monday in Helsinki) and financial markets.
In fact, licensing means different things according to
context. Typically, an individual needs some sort of business license with the
state (although for a proprietorship this is very minimal), and usually a sales
tax certificate (which could get more complicated with interstate taxing as
allowed by the Supreme Court). To mail a newsletter, apparently you have to
prove to the USPS that at least 50% comes from paid subscribers (to avoid junk
mail problems).
Broadcast television is heavily regulated (as I learned
myself when I worked for NBC in the 1970s – no complaints, I’d do it again) Cable
is much less regulated, as it morphs into Internet TV (and the network neutrality
debate). But video channels like YouTube and Vimeo essentially are not
(although there are issues like DMCA Safe Harbor, Section 230, and FOSTA). They
are perceived as for amateurs, although major media companies create free
content for them.
But then there is the obvious question as to whether
independent individual blogging would then have to be licensed, if in fact it reported
news at all or offered factual commentary (or maybe legal advice). The link here
gives many examples where citizen journalism reported things (like pipeline
demonstrations in the Dakotas) largely missed my newspapers and television stations.
One possibility is that, without net neutrality, telecoms could some day insist on some sort of certification license (for safety, SSL certificate, and supportability) before any domain is allowed to connect.
President Trump would seem to want this, based on his pre-election comments (like shutting down the Internet back in December 2015, and for his professed dislike of computers); but then he took to Twitter. and seems to hate the established corporate media, anything to the left of Fox. But individual bloggers (like Milo) seem to be OK for him.
One possibility is that, without net neutrality, telecoms could some day insist on some sort of certification license (for safety, SSL certificate, and supportability) before any domain is allowed to connect.
President Trump would seem to want this, based on his pre-election comments (like shutting down the Internet back in December 2015, and for his professed dislike of computers); but then he took to Twitter. and seems to hate the established corporate media, anything to the left of Fox. But individual bloggers (like Milo) seem to be OK for him.
This gets into nebulous issues I’ve covered before, such as
whether speech pays its own way (similar to the newsletter issue above), has
backup people, or whether the speaker has a good “social credit” reputation (as
we look toward Beijing’s plans for “social credit scores” in 2020). It also invokes the left wing idea that most
individualized political speech exists only to bully the oppressed, and that
everybody needs to belong to a tribe first.
Indeed, without the right to speak individually as we have now, people
would be forced more into group activism to be heard at all, which is what a
lot of people on the far Left want.
Saturday, July 14, 2018
Russians had exploited shooting of Philando Castile in Minnesota, before the 2016 elections
CNN is reporting Saturday morning that a Russian troll
group deliberately exploited the shooting of Philando Castile in St. Paul, MN,
and a Minnesota newspaper seems to confirm the story, here. But, worse, this
collusion story had been reported in October 2017.
In that July 2016 incident, streamed on Facebook, the
police officer himself was a POC.
More investigation has supported the idea that the “organization”
in Illinois was a shadow set up in St. Petersburg. The story raises the question of whether "organizations" are a weaker point of subversion than "individuals" on the web.
CNN is reporting the story today because of the
indictment announced against twelve Russians Firdya, just before Donald Trump
is supposed to meet Vladimir Putin in Helsinki.
Russians seem to be aware that Americans are divided
on actually marching and shouting in demonstrations. Some will show up and film and post on blogs
but not participate (the “no spectators” and “skin in the game” problems).
The Russian meddling occurred in early July 2016, even
before the Republican convention which nominated Donald Trump, under Obama’s watch.
Wednesday, July 11, 2018
Workplace, public computer blocking of "amateur" sites becoming more common; a template for telecom behavior post net neutrality?; more on paywalls
Today, after a small problem with my car this morning,
I spent a little time at a Ford dealership and tried their free computer
connection.
All thirteen of my blogs that still use the original
blogspot address connected OK with https (under Chrome in an old Windows 7 environment).
The computer appeared to have Norton security with
probably some workplace level security settings.
All my custom domain names (doaskdotell.com, the four
Wordpress blogs equated to domains, and the three Blogger blogs for which I
have linked custom domains) seemed to be blocked. In one case (a Wordpress site “billsmediareviews.com”)
the computer first failed to find the SSL certificate but was blocked the
second time.
I’ve written about this observation on my network neutrality
blog (Dec 7, 2017) and IT Jobs blog (Oct. 10, 2017).
It certainly appears that these days, workplace
filters will block any “amateur” site that isn’t from a well known company or organization. I believe they would block many non-profits
with political biases.
I’m somewhat concerned that this behavior could
provide a template for telecom behavior post net neutrality, especially if the
telecom purchased an anti-virus or security company. It would not be a problem
if a service with whitelisted sites was offered as a low-end, inexpensive
service to families that want to protect young minors (this idea had been
discussed during the COPA litigation of a decade ago). But any telecom should
offer everything unfiltered to an adult that wants it (the regular Internet). So far they seem to be doing that, even post
net neutrality repeal.
Note also the CNN warning on ad blockers, advising visitors that they could eventually lead to the use of paywalls.
Tuesday, July 10, 2018
SCOTUS nominee Kavanaugh seems to be good on First Amendment issues (net neutrality seems to be a problem)
Ken White, on a site called Popehat, has some detailed analysis of the views of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh on free speech and
first amendment issues.
The writer warns, “you’re going to hate this
post”. Rick Sincere of Charlottesville
VA and Bearing Drift shared the post today.
In short, Kavanaugh is pretty good about free speech, for
business or political purposes. He tends
to disfavor SLAPP suits based on facetious defamation claims, although there
are procedural issues in the way in the case of various state laws when
reviewed by the federal circuit, where he serves. It should seem expected that he would in
general favor corporate and political speech, since he has served in a circuit
that specializes in technology, patent and trademark. He also doesn't object to the political "weaponizing" of speech against intersectional groups.
There is a lot of concern, however, in that he has
said that the Obama net neutrality rules violated the First Amendment, except
in cases where carriers don’t have competition. So he probably would not be
supportive of legal challenges to Ajit Pai’s removing the rules from the FCC;
the details about this go on another blog. He does seem to regard telecoms as
content providers rather than utilities, and that view seems vulnerable.
Kavanaugh would not find any legal basis for
interfering with platforms’ (whether social media or conventional hosting and domain
name registration) own terms of service or acceptable use policies. That has
gotten more attention after some extreme right-wing websites were cut off after
Charlottesville. This could become more important if hosts come under more
pressure especially from the Left to regulate even “indirect” hate speech.
Monday, July 09, 2018
California data privacy bill could prove a boondoggle for most business websites in 2020
California has apparently passed an initiative privacy
bill, to go into effect 1/1/2020, which Mike Masnick on Techdirt calls “a disaster in the making”.
The article even suggests that most business websites
would have to develop a separate version for California, but won’t other states
join in?
I don’t know if this could affect Adsense, or Amazon
associate ads, for example. These
companies could probably put their privacy controls inside their images as
methods dependent on the location of the IP address receiving the content. I
haven’t seen them make any changes for the EU GDPR, which has been overtaken by
the controversies over the Copyright Directive (put off until September for
now).
Also, here’s an article on how to deal with “information
clutter” in your own Internet experience.
Sunday, July 08, 2018
Wisconsin university ordered to reinstate a professor in a freedom of speech case
The Wisconsin supreme court has ordered the Jesuit school Marquette University to reinstate a professor John McAdams after he wrote, on a
personal blog outside of the university, a post critical of a student professor
who had asked another student to drop her philosophy class when the student
disagreed with her on allowing gay marriage.
This all happened four years ago.
The lead story of the recent opinion is here.
The opinion is here.
The original blogpost is here. There is a long thread of posts about the court
case, including issues like whether the other professor should have been named.
This all seems fairly complicated and would take some
time for me, at least, to unscramble.
But I wanted to note my own past history with “conflict of interest”
over speech in the workplace, for example here and the complicated case that occurred when I worked as a substitute teacher,
described July 27, 2007 on this blog, or here. I also have a legacy essay on the problem
dating back to 2000 here.
Before the advent of modern social media (especially
Facebook, once open to everyone) I had said that persons who have direct
reports in the workplace or underwriting or discretionary authority over others
in the workplace should not self-publish on their own without supervision or
gatekeeping, because this could unintentionally lead to hostile workplace risks. I’ve also described the “conflict of interest”
in the 1990s when I was developing a book on gays in the military but working
for an insurance company that focused on selling to military officers. We resolved that with a corporate transfer
and relocation in 1997, after merger.
But an important part of McAdams's case seems to be the fact that academic freedom of speech outside of work was guaranteed by contract, which would not always be the case in the situations I take up in my essays. My own situations have never been litigated, but if they had been, they would have gotten complicated.
Saturday, July 07, 2018
Trump wants Twitter to remove major newspaper accounts; dangerous implications
Emily
Stewart of Vox has a story about Trump’s “demands” of Twitter that might have
alarming implications.
Trump
supposedly asked Twitter to disable New York Times and Washington Post accounts
for what he calls “fake news”. Yet, as
Stewart reports, Trump has sometimes interacted with what Twitter has flagged
as automated bots and then disabled.
It’s
dangerous for a president to make an order like this in jest on a Tweet, because
we don’t know for sure that he couldn’t make a real one with an Executive
Order. And with his own Supreme Court
appointments, maybe SCOTUS would have his back for purely political reasons.
Although
Trump has been gratuitous in his early morning use of Twitter, before his inauguration
there was plenty of speculation that he could try to shut down a lot of
Internet functionality on national security grounds, as I covered. That died away. Back in December 2015 he had
called for shutting down most of the Internet altogether. Before his election, he hadn’t used computers
much and didn’t like them, Manipulation
of the loyalty of people was the only thing that mattered to him.
Friday, July 06, 2018
Should bloggers avoid reviewing work of "dangerous" people (to "protect" vulnerable minorities)?
Here’s a little word to the wise.
When I review books, music, films or other content by
various authors, filmmakers, musicians or other artists, on any of my sites, I
generally review what I see. I don’t guarantee
the readers (or any platform servicing me) that I personally know about any misconduct
about the person whose work I review, or about various remarks the person could
have made in public venues that indicate extremist sentiments or possibly
organizational connections. There are examples
of writings and books by individuals (especially “conservative”) which seem
reasonable enough when read, when their authors are later reported in the media
(perhaps falsely) to have extremist connections or even sexual misconduct.
With books, especially, I will generally try to
present opposing views on something when I can find them, and the opposition’s
work is reasonably well stated.
There will be some parties who believe that giving
certain writers visibility, or even certain positions credibility, is
contributing to their group oppression, and should be banned. If I’m over leveraging my privilege, so be it;
but I see how reviewing content by others with extremist connections could
cause complaints about me. I ponder this
as I recall that last December Twitter, for example, announced that it would
close accounts to members of certain white supremacist groups, as if it were in
a position to know about any person’s associations.
There is also a “bias” in my content toward content
that somehow relates ultimately to what individuals should do on their own about
a certain immigration, rather than simply about defending people in any group
or caught in any situation (as at the border). For example, on the border
crisis, I would be more concerned about asking what could be asked from
Americans with resources (like inheritances or estates) to assist actual kids
who are displaced, than with the idea that no mother should ever be separated
from her children.
But the unprecedented incident in Charlottesville last
August opened a new dimension in the pressure on service platforms to crackdown
on speech that is somehow perceived as harmful to various minorities. (This continues a similar discussion posted June 22.)
Thursday, July 05, 2018
EU Parliament votes down draconian Copyright Directive articles 11 and 13, sending them back for revision before another vote in September
European Members of Parliament in Brussels have
rejected the two most controversial provisions of the proposed Copyright
Directive. They will go back to
negotiation for another possible vote in September.
The BBC has a news story now . I
expect to see an article on Ars Technica today (keep checking). The vote was
318-278 (EFF twtter).
Article 13 might have required Content-ID style
checking of all uploads, even text. Article 11 would have imposed a link tax,
or at least allowed countries to set up a licensing mechanism to even quote
snippets of news stories for newspapers in their countries. This did not work out very well for Spain.
The link tax was motivated by the supposed unfairness
of the way social media sites link news before sending it to users. But blogs like this one (through labels and
tags) also aggregate news. Some
observers in the publishing industry see this as unfair to newspapers and
contributing to revenue loss and job loss.
But newspapers can easily put up paywalls, which many do.
In fact, I’ve advocated consolidated paywalls, where
newspapers get together and offer deals to consumers.
Wednesday, July 04, 2018
Maryland law on website Internet ads raises question for sites: do you have to prove a negative?
Maryland is one of the first states to regulate online
political advertising, according to a Washington Post Metro story on July 4, by
Ovetta Wiggins and Tony Romm, “Md. Law on online political ads takes effect”.
The law apparently went into effect without (Republican)
governor Larry Hogan’s signature, although the article is a bit unclear about
this.
The law requires sites (or companies or persons owning
the sites) with more than 100,000 unduplicated visitors per month to maintain a
database of Maryland political ads.
Google stopped accepting Maryland state political ads June
29, so presumably they cannot appear on Adsense.
But remember, back in 2005, there was a lot of concern
that even ordinary blogging (without ads) about political candidates could be
viewed as untracked political contributions, according to McCain-Feingold. This
concern died down.
Other states are considering similar laws, and
Congress seems to backpedal, since the Supreme Court has reinforced the idea that
paid political ads are protected speech, and a more conservative Court with
Trump appointees will only reinforce that idea.
But it is a little disturbing that states could make
record keeping laws for any website that can be visited from their states. How can a blogger like me prove a negative,
that I don’t take such ads? Only because
you have never seen them on any of my sites.
Is that good enough?
Monday, July 02, 2018
YouTube ContentID flags one video of mine
Recently, in view of all the debate about EU’s Copyright Declaration and Article 13, I looked at my own YouTube account.
The instructions are here.
The directions will take this to this link relative to your own logon to Google. That link shows any videos on your account flagged by ContentID, which could increase greatly with European content soon. But in Europe, the video would have been blocked from loading or removed; in the US, usually that won't be true as many rights holders will allow small excerpts of their content to remain up when notified.
I found one two-minute video taken outdoors a year ago in July 2017 at a Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington. The video is of a trapeze act. There is about a minute of Scott Bradlee’s Postmortem Jutebox. The copyright owner allowed the use of the video but laid claim to any ad revenue (which the owner could insert into the video), which is of no practical monetary consequence for me.
This situation does not lead to a “copyright strike”. A, actual DMCA Safe Harbor takedown will result in a strike, which lasts for 90 days unless successfully challenged as Fair Use or a misidentification. But three strikes in a 90 day period do result in YouTube account termination.
Update: July 9, 2018
Update: July 9, 2018
EFF verified in an email to me that there are many reports of ContentID flagging or even blocking videos because of outdoor background music. This is not a good situation. It should be Fair Use.
Sunday, July 01, 2018
Twitter purges continue, and seem based on ideology sometimes: Miranda X Yardley's story
I came across a bizarre case of a person’s being
banned from Twitter for life. This seems
to be the narrative of MirandaXYardley, who had owned the Twitter handle of “@TerrorizerMir”. Miranda claims she was banned for a tweet in
which she wrote merely “Aimee Challenor is a man”.
That tweet refers to a transgender (male-female) young adult who is conspicuous in Britain’s Green Party and has also been (probably
appropriately) critical of Brexit.
Miranda claims she is stating a biological fact (I don’t
know what Aimee’s situation is with respect to physical or medical transition).
I suppose that one could say, however, that the
statement “Bill Boushka is a girl” would show the same kind of unacceptable
hate or animus if someone wrote that. When I was a boy, sometimes people said
that. The scope of all this gets beyond
this blog, but I did not experience the same emotions of a transgender child,
as in the short film “Pink”, for example.
So then, this sounds like a political position on whether
a person has a right to be known only by the gender “he/she/they” choose,
regardless of any medical situation. I’ve
been for moderation on this sort of question, and pretty much not taken too
much interest in, for example, “bathroom bills”. I do think that, with professional supervision,
minors should be able to change birth certificates (in school systems, too) in
some circumstances (Gavin Grimm) but these are infrequent in proportion to
other things.
Miranda goes on and argues that Twitter’s behavior is
a threat to women (I somewhat agree), ironically if Twitter is coming from “the
politically correct Left”. BBC writes
that Twitter bans anyone who threatens “trans ideology”, which seems to be in a
zero-sum game battle with feminism. Would misuse of pronouns (refusal to use "they" in a grammatically incorrect singular) qualify as abuse?
Owen Benjamin talks about why he got banned from
Twitter – including something he said about David Hogg. Well, David is mature enough not to be
bothered by what Owen allegedly said (however crass and so obviously untrue
that it has to be a crude joke, or “satire”), and David is not a threat to take
away your guns if you bought them and use them properly.
Milo Yiannopoulos had given a reasonable defense of
his Twitter altercation with Leslie Jones in his book – but he got banned.
The Purge in December seems to be just getting started. But the whole story shows how combative identity politics is getting.
Update: Tues. July 3
Ian Shapira describes in the Washington Post an incident with attorney Elmer Woodward, now defending the Charlottesville white supremacists on free speech grounds, where he called a plaintiff's client person (Emily Gorcenski) a man (by birth) when she ("they") was a male-female transgender person.
Personally, I use the pronoun the person desires.
Update: Tues. July 3
Ian Shapira describes in the Washington Post an incident with attorney Elmer Woodward, now defending the Charlottesville white supremacists on free speech grounds, where he called a plaintiff's client person (Emily Gorcenski) a man (by birth) when she ("they") was a male-female transgender person.
Personally, I use the pronoun the person desires.
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