Friday, January 31, 2020
Bizarre DMCA takedown and copyright strike on YouTube for a livestream video that did not yet exist
Here is a bizarre story (TechDirt, Timothy Geigner) of YouTuber who got a copyright strike for
scheduling a livestream that had not even started yet.
This was of Matt Binder, who was going to discuss a Democratic
debate, not just livestream the actual debate.
The takedown happened at Warner Brothers (which now
owns CNN) and was issued by a manager who should have known that this was an
inappropriate takedown. The notice was based on the “future existence” of
something. But there was a webpage that
gave WB the ability to look for a scheduled video that didn’t yet exist.
This incident is a preview of what may happen in the
EU with Article 17 soon.
Thursday, January 30, 2020
Elizabeth Warren seems to threaten Section 230 on "spreading misinformation" issues
CNBC has a story today reporting that Elizabeth Warren
wants to propose criminal penalties for spreading disinformation online, at
least for tech companies. This would
appear to involved weakening Section 230.
Recently, the New York Times interviewed Joe Biden in which he seemed to
suggest abolishing Section 230 (covered Jan. 20 here).
It is possible that Warren would also want to punish
individual speakers for deliberate spreading of misinformation (anti-vax) but
that should run into the First Amendment.
I don’t know if I’ve shared it previously, but Elliot Harmon
reshared his Oct. 16 op-ed in the New York Times on CDA230, noting that only
big tech monopolies benefit from weakening Section 230.
Again, we have a problem in that the public doesn't understand the concept of downstream liability protection and why it matters, as it also does on 2nd Amendment issues. There is a fundamental ethical problem where speakers (and platforms and hosts) should take on some of the "moral hazard" of the illiteracy, especially on tech, of the public at large. David Pakman has talked about this before.
Naomi Gilens and Saira Hussein report for Electronic
Frontier Foundation that USDC 1324 is being challenged before the Supreme Court
in US v. Sinenen-Smith. This is a law that criminalizes “encouraging”
illegal immigration. It would be
challenged on First Amendment grounds. An immigration consultant was prosecuted
under the “Encouragement Provision”.
This case needs to be watched.
Persons wanting to help refugees and asylum seekers need to be careful
about this, and realize it is illegal (and can lead to serious criminal charges) to try to arrange people to come into the
country illegally (I read about various cases in 2016 especially when I was
considering hosting – this was before Trump’s election.)
EFF also has a Jan. 24 press release reporting that a lawsuit challenging FOSTA has been reinstated. WJLA7 in Washington DC (owned by conservative Sinclair) has reported that FOSTA has led to more assaults on transgender PoC sex workers in the District, and HRC has not paid as much attention to libertarian arguments against this law as it could.
EFF also has a Jan. 24 press release reporting that a lawsuit challenging FOSTA has been reinstated. WJLA7 in Washington DC (owned by conservative Sinclair) has reported that FOSTA has led to more assaults on transgender PoC sex workers in the District, and HRC has not paid as much attention to libertarian arguments against this law as it could.
Labels:
downstream liability,
fake news,
FOSTA,
immigration issues,
Section 230
Tuesday, January 28, 2020
Many YouTube creators lose revenue to COPPA, as YouTube apparently prepares to age-gate its Kids App separately
Ian Corzine gives several examples of YouTube creators
decimated by YouTube’s implementation of the COPPA rules on Monday Jan. 6.
YouTube seems to be moving toward an environment where
the YouTube Kids App will be totally separate and age-gated, and content
creators will have to submit for pre-approval, if they are kids’ creators. This means there is a model for earning
revenue without persistent identifiers, but it is not open to ungated
submissions.
One creator of mostly kids’ materials has earned
almost zero revenue in January.
Another had to unmark made-for-kids automatically
assumed to keep kids from watching his animated adult videos.
In my case, since I am not monetized, I marked one
video as MFK because it had model trains and had an unusually large number of
visits for the entire channel. This was
easy to identify by sorting the videos by numbers of visits.
Monday, January 27, 2020
Glenn Greenwald's legal problems: reporting is considered cybercrime in authoritarian countries
James Risen has a major op-ed in the New York Times, “The
New Threat to Journalists”, or “Reporters Face New Threats from the Governments
they Cover”.
Essentially, they might be charged with hacking or
violations of information access laws, and this has been particularly the case with
Glenn Greenwald and Bolsonaro in Brazil.
There is some interesting discussion as to whether
Assange’s Wikileaks is a platform or a publisher, comparable to the debate on
Section230 today!
There is still the disturbing idea that journalists
build their reputation outside existing tiers of authority and political
competition, and don’t have “skin in the game”.
Friday, January 24, 2020
Apparently legitimate news site that paid for blog content had ties to Iran
Donie O’Sullivan reports for CNN that a website called
the American Herald Tribune paid bloggers for certain kinds of articles about
politicians and pretended to be a legitimate media company, especially during
the 2016 elections.
But apparently it had ties to Iran and the
goals of foreign operatives.
Facebook removed them during a purge for what it considered
fraudulent accounts (or coordinate unauthorized behavior – link spamming
essentially) in the fall of 2018. Google also apparently removed much of their
material.
But the story is particularly disturbing because
apparently Americans were hired thinking they were working for a legitimate
commercial business. This could become a
serious issue in the future, if the idea that user content should pay for itself
takes hold (May 10, 2017), as I’ve talked about before.
That is, ironically, it envisions a world
where it is expected that you have a legitimate business before you can go
online with your own branded content. If
you just want to advocate for political positions, you have to belong to a
legitimate partisan activist group. That’s
what a lot of leftists want.
Hubpages may be worth a look, from me at least.
Thursday, January 23, 2020
Visitor questions in comments whether my content is simply gratuitous; fairness in advertising; non-profits want joiners, not speakers
I have a couple of topics today.
In mid December, I went to a screening of a film “Freelancers:
Mexico” from Journeyman Pictures, directed by a journalism professor, Bill
Gentile, at American University, shown at the Newseum before it closed. As is my custom, I filmed brief clips of the
QA. This is usually allowed at most
independent films screenings (I think there has been only one time it wasn’t). I often will ask one question as I did here
but I usually don’t record by own question, just because of time constraints in
uploading stuff at home later.
I got a bizarre sequence of comments to this one video of a film producer speaking, and her (the speaker’s) content was innocuous politically
(despite the sensitivity of the topic of the film – journalists’ safety in Mexico
given the current political climate with Trump).
The commenter keeps insisting on my explaining why I
recorded and reported on this, unless someone else asked me about his home
country, Mexico. What is his point? I looked up his playlist on YouTube and the
name on Google, and there are many people with that name, including one relatively
high profile popular musician.
Now, the video does not have ads, so at first there
does not seem to be any conceivable disclosure issue. It is true, however, that bloggers and vloggers
are expected by the FTC to disclose if anyone paid them for the content
(sponsored them), or if anyone provided them a free copy or rental or ticket
for a film or copy of a book to review.
This seems to be more a “skin in the game” problem,
where the commenter doesn’t believe people should not write or film online (in
their own channels) about things that will not directly affect them, unless
they are credentialed as “professional” journalists. That has been part of the culture war online
the last two years.
But Virtual Legality today published a video on a
bigger problem about Google ads, and the possibility of deception with regard
to FTC rules. He refers to a recent
Verge article by Jon Porter, link.
Much of the discussion has to do with Google’s
arguably making sponsored ads (specifically for Google Search) “look like”
search results. Hoeg is concerned that
advertisers, especially professionals, could get into trouble if they advertise
on platforms that aren’t following FTC disclosure rules.
“Your company is responsible for what others do on
your behalf”, Hoeg says, paraphrasing the FTC.
It seems odd that in one post I run into something
that affects both very tiny channels and very large corporate operators.
There’s one other thing today “as part of this little
ordeal” (to quote a favorite video). Recently, I visited an exurban community
independent bookstore (in an old house) some distance away in rural Maryland.
There had been a news story about the owner who has Parkinson’s. I wrote up the visit on my Books blog (see Profile),
but I gave him my information. Tuesday,
I got two personalized mailings from Parkinson’s Foundation. I get a lot of non-profit mailings, although
I do most of my donations in automated fashion at a bank – and that does not
work out well for many of them. I had a
cousin die of ALS (which I give to regularly through the bank) and have met
people with MS. These are all different diseases,
perhaps autoimmune. But non-profits are desperately
trying to recruit activists who will focus specifically on them, not bloggers
who just mention them. This loops back
to the first part of this post.
Wednesday, January 22, 2020
COPPA classification controversies start to happen; channel owners learn to be careful whom they accept linkage offers from; More on patronage and self-sufficiency
It also reports a case where a channel was suspended
after it had accepted a link invitation to another channel that then got three
copyright strikes. But this is how the rules work. One should be careful about accepting such an invitation, essentially giving up some independence and sharing the risk of a larger business, in order to gain more potentially paying customers or advertisers.
Tuesday, January 21, 2020
Regulation of facial regulation software: would this stop with governments?; Twitter tells a startup not to harvest images
The media has been warning the public about the dangers of
new AI and facial recognition software and its use in public places.
Buzzfeed says it should be banned. The Washington Post points out that false
positives are a real risk especially for African Americans. This could even happen at airports even for
people carrying lawful passports, the Post warns. The New York Times wants to allow very
limited use by law enforcement.
Other observers suggest that their should be maximum retention
periods.
Many observers rightfully worry that western governments
could become as invasive in public places as China and use the data in calculating
social credit scores on persons that go beyond due process.
That might be a
particular risk for access to air travel.
It would seem logical to ask what happens if individual private
interests get ahold of the software.
For example, I have a library over maybe 20,000 personal
photos. Many of them are outdoors with
no identifiable people, but some do have people, like in discos. People have generally become more sensitive
about being photographed by people they don’t know (as in discos) than they
used to be, since about 2010. But
relatively few bars have no photography policies. I’ve discussed the issue (with a couple of
incidents) on my GLBT blog in the past.
Update: Jan. 23
The New York Times reports, in a Business sections story by Kashmir Hill, that Twitter has sent a cease-and-desist to a company called Clearview not to scrape images from Twitter for a facial recognition database. That is obviously because the company wants to deploy the images commercially for security customers. But theoretically that could mean that a social media company or newspaper would object to people keeping images on their hard-drives even for private use (never published online). It still might be picked up in the Cloud if someone developed the tools to do this to go after individual users. You could imagine combining this idea with the Case Act (not yet passed) and the Copyright Office, if you wanted to.
Update: Jan. 23
The New York Times reports, in a Business sections story by Kashmir Hill, that Twitter has sent a cease-and-desist to a company called Clearview not to scrape images from Twitter for a facial recognition database. That is obviously because the company wants to deploy the images commercially for security customers. But theoretically that could mean that a social media company or newspaper would object to people keeping images on their hard-drives even for private use (never published online). It still might be picked up in the Cloud if someone developed the tools to do this to go after individual users. You could imagine combining this idea with the Case Act (not yet passed) and the Copyright Office, if you wanted to.
Monday, January 20, 2020
Biden threatens to eliminate Section 230 if he can; SCOTUS may look at an unusual 230 case involving Facebook and Hamas
Hoeg Law analyzes some statements by presidential
candidate Joe Biden that suggest that Biden wants to do away with Section 230. "Joe Biden Wants to Break the Internet (and Video Games).
The video is based on a New York Times Editorial Interview of Joe Biden a few days ago.
Hoeg Law explains well the reasons for Section 230 and
the “good Samaritan clause” which addresses the “moderator’s paradox”, even though
there have been many problems with content moderation (and demonetization).
Biden seems unaware of how the Internet really works. He wants to be the Luddite who enforces localism as a way to bring stability.
But there are ways in which gratuitous self-publishing
can skew the economy and in some cases exacerbate inequality. I’ll come back to all of that soon.
Update: Jan 22
The Supreme Court will look at an unusual challenge regarding a Facebook account and a soldier killed by Hamas to Section 230, regarding apparently the way the Seventh Circuit interpreted some justification clause wording in the statute, story by Mike Swift in Marketing Insight. This story will need more attention soon. (Not sure if SCOTUS has accepted it yet.)
Update: Jan 22
The Supreme Court will look at an unusual challenge regarding a Facebook account and a soldier killed by Hamas to Section 230, regarding apparently the way the Seventh Circuit interpreted some justification clause wording in the statute, story by Mike Swift in Marketing Insight. This story will need more attention soon. (Not sure if SCOTUS has accepted it yet.)
Wednesday, January 15, 2020
A new approach to "bundling" news access online? Do "amateur" bloggers "threaten" establishment journalism livelihoods merely by aggregating links? Protectionism?
I noticed this morning in an email from Blendle Daily
Digest that when it sends links to various interesting news stories, it now
charges a microamount (usually less than $0.50) to read the story. Forbes has an article on the company (Parul Guliani, March 2016).
Obviously, the news aggregation company has set up
license agreements with the various publishers to do so. The company would have
to operate email subscription lists and find people willing to stay on the list
(in a world where people want to eliminate mass emails as potential “spam” – I often
disagreed with “Blogtyrant’ on this point in the past). One question would be,
is this an effective way to “consolidate” or “bundle” paywalls?
I suppose for a consumer willing to get “their” daily
news from one filter that’s possible. I don’t like that because then I am
dependent on any political bias of the provider (although I don’t really see
evidence of any in the email from this company -- which apparently has to handpick the articles).
Another problem is that blogs (like mine) often offer
links to articles. When a visitor goes
to such a link, the visitor may find a paywall.
The publication may allow a few free articles a month, but some do not –
partly because they can be spread among devices and different IP addresses. In my operation and view, my visitor is
responsible for their own paywall arrangements – and I’d like this to be easier
than it is. I have digital subscriptions
to the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times,
and a few periodicals. I generally will get the print subscription if I subscribe
at all, but in a couple of cases the subscriptions have not connected to the
digital part easily. It is all rather clumsy.
I’d rather have bulk subscription bundles like magazines used to have in the past.
There is at least one publisher, Fox News, that has
thrown HTTP-403-forbiddens when I try to link to their main site from Blogger
(can do indirectly through Twitter).
Generally broadcast network site articles are free to
browse and don’t have paywalls (which may related to the idea that Fox doesn’t
want amateur sites linking to it?)
Then you have the idea that the EU, for European members,
wants publishers to collect a link tax – although according to a Google article
that applies only to quotes now.
But clearly some media companies are sensitive to the
idea that not only search engines but individual commentators or “citizen journalists”
aggregate the news with links to provide their own perspective, often for free
(or with ads). I don’t know how this plays out when a YouTube channel presents
the article text and scrolls through it in a video to comment on the story. Some local news stations will have disclaimers
like “this news story may not be rewritten or redistributed” on their sites.
Well, since 2000, as I recall, the courts have
defended mere hyperlinks as fair use, as essentially the same as term paper
footnotes. But Electronic Frontier Foundation as recently as 2018 had to write
an amicus letter noting that in a hyperlink suit against BoingBoing. And there is still a case in New York State
regarding embeds, which are a kind of hyperlink (Goldman and Breitbart, see
Feb. 17, 2018 here).
The video above discusses the problem in the EU (as of 2017, before the link tax became controversial with the EU Copyright Directive).
What’s more at issue seems to be a kind of herd health
for the whole publishing world.
Companies like Blendle could feel that bloggers who offer links and
footnotes for free are undermining things, when these companies need to make money
to employ people – there is a degree of familiar protectionism in this
argument. In time, social media platforms or even hosting companies may not
want their customers to do this because it is seen as bad for other people’s
jobs – this sounds like could become a “philosophical” rather than legal threat
in the future in the next couple of years.
We’ve lost a lot of ground on free speech and citizen journalism in the
past few years as the world is becoming more populist and collectivist on both
sides.
Tuesday, January 14, 2020
Virginia will reconsider strengthening its anti-SLAPP law in 2020 (as well as gun control)
Electronic Frontier Foundation, in a deeplinks article
by Joe Mullin, reports that Virginia is now considering an anti-SLAPP statue,
HB 759 compared to the current law.
EFF reports several egregious SLAPP suits that have
occurred in Virginia, particularly in some Yelp review cases, as well as
reporting domestic violence and setting up parody accounts.
Virginia has typically been slower than bigger states (esp.
New York and California) to protect both consumers and speakers.
There will be major demonstrations regarding the
Second Amendment near the State Capitol on Richmond on MLK day, Monday, January
20, when the weather will have (finally) turned to seasonably cold again.
The video above refers to a similar attempt in
Virginia in 2017.
Monday, January 13, 2020
New "PROTECT Kids" Act HR 5573 would make COPPA-like compliance even more problematic for YouTubers
Hoeg Law has offered a video explaining a new bill in
Congress, HR 5573, “Protect Kids” or “Protect real online threats endangering
children today”, introduced by Tim Walberg (R-MI) or Bob Rush (D-IL).
Engadget has a preliminary summary of the bill by Igor
Bonifacic, here.
Several points come into play. One is that the COPPA
age increases from 13 to 16, which would obviously make it much harder to protect
certain content (especially related to games) as “not made for kids”. I think that were this to happen, Hoeg’s idea
of invisible age-gates would become absolutely necessary, and I think (as I
have said before) they could be built into routers (so families can have
different levels of access with different accounts).
The Engadget article argues that they would apply to mobile
apps, but really they already did, as Hoeg explains.
More significant, as Hoeg explains toward the end of
his video, is the “catch 22” or feedback circularity in the law, that would
require websites or apps that are predicated on collecting kids’ information to
remove that info if requested to do so by parents later, without denying the kids’
ability to at least access the website or app.
He gave certain Pokemon Go apps (which I have seen teenagers play
outside, like near the Angelika theater in Fairfax Va) as an application that
could no longer exist.
Hoeg reports that there was a Tech Freedom conference
today in the Capitol visitors’ center today (Washington DC) on COPPA, which may not have
covered this new legislation, link. I’ll
check to see if there is a video of it later. I may not have as much time as I
used to for going to these events because of changes I have had to announce in
my own priorities recently (as here on Jan. 9).
Friday, January 10, 2020
YouTube apparently promises to allow some monetization of political and "yellow coded" content, reinstates Ford Fischer's channel for partner program; some improvement in EU Article 17 situation
Ironically, at almost the same time I was announced my
own plans to scale back starting especially in 2022 (yesterday), there was a
significant positive development in free speech yesterday. Ford Fischer (News2share) announced his
channel had been re-monetized, in good faith, by YouTube.
Still the history of all this is very troubling. If you
want to review the history, for example, here are three good articles on Gizmodo,
The Verge, and the Washington Examiner from last summer on the facts, with some
theories. Human Events has a more
psychological explanation that this is Silicon Valley’s establishment wanting
to remain its hold on cultural power. A major theme in most news accounts is that YouTube is unable, with algorithms or workforce, to properly identify meta-speech: that is, distinguish between actual hate speech and journalism that talks about hate speech.
In summary, YouTube handled the Crowder-Maza-gate
fiasco inconsistently (“VoxAdpocalypse), and then very suddenly announced a
draconian policy in hate speech June 5; it’s not clear if this was coincidental
or directly related to Maza’s manipulations, but it certainly looks like YouTube
acted in bad faith.
Moreover, David Pakman has noted that recommendation
algorithms no longer choose him, put pick corporate news instead; several times, Pakman has lost revenue to
intentionally bogus DMCA takedowns from major media outlets for live-streaming
public domain material.
You see a bigger pattern. Corporate media’s own protectionism, spread
to advertisers on YouTube.
You can make up arguments that as a private platform,
YouTube was entitled, at least legally, to exclude content that shows political
polarization or hateful behavior by protesters, on the theory that lest sophisticated
visitors would never understand the context and get radicalized anyway. It’s
rather speculative, although some marginalized groups’ members (especially when
congregated) are more endangered by and vulnerable to hate just because of tribal
emotion, when stoked, than us elites and individualists want to admit. (“This may be not be good news but we want to
keep you safe….”)
It sounded to a lot of us that YouTube could have set
up a separate playpen for political content (comparable logically to “not made
for kids”) and pitched it to advertisers who were more interested in that
material. But they have faced resistance, and fielded the idea that raw news
gathering is for professionals.
Non-journalists (by profession) were supposed to sell things (like life insurance)
and march in protests or give money to candidates and organize rather than just
film them and show them up.
YouTube’s chaos wound up, however, hurting minorities’
ability to organize as well as hurting individual speakers.
Ford Fischer has probably frightened mainstream media
by showing how he can lead what appears to be a loose association of other
journalists and contractors and produce more raw footage content (except in
actual war zones) in many areas and showing it than even mainstream media does,
at much lower cost. This is called, well, innovation. Finding more efficient ways to get the work
done. Yes it can slip into the gig
economy. On the other hand, it can
upscale and merge with corporate media.
Ford’s original business partner Trey Yingst, from American University
(Washington DC) now is a leading foreign correspondent for Fox (at age 26), often
in Israel and in conflict areas (like Gaza sometimes), and recently in Baghdad.
At a certain point, it becomes impossible to report on large conflict (especially
in non-democratic countries) without the resources of major media corporations (Philadelphia Inquirer story).
All this suggests that at some point major media
outlets will need to employ the content produced by independent providers
(which happen’s now with Ford’s material, both as news footage and documentary
film material). Ford also has some
material that he may produce or direct himself as film in the usual industry (I’ve
suggested he look at film direction, and pointed some places like Bryant Lake
Bowl in Minneapolis where indie film creators often meet – a resource I recall
from living there before. It’s all too easy to imagine a documentary series
called “Protesters” winding up on cable.)
You could say that the “larger” independent news and
commentary content creators (David Pakman is a good example, as is Tim Pool,
and many others, although many of these do mostly interviews and analysis or
commentary as opposed to Ford’s emphasis on raw footage with extensive and long
length filming of protest events as is) are creating companies themselves that
are likely to become sizable enough to have regular employees, benefits, etc.,
and become “mid-sized” providers like Vox, Buzzfeed, Vice (or on the
conservative side, Breitbart). They may
become corporatized. An important part
of this process will be the ability to get customers to pay for content in a
normal commercial sense, outside of donations (patronage) or behavioral
advertising (persistent identifiers or cookies and the problems they create for
visitor privacy, that are getting even more serious).
The Human Events link above proposes that platform use
be set up legally as a “civil right” to prevent more Maza-Crowder-gates, or to downgrade
the false sense of power that Silicon Valley has.
I have noted in previous posts that this sort
of belief (that you have a right to no gatekeeping) is naïve, especially if you
consider how the world worked until the late 1990s. It is likely that eventually platforms like
YouTube and even the “free speech” replacements today will windup background-checking
(and even “social-credit”) persons who want to broadcast themselves on platforms. Legitimate commercial viability (in the
normal consumer sense) will matter.
However, the larger independent creators (who have built the technical
skills and new efficiencies and have some ability to organize or hire others)
will probably be OK in this environment, and that would include many of the major
“independent” news and commentary channels today.
But, alas, wait, in the midst of COPPA and everything
else, in late November, Susan Wojcicki sent a letter to creators saying there
will be more effort to match “yellow” rated videos with more narrowly focused
advertisers after all, which may “finally” explain YouTube’s finally agreeing
to allow News2share (and probably other affected channels) some monetization “again”. (See the embedded video above.) Note that the letter, toward the end, notes some recent improvements with behind-the-scenes negotiations with the EU in the interpretation of Article 17 of the Copyright Directive. This is important and I will come back to this in a subsequent post with more details (concerning a platform's downstream liability.) Somehow, this whole narrative reminds me of
my own ninth grade.
Thursday, January 09, 2020
My future plans, as recently announced on another site: more comments (major scale-back at the end of 2021)
OK, folks, it is time for a little candor. Some visitors may know that I posted some
details about my future plans on a sister Wordpress site Tuesday (Jan 7).
My content, since 1997, has comprised three books under
the “Do Ask Do Tell” wordmark, a smaller booklet (“Our Fundamental Rights”,
1998), a large legacy web site (at one time there were two of them), and about
twenty blogs (one hibernating blog was discontinued in 2016 but the content was
backed up). Aside from some book sales royalty and for some small advertising
revenue (Amazon and Adsense) most of the content has largely been free for
visitors. I have generally been very
stable in keeping the sites up and have, especially since about spring 2008,
posted almost every day. In the meantime, over the past eight years or
so, a large video blogging industry of independent creators has evolved, many
of whom depend on it for a living, especially ad revenue, and we all know that
in the past two years especially, there have been many controversies. My way of working is legacy and older and was
dependent on search engine results, even without optimizing, and was quite
effective with some issues (like gays in the military at first) for a number of
years, especially under Web 1.0, even as my own techniques were primitive and
simple and mostly text.
I am exploring some opportunities for activity that
would bring actual revenue. There is
evidence now of some interest in the motion picture world (more of that later),
as well as (finally) a novel that I have planned, and some music (two or three
works in particular) that have lay fallow since the early 1960s (my youth) that
I think have some genuine promise for performance if developed with modern
software (like Sibelius). All of these I
am working on.
However, I am 76 now (birthday in the summer) and I
have to be concerned about support were anything to “happen to me” or cause me
to be unable to work on the sites for an extended time. I have to get to the point that others could integrate
and work with my material.
Moreover the political and social climate, with the
multiple problems in the past few years (especially since Charlottesville) are making
the sustainability of highly individualized speech, outside of organizations,
questionable unless the speech pays its own way. This is tangential to the better known problems
with click-baiting, cookies, privacy, and supposed radicalization that results
from channeling audiences into echo chambers;
that I don’t do.
My own effectiveness is dependent on my self-branding,
though my legal and nicknames, and through the “doaskdotell” mark. I discussed these in the Wordpress blog
post. Essentially, I need to find a
larger entity that can make legitimate commercial use of the mark by late 2021
(expiration is in early December 2021). “Commercial”
means that users pay for content either directly or subscription or contextual
advertising, but not through patronage (or behavioral advertising). The deal of
forming companies to offer bundled paywall packages (like magazine subscription
packages of the past) would be desirable. In my situation, I have custody of an
inherited (now) grantor trust, not blind; so this would prohibit my “asking for
money” as such (unless I somehow made the trust blind and a third party
controlled disbursements from assets not in my name). A desirable partner would be in the media
business, possibly documentary film production and distribution.
All of this means that in the coming months, especially
by early spring at the latest (say April) I will have to be spending much more
time on the projects I mentioned above and posts will be less frequent. I probably won’t do much filming of events
not directly resulted to these efforts, unless I do find a business partner who
could address these concerns. Until that
point, I must remain “the master of my ship” with my own work plan.
By the beginning of 2022, as I described in the
Wordpress posting (and absent any definitive business partner), most of my blogs will go off line, although the text of the
books will remain. My online presence
will have to be much smaller and be focused on matters that get genuine user or
customer response that can be measured and reported. Social media participation
may be much smaller. It’s worthy of note
that in 2018 Facebook actually tried to prod me to “sell stuff’ on my Facebook
page (like Faraday bags, if I wanted to boost a post on power grid security, or
maybe more activity with independent bookstores) so that advertisers would
recognize me – again, a “skin in the game” argument, and I may take up this advice
by early Spring this year.
Absent sudden external pressures and forces, even foreign,
which I have some concern about, it is better for me (and a better reflection
on me) to make this transition gradually and announce it well in advance. I’ve seen numerous examples in the past where
people have quit suddenly and “disappeared” from social media without explanation
– maybe the “cesspool” effect, maybe the concern about being taken for granted
personally or the “imaginary friend” problem.
These I’ve talked about recently.
Along the lines of this “imaginary friend” issue, I do
get criticism, personally or in emails, not so much from articles or YouTube channels,
that there is something wrong with weighing in on things publicly when you don’t
have personal skin in the game, people who depend on you personally, or don’t
belong to an already vulnerable group or won’t admit to such. You guessed it, this largely comes from the
far Left right now. But it has come from
the “family values” world of the evangelical right in the past. (Twenty years ago, I really did have “skin in
the game” with the “don’t ask don’t tell” issue, in a paradoxical, retrograde way;
that’s a long narrative I have already presented.) But there is something disquieting about
claiming “influence” over things and yet not caring personally about the people
who could be affected. This is all part
of a nebulous problem characterized by various slogans or memes:
cherry-picking, “you can do better than that”, “I told you so”, “we can’t do
this without you”, or, yes, imaginary friends.
True, I get asked, why don’t I volunteer for a
progressive group and meet the people and learn to interact with them personally
(and cross the class divide). Why don’t
I “raise money” for established groups first?
Well, with the trust situation, I have no right to ask for money for
anybody (except in very limited ways from Facebook drives.) Why don’t I take my turn staying with the
homeless? This is all heading in a
Marxist direction but I get the point. I’ll
have more to say soon about the inheritances issue on the Retirement blog (since
I have it for a while). I do think we are headed for a world where individual speakers will have to demonstrate some kind of personal "social credit" by international norms set up by the tech industry, which should not be tied to the idea of intersectiona; group oppression or status. Maybe the crytocurrency industry will provide some sort of partial escape hatch, but right now it is very clumsy to use.
I did make some speculations on what I would do from
2022 and beyond on the other post. One
very important point: No organization
can speak for me, so I don’t donate to publications (Truthout is one of the
most aggressive) that claim only they can provide me the news I need and
protect me from politicians. Likewise, I can’t really speak for someone else. I do welcome the opportunity to contribute specific
material, whether about arts and music (I know a lot about the issue of performing
the completed Bruckner Ninth Symphony, etc.), or some national security topics
(I could help a lot with the legitimacy of the EMP and prepper issues). No, I can’t get anywhere with the idea of having
been a member of an “oppressed group” and needing special protections from the
big bad world because of that (although I do get where some of the “safe space”
crowd is really coming from).
I will work as an election “judge” three times this
year in Fairfax county (that is community service in effect—very long hours)
but I will not contribute to political candidates. I won’t work on political campaigns. I never have (directly). There is something
off-putting about saying you need a particular politician in office to protect
yourself.
But we have a real dilemma about how political
participation should work. We have
partisanship, and I hate the aggression of calling people and knocking on doors
(and it could be physically dangerous now to do the latter). But part of the reason for not only the extremism
but also the corruption and lobbying, is that the center has left and let
politics be hollowed out and left to the more polarized tribes. Then individuals themselves become vulnerable,
stuck “Under the Dome”.
Tuesday, January 07, 2020
Facebook executive admits that Facebook's tools, even if used legally and properly, tend to help Trump
Craig Timberg and Nitasha Tiku report that Facebook executive
Andrew Bosworth report that Trump won in 2016 not because of Russians but
because Trump’s team mastered Facebook’s advertising system to microtarget voters
in swing states, leveraging the electoral vote power of rural voters.
This doesn’t seem to be about misinformation. It’s more about skilled use of persistent
identifiers, now a big controversy with laws like COPPA (CCPA has similar
effects with regular websites).
The article went into bizarre references to the Lord
of the Rings, where Frodo wants to keep the ring at the end, as it is the key
to the knowledge of good and evil.
The article reports that Bosworth concedes we could
have the same result in 2020. The irony is this is a logical result from a world of user-generated content with a rather non-elite readership.
It was less clear how much difference illegally
exported data to Cambridge Analytica made.
I'm heeding thoughtfully the situation with Iran's "retaliation" it is too hard to say yet what it will mean.
Monday, January 06, 2020
More talk that YouTube wants to ban all "political" content from independent creators (??)
Will YouTube eventually “ban” all political content?
Tim Pool explained his plans for YouTube in a long
thread Sunday, and at one point that is what he predicts. He says he will support his political posts
(a lot of them on “Timcast”) with general cultural news, sciences, art, etc. But by “political” does he mean, dealing with
elections and candidates and parties, or does he refer to issues (inequality)
too?
But that is what I do with my twenty blogs. Very little of my content is
candidate-related or election-related;
there is a lot of issue-related content, but these are mostly things that
should be related to principles (like paid family leave, Social Security sustainability,
climate change, national security, power grid, Internet safety, filial
responsibility, LGBTQ equality – and that is a very loaded and variable area
right now.
I’ve seen a few takes on what YouTube intends for
political coverage. One is what Tim says
– shadow-banning and demonetization will lead to complete bans. Ford Fischer and David Pakman have both suggested
(with plenty of evidence) that YouTube will monetize political content from
large corporate legacy providers but not independent journalists.
Another Twitter user suggested that YouTube set up a
separate site for political content and court a different set of advertisers,
and then court some bigger independent channels (Pool and Fischer would fit
nicely into that). But the problem is
not as many users would go to it. A lot
of users really want only games, music, toys, entertainment, and even soft core
stuff.
Large social media sites, mainly Facebook and YouTube
(to a lesser extent Twitter) have to deal with the notion that impressionable
visitors are unduly influenced by bots and algorithmic viewing recommendations
based on cookies, which fund the behavioral ads that essentially pay for the
content. This is not too healthy. They
could set up preferred, vetted providers whom they interview, as the larger of
these (most of whom are entrepreneurs running companies with employees and
contractors) provide live content that major media miss, and provide a check on
the objectivity of establishment media companies (remember Covington).
But companies are finding that it getting, in a practical
sense, riskier to allow amateurs to post what they think without supervision or
gatekeeping and without some sort of business purpose. Attracting security threats could also be an
issue.
Friday, January 03, 2020
Professors censured for not enforcing very draconian speech codes in student discussions
Iowa State University is now in controversy over its “campus
climate reporting system”, according to a WSJ editorial today, link.
In one case a professor written up for not challenging
a student who asserted that abortion and birth control are women’s issues. The problem?
The statement “erases” trans and fluid people who need either of
these. Maybe textually this could be
construed as literally true, but it defies common sense.
I would say, it’s a men’s
issue too, because men normally have to be responsible when they become fathers.
Sexologist Ray Blanchard (National Review interview,
May 2019) is certainly controversial (even today on Twitter) weighs in on terminology,
medicine, political correctness. The
actual need for surgery or treatment (and paying for it) belongs in the
discussion, but his definition of paraphilia is interesting.
Thursday, January 02, 2020
Could "gift subscriptions" tied to social capital improve reading habits?
Here’s an interesting, if indirect, approach to the challenge
of making paywalls by publishers less of a problem. While I’ve suggested that companies set up
consolidated or bundled paywalls (the way magazine subscriptions could be
bundled a half century ago), many publishers are pressing gift subscriptions.
I got such an email from the Washington Post today,
inviting me to post it on Facebook or Twitter to friends or followers or else
to give the code to a specific friend. The trouble is, I went in to my own
account and I found the ability to redeem a gift code sent to me, but not the
ability to create a “free “ one to send to someone else (the email said it was free from premium
digital subscribers but from the website it would have to be purchased). So I can’t tell for sure if it is valid.
There have been fraud concerns with some Amazon gift
cards (see Internet safety blog Dec 17, 2019).
However, pushing the idea of “free gift subscriptions”
makes a point. It implies that someone
should have enough personal traction with “their” own social capital to amplify
the reading habits of others, so it could be seen as a kind of “legitimate”
corporate activism.
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