I am setting up this blog to address a number of technical and legal issues that, over the long run, can affect the freedom of media newbies like me to speak freely on the Internet and other low-cost media that have developed in the past ten years.
Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!
House holds hearings on Internet hate speech and right-wing extremism online; YouTube lifestream intercepts vitriolic comments; the problem with meta-speech
The House Judiciary Committee held hearings on hate crimes
and the rise of white nationalism on Tuesday, April 9, 2019.
CNN was so preoccupied with Trump and Barr that it didn’t
get around to showing this.
Candace Owens (who got things wrong on the Covington
Kids in the past) had a particularly interesting exchange.
Tony Room has an article on p. A15 of the Wednesday,
April 10, 2019 Washington Post, “A flood online of hate speech greets lawmakers
probing Facebook and Google about white nationalism”. The point of the article, of course, was the comments.
They’re still out there.I wouldn’t say
they are all that awful.
I will have to play the entire hearing later. The speakers
claim that YouTube and Facebook are piping vitriolic hate into homes. The
trouble is, you can find what you want to find, because the algorithms send you
content you were looking at. I rarely see much of this, except in intellectual
introspections from a distance (like from Sargon of Akkad, etc).You find offensive content because you want
to be offended.
There is particularly a problem with “meta-speech”.A lot of viewers don’t have the literacy or
even intellect to differentiate between speech “about” something and speech
that actually incites or promote something. Recently there have been some videos by Internet
personalities like David Pakman and the techie and normally upbeat Thio Joe
that so many users are simply “stupid” and are babies (like Trump and the orange
balloons).There is a serious cognition
gap across society, in the streets, in the military (although that’s gotten
better), and in the online world.
Here’s an example of Twitter censorship of
meta-speech, of journalist Sandi Bachom (injured in the Charlottesville
incident before the car attack), for a post that happened to include an image
of an obscure neo-Nazi symbol in reporting the march. Some of the others mentioned in her post are now in prison.
There is even the idea, as in Joshua Greene’s 2013
book “Moral Tribes”, which I will review soon, that you can rationalize anything,
based on your own idea of metamorality.
Picture: there was a conservative forum at National
Harbor Gaylord Hotel in late February. There was a recent potential (radical Islam) terror threat at NH
stopped by the FBI (various news reports) by police intercepting a stolen vehicle.
Update: April 11
Hunter Avallone reports having his YouTube channel suddenly suspended with no previous community guidelines strikes on Monday, the day before these hearings; it was restored seven hours later. I sampled his videos and found nothing that is normally understood to be hate speech (although some people on the Left wing fringe would see his being critical of some individuals with personal issues as "hateful"). It's ironic because YouTube had announced it would always give creators a courtesy warning (Verge story).
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