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!
The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Effector video mentions
the virtual forum on copyright for content creators Feb 26 at 10 AM PST.
But it also mentions an important case in British Columbia
where linking to an article critical of university surveillance of students during
the pandemic created a copyright infringement liability, at least under 2018
Canadian or British Columbia law.There
was a case in the US (NYState) described here Feb 17m 2018 undermining the
so-called server rule.
So, Steven Crowder and some assistants develop a video
(“Crowder Bits”) showing some random possible fraudulent votes in 2020, and
Twitter bans him.But right how YouTube leaves
his funny video up.
It does not appear, to me at least, that the volume of
these incidents would have made any difference in November.Biden won by too much.
Tim Pool jumped all over Twitter for banning Crowder.Remember the 2019 fight with Carlos Maza? Really, talking with a lisp means nothing; in
Canada it is just a normal accent.
Yesterday, on the Books blog, I reported Amazon’s apparently
surreptitious removal of a book critical of transgender “ideology”.Now we see corporate America maybe finally
putting the brakes on Left-wing excesses, as LinkedIn “retired” a course “Confronting
Racism, by Robin DiAngelo”.
Dr. Karlyn Borysenko explains, with some glee.
This all came up after stories that Coca Cola has
asked its white employees to act less “white” whatever that means.
To segregate “white” employees and tell them they are
supposed to feel guilty about their ancestors is way over the top.
Actually, 25 years ago, well before Y2K, companies
were already getting to the point that they would fire people for explicit
racism.In Minneapolis, a woman was
fired for passing a racist remark on a Postit Note in handwriting, and it made
the Star Trubune newspaper in late 1997, just after I had transferred there
with ReliaStar. That’s a tremendous
change in ten years, when previously (in the early 80s, under Reagan) it had
been acceptable to make wisecracks about pro football players when making up
the weekly pool.
There is another disturbing story, of Slate suspending a podcaster Mike Pesca for merely talking naming a racial slur in a subjunctive
context.English needs more conjugation
to show abstraction from fact (subjunctive mood in French). The New York Times has engaged in some of the same behaviors.
Tom Scott looks at the question as to why social media
influencers (and that presumably includes bloggers like me) must disclose
conspicuously if they were paid for commercial promotion of a product or
service or received a free sample to review (like a free DVD of Vimeo link of an
upcoming film, which I often do). In a sense this makes a post an "advert". These
are FTC requirements in the US. YouTube has additional rules so as not to confuse advertisers.
On the other hand, commercial broadcast television
does not have to make these disclosures (nor do normally produced motion
pictures) because normally the audience is presumed to know the context
already.The UK is a little stricter
about this than the US, however.
A copyright troll, Paul Hansmeier, operating in
Minnesota, has been sentenced to 14 years in prison. The 8th Circuit
has denied his appeal. Leonard French explains in his "Lawful Masses" YouTube series.
His firm Steele-Hansmeier, starting in 2010, maintained
registers of IP addresses of people who tried to download copies of movies by P2P
file sharing.
They would send litigation coercing settlements ($4000)
to defendants who could not defend themselves and would have been embarrassed by
the public disclosure of their having downloaded movies.
Apparently they set up a honey pot to lure people into
downloading the movies.Later on they
set up a front law firm, Prenda Law, and obtained copyrights to films and pretended
to be real plaintiffs.
Later they formed more shell companies apparently creating
the appearance that defendants had hacked company systems.
The criminal conspiracies involved wire and mail
fraud, and suborning perjury. French talks about the "tree-legged stool" theory. This is the first case I have heard of where trolls have deliberately enticed violations with entrapment.
Claire Miller writes for the NPR, that Facebook is
banning all linking to news stories from Australian publications (like about “dictator
Dan” and his lockdowns of Melbourne).Lucas
Matney shares a similar story on Techcrunch
Furthermore Australian users of Facebook may not link
to any news stories at all.
This reminds me of the debate over the “link tax” in
The EU Copyright Directive (and the “copyright disaster” it led to in Spain,
leaving Google to stop sharing Spanish links in the country altogether for a
while).
This could apply to Australian stories about
coronavirus.A major rapid test kit will
come from Australia soon, and this hampers the public’s learning about it.
All of this has to do with the Australian government essentially
wanting to impose a “link tax” (for all practical purposes) on social media
platforms making money on advertising.
I could not find the policy on Facebook, but here is
animageof what happens if you try to link to an Australian news article.
There have been sporadic debates and hyperlinking and embedding
(especially) and copyright.Usually,
there are viewed as like term paper footnotes.Fact can’t be copyrighted.Yet
news organizations will often have sentences to the effect “this story may not
be rewritten”, or word to that effect.
Fox news apparently doesn’t allow linking to its articles,
at least from Blogger, which gives a 403 Forbidden.
Update: Timcast has a major video explaining Google and Facebook's different business models. Feb. 24. Facebook has struck an interim voluntary "deal" and reversed its policy (New York Times). Jeff Horowitz et al gives some analysis in the WSJ and suggests that smaller channels like on Medium could make similar demands of Facebook.
Leonard French explains a new tactic by police to discourage
filming by citizens.Police play copyright
protected music in the background so that it is a video will be taken down.
French explains that copyright infringement is a “strict
liability offense” so that inadvertent playing of background copyrighted music outside
and detected by automated filters, as by YouTube (even more so in the EU with
its Copyright Directive with Article 17).
YouTube often flags a video and tells the content
creator that monetization of the video will go to the music owner, rather than
taking it down. (It may be taken down in some countries.) That will not result in a copyright
strike.This has happened to me.However in some extreme cases the content
creator might be pursued for damages. This could conceivably invite trolls into
abuse of the new CASE Act.
You do have a right to film the police.I’ve previously linked to a speech by Ford
Fischer (News2Share).
French suggested that Fair Use might deal with this
problem, and the Ninth Circuit has at least ruled in favor of the content
creator.The Supreme Court has never
ruled on this.
French also mentions that the DMCA requires hosts have
repeat infringer policies, which could cause accounts (like with YouTube) to be
removed without adjudication of Fair Use claims.
Congress needs to take a look at this.
I tend not to record demonstrations with incident
music in the background.
French suggests that the music industry could demand
that police departments have licenses to use background music this way.
It’s also obvious that police could abuse this technique
to get away with racial profiling, or worse.Activists “even on the Left” should pay attention to this.Yes, Black Lives Matter should watch French’s
video.
Allison Morrow interviews Eric Hunley after a
livestream of his discussing bitcoin was removed and then his entire channel
removed suddenly.
There seems to be no apparent explanation for what
could be an AI glitch.He says he has
never had any community guidelines strikes.
There are plenty of other channels on YouTube that discuss crytocurrencies and bitcoin, especially tech channels that go into how blockchain works.
He said he had about 30000 subscribers and wasn’t “controversial”.The automated email to him mentioned illegal
schemes.But there is nothing illegal
about bitcoin or cryptocurrency by itself.
Update: Hunley has been restored, details. There is a suggestion that he raised a red flag because he did nor ordinarily talk about cryptocurrency and offered some kind of contest. But a series of his videos have not been restored (yet).
Aria Bendix reports for Business Insider that extrapolations
from NYC data last spring suggest that only 13-18% of people infected by
coronavirus (detectable in nose, throat or saliva) develop significant symptoms.
There is some disagreement as to whether asymptomatic
people often spread infection and become superspreaders, even though they may
have enough natural resistance themselves not to become ill.This may have to do with genetics, youth, or
issues like metabolism.Younger adults
with low body mass index seem to almost never have significant systemic symptoms.
That might change with more contagious variants,
or perhaps even with those there will be no systemic disease with people who
have fewer ACE2 receptors. Genetics may be far more important than we realize, and that will be a very discomforting conclusion. But it may also suggest further treatments.
But there are other studies suggesting a small portion
of symptomatic people are responsible for most of the superspreading, or spread
may happen just before major symptoms appear.
But the idea that a “healthy” person is responsible
for the well-being of the unhealthy (like obese) sounds rather Marxist.But then consider the consequences of the
opposite.Fascism?
A Twitter Thread called “Wokal Distance” does a nice
job of explaining cancel culture.There
are 19 tweets and you can access it here.
Varietyexplained the controversy over tweets by Gina
Carano, who was to star in LucasFilm’s latest offering. They were edgy but I
would not have been phased by them.The
CBS News (Zach Seemayer) went on to report her firing, as an example of “cancel
culture”.
Wokal explains cancel cultural as a societal hack that
gives large groups in society who believe they have been wronged as a group the
power to force others to address their needs, without using government the way
more authoritarian (communist or Marxist) especially.
It is mainly a weapon of the “tribal” (and “intersectional”)
woke Left.It is true that the alt-right
is also very tribal, but it is trying to hold on to something that wasn’t morally
legitimate for members of their group to be able to share or enjoy in the past without
personal accountability The Left could
argue that if its opinions could be enforced (with dissent to them not
allowed), people now left behind will be better off, even if individually they “fail”
according to meritocratic norms popular with, say, libertarians. That’s why they can be so defensive of “critical
race theory” or race-sensitive redistribution or reparation (or simply “affirmative
action”) proposals.
That arguably makes even moderate conservatives
fearful of what could happen down the road.Expropriation.
His point 16 is telling. “Cancel culture means a guy I’ve
never met, in a state I don’t live, can see a video I didn’t film, of a thing I
didn’t say to him, and get me fired from my job for using a service he didn’t
use.”
He gives an example of someone being fired for criticizing
a pro-Israel policy.
Update: Timcast IRLweighs inon Carano. Steven Greenhut at Reason also weighs in on the career destruction of cancel culture, and suggests it should be limited to public figures. But a Blogger like me is probably a public figure by now.
I can recall from the 2018 book “Skin in the Game”, by
Nassim Nicholas Taleb”, that you “must start a business” if you want to be
significant in public life.You must do
transactions with real people that meet real needs. Virtue signaling is for the Pharisees.
David Hogg, a founder of March for our Lives after
surviving the Parkland mass shooting incident on February 14, 2018, and a
business partner William LeGate, are forming a pillow manufacturing company, in
response to the antics of MyPillow CEO Michael J. Lindell visiting former
“President” Donald J. Trump, now under a second impeachment trial, apparently
on January 15, 2021, five days before Biden’s inauguration, and allegedly
proposing “martial law” (Vox storyby Emily Stewart).
The company will be called Good Pillow, and is
describing its proposed operations on Twitter and on a new website, which
offers a short “manifesto” on itshome page. .
The company will hire union labor within the United States
(possibly centered in Massachusetts) and will set up a non-profit operation or
subsidiary to supervise community initiatives regarding desired social responsibility
(with respect to issues like climate change, health care, countering racism and
sexism, etc).It will seek private
certification as a “B Corporation”, as explained here and also discussed by
Harvard Business Review.
Setting aside the polarized politics of the country for now, it is interesting to see a Harvard undergraduate ready to start a
business, which appears likely to succeed (it has a six-month waiting list for products already?)Of course, we know that Mark
Zuckerberg did that (remember February 4, 2004), and, well, we are today where
we are.This appears to have a great
chance of working.Will Hogg have time
to run a company and finish his traditional undergraduate work?More and more resourceful students are starting
businesses today (look at Max Reisinger’s “Perspectopia”).
I’ve talked a lot about “commercial viability” in
recent months, as I must contemplate radically restructuring my own activity at
the start of 2022.
This, too, is a real company selling real products to
individual consumers, not an intermediary, or another Internet channel
dependent on attracting advertisers and clicks. Nevetheless. Alyssa Rosenberg, among others, has had some fun with Hogg's embrace of capitalism in this Washington Post op-ed about holding Trump and his nightbreed minions accountable.
It’s something to contemplate as we wonder what the online
world will look like in another years after “runaway speech” of the past has
led to so much radicalization.
Update: Hogg has announced he is taking leave from his board position on March for our Lives to have more time for his company and for school (at Harvard).
Leonard French reports that an ISP must pay $1 billion
for a user’s copyright infringement, according to a judgment involving a
Virginia user entered Dec. 19, 2019.
The reason for the judgment is that Cox did not
enforce a repeat infringer policy (under the letter of the law of DMCA Safe
Harbor), which Cox had set at 13 (not 3) strikes.
The judgment is under appeal in the 4th
Circuit (Richmond VA) with a request for a bond deposit.
It is not illegal not to have a repeat infringer
policy, but an ISP (telecom style) is liable if there is a repeat infringer with
takedowns and the ISP didn’t have a policy and enforce it.
It is not clear from the video how the infringement
happened.I don’t think you need an ISP
for Bit Torrent if you set everything up yourself.The plaintiff was Sony Music and normally
infringement is detected from hashtag watermarks.
There has been some suggestion that this liability
would not exist if Obama-era net neutrality were in place.
Coindesk, a cryptocurrency site, has reported that the
Senate has reintroduced a “tattle tale” bill, a “See Something Say Something
Online” act, based on the BSA Banking Secrecy Act, but requiring platforms and
hosts to submit Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs, ironically) when they get
reports from users or can see through moderation that criminal activity is
being planned. It was introduce dy
Denator John Cornyn not Texas.
Hoeg Law (Virtual Legality) offers a video about a
game developer Andrew Spinks, creator of Terraria, who pulled his port
connection (Stadia) from Google after Google perhaps by mistake terminated Spinks’s entire Google account or some mysterious TOS issue.
Matt Welch explainsin Reason how it forced a 45-year
veteran of the paper Donald MacNeil, a pandemic reporter, for using the N-word
in context, in doing an interview for a story, about a classmate being
suspended for a racist video made at the age of 12.
Merely using the word itself started a protest in the NYTimes
newsroom.
Robby Soave describesa similar incident where a
teenager got another teen essentially thrown out of school for an old racial
slur on Snapchat (which didn’t disappear), with the "help" of the Times.Now I had my own missteps as a teen, a particular one in ninth grade, and
I shudder at what the consequences would be today.
The "Gray Lady"?
The vengefulness of these campaigns seems to be derived
from the thought that the racism of the past is a cancer that must be stopped
with zero tolerance as the highest possible priority.
In the embedded video, MacNeil explains to Rachel
Maddow on MSNBC how China takes people into quarantine.
Leonard French explains a default judgment against a
copyright infringer by “Three Strike Holdings” which distributes adult
content.
The infringer had used Bit Torrent and P2P to download
and distribute a large number of films.
The assessment of over $108000 was recommended by a
magistrate judge when then go to a state district court, which concurred (March
2020).
The files were identified with long hash codes (we
call them watermarks) that were presented (as a list of evidence).
The award was $750 per file, which could have been
tripled as punitive damages (under normal tort law;French says this is perhaps avoided because the
defendant did not request a trial.
Criminal penalties and jail could be imposed on
failure to pay.
He talks about statue of limitations (3 years) for
downloading stuff illegally. But he admits to having done this in the distant
past, even as a copyright attorney.
It sounds likely that the Case Act might handle some
of these, and that Bit Torrent is likely to have the Copyright Office’s attention
although the awards are limited to $30000.
French warns that these sorts of cases are served to
consumers without warning, through an ISP usually.This has nothing to do with DMCA Takedowns,
as from YouTube.A pirated file need not
be posted online to create infringement;mere personal possession is infringement.
Families who have kids using the Internet should be
wary.People hosting others (like asylum
seekers) should be careful about this (set up separate accounts for other
people in your home).What about Airbnb
rentals?
Defendants had to destroy all their copies (like even
on thumb drives?)One wonders if cloud
backups of personal hard drives could be searched for infringement (which would
be way outside of Bit Torrent) but I have never heard of that being done
(yet).This case seems to resemble Malibu
Media.
Here is an article on the Strike Three situation by a
law firm called Avvo.
The Copyright Office has posted a report about “modernization”
and applications for positions by mid March for this effort.That probably is preparatory to later setting
up the “tribunal” for the Case Act.
It’s worthy of note that YouTube has sometimes removed
gay soft-core porn videos for “spam or deceptive practices” when it looks like
the reason was probably an infringement claim.
Also, I had an bizarre experience where I tried to go to an account on Gab (I don't have an account), got an error page that gave my IP address, and said it was not OK to photocopy the error page because they had my IP address. What kind of sense does this make?
WJLA7 in Washington has a story about a food blogger,
Danny Kim, who has donated his GameStop “winnings” to a DC restaurant feeding
needy children.
The blog UR: is “Eat the Capital”.It’s hard to tell what Wordpress (I presume)
theme was used, and plugins, but it is technically pretty sophisticated. You
don’t have to make the blog the landing page of a Wordpress site. This is
certainly a great example of niche blogging as advocated by “Blogtyrant”.
In the past 24 hours, YouTube has behaved again in a
knee-jerk reaction.
It had taken down a video by Ford Fischer on News2Share
which showed the crowd (or mob) near the Capitol on January 6 reacting to
Trump’s speech (“I’ll be with you…”) trying to disrupt Congress’s certification
of the electoral college vote.
Then, in a long series of tweets and replies (and I added a
few myself, more of that in a moment) YouTube maintained that a video that
shows people articulating challenges to the validity of the electoral vote
result without context within the video showing that these claims are now
untrue, can not remain online.The
YouTube maintained that one reason (why context in description in insufficient)
os that videos can be emedded in other online blog posts, which are not
guaranteed to explain the context. But, for example, you can code the embed
parameters so as to guarantee that the “Watch on YouTube” link appears inside
the embedded image so that the visitor can read context in the description.
YouTube could also allow creators to disable embedding for
specific videos, as has been done in the past.
Or it could except overstrike text in the video. But if you took some of YT's tweets literally, every video would have to present opposing views within the video, or else refutation of false (election) claims within each video. That would affect me, as I made a number of short videos of "stop the steal" demonstrations in November, well before the courts and state audits had completed certifications (and before the Electoral College vote)
The Daily Dot gives adetailed narrative about Ford and
several other journalists and channels, and spares me reproducing all the
details.You can look at Ford’s Twitter
feed and at mine (@JBoushka) directed at @TeamYouTube but there is a great deal
of detail going back and forth to follow. Ford’s tweets and the Daily Dot eventually
lead to the fact that much of this material is evidence for the impeachment
(formal charge).Furthermore, various
news outlets have licensed “on the ground” footage from Ford, as have several
documentary films.
Then, this afternoon (literally while I watched an EFF
livestream) YouTube demonetized the whole #News2share channel.Then an hour later, in another tweet, Youtube
agreed to take another look at it. In
the recent past, YouTube has hinted that it might close channels that are not
likely to become “commercially viable” for them, which would terminate my
channel, at least as it is set up now.
News2share went through all this in 2019 for seven months,
caught accidentally in the Crowder-Maza duel (adpocalypse).I learned about YT’s reversal on a Sunday in
December 2019 when I was sitting in my favorite coffee shop in Harper’s Ferry W
Va after filming the aftermath of a train wreck there (when no one else in my
own cohort did).
YouTube seems to believe that the larger corporate channels
automatically guarantee context in the way they are set up with viewers.Smaller creators cannot do that readily.We depend on visitors to look at a variety of
videos or blog posts (which can be related by label or tag;I wish videos could be also) from one creator
to get the context.
One of Ford’s tweets noted that corporate media tends to
turning controversial material into shouting matches, as CNN and Fox go after
each other.That, he says, is not
genuine context.Viewers should understand
that news footage of protests is exactly that – private citizens joining
together in movements, often tribal, to express commonly held views which may
not be literally correct.
Although some of YouTube’s conversation with Ford and others
is about specific policies regarding election results, others have to do with
“controversial issues”.
YouTube is rattled by the fact that its content creators
take on controversy individually rather than in leaving activism to
conventional non-profits who “organize” people;it also wants to see creators do lifestyle or commercial material,
ignoring the reality that right now Covid has turned a lot of that
upsidedown.Remember it’s “commercial
viability” clause? This doesn’t make sense during a pandemic, which is
essentially “wartime”.
Some younger creators, in fact, particularly “college”
channel, do very well with this kind of content, because the circumstances
favor their setting up channels with the right balance of lifestyle and serious
issues (John Fish, Max Reisinger) while offering legitimate commercial sales
opportunities that aren’t pushy (Perspectopia).But this is generally not easy.I
have, for example, have talked about national security issues because in the
past I worked on gays in the military and expanded from that.That has led Facebook to ask me why I don’t
have advertisers vouching for me, as if I should offer people volume discounts
on my books (that isn’t really feasible now with older material) or sell
Faraday sleeves to protect laptops from future pulse attacks (a doomsday
prepper idea, but sounding asinine as a business to push on people!)
I’ve had other brushes with the “context” problem, which
keeps coming back, as with an incident that happened when I was substitute
teaching (see July 27, 2007 post).
Roberto Blake has an interesting video, “Social Media is
Over” (although he has other videos explaining how to make YouTube channels
work) and explains the value of going back to your own hosted website and email
lists.That was the theme of Blogtyrant in
the past.But can any small business
make it without being on the big corporate platforms, which have a monopoly on
audiences?Do people want to be on email
lists, given the security risks to them?And now even webhosts are feeling the pressure of the cultural wars (see
Jan 16).
Update: Sputniknews has another account of this and discusses Jamal Thomas, who is actually a progressive. Ford Fischer now reports that Fox News (Joseph A. Wulfsohn) has reported his story with screenshot details.
Update Feb 5: Ford reports that his channel is monetized again.
Facebook took down Robinhood Stock Traders, an
investor discussion group, out of fear that it had somehow manipulated share
prices of Game Stop and other securities (like AMC Theaters and Blackberry). Reuters reports (and AOL picked up the story).
Yet the explanation given by Facebook to discussion
group founder Allen Tran was that it contained adult content, which was a “lie”.(The company founder is Vlad Tenet, who is
also young.)
Facebook had suspended the group as a “dangerous
organization”.
Eventually the group was restored.
In the meantime, Robinhood would indicate that it
regulated trading because it did not have the short term capital to cover all
the risk.
Karlyn Borysenko has an interesting take on reporting
what was sent to her about CVS’s employee training with critical theory.She was suspended from posting on Twitter for
12 hours for reporting “hacked content” sent to her by a CVS employee,
regarding materials like the definition of “intersectionality”, “privilege”,
and “misappropriation” – as if these were “trade secrets”.
Then David Rubin (above) discussed when Hen Psaka is saying
the Biden administration will jawbone tech companies into left-leaning
censorship, as if they didn’t do enough of that already.
Katharine Trendacosta has a brief but useful op-ed to
open the new month, “It’s not 230 you hate, it’s Oligopolies.
My take is that Facebook and YouTube could deal with
the loss of 230 by turning into either ephemerals (Facebook becomes a glorified
snapchat) or mini-Netlfix.
YouTube would continue to accept content from previously
non-established people, but it would vet them carefully, especially for social
creditworthiness.Hopefully it wouldn’t
get fooled by critical theory.
YouTube had hinted this back in 2018 in response to
the EU Copyright Directive, which Susan realized was an attack on the idea of
lettering amateurs lowball established media companies and drive people out of
work.
The usual criticisms of removing 203 is that small
companies could not get started.Well
not if they allowed users to add content. So the natural answer is to
strengthen anti-trust laws or litigation, which has already started against
Facebook.
Yet, for all intents and purposes, Mark Zuckerberg,
Susan Wojcicki and Jack Dorsey became unelected co-presidents of the United
States from January 7 until Biden took the oath on January 20. And we have Tim Pool to keep them in check.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a memo, dated January 21, 2021, to the
incoming Biden administration. Note quickly its recommendations on Section
230 and the need to preserve it to allow everyone to be heard with their own
point of view.
But we have increasing sentiment that much of our
establishment does not want everyone to be heard. As Brian Stelter of CNN says now, “Freedom of
speech” is protected, but not “Freedom of reach”.It rhymes like in a poem.Actually, there is some discussion of the
latter in the 2007 COPA opinion that I have discussed before.
But Brian Stelter, in this video excerpt from Tom Elliot, talks
instead about the “Harm Reduction Model”, and “Reducing Information Pollution”.
Stelter says that Fox has complained that CNN is
trying to drive if off the air. (He wants service providers and ISP's remove access to harmful content, when they really are "telephone companies".) But it is
more that large corporate media would like to get rid of competition from
low-cost independent producers who don’t provide others with stable jobs in
journalism.
You can’t get rid of “information pollution” and keep
it from reaching users without gatekeepers.And it’s becoming increasingly apparent that the obvious way to gatekeep
(as the legal climate is less friendly to protecting platform downstream liability)
is to pre-screen who gets published, the way it used to be. (Stelter mentions Schuster’s cancellation of
Josh Hawley.)I’ve called this idea “the
privilege of being listened to”, indeed a conditional privilege.The next apparent tool would be to establish
norms of individual social credit worthiness.If you want to be heard, you should care about the people who will
receive your message and have some accountability for what they do. You should have "skin in the game". The Chinese already have very precise
paradigms on how to do this, and pose that it is fundamental to personal
morality.And they don’t have “critical
theory” in the way, which is ironic.
Update: Allison Morrow weighs in on Stelter and Nicholas Kristoff in this video.
You may want to look at the long articleby Jessica
Garrison and Ken Bensinger, “Meet the woman facing some of the most serious Capitol
Riot charges?”, on BuzzfeedNews.
The woman is Jessica Watkins (be careful because there are others with her namesake with no connection), whose road to perdition
started with the best of intentions, after some devastating tornadoes in her
home Dayton, Ohio in the spring of 2019.She wanted to organize a volunteer humanitarian “militia” to keep order
and assist in rebuilding when government, she and others thought, was incapable
to doing it.This sounds like healthful
localism, community solidarity.
She went from an ex-Army vet and bar owner and
volunteer firefighter, through the frustrations of COVID, to so gradual extreme
radicalization.
Leonard French has a 23-minute video that explains the
class action suit against Robin Hood for braking investors from buying GameStop,
apparently motivated by the desire to short sellers (also clients) from catastrophe.
One idea to get a dismissal might be to claim the
RobinHood’s terms of service allowed it this discretion to stop unusual
activity.
But of course, this is a battle that curiously parallels
the battle for free speech from independents who provide unwelcome competition
to established corporate media interests.In this case, small investors want to have the power of corporate hedge
funds.
French looks swashbuckling in his pirate hat, but says
he lost a decade of his life financially to the crash of 2008.
Hoeg Law has two videos (nearly 90 minutes) on this, too much, but offers a linkto the court papers.
Matt Taibbi, in his own substack, offers a detailed article examining the unwillingness of YouTube and Facebook to allow
livestreams now of controversial events, at least those showing brandishing of
firearms, in this article.
He particularly discusses the problems encountered by
Jon Farina and Ford Fischer (see Monday’s post).
In many cases, Fischer has found, for example, that
some groups were not supporting either Trump’s extremists or, on the other
hand, Antifa, but were more of the libertarian anarchist ilk (as with some of
Boogaloo Bois).Some of the demonstrations,
as one in Richmond January 18 (Lobby Day) had little or nothing to do with certification
or inauguration.
Algorithms are totally unable to determine the context
of speech.
I have never done livestreams.That’s partly because I haven’t developed the
skill to (I started in 2011 or so but backed away back into my established ventures),
and a lot of my blogging “career” happened before video really took off like around
2013.Many of the issues I cover are
more legal ones (like the Section 230 debate) or medical ones (coronavirus), and involve conferences and events
which don’t allow livestreaming by visitors but already plan their own, so I simply
use the videos they make for blog posts.
More recently, in 2018 through part of 2020, I discovered
that once in a while I would come across an event that no other independent
journalist (even those that hire contractors) had covered (or even the media) so
I would make short clips (but not live) with simple canon Powershots and cell
phone and post them, and find them somewhat effective.That was particularly true of immigration or
asylum issues, and later with events like a train wreck in Harpers Ferry.
Also: Discord has banned the r/WallStreetBets server over extreme levels of hate speech, as Jay Peters reports for The Verge.
Ford Fischer, who owns News2Share, is maintaining
Monday (today, January 25) that YouTube removed a video of his made January 6
when he panned the crowd, showing the crowd’s emotional reaction just before it
stormed the Capitol.Here is his
complete thread.
It appears that he has already licensed some of his
footage to CNN and PBS which are showing their own documentary films about the
incident.PBS’s Frontline may be yet to
air.
It also appears likely that some of his footage is
included in evidentiary materials to be sent over to the Senate tonight at 6:55
PM for the impeachment trial.
Here is an account on his own News2Share site. Note that he particular video grays out and gives a warning about TOS removal.
There are various detailed accounts in news media of
this “march”, such as Reuters , and New York Magazine Intelligencer.
Here is a really interesting one in Ohio Capital Journalof the mental planning in advance. I've had brush with this kind of thing in people contacting me, as I explain later in this post.
A site called "Justsecurity" has a video from Parler (apparently) that connects Trump's speech to the crowd's behavior, link. "We're going to walk down to the Capitol, and I'll be there with you!". The Vimeo link from Justin Hendrik is here. The video includes material from Parler. There is the call "Fight for Trump!" which sounds like the chant of a cult, waiting for its Koolaid.
There were other prominent speakers advocating “violence”,
such as Rudy Giuliani’s “trial by combat”.Some rioters claimed they were part of a “1776” movement.
YouTube seems to be taking the position that anyone
not part of corporate media who films a speech advocating Trump’s claims of the
“steal” is now violating the terms of service, and that YT will not give “citizen
journalists” the validity of reporting the speech for the sake of the
journalism alone.YT does not trust average
social media users to understand what “subjunctive mood” (as in French verb conjugations)
means. However, Ford does this for a
living, and regularly sells footage to corporate outlets.Ironically, it seems not all right for him to
post it himself.
I also have some earlier footage from “STS” rallies on
YouTube (from November 2020) that are still up. Some of my footage does not seem to be duplicated by anyone else (which often happens, even though my own video activity is "small").
YouTube did not give Fischer a community guidelines “strike”
on this one, but rather a kind of warning. (YT had said that it would, starting
with January 6, originally to start with the inauguration.)
I will add that I found two Facebook posts that I had
photographed for private records from a “Friend” on Dec. 20 (six days after the
Electoral College vote) speaking about claims to come as a group of people in a
van from Nevada, that it “is time to make our move” and “I don’t care how
uncomfortable it is, this I what needs to happen”.Later, she asked if I knew where people could
stay.I said, try a hotel.The Hotel Harrington closed for the three
days.But the group apparently may have
stayed in a Comfort inn in Arlington very close to where I used to live.They don’t seem to care about giving people
COVID_19.
Then I joked on Twitter on January 5 that “game time was
1 PM” next dayThat is, I thought, the legal “game”
as to whether Pence could (lawfully in any conceivable sense) ever deviate from what had been understood as his constitutional
duty, and as to whether Ted Cruz could get the count delayed (for his panel
investigation).No, it didn’t mean
storming the Capitol.(I stayed home and
watched everything, as COVID is everywhere, and I am 77!)But you can see how making a joke on Twitter about a certification session now might be seen as a wrongful
joke by the TSA at an airport.Nothing
has come of this, but I wonder if the FBI should see the Facebook posts (I was
concerned enough to photo them but I did not report them, as I don’t think I
have ever reported anything to social media “censors” – but I could have to
answer why I behaved in this particular way in reaction to what I saw).I guess this woman’s posts don’t make any "direct" threats, so probably not.
On both the far Right and far Left, I see people going very close to the line, and then sometimes over, in resorting to force to correct what they have become convinced is existential injustice. I remember spying on the "Peoples Party on New Jersey" in 1972 and running into the same kind of hyperbole in person.
This sort of thing has happened before.On July 19, 2012, I made a joke on Twitter
that I never go to Thursday night midnight showings of comics movies (true – I don’t
like to stay up that late.).Maybe that
did not turn out well.
Update: Jan 31: The BBC has used some of Ford's footage, and viewers in the US are blocked from watching it, where in the UK they can see it (tweet).This is a coverup that dwarfs (in the other direction) Nick Sandmann's incident in January 2019.