EFF video mentions copyright case in Canada involving hyperlinks

 

Ottawa, 2019

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.

Crowder posts video with some evidence of Nov 2020 election irregularities (he claims) and Twitter suspends him

 

Philadelphia, 2018

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.

Linked-In "retires" a course in anti-racism by DiAngelo as apparently overly coercive and extremist

 

Harpers Ferry W Va

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. 

Why do "social media influencers" have to disclose business relationships to mention products when commercial television doesn't?

 

after ice storm

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.

The basic concepts are “payment” and “control”.

Copyright troll in Minnesota (leveraging P2P setups) gets 14 years in prison for wire fraud, etc.

 

central MN, 2011

A copyright troll, Paul Hansmeier, operating in Minnesota, has been sentenced to 14 years in prison. The 8^th 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.  

Facebook bans all news articles having any connection with Australia (?!) over an Aussie "link tax" proposal

 

model rr

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 an image of 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.  

Police use copyrighted background music to discourage filming by citizens, could lead to more racial profiling, a legal quandary

 

Trump supporters on Nov 14 after election, DC

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.

Youtuber suddenly has channel removed for, what, just talking about Bitcoin?

 

Middletown MD

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). 

Many more COVID19 infections may be asymptomatic (but briefly contagious) than we had thought

 

Middletown, MD, 2021

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?

Cancel Culture explained, succinctly

 

Seneca Rocks, W Va, 2014

A Twitter Thread called “Wokal Distance” does a nice job of explaining cancel culture.  There are 19 tweets and you can access it here.  

Variety explained 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 IRL weighs in on 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. 

David Hogg's "Good Pillow" teaches us something about "commercial viability"

Harvard, Aug. 2015

 
 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 story by 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 its home 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).  

ISP (Cox) assessed a $1 billion judgment for a user's copyright infringement (downloading Sony) for not enforcing a repeat offenders policy

 

Richmond, VA, downtown, 2015/9

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 4^th 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.   

Another Section 230 reform bill requires "tattle tale" by platforms; Gamer mysteriously loses entire Google account to unexplained TOS issue

 

Overlook near Frederick MD

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.

The bill is S4758.

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. 

Taylor Lykes explains on The Verge 

NYTimes gets overrun with its own cancel culture

 

NYC looking toward Brooklyn 2015

Matt Welch explains in 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 describes a 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.

More Bit Torrent litigation for downloading P2P adult content, large settlements to Strike Three Holdings

 

White Plains, NY Oct 2014

 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? 

A Washington DC food blog is a great example of a "niche blog" that does help charities

 

DC near convention center, Jan 2017

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”.

YouTube suddenly turns on journalists who posted detailed footage of Capitol Riots and other "Trumpist" demonstrations

Capitol 4th, 2016

 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 a detailed 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 gets dirty with RobinHood v. Wall Street fiasco; Twitter calls spying on employer "critical theory" indoctrination as "hacking"; Biden administration looks at tech companies as part of his sphere

 

NYC

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.

Could enforcing anti-trust law fix big-tech (instead of changing Section 230)?

 

Outside Facebook, Menlo Park, 2018

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.

Brian Stelter on CNN hints at the need for social credit systems for people who want to speak online ("Freedom of speech" vs. "Freedom of reach")

 

winter, finally

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. 

BUzzfeed News gives us the chronicle of a female Army vet in the Capitol riots

Ohio, Jan 2018

You may want to look at the long article by 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.

It wasn’t all just about social media.

The lawyers weigh in on RobinHood, GameStop, short sellers, and ordinary investors

 

San Francisco 2018

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 link to the court papers. 

YouTube, Facebook making it impossible for independent journalists to livestream conflict

 

Harpers Ferry wreck Dec. 2019

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. 

YouTube removes "evidentiary" videos of January 6 made by a prominent independent journalist; how ordinary citizens can accidentally stumble into dangerous plots online

 

Nevada, 2012

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 Journal of 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 day  That 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.