DOJ Investigation: Mississippi PD Ran ‘Dickensian Debtors Prison,’ Violated Rights Regularly

Legal Issues

from the bigots-with-badges-beating-a-small-town-into-submission dept

It’s not just the Rankin County (MS) Sheriff’s Office being scrutinized by the US DOJ. While that’s the main concern following the conviction of six deputies of a self-proclaimed “Goon Squad” who spent hours brutalizing and torturing two black men, the rest of Mississippi apparently isn’t in great shape either.

This recently-released report [PDF] details the inner workings of the Lexington, Mississippi police department, which has apparently spent years abusing the rights of the 1,200 residents of the town. There’s old, old, extremely-old school policing going on in Lexington, where officers have leveraged their power to enrich themselves while reviving jail practices that align it with a pre-Civil War past in an entirely different country. Here’s more, from Nick Judin of the Mississippi Free Press.

U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi Todd Gee, explained the gravity of the charges in a livestreamed morning press event. “Lexington has turned the jail into the kinds of debtors’ prisons Charles Dickens described in his novels written in the 1800s,” Gee said. “Only this is happening in Mississippi in 2024.”

The report details a litany of brutal, extractive practices primarily aimed at the Black residents of Lexington: countless arrests over extreme minutiae, including “illegal arrests, jailing people for conduct that is not criminal, like using profanity and owing money to the police.”

That’s just the stuff at the surface level. The extensive report is far more granular. And it details the sort of things you’d hope you’d never see committed by sworn law enforcement officers.

For instance, there’s the person whose experience with the Lexington PD opens the DOJ’s report — a litany of rights abuses that clearly demonstrates local officers felt they were above the law.

Hours after the Department of Justice announced its investigation of the Lexington Police Department (LPD) on November 8, 2023, officers chased a Black man through a field and tased him nine times. The man began foaming at the mouth. One officer pointed to a Taser probe lodged in the man’s hat and said, “Damn, one of my probes hit him in the head.” The man, who has a behavioral health disability, had been accused of disturbing a business.

This was not the man’s first encounter with LPD. Earlier that year, LPD officers had jailed him for ten days for trespassing; four days for stealing a cup of coffee; and twelve days for stealing packets of sugar. Each time they arrested him, LPD unlawfully refused to release the man until he paid money towards old fines and fees he owed from misdemeanors and traffic tickets. But each arrest added more fines and fees to the ledger. By November 2023, the man— who has no job, no assets, and no bank account—owed more than $7,500.

There’s the debtors prison — a corrupt system aided and abetted by officers willing to jail someone for twelve days for stealing sugar packets. Things haven’t improved despite a regime chance — something that only accomplished replacing one odious so-called public servant with another.

LPD made national news in July 2022 when a former officer released a recording of LPD’s Chief of Police, Sam Dobbins, bragging about shooting a Black man he referred to as a “n—–.” After the recording of Dobbins came to light, Lexington’s Board of Aldermen replaced him with Charles Henderson, who is still Chief today. During Dobbins’s year-long tenure, and continuing under Henderson, LPD has pursued an aggressive approach to policing low-level offenses. Officers arrest people for minor infractions like driving without insurance and parking in a wheelchair accessible space. They also make illegal arrests, jailing people for conduct that is not criminal, like using profanity and owing money to the police.

“Owing money” is the thing that motivates the Lexington PD. If the department can’t ensure a steady flow of fines and fees, officers have been forced to take unpaid time off. This literally poor town (its median income is only $39,000) can’t generate the revenue needed to pay officers, so officers have decided to take the law into their own hands to ensure their revenue stream goes uninterrupted, leading directly to horrific stuff like this:

For example, in July 2023, LPD officers broke down a 63-year-old Black man’s door to arrest him for calling a woman a “bitch” in a public place. On direct orders from the police chief, an LPD officer used a baton to smash in the man’s back door, then entered his home with his gun drawn. As the man ran out of his front door in fear, an LPD supervisor shouted, “Get him! Tase him!” The man fell while running and injured his leg. Officers handcuffed him on the ground.

Guns out for calling someone a “bitch,” something these officers likely do on multiple-times-daily basis, solely for the purpose of putting a few more dollars back into the town’s till so officers could keep getting paid to engage in further abuses to generate more income, etc.

The report goes on to note similar arrests and acts of violence, like officers tasing a man six times because he had an open container in the parking lot of a local bar or tasing another man for 15 seconds because he had tinted windows on his car. (Tasers cut off at 10 seconds, so the officer had to fire it again to hit the 15-second mark despite the first tasing having incapacitated the driver.)

There’s no hiding the fact that this is a rogue law enforcement agency abusing a single town for the sole purpose of enriching itself. Every arrest generates an automatic $50 “processing fee” that goes directly to the department, on top of whatever else officers can extract in additional fines and fees.

In 2019, LPD made 70 arrests. But LPD arrested 375 people in 2022 and 294 in 2023. Over the past two years, LPD has made nearly one arrest for every four people in town. That is more than ten times the per capita arrest rate for Mississippi as a whole.

The only reason for the small decline in arrests is that the DOJ announced its investigation in 2023. For a short period of time, the PD ceased arresting anyone for anything. But it didn’t last. And despite the presence of DOJ investigators, officers soon returned to their regularly scheduled abuses.

It’s all about the money:

In 2022, after LPD adopted its expansive arrest policy, Lexington’s revenue from fines increased more than sevenfold—from $30,000 per year to over $240,000. In 2023, Lexington collected more than $220,000 from fines, which made up nearly a quarter (23 percent) of LPD’s budget.

[…]

In a town of about 1,200 people, the total sum of outstanding fines is more than $1.7 million.

The PD can issue its own bench warrants for unpaid fines and court fees, generating even more arrests and processing fees. During its investigation, the DOJ discovered the LPD has 652 unique bench warrants on file — covering more than half the town’s population of 1,200 people.

Lexington residents are living in a police state — one overseen by town officials who either don’t care or feel powerless to end this. Most likely it’s the former, since part of the city’s budget is also covered by collected fines and fees. The incentives are so perverted, the town is under the thumb of a squad of full-time perverts.

The mission to collect old fines is so pervasive that officers use nearly every interaction with the public to check and see what people may owe. In July 2022, a woman came to the police station as a witness to give a statement in a murder investigation. LPD arrested her for old fines. In September 2023, an officer handcuffed a passenger from a traffic stop and brought her to the police station so that he could determine whether she owed them anything (she did not). In December 2022, an arrested man’s father arrived to bring his car home; LPD found that he owed old fines and threatened to arrest him unless he paid.

No one here is providing anything resembling “public service.” The report details the arrest of a man on disorderly conduct charges because he ran into the police station to avoid being beaten by an assailant who was chasing him. The alleged assailant was ignored by officers so they could book the person who ran into their station seeking help. In another case, officers booked someone on felony possession despite the amount of marijuana recovered being small enough to only trigger a misdemeanor under state law. DOJ investigators personally witnessed officers “brainstorming” additional charges during arrests to trigger as many fines and fees as possible.

The PD operates with so much impunity, this is the sort of thing its does on the regular.

In February 2023, officers arrested a Black woman on an “investigative hold.” LPD did not accuse the woman of any crime. Nevertheless, officers handcuffed her and brought her to jail, where she remained for the next five days. While the woman was in LPD’s custody, officers interrogated her about her boyfriend, who was a suspect in a murder investigation.

Officers also arrested and jailed the woman’s boyfriend on an “investigative hold.” After interrogating him, officers obtained a no-knock warrant to search the home that he shared with the woman. In the warrant application, officers stated that he confessed to shooting a gun and selling drugs. In body-worn camera video from his interrogation at the police station, he denied both.

The search did not yield evidence to charge anyone with murder. But officers did find about an ounce of marijuana and a bottle of pills they believed were ecstasy. They also found something else: the woman had running water, even though they believed she had not paid her water bill. Chief Henderson threatened to charge her with felony theft and federal racketeering for using the water. “And every gallon that’s been used, it’s gonna be charged,” the Chief said. “If it’s over so much, you’re gonna be charged with a felony, and you gonna be sitting in jail for a long time.” She could avoid these charges, he told her, if she could get her boyfriend to talk.

After the woman waited for two days in jail, LPD baselessly charged her with felony drug trafficking for the small amount of drugs found in her home. She bonded out five days later. Neither the woman nor her boyfriend was ever charged in connection with the murder.

There’s a lot more in the report. And it’s all disturbing and disgusting. This is sort of thing you might expect in nations where the entire government is corrupt or overseen by autocrats (or any blend of both). You don’t expect to see this in the supposed Land of the Free where certain rights are supposed to be inalienable. But this is what happens in the United States, especially in areas where law enforcement knows the population is too impoverished to fight back. There isn’t a single officer here that should still have a job, but sadly, it appears the department has yet to discipline any officers, much less fire them. The only response it has provided to this point is a “no comment” as it circles what’s left of its wagons and waits for the DOJ to leave town and take its spotlight with it. These are criminals with badges — nothing more and nothing less. And if town officials have any spine left, they’ll kick every last one of these assholes off the payroll.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, 5th amendment, doj, excessive force, investigation, lexington pd, mississippi, police misconduct, rights violations

Amazon Ratchets Up Enshittifying Prime Video After Public Shrugs At Initial Ads

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the moar-moar-moar dept

In the process of enshittification, it seems that the process will not stop until the customer has been well and truly pissed off. It was merely earlier this year that we discussed Amazon taking its Prime Video offering, after gobbling up a huge number of adopters, and suddenly introducing everyone’s favorite thing about television: advertisements! And, because big platforms like Amazon don’t so much see subscribers as customers so much as hostages, along with the introduction of ads came a subscription tier to avoid them. The point is that Amazon, a top five company by market cap in the world, needs more money. Or, in lieu of that, they need the company’s stock price to rise quarter by quarter in order to satiate those infamous “brunchlords” Karl Bode is always talking about.

When this is the mindset of a company, of course, enshittification will never be a one-step process. The enshittifiers must keep going, incrementally seeing how they can further extract any volume of dollars from its own customers to satisfy the masters. Which is how we get to today’s news, roughly 8 months after Amazon introduced ads into Prime Video, with Prime Video’s next great innovation: moar ads!!!

Speaking to the Financial Times today, Kelly Day, VP of Prime Video International, said that Amazon will offer more Prime Video ad slots to advertisers next year. She didn’t get into specifics but confirmed that Prime Video’s ad load would “ramp up a little bit more into 2025.”

In January, when Amazon launched Prime Video’s ad tier, The Wall Street Journal reported that subscribers would see an average of between two and three-and-a-half minutes of ads per hour. Day told FT today that upon launch, Prime Video with ads was given a “very light ad load,” providing subscribers with a “gentle entry into advertising that has exceeded customers’ expectations in terms of what the ad experience would be like.” The executive pointed out that Prime Video with ads doesn’t show commercials in the middle of content. That could change next year.

Amazon is also adding shoppable ads to Prime Video in 2025, FT confirmed. The new ad format, which includes carousel ads, pause ads, and brand trivia ads—is being sold to advertisers as a new way to attract TV and movie viewing audiences that have become more elusive in the streaming age.

Yes, yes, of course! The best way to make sure that Prime Video remains attractive to customers, thereby making it lucrative for Amazon, is obviously to have greater ad time in content, to inject ads into the middle of content, and to try to make those ads as annoying as possible! Why, this hasn’t been tried since — checks notes –, well, since cable television did the exact same thing! Never mind that people went to streaming in part because they hated this very thing about cable television. Never mind that this new program comes with absolutely zero benefit to the subscriber. And certainly never-the-fuck-mind that you’re going out of your way to talk about how the customer is the frog you’re gently raising the temperature on the pot of water. Yes, this is obviously brilliant.

Now, why is Amazon doing this? Because the frog didn’t complain about the temperature of the water, apparently.

Amazon says Prime Video has 200 million monthly viewers and that subscriber count hasn’t dropped dramatically since it added ads. Similarly, market research firm Antenna told FT in July that a substantial amount of Prime Video subscribers opted out of ads initially, but that number soon “trailed off.” By May, fewer than a 10th of subscribers were paying for an ad-free subscription, Antenna said.

According to Day, subscriber churn in response to the ads has “been much, much less than we anticipated.”

Read that last bit again. Amazon expected all of you to be more pissed off than you were. When you weren’t, they’ve decided to jam even more ads down your slack-jawed, pacified throats. In other words, this reads for all the world like Amazon will not be satisfied until it finds the exact line its customers will draw in the sand.

Thing is, though, by the time Prime Video pisses off a good chunk of its fans, it might be too late to pull back from the brink. And if you think that could never happen, so did cable television.

Filed Under: ads, enshittification, prime video
Companies: amazon

Elon Musk’s “Sorry, Twitter No Longer Exists” Defense Falls Flat Down Under

Legal Issues

from the you-can't-touch-me-because-my-name-is-different dept

You know how little kids sometimes play a game where they claim they’ve changed their name, and you can no longer blame them for what they did under their previous name? You know how that never actually works? Well, about that… Elon seems to be trying a corporate version of that trick in Australia, and it has been just as successful.

It’s no secret that this year, Elon’s ExTwitter has been fighting with Australia over demands to remove content, but there was a separate fight, going back over a year, in which the Australian eSafety Commissioner was disappointed with ExTwitter’s processes for handling child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on the platform.

If you don’t recall, a few weeks after taking over the site, Elon claimed that fighting CSAM was his “priority #1.”

And yet, he fired most of the trust and safety team, appeared to stop using industry-standard tools for finding/deleting known CSAM, and seemed to make the CSAM problem on ExTwitter much, much worse. That’s not even mentioning the time he reinstated an account that had shared an infamously horrid piece of CSAM because the poster was an Elon supporter.

Thus, a while back, the Australian eSafety Commissioner began an investigation into how the company was dealing with CSAM. Elon chose to not take it very seriously at all. From the eSafety Commissioner:

I assessed X Corp.’s response and identified 14 questions (many of which involved multiple sub-questions) where it failed to provide the information required by the Notice. In some instances X Corp. had failed to provide any response to the question, such as by leaving the boxes entirely blank. In other instances, X Corp. provided a response that was otherwise incomplete and/or inaccurate.

On 6 April 2023, my office sent follow-up questions to X Corp. to provide a further opportunity to provide the information required by the Notice. The correspondence stated that my office was seeking this information to assess whether X Corp. had complied with the Notice. 1 Service provider notification to X Corp. esafety.gov.au

On 5 May, X Corp. provided information in response to the follow-up questions. It is evident from many of X Corp.’s subsequent responses that it held information required by the Notice and was capable of providing that information at first instance.

Because of this, Australia fined ExTwitter $400k almost a year ago. After the fine was assessed, Elon fought back and appealed the ruling, continuing his standard “ignore first, fight it out in court later” approach to so many things.

He did so by claiming that the fine was for actions taken by “Twitter” (under his watch) but that “Twitter” no longer existed, because there was a different company called “X” that he now ran. So any demands for “Twitter” must be null and void, as X operated under a totally different set of laws.

Because Elon thinks he’s clever and that everyone else is very, very stupid.

To be clear, it’s a little more complicated here. Part of the argument was that since Twitter was a Delaware-based company, while X is a Nevada-based company, different laws apply under each state. But, the idea that this somehow absolved the company of having to deal with legal issues that began under the previous entity still seems like one of those tricks only a bratty schoolboy would try.

Turns out this didn’t work. I’m not sure what’s Australian for “not fucking impressed,” but I’d say that it applies to this judge.

 A central feature of this proceeding is that, on 15 March 2023, Twitter Inc merged into X Corp. Upon that occurring, Twitter Inc ceased to exist. These facts were not in dispute, as they were the subject of a statement of agreed facts that was received into evidence….

[….]

To adopt the language of the Nevada statute, Twitter Inc was a constituent entity that merged into X Corp. It was only upon that occurrence that Twitter Inc ceased to exist, and it was only its separate existence that ceased. X Corp’s “status” is as the surviving entity of a statutory merger, in which Twitter Inc was a constituent entity that merged into X Corp, with all of the legal consequences that ensue….

Then there was a separate argument that ExTwitter had made, basically arguing that under Australia’s Regulatory Powers Act, ExTwitter didn’t have to respond because the notice it received “did not specify the place of the contraventions” because, again, it tried to pretend that “Twitter” and “X” were different companies.

This just comes across as another bit of gamesmanship.

And again, the judge wasn’t impressed, noting that the notice identified both companies:

 In the present case, X Corp did not advance any persuasive basis on which to conclude that the failure of the infringement notice to identify the place of the contraventions could have prejudiced it. I have already mentioned that X Corp submitted that the location of the alleged contravention could have indicated which was the correct legal entity to which the notice should have been directed. But on X Corp’s own case, the location of the alleged contraventions had no relevance to this question, which was said to turn on the Online Safety Act itself, or the effects of the merger between Twitter Inc and X Corp, as provided for by Nevada law. And, as the Commissioner submitted, the infringement notice was addressed to X Corp and identified both Twitter Inc and X Corp as the relevant “provider”. It was not otherwise explained how X Corp was prejudiced by the fact that the notice did not identify where the failure to comply with s 57 of the Online Safety Act occurred. No prejudice, or even potential prejudice, is apparent. To the contrary, I accept the Commissioner’s submission that X Corp had everything it needed to know in order to consider the allegations made against it in the infringement notice.

I recognize that sometimes Elon gets away with his “cute” legal arguments. But maybe just following the law is better than trying to tap dance around it with obviously stupid rationales?

Filed Under: australia, csam, elon musk, esafety commissioner, name change
Companies: twitter, x

You’ll Never Go Broke Correctly Estimating The Internet’s Desire For Deepfake Nudes

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the getting-infected-from-online-sex dept

Cheap thrills? Perhaps not so much. A report from Joseph Cox for 404 Media not only points out there’s no such thing as a free meal AI-generated deepfake nude, but that this is exactly the sort of thing Vice Media would have been all over if it hadn’t been burnt to the ground by string of executives whose only “talent” was steadily increasing their take-home pay.

It has sex, Russian crime, and — comically enough — a seemingly direct contradiction of assertions made the US Department of Justice.

Anyway, the upshot is this: if you’re looking to find a free AI nude generator, perhaps you should just stop looking, unless you like having your Bitcoin portfolio siphoned into someone else’s pockets while malware distributed by Russian criminals wanders around your computer/device looking for any other information that might be valuable.

Multiple sites which promise to use AI to ‘nudify’ any photos uploaded are actually designed to infect users with powerful credential stealing malware, according to new findings from a cybersecurity company which has analyzed the sites. The researchers also believe the sites are run by Fin7, a notorious Russian cybercrime group that has previously even set up fake penetration testing services to trick people into hacking real victims on their behalf.

Well, you get what you pay for, I guess. Free AI-generated nudity isn’t worth the asking price, not when cybercriminal groups are running the shop. But it’s exactly the sort of thing that’s always going to work because people looking for free software allegedly capable of “nudifying” any photo are the sort of people who aren’t really going to be doing a whole lot of upper brain thinking when initiating downloads.

That’s the expected outcome of setting up a digital honeypot promising nudity you won’t find elsewhere on the ‘Net. And it worked completely as expected, according to the security researchers who looked into these sites. The cross-section of people willing to click through on questionable sites offering rare nudes also contains plenty of people who’ve plunked down a lot of real money to obtain funds that aren’t quite as tactile.

“The deepfake AI software may have an audience of mostly men with a decent amount [of income] who use other AI software or have crypto accounts,” Zach Edwards, senior threat analyst at cybersecurity firm Silent Push, told 404 Media in an online chat.

There’s a sucker logging on every minute. All Fin7 had to do is give them what they wanted. Which is, according to Zach Edwards, “the bleeding edge of creepy.” The victims get none of the nudes and the cybercriminals get all the cryptocurrency and financial info they can carry away.

But while all of that is kind of funny and completely expected, the researchers digging into these sites were able to trace this back to Fin7, which means people shouldn’t believe everything that falls out of the DOJ’s mouth.

The news also shows that Fin7 is alive despite the U.S. Department of Justice saying last year that “Fin7 as an entity is no more.” 

No criminal entity is ever completely dead. The DOJ should know this because it’s been able to witness this history repeat itself for decades. Crime-fighting is whack-a-mole. Claiming total victory is a move guaranteed to make you eat your words. Crime can be fought. It can’t be defeated. And whatever you don’t kill (which is all of it) will either go further underground or come back even stronger.

The only good news to report is that some of these sites (most of which seem to offer the same “nudifying” and trace back to Fin7 operations) are no longer accessible. Most of the domains were handled by Hostinger, which immediately blocked what it could once it had been notified by 404 Media.

The usual rules apply and internet users ignore them at their own peril. If the offer is too good to be true, it’s because it isn’t. Expecting a free service to use AI to strip the clothes off any picture you happen to possess is just the horniest of wishful thinking. And agreeing to download anything from a site you know nothing about other than its vague promise of “nudifying” is just asking for international cybercriminal trouble. Keep it (and your digital wallet) in your pants, creeps.

Filed Under: ai, cryptocurrency, deepfakes, doj, fin7, malware

Daily Deal: Babbel Language Learning (All Languages)

Deals

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

You probably already know the benefits of learning a language, so let’s focus on the app. Right off the bat, let’s be clear about one thing: When we say “app” we don’t mean that you’re limited to using Babbel on your phone. You can use Babbel on desktop, too, and your progress is synchronized across devices. Want to practice where you won’t have Wi-Fi? Download lessons before you head out, and you’ll be good to go. However you choose to access your 10K+ hours of online language education, you’ll be able to choose from 14 languages. Want to try your hand at all of them? Knock yourself out — you’ll have a lifetime to get it done. And you can tackle one or all in 10-to-15-minute bite-sized lessons, so there’s no need to clear hours of your weekend to gain real-life conversation skills. It’s on sale for $179.97 for a limited time only.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Filed Under: daily deal

Hillary Clinton’s Continued Confusion About Section 230 Highlights Need For Basic Tech Literacy Among Politicians

Say That Again

from the everything-you-said-is-exactly-backwards dept

Hillary Clinton has no clue how Section 230 works. She seems to think that repealing it will make websites more likely to remove misinformation (which is backwards). But what law do we need repealed to stop Clinton from spreading misinformation about Section 230 (and social media)?

In April, we wrote about some comments from Hillary Clinton regarding Section 230, showing that she was incredibly confused about what it does and how it works, to the point of actively spreading misinformation about how the law works. It appears that since then, either no one has told her she’s wrong or (worse) they have and she refuses to understand why.

She recently appeared on Michael Smerconish’s show to talk about her book and continued to push misinformation about Section 230. Indeed, this time it was even worse and more wrong than earlier this year. Smerconish was equally confused, though I’d never heard of the guy until now, but someone should get him to stop pushing utter misinformation as well. If you want to watch their interaction, it’s here:

Clinton kicks off this part of the discussion by saying that she believes kids are addicted to smartphones and social media. This is not what the evidence shows, but who needs evidence when you have feelings? Yes, there are a few high profile politicians and pundits who claim this is true, but the actual evidence is much more complex and nuanced, showing that many kids (especially LGBTQ kids) get real benefit from the ability to connect in this way, and only a very small percentage struggle with it (which often appears to be a sign of trouble elsewhere in their lives).

Smerconish responds by thanking Clinton for citing Jonathan Haidt as an expert, which is laughable because he’s not. Basically all of the actual experts and all of the actual science in the space disagree with Haidt and say he is misrepresenting the evidence regarding social media and kids. Even more ridiculously, Smerconish claims “I’m shocked that no person — no Republican, no Democrat — is championing this issue,” referring to kids and social media.

Has Smerconish been living in a cave? For like two years now, there’s been an ongoing baseless moral panic on this very issue (driven by non-experts like Haidt). KOSA (a terrible bill that will lead to real harm for LGBTQ youth in particular, but which is pitched as a “save the kids online” bill) passed the Senate with only three no votes and over 70 co-sponsors.

The idea that no one is championing this idea is so out of touch with reality that it makes me realize whoever Smerconish is, he seems to not know what’s going on. So why should anyone pay attention to what he has to say?

Smerconish then does the “out of touch old man” routine, claiming that we need to get kids to be more social like their parents and grandparents. Dude. Many kids do socialize today, and they do some of it with their phones. Yes, that’s different from when you were a kid, but that doesn’t necessarily make it worse.

There truly is nothing worse than two rich, out-of-touch people insisting that “the kids these days” are doing stuff wrong because it’s different from back in the day. How obnoxious. And wrong.

But, on to Clinton’s comments. In response to this, she pushed for getting rid of Section 230 again, but it appears that she completely misunderstands Section 230 (to the point of literally getting it backwards):

We need national action and sadly, our Congress has been dysfunctional when it comes to addressing these threats to our children. So you’re absolutely right. This should be at the top of every legislative, political agenda. There should be a lot of things done. We should be, in my view, repealing something called section 230, which gave platforms on the internet immunity because they were thought to be just pass-throughs, that they shouldn’t be judged for the content that is posted. But we now know that that was an overly simple view, that if the platforms, whether it’s Facebook or Twitter X or Instagram or TikTok, whatever they are, if they don’t moderate and monitor the content we lose total control and it’s not just the social and psychological effects it’s real harm, it’s child porn and threats of violence, things that are terribly dangerous.

So, I couldn’t agree with you more. We need to remove the immunity for liability and we need to have guardrails. We need regulation. We’ve conducted this big experiment on ourselves and particularly our kids, and I think the evidence is in that we’ve got to do more….

Okay, so first, she has Section 230 literally backwards. Somehow, she seems to have internalized Ted Cruz’s lying about Section 230 and assumed it’s accurate.

Section 230 was not “because [websites] were thought to be just pass-throughs.” It’s literally the opposite of that. Surely Clinton knows Senator Ron Wyden, who wrote the law, and could tell her she’s wrong? It was written to encourage moderation by removing liability for websites’ moderation choices.

There is still liability for content online. It’s just on whoever created the content.

If you repeal Section 230, you get less moderation not more, because you are now creating liability for moderation choices. If you create more liability for something you get less of it. Where Clinton is woefully confused is she seems to think that repealing Section 230 would create liability for misinformation. It would not. The First Amendment protects that. It would just create liability for moderation. Meaning you’d get less of that and more misinformation.

The First Amendment (which, surely, Clinton is familiar with?) requires there to be actual knowledge of violative content for a distributor to be liable. All repealing Section 230 would do is encourage websites to look the other way to avoid liability.

Clinton is literally misinforming the public, getting the law exactly backwards, and demanding a regulatory move that would do exactly the opposite of what she claims it would, based on misunderstanding misrepresented research.

It’s like an entire seven-layer cake of misinformation.

So, please, if anyone reading this has any ability to talk to Hillary Clinton, please, please, please get her to talk to some actual experts, whether they’re experts on Section 230 or on the very nuanced and complex issues regarding social media and mental health, as she seems to have fallen down a rabbit hole of moral panic misinformation, combined with nonsense GOP talking points, and is pushing the worst solution possible. Her current stance will do real harm to children.

Separately, I’ll just note that Clinton’s confusion is also (stupidly) leading to even more confusion and misleading reporting. Fox News took Clinton’s comments and published an article misleadingly suggesting she wants to force websites to moderate political content “or we lose control.” In the CNN interview, she was clearly only talking about child safety issues, which the MAGA world seems aligned with her on. They also want to “repeal” Section 230 and are pushing KOSA because they think it’s necessary to “stop the transgender.”

So, maybe, just maybe, Clinton would be better served by getting a clue on how all of this works, so she stops pushing nonsense that actually supports the MAGA world’s position on LGBTQ content and spewing utter misinformation?

Filed Under: 1st amendment, addiction, free speech, hillary clinton, intermediary liability, jonathan haidt, kosa, michael smerconish, protect the children, section 230, social media

If Harris Wins, Whether She Keeps Lina Khan Will Be Extremely Telling

Policy

from the merge-ALL-the-things! dept

Lina Khan has most certainly faced some growing pains as the head of the FTC, occasionally filing some undercooked cases and raising the hackles of some staff (some grumbling about real missteps, some simply grumbling about reform). At the same time, she’s the closest the U.S. has gotten to a competent antitrust enforcer any time in the last forty years; and corporate America certainly isn’t happy about it.

There’s been a growing coalition of companies and major tech billionaires (like Reid Hoffman) that have been openly pressuring Harris to ditch Khan. Often, as in the case of media billionaires like Barry Diller, without much in the way of subtlety:

“Diller, for his part, laid into Khan publicly in July, calling her a “dope” on national television, a remark that he later walked back, calling her “smart,” but “disrupting sensible business combinations.” To the ire of many of Khan’s supporters, the Harris campaign has remained silent on her future.”

Most corporations and billionaires prefer their regulators to be heavily decorative. It’s what drove them to pressure the Supreme Court to recently neuter what’s left of regulatory independence. They generally want officials that talk mindlessly about innovation and small business, while rubber stamping an endless parade of consolidative mergers that, more often than not, trample competition, small businesses, and real innovation underfoot.

The Harris campaign has remained largely silent on whether Khan will be allowed to stick around. And it remains entirely unclear whether Harris will continue Biden’s support of something that, for once, at least vaguely resembles antitrust reform and a crackdown of concentrated corporate power.

These days, only position-less, feckless careerists have much of a chance of surviving the congressional nomination process, something clearly demonstrated when the Biden administration tried to appoint popular telecom and media reformer Gigi Sohn to the FCC. Any effort to implement meaningful antitrust reform, however subtle, is immediately framed as both radical and an assault on free market innovation.

Khan’s nomination was surprising in that not only did the Biden team quickly appoint Khan, but they immediately promoted her to agency boss before Corporate America could galvanize much of a response (luxuries that Sohn, who found herself the subject of a yearlong telecom industry smear campaign without much in the way of Biden messaging support, didn’t get to enjoy).

As Dell Cameron at Wired notes, new polling suggests that 80% of Democrats feel that the government should be doing more to take on corporate monopolies. 90% of Democrats believe lobbyists and corporate executives hold too much power over the government. While it wasn’t always applied efficiently or consistently (the Biden FCC, for example, struggles to even publicly acknowledge that telecom monopolies cause widespread competitive and consumer harms), Biden did make an effort at monopoly busting.

Khan supporters and consumer groups have taken to creating mock websites highlighting her opposition by billionaires. A Trump victory will, of course, immediately result in Khan’s ouster, returning us to an era where the country’s top “antitrust enforcers” actively work with companies in their personal time to help them dodge regulatory accountability (see: Trump appointee Makan Delrahim and T-Mobile).

Right now, Harris is remaining ambiguous about whether Khan will be allowed to stay at her post; allowing voters to fill in the blanks using vibes and their imagination. Whether Khan is kept in office, or replaced with yet another cookie cutter careerist, should prove pretty immediately telling in the new year.

Filed Under: antitrust reform, corporate power, harris, lina khan, mergers, policy, reform, regulators

Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

Techdirt

from the so-you-say dept

This week, both top spots on the insightful side were taken by similar comments from That One Guy. In first place, it’s a comment about the subject of free speech in the Vice Presidential debate:

Broken finger vs Severed arm

I mean, neither came out looking great with regards to the first amendment but whereas Walz botched what is and is not covered under the first amendment Vance was conflating platforms dealing with insurrectionists as ‘censorship’ and refusing to admit that convicted felon Trump lost the last election, so yeah, both bad, but bad in very different ways and levels.

In second place, it’s a comment making the same point in reply to another take on the distinction:

One of them repeated a long-debunked saying that is sadly still common among people ignorant or dishonest about the first amendment, the other refused to acknowledge an insurrection and the lie that caused it.

‘Only marginally better’ would not be the phrasing I’d use.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with an anonymous comment about the idea that social media is biased against conservatives:

The most frustrating thing about this entire topic is how many moderates or even (actual, not pretend) liberals end up falling for it. I regularly see even actual liberals saying it as “common sense”, regardless of how much actual evidence you shove down their throats.

It’s a very strong lesson in how effective misinformation and working the refs can be, that it still works on people who should be, if anything, primed against it.

Next, it’s Toom1275 with a comment about the other pervasive belief about social media:

The “Social media is killing kids” cult operates in much the same way as the antivax cult does – centered around a handful of frauds peddling falsehoods for personal gain, and an army if sheep who swallow it down without a single critical thought.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is an anonymous comment about the cop who got his gun stuck in an MRI machine:

I hope people call this idiot Magneto for the rest of his days.

In second place, it’s PB&J with a comment on our post about Musk’s claim that subsidizing Starlink would have saved Hurricane Helene victims:

Ummm, I’d just like to say that I also donated 1000 Starlink satellite access kits to the Carolinas! Sure I did! I guarantee it!

(hey, “The rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check!”)

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with a comment from Anomalous Cowherd about the incorrect free speech trope that Walz invoked at the debate:

Every time I find myself part of a group huddled around a campfire on the beach I get an uncontrollable urge to run around screaming “Theatre!,” which upsets some people. Have I been doing it wrong?

Finally, it’s Daydream with another comment about the aforementioned Magneto cop:

So what I’ve learned from this is you can disarm a cop via use of a giant cartoon magnet.

That’s all for this week, folks!

This Week In Techdirt History: September 29th – October 5th

Techdirt

from the so-it-went dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2019, a big new study showed once and for all that net neutrality did not hurt broadband investment, while telcos were teaming up with Rupert Murdoch to lob antitrust accusations at Google, because apparently Comcast felt qualified to give lectures on monopoly power. A court said the FCC can’t stop states from protecting net neutrality, and nobody was particularly surprised when Buzzfeed linked bogus public comments on net neutrality directly to the broadband industry. Meanwhile, Mark Warner was repeating Ted Cruz’s made up claims about Section 230, while the NY Times opinion section was getting the law all wrong again. Also, we officially released Working Futures, our anthology of short speculative fiction about the future of work.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2014, a judge adjusted the MP3Tunes ruling, while major labels easily won their lawsuit against Grooveshark (with the only silver lining being that the ruling didn’t ruin DMCA safe harbors), and we dug deeper into the problems with the Sirius XM ruling. The MPAA was trying to ignore the inconvenient results of a study it paid for, Warner Bros. was ordered to reveal the process by which it sends automated DMCA takedowns, and a new copyright exception in the UK put a lot of faith in the taste of judges. Also, what would become a high-profile fight kicked off when the San Diego Comic-Con sent a trademark cease and desist to the Salt Lake City Comic-Con.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2009, another very famous trademark fight (though we had no idea it would become one at the time) got started when North Face went after a student for his line of South Butt parody clothing. Congress was moving forward with a law requiring warnings on P2P apps, senators were looking to remove telcos’ retroactive immunity for warrantless wiretaps, and the USTR was defending its lack of transparency around ACTA. BPI was continuing to make things up about ISPs and file sharing, while we looked at whether ignoring a RIAA lawsuit was cheaper than fighting. Also, friend of Techdirt Dan Bull dropped a catchy little musical open letter related to some recent Techdirt drama.

Filed Under: history, look back

The Swiss Govt. Largely Gives Up On Its ‘Gruyere’ PDO/PGI Attempts

Legal Issues

from the the-big-cheese dept

A couple of years back, we discussed a win in the courts for the U.S. Dairy Export Council against both French and Swiss consortiums that had attempted to trademark the word “Gruyere” in America. Both of those groups were jointly attempting to get a PDO/PGI trademark for the term, arguing that gruyere cheese should only be labeled such if it came from the region around Gruyeres, a Swiss town somewhat near the French border. This style of trademark is the sort used by consortiums such as that for champagne, which has successfully argued for protected status on products based on geographic origin. In this case, both the USPTO and the U.S. courts rightly concluded that these consortiums could not unring this bell. Americans have been eating gruyere cheeses for years and years, with the vast majority of them likely not even knowing that the town of Gruyeres existed, never mind being confused into thinking that the cheese they bought at the store must have come from that region.

While both groups claimed they planned to appeal the ruling, that seems less likely now. Recently, the Swiss government declined a motion to continue defending the gruyere name around the world, instead softening its language around what the government would be doing about it. That motion was in reaction to the United States’ court decision, meant to force the Swiss government to include such protections in future trade deals.

On Monday, the Swiss Senate tacitly rejected a motion aimed at better defending PDO and PGI (protected geographical indication) products like Gruyère cheese. It did, however, say it was prepared to raise awareness of these labels.

The House of Representatives had approved the motion last year, after Gruyère cheese’s PDO was definitively abandoned by American retailers.

The text of the motion was changed to remove the requirement that the government enforce such protections. The Swiss Senate correctly decided that this would hamstring the government’s ability to engage in and adopt new trade agreements out of deference to the cheese-people should a partner country not agree to those protections.

So instead of an enforcement mechanism, the government is instead supposed to take educational and advocacy measures instead.

Such a measure would restrict Switzerland’s room for manoeuvre in terms of foreign trade, and could even prevent the conclusion of new agreements, declared Economy Minister Guy Parmelin.

However, the Senate has proposed an alternative to the motion, with very few constraints. It encourages the government to make a greater commitment to respecting the recognition of products of Swiss origin. Awareness-raising could, for example, be carried out as part of trade agreement negotiations. This adapted motion was tacitly approved by the Senate and now goes to the House of Representatives for approval.

The updated motion still needs to be passed by the Swiss House, but it’s obviously a better plan than the original motion. Sure, making sure people understand the history of this cheese as part of Swiss culture can be a good thing. Educating the consumer about the origins of that style of cheese may also drive foreign consumers to want to buy gruyere cheeses from its historical birthplace, too.

But what it won’t do is lock up the name of what has become a style of cheese in foreign lands like America that consumers don’t currently associate with that birthplace.

Filed Under: cheese, generic indicators, gruyere, pdo, pgi, switzerland, trade